I think Manufacturing Consent is a deeply outdated book. It was fine for the 80s, but if you use it as your source for how the media works today you're going to reach silly conclusions and see outcomes you can't account for.

The biggest problem with it is that distribution costs for media are now zero, so it's easy to "start your own" and it's easy for audiences to switch away from outlets which don't pander to them to ones which do. The market pressure to pander to your audience and never contradict them is massive, which is a dynamic Chomsky never once mentions, because for him the manipulation always flows from the media to the consumer, even though today it's just as often the reverse.

Here's a good example of how outdated the book is: right after the J6 riot, Rupert Murdoch tried to get Fox News to dump Trump completely. He also tried to get the American right all-in on supporting Ukraine. In both cases, Fox's audience furiously revolted, they switched to Newsmax and OANN in big numbers, and Fox had to back off (at which point their ratings recovered). Manufacturing Consent cannot explain this.

Also, it's very hard to tell what the audience is organically rejecting from what various organizations (foreign or domestic) with a vested interest in the coverage are trying to suppress or what seemingly unrelated algorithmic processes are sidelining. There are so many feedback loops and their response time is now on the order of the descsion time that the people "calling the shots" are likely as in the dark as the rest of us.