Week 2 - Blog 2: Manufacturing Consent

In the film “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media,” Professor Chomsky criticizes private media corporations. To emphasize this critique, the directors use many visual techniques to drive home the point. One of the visual techniques used in the documentary was highlighting passages in books. This is something the directors use a lot in the documentary and shows that small pieces of the page are much more important that everything else there (that it is all "fluff"). The director uses this to connect with Noam Chompsky's idea that most of news from private media companies is fluff because they hide or under-emphasize important news.

Another technique used is showing a large dump of newspapers and magazines being moved with a tractor is symbolic of how much garbage is in the news when major world issues, in this example the people of Timor, are often under-represented. It doesn't put a face on the real, intense poverty and violence that was present there.

Focuses in on a quote in a newspaper "All the News That's Fit to Print," which is clearly wrong. After this quote, the directors show several New York Times newspapers and other newspapers that extensively cover the Cambodian conflicts and genocide.

The directors there collect all the newspaper column inches that cover both Timor and Cambodia. They do this by rolling out each collection. Timor has 70 inches and stops fair short of Cambodia's 1175 inches. This demonstration highlights the difference in coverage due to the US having an interest in Timor through Indonesia.

The directors go further, portraying the editing room as an operating room, and the 'surgeons' systematically delete parts of the newspaper as "not fit to print", and the deleted pieces are news that corporate America or the Government does not want emphasized by the media industry. This portrays the media exectutives as immoral or as spin doctors controlling what news is shown in news papers.

All of these visual techniques underpin Chompsky's point that private media companies control news that they release to the public.