Manufacturing Consent Questions – Avery Reyner – September 30, 2012
Manufacturing Consent is a technique of control. Noam Chomsky was first introduced to this concept from an author named Walter Lippmann who wrote about ‘Manufacturer of Consent.’ Chomsky augmented his concept to Manufacturing Concept and the philosophy has become so popular it later became a documentary film produced by two Canadians. Noam Chomsky has been called ‘arguably the greatest intellectual alive' (Fox, 1998) by the New York Times as he not only is a very outspoken professor, he is also an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, historian, political critic and activist. The information in this essay was obtained from his video called: …show more content…

Chomsky felt the East Timorese deaths (+200,000) a death toll which is considered “proportionately comparable” to the Cambodian genocide went virtually unnoticed by the international community. He believes the reason for this (although the invasion was from Indonesia) was because ‘we’ were to blame for it. ‘We’ meaning Indonesia was relying on US diplomatic support and arms, used illegally, but with secret authorisation from Washington. He wanted them to at least acknowledge what had been done and to ‘care.’ With regards to the media, Chomsky stated they were responsible in the East Timor atrocity – particularly the New York Times in writing and reporting about the East Timor. There were many components of the story deleted and changed to make it a ‘white washed’ version of the story. He believed there was a conspiracy regarding the deletions because it happened ‘every time,’ not just a few times as he says it was “systematic consistent behaviour behind the changes.” The implications of such complicity are that when media suppresses the atrocities they are making a major contribution to the worst genocides in the world. It is believed by Chomsky that they are adding to the problems and rewriting true history. The responsibility of the media is to be responsible for their predictable consequences of their actions. They should report the facts as truthfully as possible and not report based on the interests of power being served.
The