Is it news or propaganda?

I had a conversation last night with an Iranian expat in the US since 1978. He was drunk, and loud, and eventually got around to blaming all the world's problems on "Zionists."

I told him that, while I agree that the US caused most of its international problems (practically creating the Taliban, putting Saddam Hussein in power, encouraging and supporting Iraq's war with Iran, and on and on) I have a problem with blaming all the word's problems on the Jews. But, it got me thinking about our impression about ourselves. What I mean is "What do Americans believe Americans are?" Beyond that, what does the rest of the world think Americans are? Finally, how much of what we think about ourselves has been manufactured by the media.

After all, Noam Chomsky is Jewish, and he is a major force in criticizing US  policy--both foreign and domestic.
Here are a few things he has to say on the subject:

• All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
• Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.
• Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
• Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.  
• I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system
• If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion. 
• Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state. 
• The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.
• The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - "indoctrination," we might say - exercised through the mass media.    

 
I want to read the book and see the Noam Chomsky video Manufacturing Consent. Maybe this idea of the power of the American Media will be the focus of my investigation this semester.