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“Imagine you’re a fish, swimming in a pond. You can move forward and back, side to side, but never up out of the water. If someone were standing beside the pond, watching you, you’d have no idea they were there. To you, that little pond is an entire universe. Now imagine that someone reaches down and lifts you out of the pond. You see that what you thought was the entire world is only a small pool. You see other ponds. Trees. The sky above. You realize you’re a part of a much larger and more mysterious reality than you had ever dreamed

— Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

None of the eight articles in the New York Times had any details or dramatic quality that might evoke sympathetic emotion. They described the murders as remote events in a distant world

— Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, and 1 other

While the coverage of the worthy victim was generous with gory details and quoted expressions of outrage and demands for justice, the coverage of the unworthy victims was low-keyed, designed to keep the lid on emotions and evoking regretful and philosophical generalities on the omnipresence of violence and the inherent tragedy of human life.

— Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, and 1 other

A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy.

— Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, and 1 other

If the articles are written in an assured and convincing style, are subject to no criticisms or alternative interpretations in the mass media, and command support by authority figures, the propaganda themes quickly become established as true even without real evidence.

— Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, and 1 other

It should be noted that when anti-Communist fervor is aroused, the demand for serious evidence in support of claims of “communist” abuses is suspended, and charlatans can thrive as evidential sources. Defectors, informers, and assorted other opportunists move to center stage as “experts,” and they remain there even after exposure as highly unreliable, if not downright liars

— Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, and 1 other

Communism as the ultimate evil has always been the specter haunting property owners, as it threatens the very root of their class position and superior status.

— Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, and 1 other

The function of AIM is to harass the media and put pressure on them to follow the corporate agenda and a hard-line, right-wing foreign policy. It presses the media to join more enthusiastically in Red-scare band-wagons, and attacks them for alleged deficiencies whenever they fail to toe the line on foreign policy. It conditions the media to expect trouble (and cost increases) for violating right-wing standards of bias.

— Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, and 1 other

Critical sources may be avoided not only because of their lesser availability and higher cost of establishing credibility, but also because the primary sources may be offended and may even threaten the media using them.

— Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, and 1 other

It should also be noted that in the case of the largesse of the Pentagon and the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy,81 the subsidy is at the taxpayers’ expense, so that, in effect, the citizenry pays to be propagandized in the interest of powerful groups such as military contractors and other sponsors of state terrorism.

— Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, and 1 other

Newsworkers are predisposed to treat bureaucratic accounts as factual because news personnel participate in upholding a normative order of authorized knowers in the society. Reporters operate with the attitude that officials ought to know what it is their job to know . . . In particular, a newsworker will recognize an official’s claim to knowledge not merely as a claim, but as a credible, competent piece of knowledge. This amounts to a moral division of labor: officials have and give the facts; reporters merely get them.

— Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, and 1 other

“the principle of bureaucratic affinity: only other bureaucracies can satisfy the input needs of a news bureaucracy.”

— Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, and 1 other

The idea that the drive for large audiences makes the mass media “democratic” thus suffers from the initial weakness that its political analogue is a voting system weighted by income!

— Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, and 1 other

with 4.7 million readers in its last year, “the Daily Herald actually had almost double the readership of The Times, the Financial Times and the Guardian combined.” What is more, surveys showed that its readers “thought more highly of their paper than the regular readers of any other popular newspaper,” and “they also read more in their paper than the readers of other popular papers despite being overwhelmingly working class . . .”47 The death of the Herald, as well as of the News Chronicle and Sunday Citizen, was in large measure a result of progressive strangulation by lack of advertising support.

— Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, and 1 other

the dominant media firms are quite large businesses; they are controlled by very wealthy people or by managers who are subject to sharp constraints by owners and other market-profit–oriented forces;40 and they are closely interlocked, and have important common interests, with other major corporations, banks, and government. This is the first powerful filter that will affect news choices.

— Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, and 1 other