Manufacturing Consent

Introduction:

A couple of years ago top NASA officials went to Steven Spielberg’s house to meet him. The officials requested Steven Spielberg to make a film related to the voyage to, or the colonisation of Mars (Sorkin 2017). There has been many films made on this topic, but why was Steven Spielberg asked by NASA to make another one? The reason is to create a manufactured consent. According to the NASA officials, NASA has the technology and the science to go to Mars, but what they require is funding from the government and private institutions, which they are not getting. So, by asking someone like Spielberg to make a film, what NASA is essentially doing is that it is creating a public perception, an opinion for the expedition of Mars. This will ultimately lead the government and the private sector to invest money in the project as they will begin to realise that the general public is rooting for this idea. Although it is not entirely identical to how Noam Chomsky describes how the manufacturing of consent works, it still is a method of how consent is created from the public.

Media: Hero or the villain?

We live in a democratic society where, and in theory, everything done by the government or any other institution is acted out because of the will of the general public. That is, the general public decides what to be done and the rulers or the elite carry it out accordingly. But that is only in theory. According to Chomsky, the public opinion of what to be done and what the public needs is produced by the private corporations themselves so that they can serve themselves better. The corporations use the powerful tool of media to shape people’s mind. The media acts as a hypnotist to feed the general public the material so that the people themselves cry out the words that the corporations want them to say. Thus, consent on a given topic is manufactured from the mass people.

When we think about freedom of speech, the first country we think of is the United States. America is a country where people of free speech and the media is seen as a powerful tool to keep the government and the big corporations in check. The media’s role is perceived as the voice of the people, speaking on behalf of the people against any wrong doing. But according to Chomsky, reality is the other way around. Chomsky says that the media serves the government and the big corporations, not the general public. He, as a matter of fact, describes it as the primary role of media to serve the corporates. He also states that the media is owned by bigger corporate giants who again controls resources and controls the policy makers in the different branches of the government. So in other words, the corporate world controls the authority so that they can shape people’s needs according to their liking which eventually will help the extract profit.

Like any corporation, the media’s motive is to make profit. Its goal is to make profit out of the sales from its products. But what is the media’s product? Chomsky says that its product is us, the mass people. We are the product of the mass media. Just like a potter, the media shapes our mind in such a way that we can be sold to a third party for a profit. And the third party is the advertisers. Advertisers will advertise a product which is sold to us. But even before that, the mass media will shape our mind in such a way that we will feel the need to buy the advertisers products. The advertisement can be of a consumer product, or a propaganda such as “war against a country”. This is done with a process which involves five filters.

How the media operates:

Media’s primary filter is the ownership. The mass media as we know it is owned by giant corporations, and as I have mentioned before, they work for profits. The second filter is about advertising where the media earns the profit. The advertisers buy us, as the product so that they, the advertisers, on the other hand can sell us their products which will profit them. The third filter is the government and the larger corporations. They influence, or control the media so that the media’s point of view on things is on the same page as them. The fourth filter is when the elites take out the story which does not suit their view. As a result, we will not see a story which directly contradicts and does not serve the elite’s interests. The fifth filter is known as the public enemy. Media creates the fear of an enemy inside everyone. As a result of this fear, we are conditioned to accept what the media has to say about them without questioning it.

The 2003 Iraq War:

The biggest and arguably the most important example of how the media manufactured a consent from the public on a particular topic can be seen in America’s invasion of Iraq under the command of president Bush in 2003. The US wanted to invade Iraq claiming Saddam is developing weapons of mass destruction. The mainstream media backed it up. The government used fear to justify their attack on Iraq and the media intentionally induced it onto the people’s mind. The mainstream media published reports that weapons of mass destruction was found in Iraq without even verifying if it was true or not. There was no evidence found for weapons of mass destruction before or after the invasion of Iraq (IAEA, 2003). Media was used as a tool by the government to manufacture consent among the general public so that they can go to war against Iraq and spread their propaganda in making their agenda a success.

Now let’s see how the consent was manufactured. The government wanted to invade Iraq at any given cost. The government here is the advertiser. They “hired” the media to produce a consent from the general public in favour of the notion. The media shaped our minds into giving into the idea of attacking Iraq by inducing the fear that Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons. The mass people gave in and agreed to the fact that the US should go into war with Iraq. But what’s the government and the corporates profit?

According to Chomsky, the big corporations are in control of the government officials. As I have already mentioned, in the manufacturing of consent for the Iraq war, the government was the advertiser and the media sold us to the government. Due to the invasion of Iraq the oil fields opened up to the US corporations and the US government. The major US corporations started extracting oil from the fields (Ahmed, 2014). The oil was then sold to the very people who gave their consent to the idea of invading Iraq. And that is how the advertiser; which is the government, gained profit from their investment in the media.

The 2016 US Elections:

If we take Chomsky’s idea into account, in theory, media should always be able to manufacture a consent from the mass public. But what happened in the case of the 2016 US elections? Every single media outlet stood against Donald Trump from the beginning of his campaign until election day. Yet the media was unable to bring about a consensus amongst the general public against Donald Trump, which eventually resulted in him winning the elections and becoming the president of the United States. Did the media fail its job to serve the corporate purpose? What if the media actually helped Trump win the election?

Let’s consider Trump as the advertiser who the media is advertising to the public. It is a well known fact that there is no such a thing as negative publicity. Trump was in the news more than Clinton, day and night. Every move he made was met with publicity; negative or positive is a different discussion. With all the media attention, Trump was somehow able to get into the mind of the voters which eventually resulted in his win. But how was the media benefitted by Trump’s win? If we look into what Chomsky says about the ownership of the media, it is owned by large companies who are registered in the US and pay taxes. Trump promised to cancel government programmes like the Obama Care, a health care system that brought in more people into health insurance (Zoppo, 2017). The corporates and the elites now had to pay more taxes to accommodate for the increase and that is the reason why Obama Care was met with opposition from the beginning. The elites did not like it and as Chomsky stated, they have staffed people in the government who constantly opposed the idea, so, President Obama had to use an executive order to pass the Obama Care law. With Trump in the picture, the elites saw an opportunity where they could take advantage of him. This meant the elites can extract decisions from him which will favour them. The example of the US walking out of the Paris Accord just shows how Trump’s presidency eventually benefitted the corporates.

What is the defence against this?

I work at Walmart and it amazes me every time when I see people buying gossip magazines. I consider myself well informed about current affairs, and I know very well that the gossip magazines are full of fake news which has absolutely no legitimacy. I like to think I have a stronger intellectual self defence than the people who are buying those magazines. But how do people build an intellectual self defence?

The first objective is to know a lot. Read anything. Read newspapers, news articles, blogs, books etc. Once you have the information in you, it will be easier for you to critically analyse each piece of information critically. This will also help identify false or fabricated information which is regularly passed out by the mass media. Discussion is also a very important factor. Discuss ideas with equally or more informed people and share information with the less informed ones. This usually takes place when a teacher is teaching his/her students on a given topic and passes on to them the tools to build a self defence. One of the most important ways to build a defence is to know and understand both sides of the logic. Only then it will be easier for an individual to intake information which is not biased and filter out the pollution.

The internet provides us the platform to acquire as much information one can intake. One such way the internet provides us information is by the help of social media. Although social media sources have to be taken with a pinch of salt, yet there are social media news channels that are known to be less biased than the mainstream media. One such media channel is AJ+. This social media news channel broadcasts the news by making video bites which are easily understandable and less time consuming to watch than a full formed report. I am not saying that this channel is absolutely neutral and serves the people under strict journalistic ethics. It is just that this can be used to form a self defence against the narrative of the mass media which is set by the elites.

Blessing in disguise?

Although what the media is doing is a form of deception, it is still ethical in a sense. Plato states in his work that the authorities must sometimes lie in order to keep peace and justice or otherwise there would be a total break down of the system which would lead to chaos. I can go back to the example of how NASA is trying to manufacture consent from the general public to go to Mars by using the media.

References:

Ahmed, Nafeez. 2014. Iraq invasion was about oil https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/20/iraq-war-oil-resources-energy-peak-scarcity-economy

Sorkin, Aron. 2016. Masterclass

IAEA. 2003 The Status of Nuclear Inspections in Iraq: An Update https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/statements/status-nuclear-inspections-iraq-update

Zoppo, Avalon. 2017 Here’s the Full List of Donald Trump’s Executive Orders http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/here-s-full-list-donald-trump-s-executive-orders-n720796