Up until the release of Mark Achbar's film The Corporation (2003), this was the most successful documentary in Canadian history, playing theatrically in over 300 cities worldwide. It won 22 awards and appeared in more than 50 international film festivals.
The "Non-Corporate News" sequence where Chomsky speaks in "real time" while the other TVs are accelerated, was shot by an animator. The forty-second sequence took six weeks of prep and was done in one fifteen-hour take.
Even though the filmmakers were told they couldn't take video within the New York Times Building, about 12 minutes of "guerrilla footage" was shot.
The film took five years to complete. Its credits acknowledge efforts and support of over 300 people and organizations. Crews shot in 23 cities in 7 countries over a period of 4 years. The film was edited from over 120 hours of original and archival footage. Archival images were culled from 185 sources. [from an insert] A statistic: In North America there are: 7 major movie studios and more than 1,800 daily newspapers, 11,000 magazines, 11,000 radio stations, 2,000 TV stations, 2,500 book publishers. 23 corporations own and control over 50% of the business in each medium. In some cases they have a virtual monopoly.
This film is an expansion of Noam Chomsky's earlier book 'Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media' which he co-wrote with Edward S. Herman.