Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992)

This film showcases Noam Chomsky, one of America's leading linguists and political dissidents. It also illustrates his message of how government and big media businesses cooperate to produce an effective propaganda machine in order to manipulate the opinions of the United States populous. The key example for this analysis is the simultaneous events of the massive coverage of the communist atrocities of Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia and the suppression of news of the US supported Indonesian invasion and subjugation of East Timor.

Keywords: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, activism, activist, ad-hominem, advertising, agenda, aggression

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Noam Chomsky: Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech.

Noam Chomsky: If I'm analyzing capitalism and I point out that General Motors tries to maximize profit, that's not a conspiracy theory. That's analysis.

[Noam Chomsky is fielding questions after a speech in Laramie, Wyoming]::Frat Boy: Yeah, for the last hour and 41 minutes, you have been whining how the elite and the government have been using thought control to keep radicals like yourself out of the public limelight. Now, you're here, I don't see any CIA men waiting to drag you off. You were in the paper, that's what everyone here heard where you were coming from, in the paper and I'm sure they're going to publish your comments in the paper. Now a lot of countries, you would have been shot for what you have been done today. So what are you whining about? This is... We are allowing you to speak and I don't see any thought control.::Noam Chomsky: First of all, I haven't been saying, haven't said one word about my being kept out of the limelight. The way it works here is quite different. Now I don't think you heard what I was saying, but the way it works here that there is a system of shaping, control and so on which gives a certain perception of the world. I gave one example, I'll give you sources where you can find thousands of others. That has nothing to do with me, it has to do with marginalizing the public and ensuring that they don't get in the way of elites who are supposed to run things without interference.

Noam Chomsky: If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

Noam Chomsky: Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain... Now it's long been understood - very well - that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist - with whatever suffering and injustice it entails - as long as it's possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage can. At this stage of history either... the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community issues guided by values of solidarity, and sympathy, and concern for others, or - alternatively - there will be no destiny for anyone to control.

[first lines]::[title card: They who have put out the peoples eyes reproach them of their blindness. - John Milton, 1642. ]::EMTV video host: Three, two, one, take two. Good morning!... My name is Kevin Flook, and I'm your video host all day here at EMTV.

Noam Chomsky: When the state looses the bludgeon... you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what in more honest days used to be called propaganda.

Noam Chomsky: What seems to me a - in a sense - very terrifying aspect of our society, and of other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe such events. I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity. And therefore I think that it's in some sense the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt, which they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme or more violent.

Noam Chomsky: There's nothing more remote from what we have been discussing than a conspiracy theory. If I give an analysis of, say the economic system, and I point out that GM tries to maximize profit and market share - that's not a conspiracy theory; that's an institutional analysis. It has nothing to do with conspiracies. That's precisely the sense in which we've been talking about the media. The phrase "conspiracy theory" is one of those that's constantly brought up, and I think it's effect simply is to discourage institutional analysis.

Noam Chomsky: The way things change is because lots of people are working all the time. They're working in their communities, at their workplace, or wherever they happen to be, and they are building up the basis for popular movements which are going to make changes. That's the way everything has ever happened in history, whether it was the end of slavery or the democratic revolution, anything you want, you name it, that's the way it worked. You get a very false picture of this from the history books. In the history books there's a couple of leaders...