Chomsky is listing the filters, but not any countervailing forces. Al Jazeera is owned by people with different motivations than Disney. So they publish diffe

Chomsky is listing the filters, but not any countervailing forces. Al Jazeera is owned by people with different motivations than Disney. So they publish different things. But note -- this only reinforces Chomsky's point! It highlights the damage of concentrated ownership. Counting on the "benificence" of oil-sheiks seems like a bad plan for civil society. Remember too that Manufacturing Consent (1988 and Chomsky's thinking in general) precede mass-internet comms and the globalized infosphere. Mass-comms really did require large capital plants (towers, satellites, cable plants, etc.), and mass-media and big-capital were inseparable. This is less true today for new media. It is more true for the incumbent radio, tv, and newspaper businesses. Those have been concentrated into a very few hands over the last 40 years. I've not kept up with Chomsky enough to know his current thinking. I'd argue that 2 and 4 are even stronger on the internet. 5 is evergreen. And 4 is now an aspirational lifestyle - the "Influencer". If you consider that the average person hasn't read a book since high-school, and needs someone on the nightly news to tell them what happened on twitter yesterday, then this STILL hasn't reached "mass media".