Edward S. Herman > Quotes

“Convenient mythologies require neither evidence nor logic.”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“Concentrate on the victims of enemy powers and forget about the victims of friends.”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the "buying mood." They seek programs that will lightly entertain and thus fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose of program purchases—the dissemination of a selling message.”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“[...] the institutional bias of the private mass media "does not merely protect the corporate system. It robs the public of a chance to understand the real world.”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“When a Vietnamese official suggested that the U.S. send food aid to regions where starving villagers are being asked to spend their time and energy searching for the remains of American pilots killed while destroying their country, State Department spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley reacted with great anger: “We are outraged at any suggestion of linking food assistance with the return of remains,” she declaimed. So profound is the U.S. commitment to humanitarian imperatives and moral values that it cannot permit these lofty ideals to be tainted by associating them with such trivial concerns and indecent requests.166”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“that nobody has a right of self-defense against this country, even if it intervenes across the ocean to impose by force a government that the people of that country reject.”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters,", fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism.”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“People watch and read in good part on the basis of what is readily available and intensively promoted.”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“Governments 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.”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“Robert McChesney notes that “the hallmark of the global media system is its relentless, ubiquitous commercialism.”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“There is little reason to believe that they would not like to understand why they are working harder with stagnant or declining incomes, have inadequate medical care at high costs, and what is being done in their name all over the world. If they are not getting much information on these topics, the propaganda model can explain why: the sovereigns who control the media choose not to offer such material.”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“As an illustration of how the funded experts preempt space in the media, table 1-4 describes the “experts” on terrorism and defense issues who appeared on the “McNeil-Lehrer News Hour” in the course of a year in the mid-1980s. We can see that, excluding journalists, a majority of the participants (54 percent) were present or former government officials, and that the next highest category (15.7 percent) was drawn from conservative think tanks. The largest number of appearances in the latter category was supplied by the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an organization funded by conservative foundations and corporations, and providing a revolving door between the State Department and CIA and a nominally private organization.93 On such issues as terrorism and the Bulgarian Connection, the CSIS has occupied space in the media that otherwise might have been filled by independent voices.94”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“[reporting components for "worthy" victims]: Fullness and reiteration of the details of the murder and the damage inflicted on the victim. Stress on indignation, shock, and demands for justice. The search for responsibility at the top.”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“The anti-Communist control mechanism reaches through the system to exercise a profound influence on the mass media. In normal times as well as in periods of Red scares, issues tend to be framed in terms of a dichotomized world of Communist and anti-Communist powers, with gains and losses allocated to contesting sides, and rooting for “our side” considered an entirely legitimate news practice.”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“The steady advance, and cultural power, of marketing and advertising has caused “the displacement of a political public sphere by a depoliticized consumer culture.”21”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“Some argue that the Internet and the new communications technologies are breaking the corporate stranglehold on journalism and opening an unprecedented era of interactive democratic media.”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“In contrast to the standard conception of the media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and their independence of authority, we have spelled out and applied a propaganda model that indeed sees the media as serving a "societal purpose," but not that of enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process by providing them with the information needed for the intelligent discharge of political responsibilities. On the contrary, a propaganda model suggests that the "societal purpose" of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state. The media serve this purpose in many ways: through selection of topical distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and by keeping debate within the bounds of acceptable premises.”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“in a system of high and growing inequality, entertainment is the contemporary equivalent of the Roman “games of the circus” that diverts the public from politics and generates a political apathy that is helpful to preservation of the status quo.”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“[on sponsored elections] Thus the dramatic denouement of the election is voter turnout, which measures the ability of the forces of democracy and peace (the army) to overcome rebel threats. [...] "Off the agenda" for the government in its own sponsored elections are all of the basic parameters that make an election meaningful or meaningless prior to the election-day proceedings. These include: (1) freedom of speech and assembly; (2) freedom of the press; (3) freedom to organize and maintain intermediate economic, social, and political groups (unions, peasant organizations, political clubs, student and teacher associations, etc.); (4) freedom to form political parties, organize members, put forward candidates, and campaign without fear of extreme violence; and (5) the absence of state terror and a climate of fear among the public. Also off the agenda is the election-day "coercion package" that may explain turnout in terms other than devotion to the army and its plans, including any legal requirement to vote, and explicit or implicit threats for not voting.”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media