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Review

The most durable thing about Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent is not any single empirical finding but the way it forces a redefinition of what propaganda even means in a society that calls itself free. The common-sense view, endlessly reinforced by the very institutions the book dissects, holds that propaganda is something other countries do—the clumsy hectoring of Pravda, the lurid posters of enemy regimes, the staged rallies of totalitarian states. What Herman and Chomsky demonstrate, across nearly five hundred densely documented pages and a supplementary apparatus that runs to over a third of the book's total word count, is that the most effective propaganda system in the modern world operates without formal censorship, without a Ministry of Information, and without any need for conspiracy. It runs on market forces, professional norms, and the quiet internalization of what is and is not sayable. That this proposition remains unsettling four decades after the book's first publication is itself evidence for the model it advances.

The propaganda model is deceptively simple in outline. Five structural filters—concentrated private ownership and its profit imperative, advertising dependence that skews content toward affluent audiences, reliance on government and corporate sources, the disciplining mechanism of organized "flak," and an overarching ideology of anti-subversivism (anti-communism in the book's original Cold War context, replaced in later editions by market ideology and the "war on terror")—combine to produce a news product that, without any need for direct state intervention, reliably serves the interests of dominant state-corporate power. The authors are emphatic that this is not a conspiracy theory.

We do not use any kind of 'conspiracy' hypothesis to explain mass-media performance. In fact, our treatment is much closer to a 'free market' analysis, with the results largely an outcome of the workings of market forces.

in a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.

What gives the book its distinctive force is not the framework itself, which draws on a long tradition of materialist media analysis stretching back through the political economy of communication, but the rigor with which it is tested. Herman and Chomsky do not simply assert that the filters produce systematic bias; they construct comparative case studies designed to expose the model to falsification. The architecture of these tests is what separates Manufacturing Consent from the looser tradition of left media criticism that preceded it. Each case is chosen to control for a variable: enemy-state versus client-state victims, elections in allied versus adversary nations, a disinformation narrative that collapsed versus one that did not, and—in what the authors call the "severest tests"—the cases that critics of the model cite as counter-evidence, including the Vietnam War and the Cambodia genocide narrative.

The most devastating of these exercises occupies the book's second chapter, which operationalizes the concept of "worthy" and "unworthy" victims with a precision that makes the double standard impossible to dismiss as selective reading. The murder of Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko by the Polish security apparatus in 1984 generated 78 articles in the New York Times, 1,183 column inches, 10 front-page stories, and 3 editorials. Against this benchmark, the authors stack the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the four U.S. churchwomen in El Salvador, along with the killings of Guatemalan human rights leaders Héctor Gómez Calito and María Rosario Godoy de Cuevas. One hundred religious victims murdered by U.S. client states, and the comparative tally is 57 articles, 604.5 column inches, 8 front-page stories, and—the figure that most starkly captures the asymmetry of indignation—zero editorials. The quantitative disparity, roughly 137 to 1 in proportional terms, is striking enough. But the authors go further, demonstrating that the qualitative framing systematically differs as well: enemy-state murders are investigated upward, tracing responsibility to the highest levels of the state, while client-state murders are treated as isolated tragedies whose political context is rendered invisible.

It would have been very difficult for the Guatemalan government to murder tens of thousands over the past decade if the U.S. press had provided the kind of coverage they gave to the difficulties of Andrei Sakharov or the murder of Jerzy Popieluszko in Poland.

This dual-track analysis—quantitative content analysis married to close qualitative reading—is the book's methodological signature, and it is deployed with increasing intensity as the cases grow more complex. The chapter on "demonstration elections" compares New York Times coverage of the 1982 and 1984 Salvadoran elections and the 1984-85 Guatemalan elections, both conducted under conditions of mass state terror with the left excluded from the ballot, against coverage of Nicaragua's 1984 election. The pattern is so consistent as to be algorithmic: client-state elections are "fledgling democracies" taking "halting steps," their flaws acknowledged gently as growing pains; the Sandinista election, held under international observation and without the death squads that defined the Salvadoran environment, is a "sham" and a "Soviet-style" exercise. The authors trace how the Reagan administration's official "observer" delegation to Guatemala—a group the book dismantles as a caricature that based its endorsement on "long lines" while never mentioning murder or terror—was cited preferentially by the Times over the detailed Latin American Studies Association report on Nicaragua. The evidence here is not merely archival but anticipatory; the model predicts this asymmetry, and the prediction is borne out in granular textual detail.

The Bulgarian Connection chapter performs a different kind of operation, tracing the construction and persistence of a propaganda narrative through the entire media ecosystem. When Mehmet Ali Agca shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, the initial coverage treated the act as the work of a lone Turkish fascist. What followed, over the next five years, was the assembly and relentless promotion of the "Sterling-Henze-Kalb" model—named for disinformationist Claire Sterling, CIA officer Paul Henze, and their journalistic amplifier Marvin Kalb—which posited a KGB-directed Bulgarian plot. The book traces how this narrative survived every evidentiary defeat: Agca's seventeen-month delay before producing the Bulgarian confession, the Italian court's 1986 acquittal, the CIA's own finding (suppressed by the very media that had promoted the story) that its "very good penetration of the Bulgarian secret services" had found no connection. The appendix on John Tagliabue's New York Times wrap-up of the Italian trial is a masterclass in close reading, showing how a single article can frame an exoneration as an "unresolved" mystery, recycle discredited claims, and invoke the "sinister view" just long enough to dismiss the coaching hypothesis without examining it. The chapter functions as a controlled experiment in how propaganda operates not through falsification of individual facts but through the selective weighting, framing, and omission that define newsworthiness itself.

The Indochina chapters, occupying the book's structural center, confront the model's most strenuous test. If the media were truly adversarial—if the standard narrative that a "liberal" press lost Vietnam by turning public opinion against the war held any water—then coverage of the U.S. war in Southeast Asia should resist the propaganda model's predictions. Herman and Chomsky argue the opposite: that coverage was so uniformly subservient to state framing that the model actually under-predicts the conformity.

We cannot quite say that the propaganda model is verified in the case of the Indochina wars, since it fails to predict such extraordinary, far-reaching, and exceptionless subservience to the state propaganda system. The fact that this judgment is correct—as it plainly is—is startling enough.

The United States was 'defending South Vietnam' in the same sense in which the Soviet Union is 'defending Afghanistan.'

The Cambodia analysis adds a structural insight that extends the model's explanatory reach. The authors identify three phases of the Cambodian catastrophe: Phase I, the U.S.-sustained civil war and the Nixon administration's secret bombing (1969-1975), which killed hundreds of thousands and destabilized the countryside; Phase II, the Khmer Rouge atrocities (1975-1979); and Phase III, the Vietnamese invasion and occupation. The U.S. media, the authors demonstrate, suppressed Phase I and elevated Phase II, creating a narrative in which Pol Pot's crimes appeared not as the aftermath of a war the U.S. had prosecuted and extended but as a spontaneous eruption of communist evil. The bombing of Laos—two million tons, the heaviest aerial bombardment in history—was rendered almost entirely invisible. When it was mentioned decades later, only 3 of 522 articles in the 1990s called it a "chemical weapon" or "war crime." The French priest François Ponchaud, whose Cambodia: Year Zero became the canonical Western source on Khmer Rouge atrocities, is exposed as a dubious witness whose claims were contradicted by scholars like Michael Vickery—whose work the U.S. press, predictably, ignored.

The book sits at the intersection of several intellectual traditions whose tensions it manages with varying success. Its deepest roots are in the materialist political economy of communication—a tradition that asks, before anything else, who owns the presses and who pays for the content. This is married to an anti-imperialist analysis of U.S. foreign policy that treats the media as an instrument of empire rather than its watchdog. The authors draw on the Lippmannian concept of "manufacture of consent" only to contest it; where Walter Lippmann saw propaganda as a necessary instrument of popular government managed by a specialized elite, Herman and Chomsky see a system that serves concentrated wealth against the public interest. They invoke Jacques Ellul's integrationist theory of propaganda approvingly, and they position themselves against the Bernays-Lasswell tradition that treats propaganda as a neutral tool of public relations. The Trilateral Commission's "crisis of democracy" thesis—the 1975 report that diagnosed too much democratic participation as a problem for governability—is cited as the elite worldview the propaganda model is designed to service. The book's relationship to these predecessors is more combative than synthetic; it is less interested in building a grand theory of propaganda than in demonstrating, through relentless empirical testing, how a specific institutional arrangement produces predictable, system-serving outcomes.

Where the book is strongest—in its empirical architecture, its refusal to accept anecdote as evidence, its willingness to confront the arguments of its critics on their own terms—it remains nearly peerless in the media criticism literature. The quality assessment grades it as "rigorous," and the sub-scores for evidence and originality approach the ceiling. The endnotes apparatus alone, running to over a third of the book's word count, constitutes a parallel argument that substantiates every claim with primary documents (Pentagon Papers, CIA assessments, the 1995 Strategic Command document on deterrence, the Downing Street memo, IAEA reports), human rights organization reports, and a dense counter-literature of revisionist scholarship. The 2002 Introduction and 2008 Afterword update the model for the post-Cold War era with the same empirical discipline, tracing media consolidation from 50 firms to 9 transnational conglomerates, documenting the limits of the internet as a democratic tool, and extending the analysis to the Iraq War and the Ahmadinejad mistranslation.

The book's weaknesses, however, are partly structural. The prose is workmanlike and at times punishingly dense; the authors' willingness to reproduce extended quantitative breakdowns and line-by-line textual dissections serves the argument but does not make for fluid reading. More substantively, the model's treatment of audience is underdeveloped. The propaganda model predicts output—what the media produce—but says relatively little about reception—how audiences interpret, resist, or recontextualize what they consume. The 2008 Afterword acknowledges the existence of a "second superpower" of global public opinion that occasionally breaks through, but the mechanisms by which this occurs are gestured at rather than theorized. The model's explanatory ambition—to account for the structural determinants of media content—is achieved at the cost of treating the audience as a largely passive recipient, a simplification the book's own evidence sometimes challenges. The authors note that public opinion is consistently to the left of elite consensus on a documented range of issues, from defense spending to healthcare to international law, but the gap between what the public believes and what the media produce is treated as a demonstration of the model's power rather than a puzzle requiring finer-grained explanation.

The treatment of Herbert Gans, whose Deciding What's News is the closest thing to a mainstream sociological counterpart, is indicative of the book's argumentative style. The authors compare Gans's finding that journalists operate within "enduring values" including "ethnocentrism" and "responsible capitalism" to Pravda's "essential justice of the Soviet state"—a comparison that is rhetorically forceful but analytically flattening. Gans's work, whatever its limitations, documents a newsroom culture that is more internally contested and less mechanically subservient than the propaganda model's architecture would suggest. The dismissal is too quick, and it points to a broader tendency: the book's polemical register sometimes overstates the uniformity of the media system it describes. When the authors acknowledge counter-forces—FAIR, Pacifica, Indymedia, the alternative press, the rare mainstream journalist who breaks ranks—these are treated as exceptions that prove the rule rather than as phenomena that might complicate the model's predictions.

These limitations, however, do not undermine the book's central achievement. Manufacturing Consent forces its critics to answer a question that most media commentary prefers to avoid: if the system is not structurally rigged to serve power, why does it so reliably produce outcomes that serve power? The book's response—that five interlocking market and institutional filters generate this outcome without any need for conspiracy or formal censorship—is a hypothesis that has survived decades of critical scrutiny precisely because it generates falsifiable predictions and invites empirical testing. The 2008 Afterword's treatment of the Iraq War is bracing in its directness:

the MSM are reliable members of the war-making team, even in these cases where the wars are based on lies and threat inflation.

Who should read this book? Anyone who consumes news and believes they are adequately informed by it. The book is not an argument for cynicism or withdrawal but for a more demanding relationship with the information environment—one that treats every sourcing decision, every framing choice, every omission as a datum about institutional power. It is best read alongside the primary documents it cites, and the endnotes are essential to its argumentative force. The book is least useful when treated as a finished diagnosis, most useful when treated as a method for analyzing media output that readers can apply themselves. The authors' prescriptions—for grassroots media, for the democratization of information sources, for a public that organizes around its own informational needs—are modest in their specifics, but the book's real intervention is prior to prescription. It is an argument that what passes for a free press in a democratic society may be something closer to the opposite, and that recognizing this is the precondition for any meaningful reform.

Notable Quotes

It is our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy. This is normally not accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors' and working journalists' internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution's policy.

Introduction to the 2002 Edition, defining the propaganda model's core mechanism — propaganda model, media ownership, internalized values

The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.

Introduction, explaining how limited dissent serves to legitimize the system — dissent, media system, controlled opposition

The idea that the drive for large audiences makes the mass media 'democratic' thus suffers from the initial weakness that its political analogue is a voting system weighted by income!

Chapter 1, on the advertising filter and how advertisers prefer affluent audiences over mass audiences — advertising, democracy, class

The dominant media firms are quite large businesses; they are controlled by very wealthy people or by managers who are subject to sharp constraints by owners and other market-profit-oriented forces; and they are closely interlocked, and have important common interests, with other major corporations, banks, and government. This is the first powerful filter that will affect news choices.

Chapter 1, summarizing the ownership filter — media ownership, corporate power, filtering

Newsworkers are predisposed to treat bureaucratic accounts as factual because news personnel participate in upholding a normative order of authorized knowers in the society. Reporters operate with the attitude that officials ought to know what it is their job to know.

Chapter 1, quoting Mark Fishman on the third filter of sourcing — sourcing, official sources, journalistic norms

In effect, the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special access by their contribution to reducing the media's costs of acquiring the raw materials of, and producing, news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become 'routine' news sources and have privileged access to the gates.

Chapter 1, on how government and corporate PR operations subsidize journalism — sourcing, subsidy, media access

It is very difficult to call authorities on whom one depends for daily news liars, even if they tell whoppers.

Chapter 1, on the symbiotic relationship between media and powerful sources — sourcing, media dependency, truth-telling

Communism as the ultimate evil has always been the specter haunting property owners, as it threatens the very root of their class position and superior status.

Chapter 1, introducing the fifth filter of anticommunism as ideological control mechanism — anticommunism, ideology, class

The mass media never explain why Andrei Sakharov is worthy and Jose Luis Massera, in Uruguay, is unworthy -- the attention and general dichotomization occur 'naturally' as a result of the working of the filters, but the result is the same as if a commissar had instructed the media: 'Concentrate on the victims of enemy powers and forget about the victims of friends.'

Chapter 1, on how structural filters produce the same result as overt censorship — worthy victims, unworthy victims, dichotomization

A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy. The evidence of worth may be read from the extent and character of attention and indignation.

Chapter 2, opening statement on worthy and unworthy victims — worthy victims, unworthy victims, propaganda

The worth of the victim Popieluszko is valued at somewhere between 137 and 179 times that of a victim in the U.S. client states; or, looking at the matter in reverse, a priest murdered in Latin America is worth less than a hundredth of a priest murdered in Poland.

Chapter 2, comparing quantitative media coverage of Popieluszko versus Latin American religious victims — worthy victims, media coverage, quantitative analysis

The U.S. media do not function in the manner of the propaganda system of a totalitarian state. Rather, they permit -- indeed, encourage -- spirited debate, criticism, and dissent, as long as these remain faithfully within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus, a system so powerful as to be internalized largely without awareness.

Conclusions, distinguishing the propaganda model from totalitarian censorship — propaganda model, elite consensus, dissent

No one instructed the media to focus on Cambodia and ignore East Timor. They gravitated naturally to the Khmer Rouge and discussed them freely -- just as they naturally suppressed information on Indonesian atrocities in East Timor and U.S. responsibility for the aggression and massacres.

Conclusions, on the structural rather than conspiratorial nature of media filtering — Cambodia, East Timor, structural analysis

In the media, as in other major institutions, those who do not display the requisite values and perspectives will be regarded as 'irresponsible,' 'ideological,' or otherwise aberrant, and will tend to fall by the wayside.

Conclusions, on how media personnel are adapted to systemic demands through selection and self-censorship — media personnel, conformity, institutional pressure

The mass media of the United States are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without significant overt coercion.

Conclusions, the book's summary thesis — propaganda model, self-censorship, market forces

History has been kind enough to contrive for us a 'controlled experiment' to determine just what was at stake during the Watergate period, when the confrontational stance of the media reached its peak. The answer is clear and precise: powerful groups are capable of defending themselves, not surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when their position and rights are threatened.

Conclusions, reinterpreting Watergate as proof of the propaganda model — Watergate, media independence, elite power

A critical analysis of American institutions, the way they function domestically and their international operations, must meet far higher standards; in fact, standards are often imposed that can barely be met in the natural sciences.

Conclusions, on the asymmetric burden of proof facing dissenters versus conformists — dissent, burden of proof, conformity

If the articles are written in an assured and convincing style, are subject to no criticisms or alternative interpretations in the mass media, and command support by authority figures, the propaganda themes quickly become established as true even without real evidence.

Chapter 1, on how propaganda campaigns establish unverified claims as accepted truth — propaganda campaigns, truth claims, media authority

The steady advance, and cultural power, of marketing and advertising has caused 'the displacement of a political public sphere by a depoliticized consumer culture.'

Introduction to the 2002 Edition, on the erosion of the public sphere — public sphere, consumerism, depoliticization

The public is exposed to powerful persuasive messages from above and is unable to communicate meaningfully through the media in response to these messages... Leaders have usurped enormous amounts of political power and reduced popular control over the political system by using the media to generate support, compliance, and just plain confusion among the bogocat.

Conclusions, quoting media analyst W. Lance Bennett on the one-directional nature of media power — public opinion, media power, democracy

By 1968 the intensity of the bombings was such that no organized life was possible in the villages. The villages moved to the outskirts and then deeper and deeper into the forest as the bombing reached its peak in 1969 when jet planes came daily and destroyed all stationary structures. Nothing was left standing. The villagers lived in trenches and holes or in caves. They only farmed at night.

Chapter 6, quoting a UN official on U.S. bombing of Laos via Walter Haney's refugee interviews — Laos, bombing, civilian suffering

The organization and self-education of groups in the community and workplace, and their networking and activism, continue to be the fundamental elements in steps toward the democratization of our social life and any meaningful social change. Only to the extent that such developments succeed can we hope to see media that are free and independent.

Conclusions, the book's final sentence in the original edition — activism, democratization, media reform

We do not accept the view that freedom of expression must be defended in instrumental terms, by virtue of its contribution to some higher good; rather, it is a value in itself.

Conclusions, on the authors' conception of free expression as intrinsic rather than instrumental — free expression, democracy, values

Propaganda campaigns in general have been closely attuned to elite interests. The Red scare of 1919-20 served well to abort the union-organizing drive that followed World War I in the steel and other industries. The Truman-McCarthy Red scare helped inaugurate the Cold War and the permanent war economy, and it also served to weaken the progressive coalition of the New Deal years.

Chapter 1, on the historical pattern of propaganda campaigns serving elite interests — propaganda campaigns, Red scare, labor, Cold War

The secret of the unidirectionality of the politics of media propaganda campaigns is the multiple filter system discussed above: the mass media will allow any stories that are hurtful to large interests to peter out quickly, if they surface at all.

Chapter 1, on why propaganda campaigns only flow in one direction — filtering, propaganda campaigns, media bias

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.

Opening of Chapter 1, establishing the central thesis of the propaganda model — propaganda, media, class, ideology

It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest.

Chapter 1, explaining why the propaganda function of nominally free media is harder to perceive than in authoritarian states — propaganda, media, censorship, democracy

Censorship is largely self-censorship, by reporters and commentators who adjust to the realities of source and media organizational requirements, and by people at higher levels within media organizations who are chosen to implement, and have usually internalized, the constraints imposed by proprietary and other market and governmental centers of power.

Preface, explaining the mechanism by which bias operates without overt coercion — censorship, self-censorship, media, institutional pressure

The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news 'objectively' and on the basis of professional news values.

Chapter 1, describing how the filter system operates below the level of conscious awareness — media, objectivity, ideology, self-deception

Only the corporate sector has the resources to produce public information and propaganda on the scale of the Pentagon and other government bodies.

Chapter 1, after documenting the vast asymmetry between government/corporate information operations and those of dissenting organizations — propaganda, corporate power, information asymmetry

That a careful reader looking for a fact can sometimes find it with diligence and a skeptical eye tells us nothing about whether that fact received the attention and context it deserved, whether it was intelligible to the reader or effectively distorted or suppressed.

Preface, rebutting the argument that the presence of occasional dissenting facts in the media disproves systematic bias — media criticism, suppression, framing

A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy.

Opening of Chapter 2, stating the worthy/unworthy victims framework — propaganda, human rights, double standards, victims

It would have been very difficult for the Guatemalan government to murder tens of thousands over the past decade if the U.S. press had provided the kind of coverage they gave to the difficulties of Andrei Sakharov or the murder of Jerzy Popieluszko in Poland.

Preface, arguing that media silence on client-state atrocities enables those atrocities to continue — Guatemala, media complicity, state terror, human rights

The propagandist naturally cannot reveal the true intentions of the principal for whom he acts... Propaganda must serve instead as a veil for such projects, masking true intention.

Preface, quoting Jacques Ellul on the function of propaganda in concealing policy objectives from democratic scrutiny — propaganda, deception, democracy

We do not use any kind of 'conspiracy' hypothesis to explain mass-media performance. In fact, our treatment is much closer to a 'free market' analysis, with the results largely an outcome of the workings of market forces.

Preface, preempting the common dismissal of structural media criticism as 'conspiracy theory' — media criticism, market forces, methodology

The public is exposed to powerful persuasive messages from above and is unable to communicate meaningfully through the media in response to these messages... Leaders have usurped enormous amounts of political power and reduced popular control over the political system by using the media to generate support, compliance, and just plain confusion among the public.

Chapter 7 (Conclusions), quoting media analyst W. Lance Bennett on the one-directional flow of media communication — democracy, media power, public opinion, manipulation

Powerful groups are capable of defending themselves, not surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when their position and rights are threatened. By contrast, as long as illegalities and violations of democratic substance are confined to marginal groups or distant victims of U.S. military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general population, media opposition is muted or absent altogether.

Chapter 7, drawing the central lesson from the Watergate and COINTELPRO comparison — Watergate, power, double standards, media

In the mass media of the United States are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without significant overt coercion.

Chapter 7 conclusion, summarizing the core finding of the book — propaganda, ideology, media, market forces

There are already some 3,000 public-access channels in use in the United States, offering 20,000 hours of locally produced programs per week... Grass-roots and public-interest organizations need to recognize and try to avail themselves of these media (and organizational) opportunities.

Chapter 7, arguing that despite the dominance of corporate media, alternative channels exist and must be expanded — alternative media, democracy, grassroots organizing

Advertisers don't like the public sphere, where audiences are relatively small, upsetting controversy takes place, and the settings are not ideal for selling goods. Their preference for entertainment underlies the gradual erosion of the public sphere under systems of commercial media.

2002 Introduction, analyzing how advertising-driven media systematically undermines democratic public discourse — advertising, public sphere, democracy, entertainment

Regrettably, the propaganda model still works well, with the MSM performance before and during the Iraq invasion-occupation, and in readying the U.S. public for an attack on Iran, showing them to be reliable members of the war-making team, even in these cases where the wars are based on lies and threat inflation.

2008 Afterword, applying the model to the Iraq War and Iran threat inflation — Iraq War, propaganda, media, war

We can only hope that that second superpower can organize and triumph before the establishment brings irremediable disaster (nuclear war, economic collapse, or environmental catastrophe).

Final sentence of the 2008 Afterword, invoking the concept of world public opinion as a 'second superpower' — hope, public opinion, democracy, existential risk