Media institution: Manufacturing consent.
Manufacturing consent in the view of Chomsky is that the media, especially the large multimedia companies, have one prevailing motive apart from profit. He argued that the media today are involved in a two pronged-process. The first process is to ensure that the top 20 per cent of the population are satisfied, and this is achieved by maintaining their position as policy-makers, in control of some of the rudiments of power. The issue is one whereby the media help the government to remain on a path that keeps this elite content and feeling that their position in society is of some worth, whilst continuing to ensure the lifestyle and political attachments of this elite. Most of the media are therefore inevitably interested in maintaining the status quo the power elite: often the power elite and the media elite are the same group of people (Rayner and Wall 2008). This means that much of the time the government and the elite are involved in an alliance but only when it suits them. Obviously issues can and do arise on which the government and the elite disagree. Then we can say that government and elite group are the most benefit in the manufacture consent.
Noam Chomsky is interested in the social and political implications of the mass media and their ownership. The basis premise of his writing on the media that he thinks society made up of two different classes of people. The top 20 per cent represents the professional class those who feel they have a stake in the decision-making processes in society, professionals such as judges, lawyers, teachers and intellectuals. Many of these people have a genuine interest in politics and rudiments of power that are associated with their position. So these groups of people think that they have some influence on the way things are run and governed such as the financial support to mass media. This group has money and power that can own and control the media. For remain 80 per cent whose main function is to work and follow orders from people of 20 per cent professional class. Their interested are concerned about their house, fed and have enough to finance for their leisure time so they have no power or money to mass media.
The example case study that shows how media work together with other institution in bringing about a change in society is the case of The pentagon and U.S Chamber (Herman and Chomsky 1988)., the magnitude of the public-information operations of large government and corporate bureaucracies that constitute the primary news sources is vast and ensures special access to the media. The Pentagon, for example, has a public-information service that involves many thousands of employees, spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year and dwarfing not only the public-information resources of any dissenting individual or group but the aggregate of such groups. In I979 and 1980, during a brief interlude of relative openness (since closed down), the U.S. Air Force revealed that its public-information outreach included the following:
I40 newspapers, 690,000 copies per week Airman magazine, monthly circulation I25,000 34 radio and I7 TV stations, primarily overseas 45,000 headquarters and unit news releases 6I5,000 hometown news releases 6,600 interviews with news media 3,200 news conferences 500 news media orientation flights 50 meetings with editorial boards 11,000 speeches
This excludes vast areas of the air force's public-information effort. Writing back in I970, Senator J. W. Fulbright had found that the air force public-relations effort in I968 involved I,305 full-time employees, exclusive of additional thousands that "have public functions collateral to other duties." The air force at that time offered a weekly film-clip service for TV and a taped features program for use three times a week, sent to I,I39 radio stations; it also produced I48 motion pictures, of which 24 were released for public consumption. There is no reason to believe that the air force public-relations effort has diminished since the I960s.
Noam Chomsky is interested in the social and political implications of the mass media and their ownership. The basis premise of his writing on the media that he thinks society made up of two different classes of people. The top 20 per cent represents the professional class those who feel they have a stake in the decision-making processes in society, professionals such as judges, lawyers, teachers and intellectuals. Many of these people have a genuine interest in politics and rudiments of power that are associated with their position. So these groups of people think that they have some influence on the way things are run and governed such as the financial support to mass media. This group has money and power that can own and control the media. For remain 80 per cent whose main function is to work and follow orders from people of 20 per cent professional class. Their interested are concerned about their house, fed and have enough to finance for their leisure time so they have no power or money to mass media.
The example case study that shows how media work together with other institution in bringing about a change in society is the case of The pentagon and U.S Chamber (Herman and Chomsky 1988)., the magnitude of the public-information operations of large government and corporate bureaucracies that constitute the primary news sources is vast and ensures special access to the media. The Pentagon, for example, has a public-information service that involves many thousands of employees, spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year and dwarfing not only the public-information resources of any dissenting individual or group but the aggregate of such groups. In I979 and 1980, during a brief interlude of relative openness (since closed down), the U.S. Air Force revealed that its public-information outreach included the following:
I40 newspapers, 690,000 copies per week Airman magazine, monthly circulation I25,000 34 radio and I7 TV stations, primarily overseas 45,000 headquarters and unit news releases 6I5,000 hometown news releases 6,600 interviews with news media 3,200 news conferences 500 news media orientation flights 50 meetings with editorial boards 11,000 speeches
This excludes vast areas of the air force's public-information effort. Writing back in I970, Senator J. W. Fulbright had found that the air force public-relations effort in I968 involved I,305 full-time employees, exclusive of additional thousands that "have public functions collateral to other duties." The air force at that time offered a weekly film-clip service for TV and a taped features program for use three times a week, sent to I,I39 radio stations; it also produced I48 motion pictures, of which 24 were released for public consumption. There is no reason to believe that the air force public-relations effort has diminished since the I960s.
Note that this is just the air force. There are three other branches with massive programs, and there is a separate, overall public-information program under an assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in the Pentagon. In I97I, an Armed Forces Journal survey revealed that the Pentagon was publishing a total of 37I magazines at an annual cost of some $57 million, an operation sixteen times larger than the nation's biggest publisher. In an update in I982, the Air Force Journal International indicated that the Pentagon was publishing I,203 periodicals. To put this into perspective, we may note the scope of public-information operations of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the National Council of the Churches of Christ (NCC), two of the largest of the nonprofit organizations that offer a consistently challenging voice to the views of the Pentagon. The AFSC's main office information-services budget in I984-85 was under $500,000, with eleven staff people. Its institution-wide press releases run at about two hundred per year, its press conferences thirty a year, and it produces about one film and two or three slide shows a year. It does not offer film clips, photos, or taped radio programs to the media. The NCC Office of Information has an annual budget of some $350,000, issues about a hundred news releases per year, and holds four press conferences annually. The ratio of air force news releases and press conferences to those of the AFSC and NCC taken together are I50 to I (or 2,200 to 1, if we count hometown news releases of the air force), and 94 to I respectively. Aggregating the other services would increase the differential by a large factor.
Only the corporate sector has the resources to produce public information and propaganda on the scale of the Pentagon and other government bodies. The AFSC and NCC cannot duplicate the Mobil Oil company's multimillion-dollar purchase of newspaper space and other corporate investments to get its viewpoint across. The number of individual corporations with budgets for public information and lobbying in excess of those of the AFSC and NCC runs into the hundreds, perhaps even the thousands. A corporate collective like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had a I983 budget for research, communications, and political activities of $65 million. By I980, the chamber was publishing a business magazine (Nation's Business) with a circulation of I.3 million and a weekly newspaper with 740,000 subscribers, and it was producing a weekly panel show distributed to 400 radio stations, as well as its own weekly panel-discussion programs carried by I28 commercial television stations.
Besides the U.S. Chamber, there are thousands of state and local chambers of commerce and trade associations also engaged in public relations and lobbying activities. The corporate and trade-association lobbying network community is "a network of well over I50,000 professionals," and its resources are related to corporate income, profits, and the protective value of public-relations and lobbying outlays. Corporate profits before taxes in I985 were $295.5 billion. When the corporate community gets agitated about the political environment, as it did in the I970s, it obviously has the wherewithal to meet the perceived threat. Corporate and trade-association image and issues advertising increased from $305 million in I975 to $650 million in I980. So did direct-mail campaigns through dividend and other mail stuffers, the distribution of educational films, booklets and pamphlets, and outlays on initiatives and referendums, lobbying, and political and think-tank contributions. Aggregate corporate and trade-association political advertising and grass-roots outlays were estimated to have reached the billion-dollar-a-year level by I978, and to have grown to $I.6 billion by I984.
To consolidate their preeminent position as sources, government and business-news promoters go to great pains to make things easy for news organizations. They provide the media organizations with facilities in which to gather; they give journalists advance copies of speeches and forthcoming reports; they schedule press conferences at hours well-geared to news deadlines; they write press releases in usable language; and they carefully organize their press conferences and "photo opportunity" sessions. It is the job of news officers "to meet the journalist's scheduled needs with material that their beat agency has generated at its own pace."
