Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky, 1988, Excerpts
The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. The democratic postulate is that the media are independent and committed to discovering and reporting the truth, and that they do not merely reflect the world as powerful groups wish it be perceived.
The standard view of how the system works is at serious odds with reality. The media serve and propagandize on behalf of the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. These interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy.
The structural factors that dominate media operations are not all-controlling; however, dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.
Propaganda Model
The essential ingredients of our propaganda model fall under the following headings: [1] the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; [2] advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; [3] the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and “experts” funded by these primary sources; [4] “flak” as a means of disciplining the media; and [5] “anticommunism” as a national religion and control mechanism.
[1] Media Control
Since 1990, a wave of massive deals and rapid globalization have left the media industries further centralized in nine transnational conglomerates – Disney, AOL Time Warner, Viacom [owner of CBS], News Corporation, Bertelsmann, General Electric [owner of NBC], Sony, AT&T-Liberty Media, and Vivendi Universal. These giants own all the world’s major film studios, TV networks, and music companies, and a sizable fraction of the most important cable channels, cable systems, magazines, major-market TV stations, and book publishers.
The large media companies have also diversified beyond the media field, and non-media companies have established a strong presence in the mass media. The most important cases of the latter are GE, owning RCA, which owns the NBC network, and Westinghouse, which owns major television-broadcasting stations, a cable network, and a radio-station network. GE and Westinghouse are both huge, diversified multinational companies heavily involved in the controversial areas of weapons production and nuclear power.
The large media companies are fully integrated into the market and the pressures of stockholders, directors, and bankers to focus on the bottom line are powerful. They are controlled by very wealthy people who are closely interlocked with other major corporations, banks, and government. The powerful are able to fix the premises of discourse, to decide what the general populace is allowed to see, hear, and think about, and to “manage” public opinion.
These pressures have intensified in recent years as media stocks have become market favorites. This trend toward greater integration of the media into the market system has been accelerated by the loosening of rules limiting media concentration, cross-ownership, and control by non-media companies.
In addition to board linkages, the large media companies do business with commercial and investment bankers, obtaining lines of credit and loans, and receiving advice and service in selling stock and bond issues, and in dealing with acquisition opportunities and takeover threats. Banks and other institutional investors are also large owners of media stock.
It is difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest.
[2] Influence of Advertising
Before advertising became prominent, the price of a newspaper had to cover the costs of doing business. With the growth of advertising, papers that attracted ads could afford a copy price well below production costs. This put papers lacking advertising at a serious disadvantage. From the time of the introduction of press advertising, working-class and radical papers have been at a serious disadvantage.
With advertising, the advertisers’ choices influence media prosperity and survival. The ad-based media receive an advertising subsidy that gives them a price-marketing-quality edge, which allows them to encroach on and further weaken their ad-free rivals.
Advertisers choose selectively among programs on the basis of their own principles. Large corporate advertisers will rarely sponsor programs that engage in serious criticisms of corporate activities. Advertisers want to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the “buying mood.” They seek programs that will lightly entertain and disseminate the selling message. The mass media are interested in attracting audiences with buying power.
[3] News Experts
The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest. The media need a steady, reliable flow of the raw material of news. They have daily news demands and news schedules that they must met. They cannot afford to have reporters and cameras at all places where important stories may break. Economics dictates that they concentrate their resources where significant news often occurs, where important rumors and leaks abound, and where regular press conferences are held. The White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department, in
The media incorporates “proper-thinking experts” to confirm ideologies that are taken for granted. Censorship is largely self-censorship by the pre-selection of right-thinking people - reporters and commentators - who have internalized the constraints imposed by centers of power.
Another reason for the heavy weight given to official sources is that the mass media claim to be “objective” dispensers of the news. Partly to maintain the image of objectivity, but also to protect themselves from criticisms of bias and the threat of libel suits, they need material that can be portrayed as presumptively accurate.
The magnitude of the public-information operations of government and corporate bureaucracies is vast and insures special access to the media. The Pentagon, for example, has a public-information service that involves many thousands of employees, spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year and dwarfing not only the public-information resources of any dissenting individual or group but the aggregate of such groups. Only the corporate sector has the resources to produce public information on the scale of the Pentagon and other government bodies.
In effect, the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special access by their contribution to reducing the media’s costs of acquiring the raw materials of, and producing, news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become “routine” news sources and have privileged access to the gates.
Many hundreds of intellectuals were brought to these institutions, where their work is funded and their outputs are disseminated to the media. The corporate funding and clear ideological purpose has no discernible effect on the credibility or the intellectuals. On the contrary, the funding and pushing of their ideas catapults them into the press.
Because of their services, continuous contact on the beat, and mutual dependency, the powerful can use personal relationships, threats, and rewards to further influence and coerce the media. The media may feel obligated to carry extremely dubious stories and mute criticism in order not to offend their sources and disturb a close relationship.
[4] Flak
“Flak” refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. If flak is produced on a large scale by individuals or groups with substantial resources, it can be both uncomfortable and costly to the media. Positions have to be defended within the organization and without, sometimes before legislatures and possibly even courts. Advertisers may withdraw patronage. Television advertising is mainly of consumer goods that are readily subject to organized boycott.
Advertisers are concerned to avoid offending constituencies that might produce flak, and their demand for suitable programming is a continuing feature of the media environment. If certain kinds of fact, position, or program are thought likely to elicit flak, this prospect can be a deterrent.
The ability to produce flak that is costly and threatening is related to power. Serious flak has increased with business’s growing resentment of media criticism and the corporate offensive of the 1970s and 1980s. Flak from the powerful can be either direct or indirect. The direct would include letters or phone calls from the White House or from the FCC to the television networks asking for documents used in putting together a program, or from irate corporate sponsors asking for reply time or threatening retaliation.
The government is a major producer of flak, regularly assailing, threatening, and “correcting” the media, trying to contain any deviations from the established line. News management itself is designed to produce flak.
[5] Anti-communism – [To update, “Terrorism” substituted for “Communism”]
A final filter is the ideology of anti-terrorism. Terrorism as the ultimate evil has always been the specter haunting property owners, as it threatens the very root of their class position and superior status. The ongoing conflicts and the well-publicized abuses of Terrorist states have contributed to elevating opposition to terrorism to a first principle of Western ideology and politics. This ideology helps mobilize the populace against an enemy, and because the concept is fuzzy it can be used against anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests or support accommodation with Terrorist states and radicalism.
