Noam Chomsky (2017). 'What We Really Want'
https://www.youtube.com/embed/3CFwSQiTu3I
Transcript: "there's a wonderful study - huge study of the reading habits of the British working class in the late 19th century - Jonathan Rose - very detailed... say well we're British workers reading. Turns out they were better educated than um than the aristocrats..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CFwSQiTu3I&t=333s Transcript: "in the television industry there's what's called content and fill. In a programme content is the ads, fill is the car chase that you pull off the shelf to keep people watching between the ads. And if you just watch television you can see that the creativity the thought the funding and so on is going into the ads and not into the fill. You know and newspaper industry there's what they call the news hole. So you lay out the newspaper, first you get all the ads - that's what matters, then there's this news hole where you put in things to keep people watching…" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CFwSQiTu3I&t=608s Transcript: "so, anyone who took an economics course or you know reads about it, knows that uh the uh a market economy is supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. That's what we're taught our economy is. Turn on the television set and take a look at the content - the ads. Are they trying to create informed consumers making rational choices? I mean if we had a market economy... If there was an ad it would be an announcement by say Ford Motor Company... here are the characteristics of the cars I'm producing next year here's what consumer review says about them that would create informed consumers making rational choices. That's not what you see. There's huge effort - efforts to try to create irrational consumers, uninformed consumers, making irrational choices, to undermine market economies - yes and to turn people into... people who believe may even believe that what they want is to sit on a couch and watch television - it's not what they want" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CFwSQiTu3I&t=652s Bibliography: Rose, J. (2010). 'The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes'. Yale University Press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intellectual_Life_of_the_British_Working_Classes
