edit: I hope this question doesn't come across as petty or rude. I am a fan of Chomsky and intrigued by his thoughts on society. It's an honest question that I really have a hard time getting past.
Remember too that Manufacturing Consent (1988 and Chomsky's thinking in general) precede mass-internet comms and the globalized infosphere. Mass-comms really did require large capital plants (towers, satellites, cable plants, etc.), and mass-media and big-capital were inseparable. This is less true today for new media. It is more true for the incumbent radio, tv, and newspaper businesses. Those have been concentrated into a very few hands over the last 40 years.
I've not kept up with Chomsky enough to know his current thinking. I'd argue that 2 and 4 are even stronger on the internet. 5 is evergreen. And 4 is now an aspirational lifestyle - the "Influencer".
If you consider that the average person hasn't read a book since high-school, and needs someone on the nightly news to tell them what happened on twitter yesterday, then this STILL hasn't reached "mass media".
[*] really the algorithm is just another media filter that controls who gets through it, talking about "gaming" an algorithm probably has it a bit backwards.
There's a nihilistic "the media are liars and everything you read is a lie" take that bounces around the Internet a lot, but I don't think that was Chomsky's original point.
That expectation overlooks the complexity of reality - there may be reasons that Random House, etc. are exceptions, and we just can't explicitly identify and define every complexity. It also can throw away 99% of the value of things. Classical mechanics, in physics, isn't true in all situations, but it's still pretty valuable.
The value to something depends on what we can learn from it, not the flaws we can find, and how well it predicts things. If your expectation is perfection and then the theory doesn't meet it, the problem is with the expectation and not the theory.
That's like saying "If there's air pollution why are we not all dead?" Nobody said this system has no holes at all - just that this defines the major vectors of news.
>Why would Random House publish the book by Herman and Chomsky? Why would Al Jazeera produce this video and why would YouTube host it? These are all large media companies.
Because this is the general propaganda mechanisms, not absolute control.
Plus it doesn't cost them much. Reading it wont give you power, nor it's directly attached to some cause they actively promote or hurts their profit margins.
If it became a movement, or it was against some of their private interests or those of their sponsors concretely, and not in the abstract, it would be a different story.
1. Doing that would juice it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
2.Each of these institutions brands itself on providing quality information, and in the US we pride ourselves on the first amendment. So the brand hit for censoring isn't worth it.
3. Chomsky is/was tenured and couldn't be fired the same way a journalist could
If you look at manufacturing consent, they make it clear that good stuff can get through media. It is just so much harder, and therefore there is less of it overall. But that doesn't mean nothing can get through.
Arguably, the manufacturing only works if 51% or more is generally good stuff. Obviously propaganda outlets don't keep a lot of eyes, e.g. Fox News' viewership has been declining faster than demographics says it should be.
90% can be spot on, entertaining, and wholly or mostly truthful; it's the 10% makes it work.
YouTube wouldn't care, it prioritizes demonization based on legal fallout. Talking about flak is not a flak topic.
The major players in media need access to policymakers to publish stories, they tend to go along with whatever narrative is being pushed in exchange for this access.
You wouldn't expect Greenwald to have WH press credentials for instance.
You need to leave a relief valve, an opportunity for the malcontents to go express their need for rebellion in a wholly controllable way. They will then dig their own graves.
Why wouldn't we? What are we going to do about it? Nothing. It's just like youtube platforms videos discussing how bad social media is for your mental health. Or oil companies funding 'green' tech. Or a newspaper writing about how bad news is for you.
'News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier'
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
Who cares?
> These are all large media companies.
They are all large media companies controlled by the same group of elites.
In a totalitarian system, the elites carse about what you think. In a dystopian system, the elites don't care.
So random house published herman and chomsky? And? What happened since? It's like food industry being paranoid about people finding out about how sausage is made. People find out. People keep on eating sausage. Heck it's free advertising.
It's in #1. "Their end game? Profit."
Corporations don't need to manipulate people into buying things they wanted anyway.