Manufactured Consent

What it is

Chomsky and Herman's model describing how mass media systematically creates public support for elite interests through five filters: ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and ideology.

How it works

Real-world examples

• •The model: Herman and Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (1988) named five filters and contrasted coverage of worthy and unworthy victims in the 1980s Central American wars.
• •Gulf of Tonkin, 1964: the press largely accepted the Johnson administration's account of an August 4 attack that, as the NSA's own declassified history later showed, did not happen as described; the Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed within days.
• •Iraq, 2002 to 2003: the New York Times editors' note of May 26, 2004 and the Washington Post's own review that August acknowledged that pre-war reporting on weapons of mass destruction leaned too heavily on official and exile sources and buried skeptical stories.
• •Creel Committee, 1917 to 1918: the Committee on Public Information under a Democratic administration organized some 75,000 Four Minute Men speakers and shaped war coverage; Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) and Edward Bernays' Propaganda (1928) drew on that experience.
• •Corporate flak: the Tobacco Institute (1958 to 1998) and the fossil-fuel-funded Global Climate Coalition (1989 to 2002) organized criticism of unfavorable reporting and funded counter-experts.
• •A contested model: political scientists Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang (2004) argued it understates journalistic independence and internal dissent, and the label is invoked across the spectrum, by the left about corporate ownership and by the right about mainstream media, which is a reason to test the five filters against evidence case by case rather than apply the name.

Ethical guidelines

How to defend against it

From the Defense Playbook

Every playbook entry states how strong its evidence is and when not to use it. Browse the full playbook.

References

1. Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (2002). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (2nd ed.). Pantheon Books
   Original formulation of the propaganda model with five filters (ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, ideology). The 2002 edition adds a reflective preface addressing the model's reception.
2. Mullen, A., & Klaehn, J. (2010). The Herman-Chomsky propaganda model: A critical approach to analysing mass media behaviour. Sociology Compass, 4(4), 215–229 · link
   Contemporary academic review of the propaganda model, including subsequent empirical tests and applications to digital media.