What’s Politics #5 - Manufacturing Consent: Media is God

What's Politics is a series where we delve into political concepts, ideas, and questions and explore how they impact all of us. 

In their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman argued that mass communication media “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion."

The book, which is more than 30 years old, still rings incredibly true today. In fact, things have probably gotten worse in some ways. But it’s not just the US. It’s the media across the world, or most parts of the world, at least. 

In this episode, we talk to Peter Beattie about how and why the media manufactures consent?

Image Credit: Shutterstock (Golden Dayz)