How Manufactured Consent Collapsed The COVID-19 Narrative 

“Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,” by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, is a classic text for the left. The book, published in 1988 and still in print today, argues that corporate and governmental control of the news is so extensive that the “consent of the governed” has been overwhelmed by a “propaganda model” that manufactures public acquiescence.

Hmm. These days, as Americans seek to dig themselves out from under the propaganda that’s been piled high over such topics as the Lafayette Park clearance, Hunter Biden’s laptop and, most profoundly, the origins of COVID-19, perhaps the right, too, should be familiar with “Manufacturing Consent.” (RELATED: ‘More Like A Two-Bit Politician’: Ted Cruz Says ‘Its Time For Dr. Fauci To Go’)

As Chomsky and Herman wrote, “the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them.” This propagandizing, they continued, “is normally not accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.” In other words, fill up newsrooms with like-minded people, send out the signal — and presto! — the establishment gets what it wants.

The result of this system: “The mass media of the United States are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function.”