Big Data & Society

Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky excerpted from the book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky Pantheon Books, 1988 The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite. A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. In their analysis of the evolution of the media in Great Britain, James Curran and Jean Seaton describe how, in the first half of the nineteenth century, a radical press emerged that reached a national working-class audience.