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Chomping Chomsky
June 6th, 2010Noam got it wrong.
Before today I had no opinion about Chomsky. My conservative friends tend to despise him and my liberal friends suddenly look nervous when his name is mentioned. Swirling rumors about what he wrote and its relationship to propaganda theory and practice kept landing like drunken MIT co-eds in my mind (and there is nothing quite as amusingly amorous than a liquored-up geek girl).
I’m peddling a book to publishers on the very topic of agitprop. Having invested a decade in exploding gun control myths I have encountered most every manifestation of misinformation. Since gun control myths are a subset of propaganda proper, and since Noam wrote on the subject, all these rumors about Chomsky’s insights and how they might be currently leveraged by the left demanded I read into his work.
Can’t say I’m impressed.
I have to give Noam some windage here. His Manufacturing Consent was penned before every teenager had their own blog and before newspapers began evaporating faster than the last wisp of rum from aforementioned co-ed’s breath (though I will confess that Myers taste better when slurped from her bellybutton). Thus a fair amount of Noam’s noodling is non sequitur.
Some of it was plain wrong when written.
A primary premise in Manufacturing Consent was that the advertisers led the media by their financial noses. Noam was metaphorically looking down the wrong end of the barrel (it would be a wonderful event if the barrel analogy were literal). The media is a matchmaker, with the audience as client. Any media outlet that creates content disagreeable with the consumer goes out of business. The primary financial incentive is to give the public what they want, regardless of how bland, sleazy or repugnant it may be. Without content consumers, the media ceases to exist and no amount of advertising money will enact resurrection.
This is why the main stream media is moribund. In the 80’s and 90’s a few university journalism schools, paired with statisticians, measured media bias and quantified that the American media was slightly to the left of Fidel. Given that the polled public perceived itself slightly right of center, there existed a daily disconnect between the media and the public. What Ma and Pa witnessed day-in-and-out disagreed with what the media marketed. Fox News has high ratings simply because their content provided something that an otherwise homogeneous media did not.
Chomsky contends that the media was subservient to the advertiser. Having worked in marketing I know this to be less than half the story. Advertisers want to reach people, and the editorial leanings of the media are nearly irrelevant. If a television channel reaches millions of males between 18 and 32, and if the advertiser sells Girl’s Gone Goofy videos, they would not care if the media was a nexus for necrophilia (which may be the next NBS reality show). Based on ratings and demographics the vendor could predict their sales volume and would buy ad space. Indeed, the only thing that would stop an advertiser would be if the anti-necra lobby threatened to boycott stations that aired drunken co-ed videos.
Hence, the left-leaning nature of the old media. In the absence of competing outlets (pre talk radio, internet and Fox) they had insufficient backlash from the consumers. Thus, advertisers were content with the available advertising venues. Without corrective action from either end of the financial relationship, we see two realities: First, Noam didn’t know what he was talking about. Second, the bulk of news was thus controlled by the media and the government, not advertisers.
Forget the military-industrial complex. The media-politician complex was and is the real threat.
I know enough reporters to confirm that they live for two things: telling a good story and exercising power. The former is only of interest to other writers, and we get it. The later is understandable only in the context that some small and sinister part of the populace always wants to control other people. Reporters, producers and media moguls are no exception. Controlling information was a great way to push the public toward some journalists’ political ends. ‘Was’ is the operative word. Today everybody is the media – there are millions of board and bathrobed fact checkers armed with an online sea of information that would make an Alexandrian librarian faint.
The media is no longer in control of the conversation, something they have yet to realize.
Noam got the financial aspects of the media backwards. He also undersold the motivations of the media itself, which have been both malignant and manic. Too many times we have witnessed major media outlets sell what remained of their souls in order to assassinate a person, company, industry or cause. NBC faked exploding pick-up trucks. CNN used machineguns to misinform the public about the power of sporting rifles. ABC staged impossible self-defense scenarios. CBS bought or co-produced fake documents during an election. And MSNBC can’t emit an electron without it being accompanied by misinformation.
Yet Chomsky does not see this as a major source for the manufacture of “consent”. Willful blindness or purposeful obfuscation? Don’t know, but either way it says volumes about the quality of his analytical abilities. He possesses all the functioning cognitive capacity of a drunk co-ed, but with none of the giggling charm.
Chomsky also felt that reporters, as a subspecies, trusted governmental information sources more than private. Here Noam was nearly correct. Like humans in general, reporters believe what they want and many seek information that bolsters their pre-existing biases. If a corporation, advocacy group or man on the street helps assault whomever a reprobate reporter wishes to journalistically bludgeon, that is who will appear on the evening news. Since reporters have been measured to be more liberal and Democrat than the public at large, they will more often accept government’s guile than General Motors’ (not that there is a difference between those two entities any more). Yet when the government or a particular politician is the target of a reporters wrath, then non-government sources of deception work just as well.
Ask Dan Rather, providing his meds are allowing him to talk coherently this week.
Noam’s neglectfulness centers mainly on the assumption that “the media” (a rapidly evolving complex organism) is a mindless machine that is easily manipulated. He ignores the media’s motivations and members therein who are merely activists with press passes. Therein was the true source of propaganda – an unchecked media with no competition on the sources and distribution of information. In the bad old days, your world view came from three very similar network news programs and one or two local newspapers. Now with 500 television channels, several 24×7 news networks and the entirety of the Internet, the old threat of media manufactured consent is mitigated if not eliminated.
Noam Chomsky may have influenced a few, but his depth of analysis betrays a shallow intellectual pond. Now that everybody is the media, Noam can be ignored … again.
















