The key role the mainstream media plays in manufacturing public consent for elite
decision makers has a long and inglorious history that has wreaked havoc on progressive
aspirations for the development a truly democratic global polity. While the
antidemocratic implications of Manufacturing Consent were first popularized in the late
1980s by Herman and Chomsky’s (1988) classic book of the same title, the methods of
manufacturing public consent were honed much earlier by communications researchers
participating in the seminal (Rockefeller Foundation funded) Communications Group. As
early as 1940, the leading media scholars who formed this Communications Group
frankly acknowledged that: “Government which rests upon consent rests also upon
knowledge of how best to secure consent… Research in the field of mass communication
is a new and sure weapon to achieve that end” (cited in Buxton, 2003, p. 310).
Consequently the tools by which to manufacture consent were developed by many of the
founders of mass communication research (e.g. Hadley Cantril, Bernard Berelson, and
Paul Lazarsfeld) with generous funding provided by liberal foundations and in many
cases the CIA (Barker, Submitted). Strangely, in most histories of mass communications
research these researchers clearly stated desire to manufacture consent has been
mysteriously overlooked. Thus theoretical developments – like the two-step flow of
communications, exemplified in Lazarsfeld and Katz’s (1955) Personal Influence – have
been widely interpreted as implying limited media effects, when in fact their work had
“enormous practical utility to propagandists and advertisers” and “was widely used by
propaganda organizations, including the Voice of America and the United States
Information Agency” (Glander, 2000: 108)
Given the high level of involvement of mass communications researchers in
refining the means by which to manufacture consent, it is little wonder that recent studies
provide ample evidence illustrating the US government’s ability to exploit the system-
supportive tendencies of the mainstream media to justify overt wars and cover-up covert
wars (Herman and Chomsky, 1988; Keeble, 1997; Mowlana et al., 1992), ignore their
support (throughout the Cold War) of right-wing terrorist armies in every European
country (Ganser, 2005), legitimize controversial ‘humanitarian’ interventions (Hammond
and Herman, 2000; Robinson, 2000), marginalize genocides in which their government is
implicated (Holder, 2004), and manufacture public consent for economic sanctions that
wrought genocide on Iraqi children (Herring, 2004). More recent events (post 9/11), also
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Convention