Professor Edward Herman (finance, University of Pennsylvania) and Professor Noam Chomsky (linguistics at 85-Nobel-Laureate MIT) (1988): “In sum, the mass media of the United States are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship , and without any significant overt coercion. This propaganda system has become even more efficient in recent decades with the rise of the national television networks, greater mass-media concentration, right-wing pressures on public radio and television, and the growth in scope and sophistication of public relations and news management” ( Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, “Manufacturing Consent. The political economy of the mass media” , page 306, Pantheon, 2002).
Edward S. Herman (university professor and co-author with Noam Chomsky of the seminal book “Manufacturing Consent”): “The power of money in elections, the increased concentration and conservative bias of the media, the resurgent strength and aggressiveness of capital and finance in globalizing economy, and the weakening of labor, provide the structural background … for the abandonment of the rudiments of social democracy [in America]’” (quoted in Harry Kawilarang, “Quotations on Terrorism”, Trafford Publishing, UK, 2006).