true believers manufacturing consent?
An excellent column by Mark Majors on Zmag summarizes nicely the way the mainstream press consistently gives the moral benefit of the doubt to the Administration. He argues cogently that assuming the Administration’s motives are good makes certain discussions (e.g., the role of oil in the discussion to invade Iraq) out of bounds. This is really a restatement of an argument made famous by Chomsky’s political writings, that the assumption of American goodness is one of the dominant metaphors that help maintain the function of the press of “manufacturing consent.” There’s only one problem with this line of thought: neither the press nor the Administration thinks of what they do as cynically “manufacturing consent”.
A couple of summers back, I got to work as an intern in Washington, utilizing my skills as an ecologist to answer policy-relevant questions. During the course of my job, I got to talk occasionally with the head of the U.S. Forest Service, a man who had taken numerous stands that as an environmentalist I was strongly opposed to. I was surprised to find him a genteel man who clearly truly believed in the values he espoused, however perverse they seemed to me. Even though he spun propaganda all the time for his job, he believed what he said. He may have been “manufacturing consent,” but clearly not in the cynical sense that Chomsky (or at least popular descriptions of his work) implies. The same is true for all politicians, however much they are hacks: with perhaps a very few exceptions, there are no evil men cackling evil laughs in Washington, spinning conspiracies. The other side feels as strongly that they are doing good as we progressives do.
And this is one of the reasons why the press “manufactures consent.” Again, it’s important to realize that the reporters aren’t evil or mischievous. It’s just that the politicians they talk to are genuine, and the reporter’s corporate friendships encourage a sort of limited worldview. All of this is not to say there isn’t a huge need to reform the media in the U.S. There is. I just want everyone to realize that while one function of the media is to “manufacture consent,” the people doing it are genuine, for the most part. There is no real paradox here, just a psychological reality that regardless of the circumstances people will find a way to view their actions as “moral”.
