Manufacturing consent

Manufacturing consent is a book by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. It is about the political economy of the mass media.

“The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda,” an excerpt from the book says.

“In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite.

“It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest.

“What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behaviour and performance.”

Zimbabwe’s media is doing exactly that right now as the country heads for elections at the end of the month, thus short-changing the average, non-partisan reader.

Studies have shown that up to 60 percent of Zimbabwe’s voters do not support any political party, but vote for the party that they think will represent their interests, but the media gives the impression that there are only two political parties. The other 26, or so, should just support one of the two.

The government-owned media cannot see anything wrong within the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front. Equally the private media does not see anything wrong with the Movement for Democratic Change, especially the Tsvangirai faction.

The loser is the reader who cannot afford to buy the competing papers, the listener who has no alternative to the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation radio stations, and the viewer without an alternative to Zimbabwe television.

To make matters worse, the two sides also manufacture dissent. The state media is always reporting about squabbles within the Movement for Democratic Change while the private media reports about fissures in ZANU-PF. There is not even any attempt to hide their leanings.

The only consolation is that the Zimbabwean voter has shown in the past to be more sophisticated and more independent-minded than the media portrays.

See also: Lessons for Zimbabwe’s media from Kenya’s coverage of its elections

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