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Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (Open Media Pamphlet)

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A co-worker, who used to listen to me rant, recommended that I read Chomsky. I ignored the advice for several years thinking no one could understand or even know what it was that I was so positively enraged about in our so called 'free' country. I went on hunting for validation that never came. Until finally, I picked up this little gem! Ah! The fact that I felt isolated in my 'subversive' views is even a part of Chomsky's little essay. This little book is pure concentrate.
Chomsky's focus is on the foreign policies of the US, but one can easily extend his thesis to simple domestic uses of propaganda. In other words, the ways in which a person will champion certain rhetoric to gain support which in so doing gains power from people who willingly give up freedoms.
Remember three things:
1. All art is propaganda
2. Propaganda is to the free society what the iron fist is to the totalitarian society.
3. A free society is not necessarily defined by what one is free to do, rather what one is free NOT to do.
I have been a Chomsky-ite for years, but never knew it. This is an outstanding starting point to his other works.

Chomsky does a masterful job of analyzing the development of propaganda as used by corporations,the government and the media. The book is concise, extremely interesting and well thought out. If you have never read Chomsky, be prepared to read into the mind of a genius. Great stuff. He charts the history of propaganda and makes sense of government and corporate actions that on the surface don't make sense. A must read.

An excellent little primer on propaganda in America, its origins, rationale, and uses. Readers may be surprised to learn that propaganda techniques have their origin in America's public relations industry. Specifically, in the need of modern democratic governments to shape perceptions and direct popular hostility. Lacking cruder coercive measures of totalitarian states, elected governments depend on managing information and creating popular conceptions to achieve their aims. These can then be exploited to carry out policies which may benefit only a few to the detriment of the many (attacks on Vietnam, Central America, et. al.). America's intellectual elites, as Chomsky makes clear, have historically supported such techniques, believing the common herd too ignorant to rule themselves. The task is best left to those elites, who, as Chomsky also makes clear, go on to serve the interests of the country's highest elite, the business and corporate sector where real power lies. Thus in the past 75 years, propaganda has become a standard tool of governance in the US, subverting the dictionary definition of what democracy is supposed to be. Many Americans feel the truth of this in their bones, so to speak, but have trouble admitting it. Patriotism's first allegiance, however, should be to truth, comfortable or not. And in that very necessary sense, Chomsky's is a solidly patriotic book indeed, pleasant reading or not.

There is more in this book(pamphlet for God's sake) than you could get watching 20 years of news. Noam Chomsky has been influential in the way I look at things now. The forces he talks about are insidiously powerful and you must always be conscious of resistance and questioning of them.I think whoever said we use 5-10% of our brains was right.

This is a really short pamphlet in fact. The tone is very direct and highly legible (the texts being from talks I believe). The history of propaganda in the US, though not revealed in detail and its precise mechanical functioning, is outlined. More importantly, the values and thinking this type of human behavior and the functions it serves are outlined clearly.

Lest the above paragraph mislead you, this is not a theoretical book. Chomsky starts simply with the question "what is democracy?", gives two different but applicable answers, and from there we get examples through recent history of how the elite (i.e. the people who own the companies and run the governmental and economic system, i.e. the people in control) behave and use propaganda for their purposes (generally for class warfare and also to create support or muffle dissent for their latest foreign crusades and repressions).

Not the happiest reading but pretty clear and to the point. Makes you see pretty quickly how things work.

Just in case you thought you knew about how the media stinks get ready, you haven't seen anything yet. Unlike most political writers, Chomsky uses EXTENSIVE research in portraying the true power the media has on the way we think. Don't forget that this guy is a Linguistics professor at MIT so he definitely has a wealth of knowledge on the science of language and he applies this knowledge into his writings. You might never realize how much nonsense we get fed until you read this book or perhaps a book like it. Great read!!

An exceptional read. The subject is one which does not get touched upon enough in the media (but why would it?) It is a clearly written and engaging book. I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone. In fact, I am buying a few dozen to to pass out. Few books have been able to notably shift my perspective...this one has. Read it.

I sat down to glance at this book. I thought I would skim through the first chapter to see if it was interesting. I spent the next 45 minutes reading the rest of the book and thinking about what I had read. This short pamphlet is very interesting and informative. A real eye opener. This is a non-fiction book that you will actually read more than once. A must have for anyone who is at all interested in foreign policy or afraid of their lack of real knowledge of what is happening in D.C.

Initially, I would like to say that this is without doubt the most intelligent book on the subject matter! It reveals the insidious methods commonly employed by the Media. Accordingly, these methods are used to manipulate and mislead the public's mind, especially in areas concerning foreign politics, domestic issues including racial discrimination and unjust distribution of wealth! People have to face the indisputable fact that the Media is controlled by the government. Unedeniably, the media frequently misrepresent the facts in order to protect the government from public discontent! I highly recommend this book to everyone who wants to understand how the media control the public's mind. Buy this book immediately! Noam Chomsky is a master!

This pamphlet ostensibly discusses the impact of the communications media in shaping people's views on public policy. The subject is an interesting but inconclusive area of sociology and political science, in which some useful work has been published in the past few years (for example, Benjamin Page's 'Who Deliberates?'). Most such work, in my judgement, exaggerates the media's importance as intermediaries in a deliberative democracy, but raises important questions about matters of selection bias and the framing of policy issues. Chomsky's polemic doesn't begin to approach, and doesn't appear to be familiar with, this body of work. It is short on analysis and long on abuse. Few readers are likely to gain insight from its melange of unsubstantiated assertion, unfalsifiable thesis and frequent resort to abuse.

The unfalsifiable thesis is the notion that the communications media are a consistent force for communicating the policy preferences of a homogeneous elite, thereby 'manufacturing consent' among the governed. As an analytical device, this is useless, for it precludes nothing and predicts nothing. In Great Britain, for example, most newspapers opposed military action in Kosovo in 1999, but Tony Blair went ahead anyway and won public respect for doing so. One can read Chomsky's pamphlet on alleged media control in vain for any insight into the ambiguous relationship among the executive, the press and the people that this incident illustrates. All one will find is a refusal to credit people's ability to judge public policies for themselves.

Chomsky is thus a consistent elitist in the mould of Herbert Marcuse, and the reader should be prepared. But even so, it is still a shock to see just how deep is the contempt expressed in this pamphlet for the citizenry of a liberal democracy. What can one make, for example, of the assertion, with its preposterous identification of public opinion with unthinking militarism, that during the Gulf War everybody 'goosestepped on command'? Even as hyperbole, this is gross condescension and hardly consistent with democratic precepts. Unfortunately there is no stopping the stream of vitriol directed at those who have the temerity to hold different views from Chomsky. He asserts, "no reason was given for going to war that could not be refuted by a literate teenager." I can assure Chomsky that the 80% of us in the US and Great Britain who supported Operation Desert Storm are not automata and were perfectly capable of stating an overwhelming justification for going to war: we didn't wish to see an aggressive and expansionist tyranny succeed in annexing and plundering a neigbouring country, threaten Israel and the Arab states, and augment its weapons of mass destruction. Fortunately for world peace, our side ignored the prescriptions of the anti-war activists and defeated Iraq. But to Chomsky, if he loses the argument, there must be dark forces at work: the overwhelming public support freely and responsibly given to our leaders and armed forces was, in his judgement, "the hallmark of a totalitarian culture".

In his new book 'Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline', Judge Richard Posner notes that "the enormous volume of Noam Chomsky's political writings ... has received little public attention, much of it derisory." No one who has read 'Media Control' will be surprised by that information.