Chomsky on the current media landscape | Hacker News Reader

Chomsky on the current media landscape

alternet.org

94 pointsdoctorshady5 comments

If anyone is unaware, the title of Chomsky's book refers to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_of_the_governed

Actually, it refers to a phrase used by Walter Lippman in his seminal 1922 book, Public Opinion [1]. The genesis for the book is the lead-up to World War 1. The US population was rabidly ANTI-war at the time. In fact, Woodrow Wilson won re-election on the slogan "He kept us out of the war."

But the US banks were in a position to lose billions if Western Europe was defeated in the war, and so the power elite decided that it was necessary for the US to enter the war to protect the interests of the 1%. The intellectuals of the time believed that it was possible to win over the American public by creating what was effectively the first mass propaganda campaign in history. At the time, the word "propaganda" didn't have the negative connotations that it has now, so Edward Bernays, who was really the mastermind of the effort, wrote a book titled "Propaganda" summarizing everything they learned in converting the American public into Hun-haters.

After the war ended, the fear that the liberal intellectual class stirred up against the Huns, was immediately transferred onto the communists. And then these same intellectuals moved into comfortable positions on Madison Ave and made millions creating the modern advertising industry.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_%28book%29

Thanks, I did not know that the phrase had originated with Lippmann.

The bibliography looks interesting, I'm aware of the broad outline, but not the details.

Not even Chomsky's interview can avoid being juxtaposed with the utter nonsense "sponsored by Taboola" links below it.

I'm a bit taken aback by the findings in this article. I thought the opposite in fact when I read this. I will say that according to our own growth as a society, we have taken it upon ourselves to create an absorbable rate of finite information to be spread amongst the globe without neccesarily understanding the entire story. However, that is not to say that propaganda rules the internet. On the contrary, it would only enhance our continual perspective into the current dynamics on a global level, in order to denote patterns of auspiciousness that enable us to learn more about current niches. As such, we cannot forget that being in a capitalistic society we must also be self-aware of the market dynamics at play too. I am not an linguistics or media expert to that extent but it would be neccesary to understand that there must be a disclosure over current headlines either through financial reporting or in some ways by analytics experts whom measure the content of these newpaper organizations objectively and in essence try to understand what is the lexical information they are providing to the public. In this way we can understand and begin to denote the granular changes occuring daily. Before I get over my head explaining a difficult problem to solve I wil say I hope there could be some research done in the AI / machine learning realm in order to understand what sort of vectors would be measurable here. Thank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com