Manufacturing Consent

*Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media* is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "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", by means of the propaganda model of communication. This propaganda model, while it may not take into account every element of ruling class control of information, especially not in the digital age, does generally sum up how the media does this and provides the principles we can use to analyze modern media like social media. We can take the main principles in the book and tie it to the elements of the ruling class as described here.

1. *Size, ownership, and profit orientation*: The dominant mass-media outlets are large profit-based operations, and therefore they must cater to the financial interests of the owners such as corporations and controlling investors, ie, the members of the business class, the wealthy. The size of a media company is a consequence of the investment capital required for the mass-communications technology required to reach a mass audience of viewers, listeners, and readers. The media are among the many sectors of the US economy that are consolidated and oligopolized, including the banks and investment firms that own and lend to the media companies.
2. *The advertising license to do business*: Since the majority of the revenue of major media outlets derives from advertising (not from sales or subscriptions), advertisers have acquired a "de facto licensing authority." Media outlets are not commercially viable without the support of advertisers. News media must therefore cater to the political prejudices and economic desires of their advertisers, corporations owned by other members of the business class. This has weakened the working class press, for example, and also helps explain the attrition in the number of newspapers.
3. *Sourcing mass media news*: Herman and Chomsky argue that "the large bureaucracies of the powerful *subsidize* the mass media, and gain special access [to the news], by their contribution to reducing the media's costs of acquiring [...] and producing, news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become 'routine' news sources and have privileged access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers." Editorial distortion is aggravated by the news media's dependence upon private and governmental news sources. If a given newspaper, television station, magazine, etc., incurs disfavor from the sources, it is subtly excluded from access to information. Consequently, it loses readers or viewers, and ultimately, advertisers. To minimize such financial danger, news media businesses editorially distort their reporting to favor government and corporate policies in order to stay in business. The business class funds/owns the think tanks, centers of education and research, and businesses that media relies on, and a lot of information also comes from the government, which can thus skew private media to its own liking. The old ruling class religious and aristocratic figures have special prominence and thus are more likely to be interviewed or be sources, and the intellectual class will inherently be an important source for media.
4. *Flak and the enforcers*: "Flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program (e.g. letters, complaints, lawsuits, or legislative actions). Flak can be expensive to the media, either due to loss of advertising revenue, or due to the costs of legal defense or defense of the media outlet's public image. Flak can be organized by powerful, private influence groups (e.g. think tanks) backed by the business class, or include actions by the government, including violence. The lawyer class is necessary to all legal actions against media, and direct nongovernmental violence is also an option from organized crime or anyone with the resources to pull it off. The prospect of eliciting flak can be a deterrent to the reporting of certain kinds of facts or opinions.
5. *Ideology Anti-communism/war on terror/neoliberalism*: Anti-communism was included as a filter in the original 1988 edition of the book, but Chomsky argues that since the end of the Cold War (1945–91) anticommunism was replaced by the "war on terror" as the major social control mechanism. Some have argued that neoliberalism, the unofficial ideology of the American ruling class that justifies it with the language of free markets, democracy, and competition is a more relevant way of analyzing how a sort of non-spiritual but dogmatic "religion" will drive and coordinate media.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing\_Consent