War Made Easy & Manufacturing Consent

  "War Made Easy" is a film that focuses on how the United States government, in association with the large media companies, in a sense manipulate the population into believing that wars are righteous and should be supported. While the film focuses on the Iraq war, it displays how the same tactics are used by every president in order to rally support. We will use five filters from "Manufacturing Consent" to analyze how the media is controlled by outside sources, like the government, in order to only send across certain news or views to the viewers. 
  The first filter Chomsky writes about is size, ownership, and profit orientation of the mass media.  This refers to the large main four companies that run the major broadcasters of mass media such as Fox and ABC. There is brief mention of this in the film but it is not discussed in detail. 
  The second filter is advertising sponsorship of the mass media. This is referring to the advertisers that invest on the news channels and if they do not approve of the content of the news, they will cease to sponsor the channel. This filter is not really touched upon in the film. 
   The third filter is the symbiotic relationship between mass media and powerful sources of information. This is, in my opinion, the most clear filter in the film. The part of the film that stands out in accordance to this filter is when the news channel representatives go to the Pentagon in order to get a list of generals and sergeants approved to talk about the war and their take on it. The government obviously does not release full information on such fragile matters like the war so they control what the American population knows also. They can choose what to say to the media and what to let the media find out. If the media was to go against what these powerful sources wanted, they would face severe consequences. 
  The fourth filter is the projection of "flak" onto diverging views. In "War Made Easy" they showed how the few times elected officials try to go against the norm they are torn to pieces by news casters. For example, when veteran John Murtha stated that the troops should be pulled out, he was brutally scrutinized for not supporting the troops. Phil Donahue had the highest rating show on MSNBC but was fired in 2003 because he was an open critic of the Iraq war and NBC claimed he was a difficult face for the news channel during the time of war. Whenever someone openly diverges from the accepted views, they are immediately shut down.
   The last filter is the idea of protecting the nation and the people from forces like anticommunism, or more applicable today, Islamic fundamentalism. The 9/11 attack was used to wrongly connect Al-Qaeda  to Saddam Hussein and thus serve as motive for war.