Understanding Power

And the way you do it, Lippmann said, is by what he called the “manufacture of consent”—if you don’t do it by force, you have to do it by the calculated “manufacture of consent.

what they’re doing is selling audiences to other businesses, and for the agenda-setting media like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, they’re in fact selling very privileged, elite audiences to other businesses—overwhelmingly their readers are members of the so-called “political class,” which is the class that makes decisions in our society.

the economic structure of a newspaper is that it sells readers to other businesses.