Noam Chomsky - Manufacturing Consent

The Political Economy of the Mass Media

EDWARD S. HERMAN
and NOAM CHOMSKY

With a new afterword by Edward S. Herman

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Copyright Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky 1988 Introduction Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky 2002 Afterword Edward S. Herman 2008

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TO THE MEMORY OF ALEX CAREY
AND
HERBERT I. SCHILLER

By the same authors

The Political Economy of Human Rights:
The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism

The Political Economy of Human Rights 2:
After the Cataclysm

The Iran-contra scandals were blamed on the Presidents easygoing habits, though the people had every opportunity to know this was his way of doing things or not doing before they put him in the White House, not once but twice.

James Reston

They who have put out the peoples eyes, reproach them of their blindness.

John Milton

Mainstream Media Usage of Genocide for Kosovo, East Timor, Turkey, and Iraq

This book centers in what we call a Propaganda model, an analytical framework that attempts to explain the performance of the U.S. media in terms of the basic institutional structures and relationships within which they operate. It is our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy. This is normally not accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors and working journalists internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institutions policy.

Structural factors are those such as ownership and control, dependence on other major funding sources (notably, advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media and those who make the news and have the power to define it and explain what it means. The propaganda model also incorporates other closely related factors such as the ability to complain about the medias treatment of news (that is, produce flak), to provide experts to confirm the official slant on the news, and to fix the basic principles and ideologies that are taken for granted by media personnel and the elite, but are often resisted by the general population.believe that what journalists do, what they see as newsworthy, and what they take for granted as premises of their work are frequently well explained by the incentives, pressures, and constraints incorporated into such a structural analysis.

These structural factors that dominate media operations are not allcontrolling and do not always produce simple and homogeneous results. It is well recognized, and may even be said to constitute a part of an institutional critique such as we present in this volume, that the various parts of media organizations have some limited autonomy, that individual and professional values influence media work, that policy is imperfectly enforced, and that media policy itself may allow some measure of dissent and reporting that calls into question the accepted viewpoint. These considerations all work to assure some dissent and coverage of inconvenient facts. The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.

It should also be noted that we are talking about media structure and performance, not the effects of the media on the public. Certainly, the medias adherence to an official agenda with little dissent is likely to influence public opinion in the desired direction, but this is a matter of degree, and where the publics interests diverge sharply from that of the elite, and where they have their own independent sources of information, the official line may be widely doubted. The point that we want to stress here, however, is that the propaganda model describes forces that shape what the media does; it does not imply that any propaganda emanating from the media is always effective.

Although now more than a dozen years old, both the propaganda model and the case studies presented with it in the first edition of this book have held up remarkably well. The purpose of this new Introduction is to update the model, add some materials to supplement the case studies already in place (and left intact in the chapters that follow), and finally, to point out the possible applicability of the model to a number of issues under current or recent debate.

The propaganda model, spelled out in detail in economic system. For this reason, we focused heavily on the rise in scale of media enterprise, the medias gradual centralization and concentration, the growth of media conglomerates that control many different kinds of media (motion picture studios, TV networks, cable channels, magazines, and book publishing houses), and the spread of the media across borders in a globalization process. We also noted the gradual displacement of family control by professional managers serving a wider array of owners and more closely subject to market discipline.