The real goal of the US mass media is the construction of mass idiocy

[Karmadillo]

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Beyond-Manufacturing-Consent-20150327-0024.html

Beyond Manufacturing Consent
By: Paul Street
Published 27 March 2015

The book Manufacturing Consent did not examine what is probably the biggest part of US corporate media’s contribution to the engineering of mass “consent.”

I am still occasionally asked by readers and others what I think of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s 1988 text Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. My answer is always the same: it is an indispensable, classic, and justly famous study of the United States corporate media’s role as propaganda organ for that nation’s imperial establishment. For many of us on the Left, Manufacturing Consent was a revelatory volume, one that significantly sharpened our grasp of how and why “mainstream” US media perform that function. The book was particularly enlightening for me on the critical role played by the (not so) “leftmost” liberal wings of that media – the New York Timesespecially – in setting the narrow imperial parameters of acceptable political and policy debate for the nation’s educated classes.

Beyond the News

Still, Herman and Chomsky did not pretend to give readers anything more than a modest and opening take on dominant US media’s inclusive power-serving role. The brilliant content analysis and “propaganda model” that Herman and Chomsky advanced in Manufacturing Consent focused on how that media reported and commented on matters of US “foreign policy” (US Empire). The same basic model and analysis can and should be adapted for and applied to US domestic policy and society as well (and indeed it has been in various writings since, including those of Herman and Chomsky). The leading capitalist US media corporations are naturally no less committed to advancing “homeland” oppression structures and ideologies than they are to hawking related imperial policies and propaganda.

At the same time, Manufacturing Consent did not examine what is probably the biggest part of US corporate media’s contribution to the engineering of mass “consent.” That media’s function of transmitting ideology and propaganda in service to those atop the nation’s interrelated hierarchies of empire and inequality is hardly limited to the news. Equally if not more significant for that task are “entertainment” media. Far from restricting their hearts-and minds-influencing powers to the (Aldous) “Huxlean” tasks of mass diversion, distraction, and infantilization, US movies (like US television sit-coms and dramas and video games) are loaded with richly “Orwellian” political and ideological content. As US Court of Appeals Justice Bennett C. Clark explained in upholding the conviction of ten Hollywood screenwriters and directors who refused to “confess” current or past Communist Party membership in 1949, US motion pictures play “a critically important role” as “a potent medium of propaganda dissemination.” The same could be accurately said six-plus decades later about US television sit-coms, dramas, “reality shows,” talk shows, and even commercials, along with the movie industry, not to mention video games and much of book and magazine publishing.

Manufacturing Idiocy and Cruelty

But even this expansion of our understanding of the US mass media’s authoritarian role in (not-so) “democratic” America comes up short. Seen broadly its total many-sided and multiply delivered impact, that media’s mission is worse than merely the production of mass consent. The real goal is the construction of mass idiocy – the manufacture of idiots. Here I use the words “idiocy” and “idiot” in the original Greek and Athenian sense, one that refers not to stupidity but rather to childish selfishness and willful indifference to public affairs and concerns. As Wikipedia explains, “An idiot in Athenian democracy was someone who was characterized by self-centeredness and concerned almost exclusively with private – as opposed to public – affairs…Declining to take part in public life, such as democratic government of the polis (city state),…’idiots’ were seen as having bad judgment in public and political matters.”

In US movies, television sit-coms, television dramas, television reality-shows, commercials, the state Lotteries, and video games, the ideal-type American is to no small degree an idiot in the classic Athenian sense: a person who cares about little more than his or her own well-being, affluence, personal consumption, individual status and accomplishments. This noble American idiot has no real concern for the fate of others. He or she is blissfully indifferent to the terrible social and environmental prices paid by fellow human and other sentient beings for the maintenance of currently reigning and interrelated oppressions structures (class, race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, anthropocentrism, Empire, and more) at home and abroad.

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[hifiguy]

1. Great post. All true.

An idiot populace is very easy to control. And that's what the tenth-percenters want above all else.

[leveymg]

2. There is yet another primary structure and function of mass media: reinforcement of ritual sacrifice

and scapegoating practices that underlie institutional authority. All societies have their own version of violent ritual scapegoating and a priestly class that lead and interpret the sacrificial ritual.

In the United States, that function is segmented by demographics and served by various talking heads, quasi-news funnymen, sitcom one-liner writers, along with more traditional political and religious figures and opinion-leaders who convey narrative to the community. Police and military execute, and sometimes provide the priestly interpretative function.

The point of these sacrificial rituals is to channel intra-community tensions that arise from inequality and injustice that is the hallmark of all hierarchic agricultural or industrial societies. Following the signals of the high priests, resentments and fears are displaced onto scapegoats, victims who are ritualistically alienated, drubbed or chopped up as they are led or carried into expulsion or to a fire where they are consumed.

This theory is developed by Stanford anthropologist, Rene Girard. Please see his Violence and the Sacred, http://books.google.com/books/about/Violence_and_the_Sacred.html?id=z0vO6ctw3E4C and The Scapegoat.

[Orsino]

3. Idiocy is the side effect, or the prerequisite.

Obedience is the goal.

[leveymg]

4. Unity.

Obedience is also a means to that goal, IMHO.

[G_j]

5. and they are succeeding

great article