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Revision as of 16:39, 2 August 2006 by TDC (talk | contribs) (Its not a hack job and a legitimate concern has been raised in talk)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)The propaganda model is a theory advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky that alleges systemic biases in the mass media and seeks to explain them in terms of structural economic causes.
Overview
First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media, the propaganda model views the private media as businesses selling a product — readers and audiences (rather than news) — to other businesses (advertisers). The theory postulates five general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five are:
The first three (ownership, funding, and sourcing) are generally regarded by the authors as being the most important.
Although the model was based mainly on the characterization of United States media, Chomsky and Herman believe the theory is equally applicable to any country that shares the basic economic structure and organizing principles which the model postulates as the cause of media biases.
The filters
Ownership
Herman and Chomsky argue that all mainstream media outlets are embodied in large corporations, which are themselves often part of much larger conglomerates (e.g. Westinghouse or General Electric). Such conglomerates frequently extend beyond traditional media fields, and thus have extensive financial interests that may be endangered when certain information is widely publicized. Thus, according to this reasoning, news items that most endanger the corporate financial interests that own the media will face the most bias and censorship.
The authors claim that the importance of ownership filter is the fact that corporations are subject to shareholder control in the context of a profit-oriented market economy. The theory then argues that maximizing profit means sacrificing news objectivity, and news sources that ultimately survive must have been fundamentally biased, with regard to news in which they have a conflict of interest.
Funding
Since the mainstream media depends heavily on advertising revenues to survive, the model suggests that the interests of advertisers come before reporting the news. Chomsky and Herman argue that a newspaper, like any other company, has a product which it offers to its audience (or customer base). In this case, however, the product is composed of the affluent readers who buy the newspaper — who also comprise the educated decision-making sector of the population — while the audience includes the businesses that pay to advertise their goods. According to this "filter", the news itself is nothing more than "filler" to get privileged readers to see the advertisements which makes up the real content, and will thus take whatever form is most conducive to attracting educated decision-makers. Stories that conflict with their "buying mood", it is argued, will tend to be marginalized or excluded, as will information that presents a picture of the world that collides with advertisers' interests. The theory argues that the people buying the newspaper are themselves the product which is sold to the businesses that buy advertising space; the newspaper itself has only a marginal role as the product
Sourcing
The third filter concerns the mass media's need for a continuous flow of information to fill their demand for daily news. In an industrialized economy where consumers demand information on numerous worldwide events unfolding simultaneously, they argue that this task can only be filled by major business and government sectors that have the necessary material resources. This includes mainly The Pentagon and other governmental bodies. Chomsky and Herman then argue that a "symbiotic relationship" arises between the media and parts of government which is sustained by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest. On the one hand, government and news-promoters strive to make it easier for news organizations to buy their services; according to the authors (p. 22), they
- provide them with facilities in which to gather
- give journalists advance copies of speeches and forthcoming reports
- schedule press conferences at hours well-geared to news deadlines
- write press releases in usable language
- carefully organize their press conferences and "photo opportunity" sessions
On the other hand, the media becomes reluctant to run articles that will harm corporate interests that provide them with the resources that the media depends upon.
This theoretical relationship also gives rise to a "moral division of labor", in which "officials have and give the facts," and "reporters merely get them". Journalists are then supposed to adopt an uncritical attitude that makes it possible for them to accept corporate values without experiencing cognitive dissonance.
Flak
Chomsky and Herman claim that "flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. The term "flak" has been used to describe what Chomsky and Herman see as targeted efforts to discredit organizations or individuals who disagree with or cast doubt on the prevailing assumptions which Chomsky and Herman view as favorable to established power (e.g., "The Establishment"). Unlike the first three "filtering" mechanisms — which are derived from analysis of market mechanisms — flak is characterized by concerted and intentional efforts to manage public information.
Flak from the powerful can be either direct or indirect. The direct could include the following hypothetical scenarios:
- Letters or phone calls from the White House to Dan Rather or William Paley
- Inquiries from the FCC to major television networks requesting documents used to plan and assemble a program
- Messages from irate executives representing advertising agencies or corporate sponsors to media officials threatening retaliation if not granted on-air reply time.
The powerful can also work on the media indirectly by:
- Complaints delivered en masse to their own constituencies (e.g., stockholders, employees) about media bias,
- Generation of mass advertising that does the same,
- By funding watchdog groups or think tanks engineered to expose and attack deviations in media coverage that endanger vital elite interests.
- By funding political campaigns that elect politicians who will be more willing to curb any such media deviations.
Anti-Ideologies; substitutes for anti-communism
A final filter is anti-ideology. Anti-ideologies exploit public fear and hatred of groups that pose a potential threat, either real or imagined. Communism once posed the primary threat according to the model. Communism and socialism were portrayed by their detractors as endangering freedoms of speech, movement, press, etc. They argue that such a portrayal was often used as a means to silence voices critical of elite interests.
With the Soviet Union's collapse, proponents of the propaganda model have argued that the functionality and credibility of anti-communism has been fundamentally compromised. Proponents state that new, more functional anathemas have arisen to take its place. Chomsky and Herman argue that one possible replacement for anti-communism seems to have emerged in the form of "anti-terrorism".
Empirical support
Following the theoretical exposition of the propaganda model, Manufacturing Consent contains a large section where the authors seek to test their hypotheses. If the propaganda model is right and the filters do influence media content, a particular form of bias would be expected — one that systematically favors corporate interests.
They also looked at what they perceived as naturally-occurring "historical control groups" where two events, similar in their relevant properties but differing in the expected media attitude towards them, are contrasted using objective measures such as coverage of key events (measured in column inches) or editorials favoring a particular issue (measured in number).
Finally, the authors examine what points of view they believe are expressed in the media. In one case, the authors examined over fifty of Stephen Kinzer's articles about Nicaragua in the New York Times. They criticize Kinzer for failing to quote a single person in Nicaragua who is pro-Sandinista and contrast this with polls that Chomsky and Herman cite as reporting a 9% support for all the opposition parties taken together. Based on this example and select others, the authors conclude that such a persistent bias can only be explained by a model like the one they advocate.
Applications
Since the publication of Manufacturing Consent, both Herman and Chomsky have adopted the theory and have given it a prominent role in their writings, lectures, and theoretical frameworks. Chomsky, in particular, has made extensive use of its explanative power to lend support to his own interpretations of mainstream media attitudes towards a wide array of events, including the following:
- Gulf War (1990)
- Panama invasion (1989)
- Iraq invasion (2003).
Herman, seeking to build upon a more institutionalized framework to analyze mainstream media functioning, joined the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which has as its goal the critique, documentation, and statistical analysis of what it alleges is media bias and censorship since 1986.
With the emergence of the World Wide Web as a cheap and potentially wide-ranging means of communication, a number of independent websites have surfaced which adopt the propaganda model to subject media to close scrutiny. Several examples of these are MediaLens, a British-based site authored by David Edwards and David Cromwell.
Criticism
Critics of Chomsky and Herman's mass media analysis, including author and historian Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution severely disagree with Chomsky and Herman's theories. They see the idea of "Manufacturing Consent" as nothing more than a recycling of the Marxist idea of "false consciousness", (as in Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man), where the masses have been so manipulated that they have neither the perspective or intellect to see beyond the propaganda and require "superior intellects" like Chomsky's to point out to them the real truth. They also focus on the idea that Chomsky and Herman are so far out of the mainstream political spectrum that they seek to explain their marginalization as a “conspiracy of the elite” to suppress their criticisms, instead of the idea that their philosophy is unacceptable in the mainstream, and therefore ignored by the mainstream population.
Arch Puddington, also of the Hoover Institution, claims he sees virtually no empirical evidence in media coverage, specifically regarding the mass media's treatment of Cambodia and East Timor, to back the claims made in Manufacturing Consent. Stephen J. Morris, a critic of Chomsky's position on Cambodia, evaluates Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model by reviewing their analysis of media coverage during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Chomsky and Herman argue that the "flood of rage and anger directed against the Khmer Rouge" peaking in early 1977, was a concrete example of their "propaganda model" in action. They argued that the media was singling out Cambodia, an enemy of the United States, while under-reporting human rights abuses by American allies such as South Korea and Chile. A study performed by Jamie Frederic Metzl (Responses to Human Rights Abuses in Cambodia, 1975–80) analyzes major media reporting on Cambodia and concludes that media coverage on Cambodia was more intense when there were events with an international angle, but had largely disappeared by 1977. Metzl also challenges Chomsky and Herman by claiming that of all the articles published regarding Cambodia, less than one in twenty dealt with the political violence being perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge.
Bruce Sharp , and Sophal Ear argue that Chomsky has shown little respect to Karl Popper's criterion of induction: that scientific theories must be falsifiable. So Sharp argues that Chomsky and Herman prematurely assume their theory is true and seek only evidence to support it rather than looking at other theories, or for evidence that contradicts the theory. For example, it is undeniable that the media spent more time covering the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia than those in East Timor, but it is possible that this was (at least partly) because journalists were already in the region of Cambodia (i.e. Vietnam) and found it easy to interview refugees from the Khmer Rouge, whereas it was more difficult to access East Timor. Sharp points out that Chomsky and Herman sideline the fact that fatalities in Cambodia were far higher (in the millions) than in East Timor (estimated at 200,000), which might provide another explanation for the differences in media coverage.
Related organizations
- Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
- MediaLens
- Free Press
- Independent Media Center
- Media Matters for America
References
- Chomsky, Noam. Understanding Power: the Indispensable Chomsky. New York: the New Press, 2002.
- Herman, ..... and Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
- The myth of the liberal media, Documentary, 1997. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8782509076175388309
- Herman, Edward S. 'The Propaganda Model: A Retrospective,' Against All Reason, December 9, 2003.
- Klaehn, Jeffery (ed.) Filtering the News: Essays on Herman and Chomsky's Propaganda Model. Edinburgh: Black Rose, 2005.
- ----. 'A Critical Review and Assessment of Herman and Chomsky's Propaganda Model, European Journal of Communication, Volume 17(2)
- Sharp, Bruce 'Averaging Wrong Answers: Noam Chomsky and the Cambodia Controversy
- Patrick Le Lay quote about selling the brains of viewers
- http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/38/9671