"A Propaganda Model" by Edward Herman
and Noam Chomsky was by far one of my favorite readings of the semester thus
far. The idea of media influencing these mass amounts of people, although sometimes
scary to think about, is extremely fascinating to me and something that I enjoy
talking about and studying.
Propaganda
is something that I think a lot of people hear and immediately think Nazi Germany,
or Stalinist Russia, or something along those lines. But something that Chomsky
touches on, and I didn’t really think too much about until after class, is that
in a way, the media today making it seem as though propaganda is something that
isn’t present in today’s society and was only done by these terrible governments
nearly 100 years ago. And that today everything is much more transparent. Yet that right there is propaganda in itself.
The media today is more manipulating and misleading then potentially ever before.
Chomsky talks
about this. A famous quote from Chomsky that I heard before even reading his
essay is “The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't
even know that it doesn't know.” When I first heard this quote, I didn’t know
who Chomsky was, and I didn’t think too much about this quote. But now, this quote
speaks to me much more than it did before. The general population today is very
disconnected what is happening in the world. There are so many distractions in
the world, that people have stopped caring about important things going on.
Look at voter turnout for example, especially from young voters.
The general
population is so disconnected, that they don’t know what is going on. And so
many of them don’t know what is going on, that they don’t even know that they don’t
know. Noam Chomsky is one of my new favorite theorist, and I am excited to read
more of his works and learn more about what he has to say about the world.
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