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.