Books like The Nightly News

Noam Chomsky Meets the PunisherHow do you turn the brilliant but rather prosaic writings of Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman into a comic book? Jonathan Hickman came up with this idea: you just copy some of their sentences, then add a few statistics from a recent article on globalization. Oh, and then you throw in lots of self-righteous violence, of course, so that comic-book readers can relate to the whole thing. "Noam Chomsky Meets the Punisher," basically. Sounds like an ill-advised approach? Well, that's because it is.In their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Chomsky and Herman argue that the mass media impose propaganda designed to manipulate the general population into accepting economic, social and political policies that are actually not in their best interest, but only in the interest of small political and economic elites. This ideological manipulation is argued to be the result of the mass media's very structure, most significantly of the concentration of media ownership, and of the media's reliance on advertising and governmental news sources.The Nightly News provides a very rough and sketchy introduction to the theories developed by Chomsky and Herman, quoting a sentence here and referencing an argument there. The spotlight is on the fact that our access to critical information on the topic of globalization is very limited, as the mass media we have come to rely on for information have every reason to keep us in the dark on the subject. After all, why would global media conglomerates and the advertisers they rely on have an interest in us becoming aware of the harmful implications of processes that have been immensely profitable for them?So far so good. Unfortunately, the story Hickman has constructed around those scattered globalization facts is not only awful from a storytelling perspective (cardboard characters, etc.), but falls prey to the very ideological mass media tendencies it purports to criticize. The anti-globalization activists that the story presents us with are not reasonable human beings fed up with multi-national corporations having unregulated political power, but psychotic cult members duped into rebellion by a recorded voice, ruthless and arrogant mass murderers ("We ain't the good guys... we're killing without conscience, bad men with big ideas.") who look down on non-violent protesters (as they, it is claimed, "offer nothing of consequence") and have given up all "hope for a better world," recommending that you simply "abandon it." Apparently, they are in it just for the killings.In short, the book's demonization of political activism is even more absurd than the one usually provided by the mass media, and the false claim that peaceful activists are fighting for a lost cause simply repeats one of the most commonly trumpeted myths designed to discourage us from exercising our democratic rights. Under its pseudo-intellectual surface, The Nightly News thus adds up to little more than Fox News in disguise. While the book pretends to provide the kind of globalization critique that is usually repressed in our corporate-controlled media environment, it is at its core every bit as close-minded, neoconservative, and manipulative as your typical mass-cultural commodity.Until a more insightful and sincere comic book comes along (by Joe Sacco, maybe?), I recommend you explore some of the many excellent conventional books or documentary films on the crucially important topics of globalization and mass-media propaganda. The writings of Noam Chomsky, clearly a (not even half-digested) key influence on The Nightly News, would be a great place to start.