Public Opinion Series

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 Washington, D.C., are central nodes of such news activity.

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.

Public Opinion Series

Media Control by Noam Chomsky, 2002

One conception of democracy is that the public has the means to participate in some meaningful way in the management of their own affairs and the means of information are open and free. An alternative conception of democracy is that the public must be barred from managing their own affairs and the means of information must be kept narrowly and rigidly controlled.

In a totalitarian state, or a military state, you just hold a bludgeon over their heads, and if they get out of line you smash them over the head. But as society has become more free and democratic, you lose that capacity. Therefore you have to turn to the techniques of propaganda. Propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

It’s also necessary to completely falsify history.

 Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann, 1921, Excerpts

Political bodies set armies in motion or make peace, conscript life, tax, exile, imprison, protect property or confiscate it, encourage one kind of enterprise and discourage another, facilitate immigration or obstruct it, improve communication or censor it, establish schools, build navies, proclaim “policies,” and “destiny,” raise economic barriers, make property or unmake it, bring one people under the rule of another, or favor one class as against another. 

Madison’s theory is that the propensity to faction may be kindled by religious or political opinions, but most commonly by the distribution of property. From the existence of differing economic situations you can tentatively infer a probable difference of opinions. If men are economically situated in different ways, they can then be induced to hold certain views.

Representative government cannot be worked successfully unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions. Public opinion must be organized for the press, not by the press. The art of inducing all sorts of people who think differently to vote alike is practiced in every political campaign.

A concrete choice has to be presented, the choice has to be connected, by the transfer of interest through the symbols. The professional politicians learned this long before democratic philosophers.

Without some form of censorship, propaganda is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. The military censorship is the simplest form of barrier, but by no means the most important, because it is known to exist, and is therefore in certain measure agreed to and discounted.

The General Staff of an army in the field can control what the public will perceive. It controls the selection of correspondents who go to the front, controls their movements at the front, reads and censors their messages from the front, and operates the wires. The Government behind the army by its command of cables and passports, mails and custom houses and blockades increases the control.

Public Opinion Series

Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann, 1921, Excerpts

Mr. Creel assembled machinery which included a Division of News that issued more than 6000 releases, had to enlist 75,000 Four Minute Men who delivered at least 750,000 speeches to an aggregate of over 300,000,000 people. Boy scouts delivered annotated copies of President Wilson’s addresses to the householders of America. Periodicals were sent to 600,000 teachers. 200,000 lantern slides were furnished for illustrated lectures. 1,500 different designs were turned out for posters, window cards, newspaper advertisements, cartoons, seals, and buttons. The chambers of commerce, the churches, fraternal societies, schools, were used as channels of distribution. This was the largest and the most intensive effort to carry quickly a fairly uniform set of ideas to all the people of a nation.

Media Control by Noam Chomsky, 2002, Excerpts

Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1916 on the platform “Peace Without Victory.” That was right in the middle of the World War I. The population was extremely pacifistic and saw no reason to become involved in a European war. The Wilson administration was actually committed to war and had to do something about it. They established a government propaganda commission, called the Creel Commission, which succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world. There was a good deal of fabrication of atrocities by the Huns, such as Belgian babies with their arms torn off.

Father of Spin by Larry Tye, 1998

Gulf War I

The selling of America on the Persian Gulf War was a public relations triumph. Its leading man, Saddam Hussein, was cast as pure villain complete with menacing leer and malevolent mustache. It had Iraqi soldiers snatching infants from hospital incubators and leaving them on the floor to die while Iraqi helicopters hovered over Kuwait City and Iraqi tanks rolled down the streets.

One detail was left out of that version of the war, however: the fact that it was crafted by one of America’s biggest public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton, in a campaign bought and paid for by rich Kuwaitis who were Saddam’s archenemies.

Hill and Knowton: ‘We put in place whatever is needed to help get the end result.’

Hill and Knowlton’s war against Iraq was hardly a PR first. Forty years earlier Bernays had designed an almost identical campaign in Guatemala, one where Guatemala’s socialist leader Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was demonized much like Hussein and where the U.S. public was made to believe it was fighting against tyranny.

That was a major achievement, and it led to a further achievement. After WWII, the same techniques were used whip up a hysterical Red Scare, as it was called, which succeeded pretty much in destroying unions and eliminating such dangerous problems as freedom of press and freedom of political thought. There was strong support from the media and from the business establishment.

Pentagon and Bogus News

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0DE6DC143DF936A35751C1A9659C8B63

December 5, 2003

Early last year Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld disbanded the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence after it became known that the office was considering plans to provide false news items to unwitting foreign journalists to influence policymakers and public sentiment abroad.

But a couple of months ago, the Pentagon quietly awarded a $300,000 contract to SAIC, a major defense consultant, to study how the Defense Department could design an ''effective strategic influence'' campaign to combat global terror, according to an internal Pentagon document.

The Pentagon Clears Itself of Illegal Acts

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=131435

Octorber 23, 2006

According to a brief summary of the investigation released by the Inspector General's office, "Psychological operations are planned to convey selected, truthful information to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of Psychological Operations is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to U.S. objectives."

Pentagon Iraqi propaganda program contracted to the Lincoln Group (which calls itself "a strategic communications & pubic relations firm providing insight & influence in challenging & hostile environments")