• By Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky

Red = Theoretical ideas (MC)

• Manufacturing consent works in a similar, if not the same (modern) way as propaganda.

In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.

• The five ‘filters’ of Manufacturing Consent’ –
• 1) The size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms
• 2) Advertising as the primary income source of the mass media
• 3) The reliance of the media on information provided by government, business and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power.
• 4) ‘Flak’ as a means of disciplining the media
• 5) ‘Anticommunism’ as a national religion and control mechanism.

Blue = Other theorists/ quotes (Currna&Seaton)

• Curran and Seaton show that the market did successfully accomplish what state intervention failed to do. Following the repeal of the punitive taxes on newspapers between 1853 and 1869, a new daily newspaper was introduced, but not one new local working-class daily was established through the rest of the nineteenth century. Curran and Seaton note that –

The eclipse of the national radical press was so total that when the Labour Party developed out of the working-class movement in the first decade of the twentieth century, it did not obtain the exclusive backing of a signal national daily or sunday newspaper.

• In other words, the radical press, newspapers or print media that emphasises ideologies that are considered extreme or against dominant ideologies, was so influential that the backing of other daily newspapers may convey the idea of shared interests. In addition, the rise in costs of print media during the nineteenth century meant that there was large competition between newspaper enterprises.

Yellow = Political

In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite.

Orange = Institutional

• Censorship is largely self-censorship, by reporters and commentators who adjust to the realities of source and media organisational requirements, and by people at higher levels within media organisations who are chosen to implement, and have usually internalized, the constraints imposed by proprietary and other market and governmental centers of power.

Green = Definitions

• Censorship – the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or “inconvenient.” 
• Radical press – was introduced by John D. H. Downing in his 1984 study of rebellious communication and social movements emphasizing alternative media’s political and goal-oriented activism.