According to Chomsky, “the point of public relations slogans like ‘Support our troops’ is that they don’t mean anything.” (Location 109) As much as I have always supported our troops, I never comprehended how that justified our country’s involvement in Iraq, yet I have heard and read the slogan more often than anything else since Operation Iraqi Freedom started in 2003. Slogans seeming to contain little or no value are a primary manipulation tool to support the concept of manufacturing consent. Though I feel propaganda has shifted wildly in the past few years, the desire to use it to win over the audience is alive and well. I see it in the 2012 presidential race as the slanderous tactics used between the Republican contenders for the nomination I recognized it in the case made to invade Iraq almost a decade ago. The concept is something I have paid attention to for quite some time in mass media – newspapers, cable news, news websites, social media, word of mouth – it’s an amazing phenomenon when one subject is discussed in all corners of mass public communication. In this respect, the book left me with more questions and doubts about his claims than answers to my historical interests.Ĭhomsky writes about manufactured consent, a method for creating scenarios that the masses could all agree to support – propaganda – in order for the democratically-elected governing body of intellectuals to achieve its goals. It went further into how journalists should have covered the events leading to the Gulf War if they were not bought and owned by the government. Beyond the theoretical aspect of propaganda early in the book, which is where my interests are, it morphed into criticisms of the United States government making hypocritical cases for war and holding ownership over all of the media outlets. This book covered several interesting theories on the use of propaganda in democratic societies to control the “bewildered herd” – Chomsky’s term for describing the uneducated and uninformed public.
The history of propaganda leading to its modern day usage fascinates me, especially in how it ties in with the early days of the Public Relations discipline. I really did not know what I was stepping into when I decided to read Noam Chomsky’s Media Control.
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