Understanding Power

And the way you do it, Lippmann said, is by what he called the “manufacture of consent”—if you don’t do it by force, you have to do it by the calculated “manufacture of consent.

what they’re doing is selling audiences to other businesses, and for the agenda-setting media like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, they’re in fact selling very privileged, elite audiences to other businesses—overwhelmingly their readers are members of the so-called “political class,” which is the class that makes decisions in our society.

the economic structure of a newspaper is that it sells readers to other businesses.

product is audiences, and the market is advertisers.

the agenda-setting institutions are big corporations

the basic structure is that there are what are sometimes called “agenda-setting” media: there are a number of major media outlets that end up setting a basic framework that other smaller media units more or less have to adapt to

Well, it depends what you look at. If you look at 200,000 corpses in Central America, it doesn’t seem like much of a victory. But if you look at ten million people who are still alive, it does seem like a victory. It depends where you’re looking. You don’t win what you’d like to win, but you could have lost a lot more.

Clandestine terror is a different part of it—if the public will not support direct intervention and violence, then you have to keep it secret from them somehow. So in a way, I think the scale of clandestine government activities is a pretty good measure of the popular dissidence and activism in a country—and clandestine activities shot way up during the Reagan period. That tells you something right there about popular “empowerment”: it’s a reflection of people’s power that the government was forced underground. That’s a victory, you know.

See, the idea behind royalty was that there’s this other species of individuals who are beyond the norm and who the people are not supposed to understand. That’s the standard way you cloak and protect power: you make it look mysterious and secret, above the ordinary person—otherwise why should anybody accept it? Well, they’re willing to accept it out of fear that some great enemies are about to destroy them, and because of that they’ll cede their authority to the Lord, or the King, or the President or something, just to protect themselves. That’s the way governments work—that’s the way any system of power works—and the secrecy system is part of it.

every government has a need to frighten its population, and one way of doing that is to shroud its workings in mystery