What is Manufacturing Consent Anyway?

I got ratio'd in the mentions of the DSA International Committee for defending them, which is a good indication of the lightning rod/whipping boy they've become for the war-hungry liberals who are basically ready to nuke Russia.  It would be otherwise unremarkable to mention this much less make a post about it but for the specific, recurrent counter-argument I received.

First, for some context, the original series of posts:

This all feels like bog-standard anti-imperialist rhetoric, but of course a lot of people have been conditioned to be vehemently opposed to that.  One guy replied with a screenshot of a Bloomberg poll, so I replied back:

As you can tell, a lot of people did not like this!  A common response was to basically reiterate the headline to me, claiming that you can't possibly oppose the "will of the people."  Of course this is silly: A lot of bad things are also very popular, but that doesn't mean I should like or support them.  But the other repeated reply I got was much more pernicious: 

In short, the common argument is that no consent is being manufactured here, and that the sudden groundswell of support for NATO expansion is wholly organic.  This stance shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what "manufactured consent" is at best, and is wildly disingenuous at worst.  I will address the best case scenario.

The first counterargument to this is contained in some of the responses themselves.  A few people noted that Finnish support for NATO membership was well underwater until very recently.  Here's some data to that effect from the same polling outfit:

What's notable here is that Russia also invaded Ukraine in 2014 (and had invaded Georgia before that, and was a general menace to its neighbors, etc etc).  And yet, support was roughly a third of what it is now, and subsequently went down even as Russia continued to occupy parts of the country.  I won't claim to understand the inner workings of Finnish media, so I don't know precisely how or why this swift turnaround came about.  But I'm going to guess it's something similar to what happened here in America (a place that was also lukewarm towards opposing Russia in 2014), where a media apparatus increasingly prone to exaggerating claims of Russian influence on our decrepit political processes subsequently took a very bad and devastating war and turned it into The Worst Thing To Ever Happen.  Building a narrative out of a selective version of the truth to drive people to support a specific course of action is literally what manufacturing consent is, and it appears to be the most likely explanation of why this time is different, both here and in Scandinavia.

This leads directly into the second counterargument.  Many of the responses assumed (or appeared to assume) that my use of the term manufacturing consent meant that I think corporate media is being wholly deceitful and/or fabricating the events surrounding the war.  While this does happen, the concept is much better understood as a filter on the truth rather than a factory of outright lies.  Yes, you should be skeptical of opinion polling, but I think the main proposition presented by the Bloomberg article (Finnish citizens now want to join NATO) is likely true.  What "manufacturing consent" is in this scenario is not the results of the poll itself, but the process that led to that poll.  And a near-perfect microcosm of this process is Bloomberg's inclination to report on the high levels of support for joining NATO while ignoring the dissent that the DSA highlighted.  Which in turn leads to braying hordes on the internet who've never stepped foot in Finland claiming to profess the definitive and sacrosanct "will of the people."

To conclude, understanding how this works is important, but it's all sort of besides the larger point.  Finnish opinions are not my primary concern here — after all, the instigating post in question is me, an American, defending an organization with America in its name against the cause of an American proxy war with Russia, which is currently devastating the people of Ukraine.  Regardless of what popular opinion says, I will always think that war is bad and should be avoided at all costs.  The process of manufacturing consent is a small part of this, but it helps explain how these wars earn widespread popular support when they very evidently serve no one other than imperialist leaders and weapons manufacturers.  If you ever find yourself on the same side of an argument as those ghouls, you might want to take a second to reflect what you're really consenting to and why.

Some Films Are Pretty Good

I don't know if this is a larger pattern or random chance, but I've seen a lot of bad movie criticism lately.  Most of these are too frivolous or silly to merit a response, but I finally found one that broke me:

Some brief thoughts:

1. I tend to find myself somewhere in the middle of the didactic/aesthetic dichotomy of art.  The fundamental purpose of art is to communicate truth as one sees it in a nature that more direct methods cannot achieve.  Rank didacticism is pretty obviously incongruent with that vision.  At the same time, cowardly or ignorant art that doesn't at least occasionally put its cards on the table betrays the very idea of truth itself.  In short, I just want a well-told story that conveys a richness and a consideration that doesn't waste the attentive viewer's time.

Judging by the above, I am guessing the OP falls more towards the didactic side of this spectrum.  Which is fine, whatever, people can engage with moving pictures in a different way than I do.  But the specific problem here is that the OP appears to be applying a didactic lens to an incredibly aesthetic film.  This fundamental mismatch of object and subject doesn't just lead to an incorrect take; Rather, the contradiction rooted in her own misunderstanding is instead externalized, and is thus resolved by casting suspicion on Anderson (which, I should note, is directly refuted by his previous work).  Once again, desiring art that explicitly conforms to your morals isn't wrong per se, but expecting or even needing art to do so will only lead to trouble.

2. Critical fallacies of this flavor are commonly summarized as "depiction does not equal endorsement."  Getting in the mind of an "evil" character or showing something bad happening does not mean the director/actor/writer thinks said character or event is cool and good (not that it even necessarily matters).  The OP specifically mentions prison and class struggle, and yes, the film does depict both of these things.  But just because the specific characters of the film navigate the specific events of the film in the way they do does not mean that the film itself is explicitly or even implicitly advocating for carceralism/fascism/etc.  This doesn't mean that those aspects of the film shouldn't be interrogated—they absolutely should be!  But a meaningful critique requires much more than the paucity of thought and the appeal to suspicion on display here.

3. One of the most cited observations of the late Mark Fisher is his idea that the didactic nature of certain works of art "performs our anti-capitalism for us."  He specifically cites the second half of Wall-E, and how it's easy for viewers to sneer at how the material excess afforded to the ship's passengers blinded them to reality.  The OP's analysis is literally the contrapositive of this; Performing one's own anti-capitalism by severely misreading a piece of art.  And as we all remember from math class (?) the contrapositive is as equally valid as the original statement, which means I have proven her wrong with math.  Never say your undergraduate degree doesn't matter.

4. I am not overly familiar with the OP, but I do recall listening to her on a podcast episode.  Her area of expertise (feminist critique of the modern concept of family) is compelling and worthwhile, but it's also unquestionably provocative.  Such an area of advocacy requires her to challenge a dominant structure in our society; one that many people identify with on a personal level.  In effect, she has to be explicitly contrarian to advance such a position.  To be clear, contrarianism is service of a specific moral goal is fine and good.  But when that contrarianism escapes its useful context, as it appears to have done here, it can lead to wrong and/or unnecessarily vitriolic rhetoric.  This may then cause others to question whether your seemingly purposeful contrarianism was offered in good faith, potentially undermining the whole basis of your work.  I'm not less likely to believe in the deleterious effects of the patriarchy as the result of her bad takes; my moral commitments are much, much stronger than that.  But I am less likely to listen to her specific advocacy.

5. As is my tendency when encountering "divisive" art, I thought The French Dispatch was pretty good.