Well, interestingly, the term, the phrase, manufacturing consent, was not ours.

We borrowed it from the leading public intellectual of the 20th century, Walter Lipman.

He said, that's a new art in democracy to manufacture consent so that the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, his phrase, the population,

will be passive and acquiescent and will accept the rule of the responsible men, people like us.

And in fact, the myth is that the media are independent, adversarial, courageous,

struggling against power.

And it's actually true of some, the very fine, often very fine reporters, correspondents.

In fact, the media does an honest, courageous job, but within a framework that

determines what to discuss, what not to discuss, and what we try to demonstrate in the book

is that if you simply look at the institutional structure of the media within a state capitalist society like ours,

they're performing it pretty much the way you'd expect.

There can be no other opening for this show than to hear from the great Noam Chomsky,

the most consistent practical humanist in the Western world. On this, I offer no equivocation. There's a good chance

that unfuckers have heard the phrase manufacturing consent, the title of Chomsky's landmark book,

based upon the phrase first uttered by Walter Lipman, as you heard in the clip. But there's never a

bad time to revisit the work of Dear Uncle Nome. We're going to once again leverage prior episodes

as building blocks to a larger narrative about how our so-called democracyome. We're going to once again leverage prior episodes as building blocks to a larger

narrative about how our so-called democracy operates. We're not completely leaving Uncle

Fuck Nugget in our rearview mirror as there's a Chicago school connection in this episode as well.

And while we're on the subject, thank you. Thank you to the hundreds of listeners that reached

out after our Fuck Milton Friedman episode last week to affirm our standing in the potosphere. I am thrilled and

eminently soul-satisfied that you enjoyed the show, and we'll share some of your remarkable

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