Excerpted from a longer essay by Mel Valentin to be found at http://www.politicalstrategy.org/archives/000381.php

"As Chomsky points out in [Manufacturing Consent, the conception of representative democracies guided and directed by political elites isn’t a revolutionary idea. Chomsky traces the idea of political elites directing the masses in representative democracies back to the English Civil War, and much more recently, to the ideas of philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr and influential journalist (and author of the seminal Public Opinion), Walter Lipmann. In each case, the fundamental assumption is that the masses are simply incapable of recognizing and adequately responding to their own common interests. Chomsky quotes a particularly damning passage from Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings, “Rationality belongs to the cool observer…the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, his naive faith requires necessary illusions and emotionally potent over-simplification.” One need only look at the current presidential campaign coverage and the failure of the mainstream media to challenge either campaign for factual errors or mischaracterizations, or to signal the emotional appeals made by the Bush campaign (i.e., the fear of future terrorist attacks)."