Manufacturing Consent

Exploring Media Bias

Personal Bias

• Every person has a unique perspective and seesthings a little differently.

• Different people can see the same event and describeit very differently.

Ways Personal Bias Appears

• Bias through selection and omission• Bias through use of names and titles• Bias through statistics and crowd counts• Word choice and tone

Organizational Bias

•Organizations have needs distinct from the needs of their members•When people are members of a group, they often act to promote what’s bestfor the group•Former CBS president Richard Salant once said, “Our job is to give peoplenot what they want but what they ought to have.”

Ways Organizational Bias Appears

• Bias by headline• Bias through placement• Bias by source control• Bias by photos, captions and camera angles

Looting or Finding?

Corporate Media

"In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests… gottogether 12 men high up in the newspaper worldand employed them to select the most influentialnewspapers in the United States and sufficient

number of them to control generally the policy ofthe daily press. … They found it was only

necessary to purchase the control of 25 of thegreatest papers."

• Oscar Callaway(1872-1947) U.S. Congressman, TX-D (1911-1917)Congressional Record of February 9, 1917, page 2947

Many Outlets, Few Owners

• According to some estimates, Disney,Viacom, Time Warner, News Corporation,Bertelsmann AG, and General Electrictogether own 90% of all media holdings inthe United States

• Other major corporations include: AT&T,Vivendi Universal, Sony, Liberty MediaCorporation, and Clear Channel

The Hidden Agenda

Birth of a New Culture• “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits

and opinions of the masses is an important element in democraticsociety.

Edward Bernays - Inventor of Public Relations

• "We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People mustbe trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old havebeen entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man'sdesires must overshadow his needs.”

Paul Mazur - Lehman Brothers Banker

• “Our enormously productive economy…demands that we makeconsumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use ofgoods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our egosatisfaction, in consumption…we need things consumed, burned up,replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

Victor LeBeau - Retail Analyst

Wall-e