Manufactured consent
Etymology
The phrase "the manufacture of consent" comes from the journalist Walter Lippmann’s 1922 book Public Opinion, where he described it as a normal, even necessary, tool of modern governance. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman inverted its tone in Manufacturing Consent (1988), turning it into a critique of how corporate mass media filter news to serve powerful interests. Today the term almost always carries that critical, Chomskyan sense.
noun phrase · /man-yuh-FAK-cherd kun-SENT/
Public agreement that has been shaped and engineered by media and elites rather than arrived at through free, informed debate.
What it names
The unsettling possibility that a population can feel it freely chose a view that was, in fact, quietly steered by which stories got told and which got buried.
Example
Looking back at the run-up to the war, she saw less a debate than a case of manufactured consent, with every major outlet echoing the same official framing.
Related idea
Propaganda is usually overt and attributable to a source; manufactured consent works through the ordinary, seemingly neutral operation of the press.