Rating: 
Summary: the Facts behind the Fiction
Review: News is selective. We all know this. Noam does a great job of pointing out specific examples of times we didn't ask the questions. He also talks of the times where media blatently refused to print the news they know, and those times it was used to manipulate the mindless masses.He also does a good job of drawing parallels between the two war on terrorism bits that are twenty years apart. This was my first read of Noam, and I am sure that by no means will it be my last!
Rating:
Summary: An introduction to Chomsky's media analysis
Review: Noam Chomsky's description of US foreign policy often causes people to ask, "If this is true, why haven't I heard about it?" That led Chomsky to write about the mainstream news media. His explanation is simple enough to understand, but it needs a lot of documentation to back it up. So Chomsky wrote a short stack of heavily-footnoted books on the topic, such as Necessary Illusions and (with Edward Herman) Manufacturing Consent. But it can be intimidating to pick up one of those books, so Chomsky wrote this introduction. The footnotes are gone (more or less). The basic picture of the US news media --- how it works and who it serves --- is here, but in condensed form. If you want the nuances, the sources, and the case studies, you'll have to read his other books. Once you have a grasp of the broad outlines, you can get into the specifics much more easily. This second edition adds the transcript of a talk Chomsky gave a few years ago. It was printed in FAIR's media watchdog magazine, Extra. In it, Chomsky imagines a Martian as an outside observer, someone who can analyze human affairs without being inside it. The Martian idea works well because so many Americans feel outside the mainstream media's message --- as Chomsky describes the current war on terror from the Martian point of view, you find yourself in total agreement. The rest of the book is just as good. Chomsky talks about the history of the media as a voluntary propaganda arm of the government, citing examples from World War I to the Gulf War. His ten-year-old comments on Iraq (including references to WMDs) show how the old news has been re-packaged for a new decade. It's a new century, but it's the same old lies..
Rating:
Summary: Powerful and Upsetting
Review: One of the most to-the-point books I've read in ages. This book can be read within 45 minutes and not only gives real-life examples of modern propaganda uses and successes, but also gives a brief history of its use in the United States. The details of Gulf War propaganda use reads prophetically... the same exact tactics used in the '91 Gulf War are being used today (2003). It's as if Chomsky sees the news reports before they're produced. The pattern of media control is made starkingly clear to the reader and is sure to upset you. Few books have generated such emotion in me, and for a book this short to have such an effect speaks volumes. Highly recommended!
Rating: 
Summary: good intro to [information], but follow up on it
Review: People often complain that Noam Chomsky is too erudite and intellectual in his arguments. Not so in this booklet--I don't think there's a single citation in the whole thing. In fact, I'd even call it low brow. Consider this a few levels above Michael Moore on the sophistication scale. That having been said, everything Chomsky says in here has in fact been meticulously researched (from other, more substantial works he has written, such as Manufacturing Consent) and is argued in plain English. In many ways this is a vastly condensed, simpler, and rather sarcastic version of Stewart Ewen's brilliant work, PR! Overall it makes for a good, solid (if one-sided) introduction to the issues, especially so if you'd rather skip over the intellectual mumbo-jumbo and nit-picky historical details. I could have done with a bibliography, personally.
Rating:
Summary: Brief and straight to the point !!
Review: The media was co-opted by the elites and the global corporate groups many many years ago. The viewer and the reader will never be able to get an accurate and objective view of events from their newspaper or television set. The corporate media has become an intrinsic organ of the new breed of the hybrid ruler that is half politician and half corporation.
Chomsky's book is a good eye opener for the media blind. It's a book worth reading.........
Rating:
Summary: Are you being DISSERVED???
Review: There is more in this book(pamphlet for God's sake) than you could get watching 20 years of news. Noam Chomsky has been influential in the way I look at things now. The forces he talks about are insidiously powerful and you must always be conscious of resistance and questioning of them.I think whoever said we use 5-10% of our brains was right.
Rating:
Summary: A polemical crowbar
Review: This author's work is a little too sciolistic for my own personal taste, while the doctrine he promulgates is singularly unconvincing and is, to my mind, a purely bombastic jeremiad about the nominal faiings of entirely righteous democratic polities. Neverthless, we mandarins are small people and I would not presume to pass absolute judgment on a field outside the cordon of my ostensible competence. What I will enunciate is this: the text's style is so verbally ornamental, littered with latinates and limping with tired tropes that is does not so much teeter on the edge of self parody as plumet, vertiginously therein - shamelessly and with a naivity that is almost endearing. The next time the author is in London I sincerely hope we can meet up for a hearty polemical ding-dong (i with my crowbar, he with his cosh or jemmy).
Rating:
Summary: Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion for middle schoolers
Review: This book reads just like the Protocols of Zion (supposedly an "anti-semitic" tract published by the Czar's secret police in 1905) but with a modern edge and a sarcastic and accusing ring to it. It explains how government uses the media to further its own ends, such as drumming up support for wars against countries the Average Joe can't point out on a map or has never even heard of.
Take for instance Afghanistan. If 9/11 never happend, do you think that places like "Kabul," "Mazar-e-Sharif," or "Khyber Pass" or people like "Mullah Omar," "Marwan-al-Shehi" or "Pervez Musharraf" would have ever become household words?
Now the media is getting the public in a panic against a never-ending array of minute Third World states that are presented as extremely dangerous. But as has been shown in RECENT world conflicts in which the US has been a part, most of our "enemies" can't even sissy-slap us in combat. The only substansial damage that Iraq, Yugoslavia, Cuba, etc (besides a limited number of combat casualities) is the financial cost-HUNDREDS of BILLIONS of DOLLARS which goes into the pockets of the MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.
Rating: 
Summary: Liberal Lies
Review: This is a typical book by an anti-American liberal. Full of obfuscation, specious reasoning and half truths. Chomsky is right that most of the media is controlled, but he neglects to state that the media generally is controlled by fuzzy minded liberals.
Rating:
Summary: Intemperate and inconsequential
Review: This pamphlet ostensibly discusses the impact of the communications media in shaping people's views on public policy. The subject is an interesting but inconclusive area of sociology and political science, in which some useful work has been published in the past few years (for example, Benjamin Page's 'Who Deliberates?'). Most such work, in my judgement, exaggerates the media's importance as intermediaries in a deliberative democracy, but raises important questions about matters of selection bias and the framing of policy issues. Chomsky's polemic doesn't begin to approach, and doesn't appear to be familiar with, this body of work. It is short on analysis and long on abuse. Few readers are likely to gain insight from its melange of unsubstantiated assertion, unfalsifiable thesis and frequent resort to abuse. The unfalsifiable thesis is the notion that the communications media are a consistent force for communicating the policy preferences of a homogeneous elite, thereby 'manufacturing consent' among the governed. As an analytical device, this is useless, for it precludes nothing and predicts nothing. In Great Britain, for example, most newspapers opposed military action in Kosovo in 1999, but Tony Blair went ahead anyway and won public respect for doing so. One can read Chomsky's pamphlet on alleged media control in vain for any insight into the ambiguous relationship among the executive, the press and the people that this incident illustrates. All one will find is a refusal to credit people's ability to judge public policies for themselves. Chomsky is thus a consistent elitist in the mould of Herbert Marcuse, and the reader should be prepared. But even so, it is still a shock to see just how deep is the contempt expressed in this pamphlet for the citizenry of a liberal democracy. What can one make, for example, of the assertion, with its preposterous identification of public opinion with unthinking militarism, that during the Gulf War everybody 'goosestepped on command'? Even as hyperbole, this is gross condescension and hardly consistent with democratic precepts. Unfortunately there is no stopping the stream of vitriol directed at those who have the temerity to hold different views from Chomsky. He asserts, "no reason was given for going to war that could not be refuted by a literate teenager." I can assure Chomsky that the 80% of us in the US and Great Britain who supported Operation Desert Storm are not automata and were perfectly capable of stating an overwhelming justification for going to war: we didn't wish to see an aggressive and expansionist tyranny succeed in annexing and plundering a neigbouring country, threaten Israel and the Arab states, and augment its weapons of mass destruction. Fortunately for world peace, our side ignored the prescriptions of the anti-war activists and defeated Iraq. But to Chomsky, if he loses the argument, there must be dark forces at work: the overwhelming public support freely and responsibly given to our leaders and armed forces was, in his judgement, "the hallmark of a totalitarian culture". In his new book 'Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline', Judge Richard Posner notes that "the enormous volume of Noam Chomsky's political writings ... has received little public attention, much of it derisory." No one who has read 'Media Control' will be surprised by that information.
| 
