Manufacturing Consent?

Manufacturing Consent?

We are told that one of the great things of our modern society is our freedom of speech, the ability to say wherever we want to and not get punished for it. This notiongoes in hand with the notion of democracy, because in democracy we are all equals, or so we are told. The truth is that for a democracy to work out widely, it becomes necessary to have some kind ofcontrol on the population. In older times, the best way (or at least the most commonly used) was the physical punishment. But nowadays we experience a more subtle method: the manufacturing of consent.And this is a complex scenario in which there are several social agents involved, but mainly four: Government, the Mass Media, Corporations and the Population.
In a democratic society as our own, itis needed to guide the public opinion to things that are not really important. Because there is domination taking place, and it is best if people don’t question it. And so we are given adulteratedinformation or just a piece of the cake of what is really going on. Evidence of this behaviour is found in things as simple as the time given in a radio show to world news and sports: sports usuallyhave the same amount of time as the political or world news. There is a clear reason there: sports put away people’s eyes from what really matters. Besides, the sports create some kind of illusion ofbelonging to some particular group; it creates the illusion of bonding with your peers.
And even if they would care for political news, they would need to read not just one paper but several,because every newspaper has its own point of view about the same matter. And not just newspapers, because let’s not forget that also newspapers have motivations of their own to tell this and not to tellthat. They serve their own economic reasons, not the freedom of speech. The Mass Media is not objective as we are so often repeated. And it is our job to see through that, if we want to.
We are so...