Most folks would bristle at the suggestion that they are capable of being manipulated, let alone the proposal that they are. The abstract concept of independence is so fundamental to our national identity as to become central to individual core values. To suggest that a person is somehow less then 100% free in body, mind and spirit is more then just offensive; it's positively unpatriotic.

To Americans the concept of propaganda is unpleasant, foreign, sinister, threatening. Usually associated with distant places populated with people different from us who speak strange languages and have bizarre customs and because they're so backwards, they practice some sort of primitive economic/political system at odds with our own possessing violent expansionist intentions. In short, the Generalized Other. Propaganda is something the Germans did in WW2, or Soviet era Russia, or those cah-raazy North Koreans with their cah-raazy leader. Propaganda isn't something that could ever happen here, so let's stick with the pleasantly acceptable euphamism, Mass Influence.

The mass media is comprised of a collection of for profit business corporations. The purpose of any business is to make money, in the case of a corporation, they have a legal fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder return, and can be sued if they don't. Mass media make their money by selling exposure to their audience to advertisers. Since it is so lucrative, they will do anything to increase their audience share. Massive amounts of capital are spent employing the brightest minds in psychology, marketing, and other creative disciplines developing increasingly sophisticated methods and techniques to influence the public, specifically to get and maintain attention, and create a suggestible state of mind. So that the public is more likely to go buy whatever it is they're selling. This is called effective advertising. Advertisers being their source of revenue, and alternate divisions part of the same organization (the connections are vast and serpentine, the obfuscation deliberate) possessing a mutual self-interest, media distributors are not about to draw attention to information that is unflattering of them. It's just common sense not to bite the hand that feeds you, and protect your family.

Now, if mass media is the worlds biggest attention whore, how do they get the public to pay attention? Content. They want it as fast and cheap and effective as possible, and tons of it is distributed, free of charge from Washington DC. You didn't really think all these news networks maintained foreign offices, with desks of reporters covering the Mumbai beat, did you? No! They just take what they get from Washington, and regurgitate it for mass consumption. If they don't do it how DC likes it, their access gets restricted, and they suffer a comparative disadvantage to their competition. That's a pretty compelling reason to stay in line and do what you're told.

To assume that a government dependent on popular support and approval for most of its activities would seek objective truth as the primary goal in its production and release of information is gullibly naive at best and willfully ignorant at worst. Any entity is going to present itself in the best possible light, that's just human nature, and the government is going to produce and release information intended to influence public opinion to support its practices and policies. A great deal of Manufacturing Consent is dedicated to demonstrating this premise, and it is done quite effectively.

Traditionally, propaganda has been quite crude in it's design. It was distributed directly from the government to the public. In Soviet Russia, the national paper was called Pravda. That means Truth. It's pretty easy to see through that one. But over here, we've got the most sophisticated Mass Influence information dissemination system ever designed. The process of Mass Influence will be more effective if people believe what they're told and people will inherently have greater trust for a third party with the facade of impartiality then the source itself.

True independence of mind and spirit takes work and folks tend to prefer a comfortable illusion to an unpleasant reality, so this book is not for everybody. But it is infinitely rewarding for those who would make the effort.