It’s easy to forget at times, living in the social bubbles that we all do, that approximately two-thirds of Americans are not university graduates, and thus have not completed the process of “internalizing the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society”, whereby Noam Chomsky noted:
"Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience … it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society.
Throughout the 2016 primary elections season to date, the “mainstream media,” both “liberal” and “conservative,” along with the establishments of both the Republican and Democratic parties, have been desperately working — at times in a state of barely-concealed panic — to contain, divert, coopt and otherwise neutralize a tsunami of discontent among the “uneducated,” “working class” masses, many of whom are “stubbornly” refusing to cooperate with the extremely expensive simulation of democracy that the corporate plutocracy is forced to stage for us every four years.
These “discontents” have already handed the Republican presidential nomination to Donald Trump, a buffoonish billionaire real estate mogul whose incoherent demagogic ramblings make George W. Bush sound articulate in comparison, and are “childishly” dragging out the coronation of Democrat Hillary Clinton by continuing to vote for a 74-year-old self-proclaimed “socialist” who has had the audacity to talk about Clinton’s shady ties to Wall Street, and the rest of the transnational corporate elite that more or less rules the world at this point, and things like that.
Now, when we talk about the “mainstream media,” it’s easy to end up speaking in overly simplistic terms, as if they were some sort of neo-Orwellian Ministry of Information pumping out bald-faced lies and propaganda that they wanted everyone to mindlessly parrot … but what we’re talking about is something much subtler and more insidious than that, generally.
As Chomsky notes in the brief article referenced above (and in detail in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, with co-author Edward S. Herman), the mainstream media is an informal network of news and opinion sources (i.e. corporations) that together define the “acceptable” boundaries of political and cultural discourse (i.e. what one is allowed to say and how one is allowed to say it), a network owned and operated by people who have “internalized the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society.” In our case, of course, “the surrounding power system in the society” is global Capitalism, or Neoliberalism, or whatever you want to call it. And it is this internalization of capitalist values, and not any type of conspiracy or direct editorial censorship, that produces the mainstream media’s monolithic aspect, despite the fact that reporters and editorialists are “free” to write whatever they want.
The current election season in the US is providing us with a rather clear example of this. Anyone halfway paying attention has witnessed the mainstream media (both “left” and “right”) operating as a superficially diverse yet essentially monolithic echo chamber … manufacturing public opinion in perfect synchronization as if following a Hill+Knowlton script. According to this script, Clinton is the only reasonable choice for “normal, intelligent grown-ups,” Sanders is the “unrealistic” protest-vote candidate (who is also racist, sexist and sometimes anti-Semitic, depending on the publication and whether he has just won another primary), and Trump is … well, Hitler. One could go back and catalogue the mainstream media’s coverage of the campaign season so far — in both “liberal” and “conservative” news sources — and marvel at their dogged adherence to this simplistic narrative.
Now it remains to be seen whether Trump can be transformed into some “mainstream” version of himself that the liberalize GOP establishment can possibly live with. At the moment, the odds of that happening seem pretty slim, and the big liberalize money is flowing toward Clinton, who has proven her allegiance to the global banking and corporate elites time and time again. (Although I wouldn’t put anything past Trump, who has no real principles whatsoever.) Sanders, meanwhile, is doomed, and appears to be preparing his supporters for the day when he will herd them all into the Clinton camp (i.e. the mainstream) and instruct them to ignore Clinton’s corrupt ties to Wall Street, and her war-mongering and coup-inciting, and so on, because, well … Hitler.
Read the full report: The Mainstream Media and Its Discontents
"Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience … it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society.
Throughout the 2016 primary elections season to date, the “mainstream media,” both “liberal” and “conservative,” along with the establishments of both the Republican and Democratic parties, have been desperately working — at times in a state of barely-concealed panic — to contain, divert, coopt and otherwise neutralize a tsunami of discontent among the “uneducated,” “working class” masses, many of whom are “stubbornly” refusing to cooperate with the extremely expensive simulation of democracy that the corporate plutocracy is forced to stage for us every four years.
These “discontents” have already handed the Republican presidential nomination to Donald Trump, a buffoonish billionaire real estate mogul whose incoherent demagogic ramblings make George W. Bush sound articulate in comparison, and are “childishly” dragging out the coronation of Democrat Hillary Clinton by continuing to vote for a 74-year-old self-proclaimed “socialist” who has had the audacity to talk about Clinton’s shady ties to Wall Street, and the rest of the transnational corporate elite that more or less rules the world at this point, and things like that.
Now, when we talk about the “mainstream media,” it’s easy to end up speaking in overly simplistic terms, as if they were some sort of neo-Orwellian Ministry of Information pumping out bald-faced lies and propaganda that they wanted everyone to mindlessly parrot … but what we’re talking about is something much subtler and more insidious than that, generally.
As Chomsky notes in the brief article referenced above (and in detail in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, with co-author Edward S. Herman), the mainstream media is an informal network of news and opinion sources (i.e. corporations) that together define the “acceptable” boundaries of political and cultural discourse (i.e. what one is allowed to say and how one is allowed to say it), a network owned and operated by people who have “internalized the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society.” In our case, of course, “the surrounding power system in the society” is global Capitalism, or Neoliberalism, or whatever you want to call it. And it is this internalization of capitalist values, and not any type of conspiracy or direct editorial censorship, that produces the mainstream media’s monolithic aspect, despite the fact that reporters and editorialists are “free” to write whatever they want.
The current election season in the US is providing us with a rather clear example of this. Anyone halfway paying attention has witnessed the mainstream media (both “left” and “right”) operating as a superficially diverse yet essentially monolithic echo chamber … manufacturing public opinion in perfect synchronization as if following a Hill+Knowlton script. According to this script, Clinton is the only reasonable choice for “normal, intelligent grown-ups,” Sanders is the “unrealistic” protest-vote candidate (who is also racist, sexist and sometimes anti-Semitic, depending on the publication and whether he has just won another primary), and Trump is … well, Hitler. One could go back and catalogue the mainstream media’s coverage of the campaign season so far — in both “liberal” and “conservative” news sources — and marvel at their dogged adherence to this simplistic narrative.
Now it remains to be seen whether Trump can be transformed into some “mainstream” version of himself that the liberalize GOP establishment can possibly live with. At the moment, the odds of that happening seem pretty slim, and the big liberalize money is flowing toward Clinton, who has proven her allegiance to the global banking and corporate elites time and time again. (Although I wouldn’t put anything past Trump, who has no real principles whatsoever.) Sanders, meanwhile, is doomed, and appears to be preparing his supporters for the day when he will herd them all into the Clinton camp (i.e. the mainstream) and instruct them to ignore Clinton’s corrupt ties to Wall Street, and her war-mongering and coup-inciting, and so on, because, well … Hitler.
Read the full report: The Mainstream Media and Its Discontents
