Manufacturing consent in higher education : the case of the Gulf cooperation council region

Abstract

Against the backdrop of Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model (PM), this study examines how consent is manufactured among higher-education faculties in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region—a political union comprising six Arab states: Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. Specifically, it studies the relevance of the five filters that comprise the Propaganda Model (i.e., ownership, dependence on revenue, information sourcing, flak, and convergence in the dominant ideology) to how GCC-based higher-education faculties engage in behaviors that filter reality to promote and shield the interests of policy makers in the region. The aim is to scrutinize how GCC faculties are subject to various types of propaganda that manufacture consent for political, economic, and social agendas at both the local and global levels.