“Manufacturing Consent: The political Economy of the Mass Media” was written by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. It sketches out a “Propaganda Model” and applies it to the performance of the mass media in the United States of America.
Chomsky and Herman demonstrate how the media system serves the powerful which decide what the general populace is allowed to see. They show in great detail that the popular view of the media system is not the reality. Given attention to facts is distorted and suppressed by the media. According to the authors, the media content that Americans receive is processed through five filters.
The first filter: Size, Ownership, and profit orientation of the mass media
In the nineteenth century, a radical press in Great Britain unified workers and ‘fostered’ a different view on the value system. Ruling elites saw this as a major threat and passed laws that would cushion the working-class media. Top tiers like the Government, wire services and other driving forces supplied the lower tiers with national and international news. Large media businesses are often owned by wealthy people and in close collaboration with other influential owners and ‘market-profit-oriented forces’ such as major corporations, banks, and government. These top forces filter out anything that might negatively influence their prosperity.
The second filter: The advertising license to do business
News programs have to encourage consumption of the particular products advertised in order to make profits and maintain competitiveness. This results in skewed news that encourage consumption. Furthermore news companies are more likely to cover stories that speak to ‘audiences with buying power.’ Advertisers will always avoid content that might disturb the ‘buying mood.’
The third filter: Sourcing mass-media news
US reporting rely much on government and corporate officials. There is very little interpretation done by reporters so that they can’t be accused of bias. The fairness, however, is not assured when editors pick differently weighted arguments from each source. This way, news-companies portray the favored source in a more effective manner and skew the reader’s observation.
In 1968 the U.S Air-Force involved 1305 full-time employees for public affairs.
The fourth filter: Flak and the enforcers
If a news piece that badly reflects on the elites makes it through the first three filters, flak will specifically criticize the media and put them into a bad light. Despite the pressure and harsh critique, flak machines still receive respect from the mass media, reflecting the great power of their sponsors.
The fifth filter: Anticommunism as a control mechanism
Opposition to communism is elevated by well-publicized abuses of Communist states. During the Kennedy administration the United States tactically supported the military coup of Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic. Bosch attacked military corruption and established a functioning government and projects to educate the populace. The U.S. resented his policies and actions as amenable for ‘Communists and radicals.’ These actions help to mobilize the populace against an enemy.
Worthy and Unworthy Victims
This chapter shows how the U.S. government’s definition of worth is extremely political and fits a propaganda model. “Worthy” victims are those, maltreated in enemy states and hence consistently portrayed by the U.S. propaganda system. “Unworthy” victims are those, maltreated by the U.S. government or its client states and inadequately covered by the media.
The authors compare the media coverage of Jerzy Popieluszko, a Polish priest murdered by the Polish police in 1984 with over a hundred religious workers that were murdered in Latin America at about the same time. A table about media coverage shows that a priest murdered in Latin America is worth less than a hundredth of a priest murdered in Poland. The U.S. media coverage of four American churchwomen raped and murdered in El Salvador was far less outrageous and passionate than that of the Polish priest. Popieluszkos case was portrayed in such manner to create the maximum emotional impact on the readers. The audience was never allowed to forget that his murderers were part of the Polish government. Whereas Salvadoran murders fell victim to newspaper censorship, “allowing the terror to go on unimpeded” with nearly no evidence in the media that the murders had any connection to the Salvadoran government. The U.S put the protection of its client states above the equity of the four U.S churchwomen.
The NY Times also fails to sufficiently portray twenty-three murders in Guatemala in a time where the U.S. provides arms to their military. The Victims had about one-twentieth of the space that the Times used for Popieluszko. This “unworthiness” in the media allows the Guatemalan Army to continue to kill.
Legitimizing versus Meaningless Third World Elections: El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua
The U.S Government supports election for demonstration, image-enhancing purposes, or to legitimize an easy-to-overthrow government, such as the Nicaraguan. The U.S. uses selective election management to give favored elections a positive image. According to Chomsky and Herman a free election needs to meet five conditions in order to be fair and clear from any coercion. Guatemala and El Salvador don’t meet any of them. They conclude that the U.S mass media will always find a Third World election sponsored by their own government as a “step towards democracy,” and an election that is held in a country that the government is trying to destabilize as “farce and a sham.” The Government sponsors terror in all three states and its media ironically serves terrorism, despite their “righteous self-image as opponents of something called terrorism.”
