Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky And the Media

On June 18, 1992, Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick's Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media received a standing ovation at the 39th Sydney Film Festival in Australia. In the popularity poll, it nudged out such works as Wild Wheels, Ida B. Wells: a Passion for Justice, Color Adjustment, and Brother's Keeper. Since then, the film has gone on to garner numerous awards and has had a considerable theatrical run throughout the world. That's a lot of attention for a film about a man who rarely appears in the popular media (which is, incidentally, the windmill that Chomsky has tilted against for the past three decades). An M.I.T. professor, Chomsky is arguably the only noted linguistic scholar who also happens to be a prominent radical dissident. His ideas have earned dismissals from novelist Tom Wolfe ("rubbish"), Nightline producer Jeff Greenfield ("whacko"), and a much more personal rejection from conservative intellectual William F. Buckley, Jr. ("I'd smash you in the goddamn face"). a relatively quiet (but insistent), unprepossessing man, Chomsky has written some 30 books (in the rather divergent fields of linguistic theory and political activism) and has spoken to scads of college audiences--where people's brains have yet to be set in concrete. Filmmakers Achbar and Wintonick have done a remarkable job of capturing the major strains of Chomsky's thought and sharing those ideas through a wide variety of modes: interview clips, dramatic reconstructions, humorous segues, even a bit of animation. At times, it's too much; there are moments where the style unnecessarily competes with the substance, and Chomsky's statements become lost in the very chopped-up soundbite editing which he himself so admirably decries throughout. But this is really a minor consideration compared to the video's benefits. Chomsky's commentary on media propaganda, his comparison of the mostly unreported genocide in East Timor and the widely reported killing fields story in Cambodia (the former warranted some 20 inches of coverage in the New York Times while the latter landed a whopping 1,175 inches), and his analysis of the indoctrinary aspects of sports, provide excellent flexing for the mental muscle. In fact, if there were exercise videos for the brain, Noam Chomsky might be the Jane Fonda of the genre. Not for the weak of mind, Manufacturing Consent is highly recommended, and is sure to be popular amongst vigorous investigators of the social and political dynamics of our changing world. (R. Pitman)