The freedom of the press throughout the world where the capitalists rule, is the freedom to buy up papers, the freedom to buy writers, to buy and manufacture public opinion in the interest of the capitalists.
Vladimir Lenin
The media, itself an arm of mega-corporate power, feeds the fear industry, so that people are primed like pumps to support wars on rumor, innuendo, legends, and lies.
The book Manufacturing Consent, which I co-authored with Edward Herman, begins with a description of the structure and institutional setting of the commercial media, and then draws some rather simple-minded conclusions about what we would expect the media product to be, given these (not particularly controversial) conditions.
It's much better to talk about the media as a system of propaganda and abuse, of manufactured consent, than it is to claim it's some kind of democratizing force that is not responsible for what it does. The notion that the media simply reflects reality is an argument that justifies its flight from responsibility.
Anytime there's an actual grassroots movement that isn't funded by people trying to create a grassroots movement, I find that interesting.
Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters.
The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness
It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.
