Aleph
Volume 9, Numéro 4, Pages 47-61
2022-10-14
The Power Of Western Mass Media In Manufacturing Consent And Diminishing Democracy
Authors : Bouhaba Ikram . Mansouri Brahim .
Abstract
The telos of the enlightenment thinkers was to challenge the traditional edifice entrenched by monarchy and the church, a goal that once nurtured the perfectibility of human reason and emboldened man for mind revolution. It is de facto true that reason has made great strides in the ladder of civilization, however; the latter has become a hostage of modern mass media which has systematically ingrained chains of unconscious servitude to manufacture consent, to erode political awareness and to rise political passivity. The doctrine of progress that was hailed by enlightenment thinkers has been now substituted by the doctrine of survival, as individualism and free thinking is now challenged by a conformist society where the homogeneity of needs, thoughts and behaviour are well entrenched by the mass media. It becomes thus the duty of modern thinkers to protect the mind from deception and false consciousness. The modern mass media has established, inter alia, the chimera of democracy and the superiority of Western power, a vision that is now substantially fading away because of the crisis of Covid 19. It is the aim of this paper to show how reason and language become distorted and deficient means to discern the truth and how they are manipulated by the media through the use of highly deceptive techniques to manufacture consent. It is also the aim of this study to show how radical press that once existed in Britain as an incentive tool for rising political awareness could not survive in the age of globalisation and commercialisation.
Keywords
Mass Media ; Democracy ; False Consciousness ; Political passivity ; Propaganda
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