Manufactured Consent

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) is Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's analysis of how news media in capitalist democracies systematically filter information to serve elite interests while maintaining the appearance of independence. The propaganda model identifies five filters: ownership concentration, advertising dependence, reliance on official sources, flak as a disciplining mechanism, and anti-communism (later updated to anti-terrorism).

The book's central claim: these structural features predict media behavior more reliably than individual journalists' intentions. Media outlets are not conspiring to deceive — they are rationally responding to economic and institutional incentives that align their output with state and corporate power.

The model has been empirically tested with mixed results. It explains some patterns well (marginalization of dissent, differential coverage of state violence depending on perpetrator) and others poorly (the rise of adversarial investigative journalism, the diversity of online media). Critics argue it overestimates elite coherence and underestimates journalistic agency. Defenders argue it remains the best structural account of systematic media bias.

Whether the model is unfalsifiable or merely uncomfortable remains disputed.