According to him, the enemies of America are painted as “disruptive and causing trouble and breaking harmony and violating Americanism.” This propaganda has portrayed Muslims as barbaric and Islamic political entities as terrorist groups. Images and videos of beheadings and other extreme acts of violence by the Islamic State, in particular, are used to “elicit jingoist fanaticism.” In reaction, American citizens behave as “spectators,” who sit back and watch these events unfold without questioning their validity.Ĭhomsky’s thesis builds off the idea that the US government manufactures consent by using propaganda as a tool to control the public mind. Since 9/11, the US government has fed Americans propaganda that portrays Muslims as “boogeymen,” a term used to create “wartime hysteria,” as Chomsky calls it. Although first published in 1991, Chomsky’s book remains timeless and pertinent. Noam Chomsky’s book Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (published by Seven Stories).
Media Control is an invaluable primer on the secret workings of disinformation in democratic societies.What role does the media play in contemporary politics? This question is at the heart of Dr. Chomsky further touches on how the modern public relations industry has been influenced by Walter Lippmann’s theory of "spectator democracy," in which the public is seen as a "bewildered herd" that needs to be directed, not empowered and how the public relations industry in the United States focuses on "controlling the public mind," and not on informing it. From an examination of how Woodrow Wilson’s Creel Commission "succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population," to Bush Sr.'s war on Iraq, Chomsky examines how the mass media and public relations industries have been used as propaganda to generate public support for going to war. According to Chomsky, "propaganda is to democracy as the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state," and the mass media is the primary vehicle for delivering propaganda in the United States. Noam Chomsky’s backpocket classic on wartime propaganda and opinion control begins by asserting two models of democracy-one in which the public actively participates, and one in which the public is manipulated and controlled.
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