BLOG 3 : CHLOE CHAMBERS
Manufacturing Consent is a book by Noam Chomsky and David S Herman, “aimed to upend the notion of Western media as a force for public good” (Pizzaro). I personally agree with this idea. A really good example to me would be what happened with the media and the Charlie Kirk shooting. Charlie Kirk was a right-wing political activist, “and famously said that gun deaths were “worth it” for the right to own firearms” (BBC), which makes his death ironic. But the reason I bring up this shooting, whether you disagree or agree with Charlie Kirk’s view, is because of how it was reported on after the fact. The first thing is that people call this an assassination, which I think is just objectively wrong. To me, an assassination is of someone significant, like a leader or official, or someone who had a major impact, and I don’t think he falls under that. It’s like the media is trying to make his murder seem more politically important than it was to push an idea that they’re under attack or being persecuted. People of all different influence levels get murdered but why is Charlie Kirks considered an assanination? It adds to this idea by Chomsky and Herman that the media is just trying to sustain and protect current power which right now is very right winged. For example, “Rather than serving as a vital check on power and a source of reliable information, they argued, the mass media existed to sustain and protect power, making media institutions of the ‘free world’ little better than government propaganda channels of dictatorships” (Pizzaro). This is doubly proven when we see how people in media react against this. A prime example would be how Jimmy Kimmel a host for a show was shut down for giving an opinion that the right wing wouldn’t agree with. To quote, “During Monday night’s show, he spoke about flags being flown at half mast inhonour of Kirk and mocked US President Donald Trump’s reaction to the shooting…Hours later, Nexstar Media, one of the biggest owners of TV stations in the US, said it would not air Kimmel’s show “for the foreseeable future”…Nexstar called his remarks about Kirk “offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse” (Saad, Morris). I think this is a crazy thing to do especially when a common thing the right wing supposedly support is free speech but here they are actively censoring and happy at the fact Jimmy Kimmel was censored and bashed for speaking his mind. Him mocking Trumps reaction to the shooting proves nothing on how he felt about the shooting itself and is a valid opinion to have and make. This situation really puts Chomsky and Hermans idea into a modern perspective and proves how back then and still now the media just manufactures consent in that everyone seemingly agrees and consents only because the ones who disagree are removed or hidden.
References
Source 1 – Manufactoring Consent
Source 2 – Charlie Kirk
Source 3 – Jimmy Kimmel
