Does the Media Manufacture our Consent?

The Lion's Roar

A weekly column by Lion Coore

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Many years ago, while I was working as the Marketing Manager for a newspaper company in Jamaica, I had an eye opening revelation. I was having a discussion with the editor who was telling me about one of the many inappropriate exploits of the company’s chairman. We had printed many unflattering stories about notable persons in society, so I asked her why she had never printed any stories about his lifestyle. She wondered if I was crazy, “You want the whole a we get fired?” she asked rhetorically.

It was then that I realized the media will always reflect a bias of its owners and that the muzzling of truth doesn’t even have to be requisitioned or sequestered it is often implied. Essentially the chairman could be caught sodomizing a goat in a bathroom stall and it would never make the news. So why is it that we have such an unwavering trust in the media?

In Jamaica, the writer’s at the Jamaica Observer Newspaper loves Sandals Chairman, Gordon Butch Stewart like Jesus loves the little children. Is this because Butch is a Saint or is it because he is the owner of the newspaper?


In America a small number of super-powerful corporations have bought up and controlled the global commercial media system. So don’t allow the fact that you see hundreds of TV channels, lead you to conclude that there’s true diversity and variety in today’s television …. A handful of large companies control what you see, hear, and read every day.

The media is an extremely powerful entity, especially in a society like ours, where it tells us who’s hot and who's not'; what to think and who to believe; they tell us who the good guys are and they point the finger at whomever they decide is the bad guy.  The media doesn't allow you to think, it thinks for you.


It is now a matter of record that under the Reagan Administration in the 80’s, the CIA planted false stories in the media about Jamaica’s Prime Minister Michael Manley’s and the state of the Jamaican economy. This was done in order to destabilize the country because our government was becoming too friendly with Fidel Castro’s communist Cuba.

It makes me wonder if a person like Hugo Chavez, a democratically elected leader, is justified in closing down so called “independent” television station in his country in an attempt to curtail the foreign corporate influence in Venezuela.

It was a logical response for the corporations to set their media hound dogs on Chavez to get to a pound of flesh, after he nationalized oil in his Venezuela.  According to Chavez, it was a decision made to get more of the oil profits going to the citizens of the country instead of greedy international corporations.

The truth is, we are all being controlled whether you live in a free or closed society, some of us just haven't figure it out yet. Under communism there are no charades, governments don’t care much about what its citizens think; they use force to keep them in line. While in a democratic society, what the majority think is very essential. Getting the citizen’s permission is paramount and I believe that the media is the machinery used to manufacture this consent.

Noam Chompsky, according to New York Times, is considered the most important intellectuals alive.

He believes that any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. corporate media. He said, “I think there is a good reason why the propaganda system works that way. It recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them.”


I was once a news junkie until I realized that the current affairs shows had a sinister motive. The programs were not only keeping me informed, they were also using smart, likable TV personalities to tell me 'what' to think. I found myself in conversations, regurgitating the talking points from the many different corporate and political interests who came on TV parading as experts on the issues. I realized that I was sounding smarter while becoming dumber.

It seems I had outsourced my thinking to these TV personalities like the US outsourced its jobs to China. So I stopped watching shows like Glen Beck on the right and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on the left and began practicing independent thought. 


There are some who believe that there is an organized dumbing down of the US population. Whether this rhetoric is true or not, the statistics don’t lie. It seems that the US is falling while China is not only rising in influence and economic power but in their children’s test scores as well. According to Bloomberg “Fifteen-year-olds in the U.S. ranked 25th among peers from 34 countries on a math test and scored in the middle in science and reading, while China’s Shanghai topped the charts, raising concern that the U.S. isn’t prepared to succeed in the global economy.” …..Poor Obama; I bet they’ll blame him for this one as well.

Also, by giving some stories heavy rotation and others none, the mainstream media tells us what is important and what is trivial. Therefore you’ll find Snookie and the Situation from the Jersey Shore getting more airtime than the two unprovoked wars in the Middle East. The media will find out what is Victoria’s Secret long before they’ll ever find the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.


So in the final analysis; who do we trust?


Hmm, that’s a tough one. What I do know is that we cannot trust all that we read in the newspapers and we shouldn’t believe everything we see on TV. Until that day when the main stream media is owned and operated by the people instead of corporations we’ll be fed half truths and lies. So question everything and believe nothing….Well, except for the Lion's Roar of course... :-)


Walk Good.
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