::: Propaganda Model :::

[Dan Clore]

An excerpt from Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's excellent book
_Manufacturing Consent_ (not to be confused with the movie and tie-in
volume of the same title).

* * *

In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state
bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented
by official censorship, makes it clear the media serve the ends of a
dominant elite. It is much more 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. What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the
media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge
inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a
private media system and on its behavior and performance.

A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and
its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces
the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit
to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant
private interests to get their messages across to the public. The
essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters,"
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 and approved by these primary sources and agents of power;
4."flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and
5."anti-communism" as a national religion and control mechanism.

These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material
of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed
residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and
interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first
place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to
propaganda campaigns.

In their analysis of the evolution of the media in Great Britain, James
Curran and Jean Seaton describe how, in the first half of the nineteenth
century, a radical press emerged that reached a national working-class
audience. This alternative press was effective in reinforcing class
consciousness: it unified the workers because it fostered an alternative
value system and framework for looking at the world, and because it
"promoted a greater collective confidence by repeatedly emphasizing the
potential power of working people to effect social change through the
force of 'combination' and organized action." [1] This was deemed a
major threat by the ruling elites. One MP asserted that the
working-class newspapers "inflame passions and awaken their selfishness,
contrasting their current condition with what they contend to be their
future condition - a condition incompatible with human nature, and those
immutable laws which Providence has established for the regulation of
civil society." [2] The result was an attempt to squelch the
working-class media by libel laws and prosecutions, by requiring an
expensive security bond as a condition for publication, and by imposing
various taxes designed to drive out radical media by raising their
costs. These coercive
efforts were not effective, and by mid-century they had been abandoned
in favor of the liberal view that the market would enforce
responsibility.

Curran and Seaton show that the market did successfully accomplish what
state intervention failed to do. Following the repeal of the punitive
taxes on newpapers between 1853 and 1869, a new daily local press came
into existence, but not one new local working-class daily was
established through the rest of the nineteenth century. Curran and
Seaton note that

Indeed, the eclipse of the national radical press was so total that
when the Labour Party developed out of the working-class movement
in the first decade of the twentieth century, it did not obtain the
exclusive
backing of a single national daily or Sunday paper. [3]

One important reason for this was the rise in scale of newspaper
enterprise and the associated increase in capital costs from the
mid-nineteenth century onward, which was based on technological
improvements along with the owners' increased stress on reaching large
audiences.

Thus the first filter - the limitation on ownership of media with any
substantial outreach by the requisite large size of investment - was
applicable a century or more ago, and it has become increasingly
effective over time.

In arguing for the benefits of the free market as a means of controlling
dissident opinion in the mid-nineteenth century, the Liberal chancellor
of the British exchequer, Sir George Lewis, noted that the market would
promote those papers "enjoying the preference of the advertising
public." [4] Advertising did, in fact, serve as a powerful mechanism
weakening the working-class press. Curran and Seaton give the growth of
advertising a status comparable with the increase in capital costs as a
factor allowing the market to accomplish what state taxes and harassment
failed to do, noting that
these "advertisers thus acquired a de facto licensing authority since,
without their support, newspapers ceased to be economically viable." [5]

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 in advertising at a serious
disadvantage: their prices would tend to be higher, curtailing sales,
and they would have less surplus to invest in improving the salability
of the paper (features, attractive format, promotion, etc.). For this
reason, an advertising-based system will tend to drive out of existence
or into marginality the media companies and types that depend on revenue
from sales alone. With advertising, the free market does not yield
a neutral system in which final buyer choice decides. The advertisers'
choices influence media prosperity and survival.

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. 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. On a local basis, city hall and the police
department are the subject of regular news "beats" for reporters.
Business corporations and trade groups are also regular and credible
purveyors of stories deemed newsworthy. These bureaucracies turn out a
large volume of
material that meets the demands of news organizations for reliable,
scheduled flows. Mark Fishman calls this "the principle of bureaucratic
affinity: only other bureaucracies can satisfy the input needs of a news
bureaucracy." [6]

Government and corporate sources also have the great merit of being
recognizable and credible by their status and prestige. This is
important to the mass media. As Fishman notes,

Newsworkers are predisposed to treat bureaucratic accounts as
factual because news personnel participate in upholding a normative
order of authorized knowers in the society. Reporters operate with
the attitude that officals ought to know what it is their job to
know.... In particular, a newsworker will recognize an official's
claim to knowledge not merely as a claim, but as a credible,
competent piece of knowledge. This amounts to a moral division of
labor: officials have and give
the facts; reporters merely get them. [7]

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. This is also partly a
matter of cost: taking information from sources that may be presumed
credible reduces investigative expense, whereas material from sources
that are not prima facie credible, or that will elicit criticism and
threats, requires careful checking and costly research.

"Flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. It
may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions,
lawsuits, speeches and bills before Congress, and other modes of
complaint, threat, and punitive action. It may be organized centrally or
locally, or it may consist of the entirely independent actions of
individuals.

If flak is produced on a large scale, or 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 in courts.
Advertisers may withdraw patronage. If certain kinds of fact, position,
or program are thought likely to elicit flak, this prospect can be a
deterrent.

Freedom House, an example of a well-funded flak organization which dates
back to the early 1940s, has had interlocks with AIM (Accuracy in
Media), the World Anti-Communist League, Resistance International, and
U.S. government bodies such as Radio Free Europe and the CIA, and has
long served as a virtual propaganda arm of the government and
international right wing. It has expended substantial resources in
criticizing the media for insufficient sympathy with US foreign-policy
ventures and excessively harsh criticism of US client states. Its most
notable publication of this genre was Peter Braestrup's Big Story, which
contended that the media's negative portrayal of the Tet offensive
helped lose the war. The work is a travesty of scholarship, but more
interesting is its premise: that the mass media not only should support
any national venture abroad, but should do so with enthusiasm, such
enterprises being by definition noble.

A final filter is the ideology of anticommunism. Communism as the
utlimate evil has always been the specter haunting property owners, as
it threatens the very root of their class position and superior status.
The Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were traumas to Western
elites, and the ongoing conflicts and the well-publicized abuses of
Communist states have contributed to elevating opposition to communism
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
Communist states and radicalism. It therefore helps fragment the left
and labor movements and serves as a political-control mechanism. If the
triumph of communism is the worst imaginable result, the support of
fascism abroad is justified as a lesser evil. Opposition to social
democrats who are too soft on Communists and "play into their hands" is
rationalized in similar terms.

Liberals at home, often accused of being pro-Communist or insufficiently
anti-Communist, are kept continuously on the defensive in a cultural
milieu in which anticommunism is the dominant religion. If they allow
communism, or something that can be labeled communism, to triumph in the
provinces while they are in office, the political costs are heavy. Most
of them have fully internalized the religion anyway, but they are all
under great pressure to demonstrate their anti-Communist credentials.

The five filters narrow the range of news that passes through the gates,
and even more sharply limit what can become "big news," subject to
sustained news campaigns. By definition, news from primary establishment
sources meets one major filter requirement and is readily accomodated by
the mass media. Messages from and about dissidents and weak, unorganized
individuals and groups, domestic and foreign, are at an initial
disadvantage in sourcing costs and credibility, and they often do not
comport with the ideology or interests of the gatekeepers and other
powerful parties that influence the filtering process.

Notes

1.James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility: The
Press and
Broadcasting in Britain, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 24.
2.Ibid., p. 23.
3.Ibid, p. 34.
4.Ibid., p. 31.
5.Ibid., p. 41.
6.Mark Fishman, Manufacturing the News (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1980), p.
143.
7.Ibid., pp. 144 - 45.

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Dan Clore

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