Directing
Mark Achbar is a Canadian filmmaker, best known for The Corporation (2003), Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1994), and as an Executive Producer on over a dozen feature documentaries.
A film about the noted American linguist/political dissident and his warning about corporate media's role in modern propaganda.
Since the late 18th century American legal decision that the business corporation organizational model is legally a person, it has become a dominant economic, political and social force around the globe. This film takes an in-depth psychological examination of the organization model through various case studies. What the study illustrates is that in the its behaviour, this type of "person" typically acts like a dangerously destructive psychopath without conscience. Furthermore, we see the profound threat this psychopath has for our world and our future, but also how the people with courage, intelligence and determination can do to stop it.
Beginning with Noam Chomsky's response to a college student who role-plays "Jane U.S.A."--someone who naively believes she lives in a democratic society in which she can create her own destiny--the viewer is presented with a cross-section of typically lively Chomsky encounters. Central to a functioning democracy is the necessity of free access to information, ideas and opinions. But what should be our democratic right turns out to be limited and shaped by the biases of insitutions and ideologies within the mass media. Chomsky shows how governments, corporations and other elites manufacture the consent of the public to serve their interests.
This video focuses primarily on the implications of the structure and format of television, especially the consequences of concision, and how these factors can shape the messages of the medium. In addition, other issues, such as how democracies handle dissenters, and how the mainstream media have treated the challenges of Noam Chomsky's media critiques are explored. The media construct reality, and in the conclusion we see the author participating in that very process.
A visual interpretation of the massive disarmament rally held in New York City on June 12, 1982. With huge rallies held simultaneously around the world, people gathered together on this day at the height of the Regan-era nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union.