Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky and the Media

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Peter Wintonick and Mark Achbar made this penetrating documentary about the career and views of linguist and media critic Noam Chomsky. While the man is the subject of the movie, the filmmakers wisely and carefully choose not to make Chomsky more important than his insights into the way print and electronic journalism tacitly and often willingly further the agendas of the powerful. We learn a lot about Chomsky's formative experiences as a child, student, academic, activist, and politician (he has campaigned for office), but we learn just as much about the media institutions that deny him access today, from ABC to PBS. The centerpiece of the film, arguably, is a long examination into the history of the New York Times' coverage of Indonesia's atrocity-ridden occupation of East Timor, reportage that (as Chomsky shows us) was absolutely in lock step with the government's unwillingness to criticize an ally. --Tom Keogh

Description

Funny, provocative and surprisingly accessible, MANUFACTURING CONSENT explores the political life and ideas of world-renowned linguist, intellectual and political activist Noam Chomsky. Through a dynamic collage of biography, archival gems, imaginative graphics and outrageous illustrations, Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick's award-winning documentary highlights Chomsky's probing analysis of mass media and his critique of the forces at work behind the daily news. Available for the first time anywhere on DVD, MANUFACTURING CONSENT features appearances by journalists Bill Moyers and Peter Jennings, pundit William F. Buckley Jr., novelist Tom Wolfe and philosopher Michel Foucault. This Edition features an exclusive ten-years-after video interview with Chomsky.

Customer Reviews:

Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky and the Media.......2007-08-29

My copy of this DVD shows a blank screen, with 'Region Error' in a small box in the centre of the screen. Please tell me hoe I can have this replaced. The other DVD's ordered at the same time were all fine.

Outstanding.......2007-04-05

This DVD is outstanding. Although 2 hours and 45 minutes, it is riveting. Every American should see it. As for the negative reviews, as usual when you can't attack the message, attack the messenger. This is the typical tactic (even as Chomsky says) to marginalize dissenting views. People are getting wise to that crap. This country behaves like to old Soviet Union at times; calling people like Noam Chomsky (and me) America haters. This is tactic used by totalitarian regimes. So remember when you call someone anti-American (or America-hating), you're actually being a good Soviet.

Chomsky offers people intellectual self-defense against the sycophants.

This is a fascinating narrative about the world's most irritating rhetorician.......2007-03-26

A fabulous documentary of a genius cult leader. Move over Branch Davidians! Excelent interviews with defenders and critics, it's all Chomsky all the time!

Production values are okay for a documentary, although I would have preferred more shaky cam action, in keeping with the constant disorienting in order to reorient you that is so common with Chomskyites.

Noam Chomsky is a religious cult, and has skills even a dead Mesmer envies. Master of the rapid-fire counterfactual (if he wore a tinfoil hat and didn't bath, you'd mistake him for a schizophrenic homeless person), one cannot escape the construct of his rhetoric, simply because it is a closed hermeneutic circle of simultaneously no authority and his own node of authority. The Chomsky tautology is the ultimate "ommmm" chant for leftists who have abandoned the search for god, become disgusted with the idol of themselves in God's place, and need that vacuum of prophetic voice filled with someone. Enter clown Chomsky, stage left.

Chomsky isn't a Holocaust denier, and the backwater back and forth arguments of Semitic anti-Semites is such a stew it has expelled a good many well-intended leftists from the cacophony of the kvetching. But he is far worse, he is a Khmer Rouge auto genocide denier, and on a proportional scale the Cambodian genocide was far graver than the Holocaust (spare me your elevation of a Western European post enlightenment horror indignation preference construct over the troubles of the little brown people, you Colonialist revanchist you).

Chomsky, in other words, is an ideologue par excellence: he can deny fact.

For those of you who've gotten this far and are still Chomsky apologists: please read the Anti-Chomsky Reader for actual scholarly rebuttals to his thinking and positions.

The more you try to strike him down the more powerful he becomes than you can possibly imagine........2007-03-04

While researching 9/11 denial I came across a very interesting video on a debunking web site which featured Noam Chomsky making the statement along the lines (and I am paraphrasing) that in a controlled experiment we know what the apparatus are, the procedure, the results and then we base our conclusions on facts. In an uncontrolled situation, we don't always know what the apparatus is, the procedure or the results and so we find that we can push the facts or evidence in any direction we like (albeit to active scepticism, something Chomsky proposes as vital to the rational mind). While Chomsky is certainly not a 9/11 denier (he believes the evidence logically and rationally points to a foreign terrorist attack) he firmly acknowledges the ease of which it is to manipulate facts without challenge. In this way he is all for the "freedom of speech" so that we can at least experience all the variations in interpreting the facts (if we do get all the facts!). At his heart Chomsky just wants more exposure and more coverage of dissidents in the mainstream media so that people can make up their own minds, instead of having their minds made up for them.

The freedom of speech is not without its own problems that Chomsky himself has found himself caught up in. I was equally interested in the topic of Jews who are anti-Semites, something Chomsky has been accused of, although unjustly so. If a Jew makes a statement about the Holocaust that is not true then are they a Holocaust denier? The answer here is that most Jews would claim these people have stopped being Jewish and so should not be called anti-Semitist Jews, but just simply anti-Semites. Chomsky was told that someone questioning some things about the Holocaust in the "French Faurisson affair" was prevented from freely expressing his opinions and Chomsky was asked to write a paper on the basics of the freedom of speech. The paper was then used, unknown to Chomsky, by Faurisson's publishers as a foreword for the holocaust denial book. Chomsky was then automatically linked to this holocaust denial because of it. The bottom line here is that just because you believe in the freedom of speech does not mean that you are in agreement with the content of the speech, but believe in the freedom to be able to speak. In many ways this means that Chomsky is aware that propaganda, of all kinds, be it from the White House or a Holocaust denier is covered under the basics of the freedom of speech (note the term basics, not advanced, in which we learn that some things should not be freely made available to everybody). However, if we start to suppress the freedom of speech then are we not acting like the dictator Nazi's that curbed those freedoms? As you can see the debate is a major one.

When a single conclusion is drawn and pushed by one body then our experience with this topic is limited to the one body proposing it. If the body, such as the White House, is a very powerful one, then we find that smaller bodies in an attempt to "keep up with the joneses" tend to regurgitate it without question. Journalists working within the larger bodies acknowledge this problem. They understand that deadlines pressures, limited column space and front desk judgment is why they need to maintain some rules or else their imperfect media structures would simply become an even bigger mess and probably promote more error and contradictions than they already do. They don't deny it. Imagine if say the New York Times does question the White House's statement. Chances are if the NYT counterpoint is judged a bigger statement than the WH statement, then the smaller bodies will generally go with the NYT counterpoint to improve sales. While we would like to jump up and say, "Hold on here a moment, we aren't all stupidly duped fools, journalists can use their brains too!" Chomsky goes the extra mile by saying that these rules and judgements within America's major media management systems are `manufacturing consent' because of their limitations. If it takes 40 minutes to explain something, then obviously that person isn't going to appear on a half hour show that has ten minutes worth of advertisements (need to pay the wages and bills). Chomsky lists the major regulations in place in the media that prevent journalists from exercising better judgement (common sense) and how this affects the populace that is exposed to it.

Chomsky then brings up American involvement in East Timor and Cambodia and how the American media covered nothing of American involvement (or active ignorance) until as such time as they could find an appropriate bad guy on which to lay the blame. When the bad guys showed up, the Khmer Rogue, suddenly the media became extremely active and the stories pasted from start to finish across the media. This case study proves beyond a doubt that there is a real overwhelming factual instance of the deliberate suppression of information by the American media in order to manufacture consent. It is the key evidence that Chomsky uses when he puts the media (and us!) on trial.

Without dissident voices Chomsky proclaims that the masses are being brain-washed into not questioning anything. That 80% should be satisfied with the sports section while the remaining 20% promote the consent through political and management systems. Chomsky says that we should be aware of the propaganda and thus automatically supersede this system that is in place by simply questioning what we read, see and hear. He firmly believes the power of better judgement and common sense is what makes a society influence its government as opposed to a government, or media, or us (and we are to blame for most of it!), that influences its society in how to act and think. This is scientific thinking. It is good, not bad. Chomsky himself is the experiment in action. As a dissident questioning propaganda he finds himself lambasted and sometimes torn about by the media and government officials. Chomsky is living proof that the propaganda machine is in action. Note however that he does not think that America is a dictatorship trying to suppress him (obviously he is freely able to go about saying what he wants to say). Chomsky believes that America is one of the few nations that have this ability to notice these things and to do something about them by looking at alternative sources. If we walk away from the challenge then we have lost already. This isn't about finding a comfortable platform to talk about `conspiracy hypothesis' (note I use the term hypothesis because theories are made of facts, so a conspiracy theory is in fact a `conspiracy fact' such as the Watergate scandal as opposed to a conspiracy hypothesis like there are aliens visiting Earth on spacecraft) it is about actively engaging your own society about this, wherever you are.

If you have never heard about Chomsky before, then this is the documentary to watch. Don't be afraid to have a dictionary and a pause button on standby. It is often called one of the most important documentaries ever made and I would strongly agree with that position without reservation. Get those brain neurons to start firing again and if you like this then certainly you will be delving into his literature. I know I will.

(As a closing note the monkey human language model that was in question in this documentary has since been expanded on, although a controversy still remains in academic science circles. You might want to go find out more about it, although this is exactly the kind of attitude Chomsky promotes. Think for yourself!)

A very good way to start..........2007-02-21

"Manufacturing consent" is a very good documentary that introduces the spectator to Noam Chomsky's ideas and political views, thanks to interesting footage of some of his interviews and conferences.

I think that this documentary is ideal for those who would like to know more about Chomsky, but don't want to read several of his books in order to do so. All the same, I must highlight the fact that you will probably learn less by watching this dvd than if you decide to devote time to reading his books and articles, and that this dvd only includes footage until 1992. By that, I mean that there is more to Chomsky's ideas than what is shown in this documentary, but that watching it is a very good way to start.

All in all, I can say that even though "Manufacturing consent" is very long, it will make you think and it is a good introduction to Chomsky. Those are the reasons why the time you spend watching "Manafucturing consent" will not be time lost. Recommended!

Belen Alcat

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media

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Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media
Starring: William F. Buckley , Peter Jennings , Bill Moyers , Jeff Greenfield , and Noam Chomsky
Manufacturer: Zeitgeist Films
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B000A2SA64
Release Date: 2002-03-26

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