Rating: 
Summary: when harry met chomsky
Review: 8.95 and thank goodness i wasnt fooled - propagandized - into buying other more expensive books of his.
the chapter on aliens visiting earth really was the last straw. harry potter had indeed visited mit and forced a great scholar to dumb his writing for the masses. i suppose his book is the greatest example of his argument.
chomsky risks his linguistic achievement by scribing emotional, unscientific gibberish with defense in little green analogies.
Rating: 
Summary: Validation at last!
Review: A co-worker, who used to listen to me rant, recommended that I read Chomsky. I ignored the advice for several years thinking no one could understand or even know what it was that I was so positively enraged about in our so called 'free' country. I went on hunting for validation that never came. Until finally, I picked up this little gem! Ah! The fact that I felt isolated in my 'subversive' views is even a part of Chomsky's little essay. This little book is pure concentrate.
Chomsky's focus is on the foreign policies of the US, but one can easily extend his thesis to simple domestic uses of propaganda. In other words, the ways in which a person will champion certain rhetoric to gain support which in so doing gains power from people who willingly give up freedoms.
Remember three things:
1. All art is propaganda
2. Propaganda is to the free society what the iron fist is to the totalitarian society.
3. A free society is not necessarily defined by what one is free to do, rather what one is free NOT to do.
I have been a Chomsky-ite for years, but never knew it. This is an outstanding starting point to his other works.
Rating:
Summary: are we sheep that we believe everything we're told?
Review: After reading this book, you will not listen to the news again without wondering if you are being given a spin or what. Basically we are lied to all the time. We are manipulated by those that control the media and Chomsky points out time and again many examples of how it has been done. I don't know about you, but I am tired of listening to the news and wondering how much of it is just propaganda and how much we can believe.Chomsky is brilliant! Everyone should read this book and then they will at least get a better idea of how many of the events that have happened are not always quite what the media led us to believe. Look a little deeper and use your own minds to come to your own conclusions. Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: are we sheep that we believe everything we're told?
Review: After reading this book, you will not listen to the news again without wondering if you are being given a spin or what. Basically we are lied to all the time. We are manipulated by those that control the media and Chomsky points out time and again many examples of how it has been done. I don't know about you, but I am tired of listening to the news and wondering how much of it is just propaganda and how much we can believe. Chomsky is brilliant! Everyone should read this book and then they will at least get a better idea of how many of the events that have happened are not always quite what the media led us to believe. Look a little deeper and use your own minds to come to your own conclusions. Enjoy!
Rating: 
Summary: An Essential to Understanding Propaganda
Review: Again Noam Chomsky has proven his abilities to interpret the complexities of the current and past American political system. In Media Control, Noam Chomsky launches an attack on the propaganda distributed to citizens through the media. He states that the American media acts as the true ruler of the modern American society. He describes it as a support to the more intelligent fraction of the population he calls "The Elite". He then elaborates, giving his analysis of the facts he gives, that this "elite" controls the narrow-minded, less intelligent portion of the population. He in general criticises how the government has used and still uses propaganda to manipulate and guide the population towards what is the elite's interest.
The book has become a target of criticism for this, started by a few of its readers. Yet, according to the majority of its readers, it is a very accurate book that is trying to explicate the purposes of mass media. Most criticism is based on the fact that the interpretations this book provides are obvious and have no need to be re-stated. Disagreeing, I feel that it was necessary for Chomsky to write this book for it summarizes what to the critics seems so obvious. After-all not all humans are open-minded enough to see what to others is obvious.
Chomsky wrote the book in an undemanding manner and his interpretations are supported by less evidence than in his earlier works. The book is an easy read that for once not only is for the open-minded historian but for the average intelligent individual who wishes to explore the world of the democracy.
Ultimately this book encourages anyone who read it to read other works of Chomsky and as for me it created the desire to explore the roots of politics.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Primer
Review: An excellent little primer on propaganda in America, its origins, rationale, and uses. Readers may be surprised to learn that propaganda techniques have their origin in America's public relations industry. Specifically, in the need of modern democratic governments to shape perceptions and direct popular hostility. Lacking cruder coercive measures of totalitarian states, elected governments depend on managing information and creating popular conceptions to achieve their aims. These can then be exploited to carry out policies which may benefit only a few to the detriment of the many (attacks on Vietnam, Central America, et. al.). America's intellectual elites, as Chomsky makes clear, have historically supported such techniques, believing the common herd too ignorant to rule themselves. The task is best left to those elites, who, as Chomsky also makes clear, go on to serve the interests of the country's highest elite, the business and corporate sector where real power lies. Thus in the past 75 years, propaganda has become a standard tool of governance in the US, subverting the dictionary definition of what democracy is supposed to be. Many Americans feel the truth of this in their bones, so to speak, but have trouble admitting it. Patriotism's first allegiance, however, should be to truth, comfortable or not. And in that very necessary sense, Chomsky's is a solidly patriotic book indeed, pleasant reading or not.
Rating:
Summary: TRULY EYE-OPENING AND ENGAGING!!
Review: An exceptional read. The subject is one which does not get touched upon enough in the media (but why would it?) It is a clearly written and engaging book. I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone. In fact, I am buying a few dozen to to pass out. Few books have been able to notably shift my perspective...this one has. Read it.
Rating:
Summary: Bitter, charged, quick introduction to Chomsky's thinking
Review: As a brief and pithy introduction to Chomsky's anti-imperialistic thinking about media control, and as a charged denunciation of mass propaganda in the modern world (particularly US), this is a very fast-paced, slim, and intriguing read. But if you are looking for material that substantiates his claims with hard, quantitative evidence, you'd do better with a somewhat more detailed treatise from Chomsky, e.g., "Manufacturing Consent". This though is a somewhat embittered manifesto, spewing out bits on how administrations in the past from Wilson to Bush Senior have manipulated the public into war with unlikely, usually defenceless enemies. This edition sports a new speech "The Journalist from Mars," which lends a refreshingly dissident tenor to the chorus of patriotism. The 31 new pages are particularly relevant today as President Bush picks up where his father left off, once again calling a fear-ridden population to war. Media Control might sound like a flaming rant but it is a good, crisp lead-in into Chomsky's thinking -- likely to be misinterpreted unless you are also familiar with his work otherwise. But his ideas are a welcome second opinion at a time when we should be questioning more than ever whether the spurious memes of "War on Terror", "Shock and Awe" etc are really about terrorism or tyranny at all, or a nearly-successful PR agenda pandering to the big few. A highly engaging read.
Rating:
Summary: This book will change the way you watch the news
Review: Before I read this book, I beleived what I read in mainstream newspapers and what I saw on the evening news shows. After reading this book I still read and watch mainstream media, but I do so with a media filter. Since learning about the lies that are fed to the "sheep" of America, I now go through a variety of sources to find the real story. A good source are alternitive news sources such as fair and the nation. My entire view of the world and the government have been forever altered. I feel that I have become a much more informed human being since reading this book.
Rating:
Summary: Great analysis of corporate/government propaganda
Review: Chomsky does a masterful job of analyzing the development of propaganda as used by corporations,the government and the media. The book is concise, extremely interesting and well thought out. If you have never read Chomsky, be prepared to read into the mind of a genius. Great stuff. He charts the history of propaganda and makes sense of government and corporate actions that on the surface don't make sense. A must read.
|
