Manufacturing Consent is more than a book by Noam Chomsky, and more than a concept borrowed from Walter Lippmann's book Public Opinion. It is also a documentary film about the views and life of the world renowned linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky. The film was released in 1992 and is 167 minutes long. It was created by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick. The film has won some fifteen international awards.
The films' more interesting parts include Noam Chomsky defending his choice to support a French professor's right to free speech and a case study of atrocities carried out in Southeast Asia. Would you be surprised that the end of Nazi Germany was not the end of genocide? Very recently genocide has been committed in Cambodia and East Timor. The U.S. backed the Indonesians while they carried out genocide in East Timor. The film shows how the the tragedy in Cambodia had much more media coverage than East Timor. It (the film) also gives some reasons as to why the media would cover Cambodia and not East Timor which basically relates back to Noam Chomsky's and Edward Herman's analysis on how the media functions.
There are several clips of interviews, debates, and arguments featuring Bill Moyers, Peter Jennings, William F. Buckley Jr., Tom Wolfe, Michel Foucault and many others in the film. The special features on the DVD version shows an extended excerpt of the debate with William F. Buckley Jr. where Chomsky makes Buckley look like a fool.