HERMAN AND CHOMSKY

Herman and Chomsky as the Contemporary Plato



Herman and Chomsky as the Contemporary Plato

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast Plato's “Allegory of the Cave” and Herman and Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. This paper explores the concept that Herman and Chomsky's “Manufacturing Consent” is largely an updated version of Plato's “Allegory of the Cave”. This paper also aims to explore the ideas of both theories and concepts and enlighten the approaches suggested by Chomsky and Plato. It is a wide spread fact that Plato's Allegory of the Cave is one of the most famous metaphors and Western thought. It was the Socrates who introduced this metaphor; Socrates urges people to imagine that mankind lives in an underground cave (Stewart, 1905). This cave has a grand entrance which is the only path through which the light comes into the cave. There are people deep inside the cave; these people are chained by the neck and legs so they cannot move (Stewart, 1905). The core objective of this theory is that mankind often gives up when they face problems and hardships. The theory states that humans should not lose hope in the time of hardship as there surely is one pathway in that dark cave that can provide the ray of light (Stewart, 1905).

Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent proposes six filters working to exclude from the news any ideas which do not fit into corporate and state projects. The first four filters are economic: monopoly production, advertisers' pressure, and expensive public relations masquerading as news, and lavishly funded right-wing think tanks (Edgley, 2000). The fifth filter is anti-communism and the sixth is the piecemeal vision of politics afforded by news. These filters create propaganda illustrating their thesis with comparisons that include press coverage of Polish and Guatemalan religious victims (Edgley, 2000). This concept pertains to the violence of elections, dissonance of internal government documents and right-wing critiques related to Vietnam coverage. They forcefully demonstrate that coverage of elections and victims in Central American countries depends on their identification as enemy or ally nations (Edgley, 2000).

Discussion and Analysis

Herman and Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent

This book gives evidence for many Americans' suspicion that the media is not trustworthy. The book clearly demonstrate that, without direct pressure from the government or corporations, major American newspapers systematically frame news accounts in ways which correspond to government or corporate views, and exclude or minimize interpretations and facts which do not mesh with official world views (Edgley, 2000). Hegemonic ideas (like anti-communism and anti-unionism) benefit elites, but they seem to arise without any action on their part, in his view (Edgley, 2000). That is an interesting idea, but it is still unclear on how hegemonic culture comes to reflect the elites' interests. Still, the book makes a very worthwhile contribution to critical cultural studies.

Herman and Chomsky contrast the coverage with their own thorough study of the facts; a methodologically simplistic but refreshing approach. The problem with the approach is that it intentionality attributes to reporters (Edgley, ...