Manufacturing consent
The idea that public agreement in a democracy is produced rather than found: by elites through the press, in Walter Lippmann's 1922 phrase "the manufacture of consent", or by the structure of the media itself, in Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's 1988 book of that title.
Lippmann used the phrase in Public Opinion to describe something he thought both inevitable and dangerous. The public could not know the world directly; it knew the pictures in its head, and those pictures were supplied by the press and by the people who had learned to work the press. Consent to policy was therefore manufactured, in the sense that it was the product of a process, and the process could be run well or badly. Lippmann wanted it run by experts. Edward Bernays, writing a year later, wanted to sell the service.
Herman and Chomsky borrowed the phrase for a different argument. Their propaganda model holds that the news passes through five filters before it reaches the public, ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and a shared ideology, and that the filters select for news that serves the interests of those who own and fund the media, without any conspiracy being needed. The model is contested in media studies and widely cited outside it.
For a reader of this site, both senses point at the same thing: that the structural techniques, Gatekeeping, Agenda Setting, Media Capture, and Message Discipline, do their work before any message is written, by deciding which messages get written at all.
Sources
- Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922.
- Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 1988. ISBN 978-0375714498