The media is not your friend. The media is a weapon of the elite in the battle for your mind.
Alan MacLeod.
In their 1988 book ”Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,” Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky introduced the idea of manufacturing consent. It describes how influential organisations, including governments and businesses, utilise the media to influence public opinion and preserve their own authority. They focused their argument around the idea of the ”Propaganda Model.”
According to Chomsky, the media is a manipulative tool to make you think what the elite wants. Also, the political writer divided the consumers in two groups.
80% are the population, who are the manipulable ones, who do not question the information they receive from the media. The other 20% are the elite, the powerful people, that is, the opinion leaders such as politicians.
The media actively shapes reality rather than acting as a neutral observer. They list five filters that work to restrict the variety of data that is made available to the general public:
- Financial Ownership: powerful people with an interest in preserving what is right to have profit.
- Advertising: media depends on the money from advertising, so advertisers control it.
- Sourcing News: Government representatives.
- Flak: Governments and other influential institutions criticise the media.
- Anti-Communism: bias in the media against communism.
Manufacturing consent can result in a problem to people, because they can be misinformed about crucial problems, which is a severe concern. Additionally, people can also be manipulated into supporting acts that are unfavourable to their personal interests.
EXAMPLE
There have been discussions and disputes regarding Donald Trump’s use of methods of communication and the media to shape public opinion during his presidency. He used to communicate with the public through Twitter and used controversial language. Trump has additionally been charged with using other deceptive strategies like scapegoating, gaslighting, and disseminating false information.
Donald Trump’s use of rhetoric and media manipulation played an important role in his ability to manufacture consent and gain support among a large segment of the American population.
REFERENCE LIST:
- Chomsky, N. (2018, June 13). Noam Chomsky: The five filters of the mass media. https://prruk.org/noam-chomsky-the-five-filters-of-the-mass-media-machine/
- MacLeod, A. (2019). Propaganda in the information age: Still Manufacturing Consent. Routledge.
- Durham, M. G., & Kellner, D. M. (2009). Media and cultural studies: Keyworks. John Wiley & Sons.
You mentioned the Donald Trump example, which is an interesting and representative example of how leaders can shape their image by making controversial statements and using attention-grabbing tactics to create public attention on social media.
I think Donald Trump’s case of media manipulation may not only be a political phenomenon, but also a microcosm of the media-society relationship that provokes profound thinking. The emergence of this phenomenon exemplifies the trend of entertainment in the media mentioned by Neil Postman in Entertainment to the Death and the system one and system two thinking mentioned by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow. In an age of information overload, people may be more inclined to system one thinking, where opinions are formed quickly, rather than thinking deeply. This may result in people being more likely to believe or disseminate inaccurate information. How to cultivate public literacy so that people can approach news more critically through System II thinking remains an issue worth exploring, and one that is closely related to the development of media communication. At the same time, news organisations that balance the need to attract attention with the need to provide reliable information can help foster healthier media-society relations.