COMS 361 - Lesson 3, The Propaganda Model

Reading Summary: The Propaganda Model

Learning Objectives

At the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

  • Interpret Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model in relation to mass and dominant media’s propaganda processes

  • Acquire discursive tools to recognize prolific, subtle and complex operations or propaganda in democratic societies

  • Develop critical, analytical, and interpretive skills to challenge propaganda in the media

Introduction

  • Overview of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model, proposed in their 1988 book “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media”

  • Asks that we examine the operations of the media in society related to propaganda, in a thorough manner to observe the less visible mechanisms of propaganda by the media

Manufacturing Consent

  • Manufacturing Consent demonstrates how media mobilizes support for:

    • Special interests

    • Private activity

    • The state.

  • Directs attention to what the media chooses to portray, their emphasis and omissions, and how it can be understood through the lens of propaganda

  • Media power, media ownership, their agendas, and interconnections with wider-power structures of society, democracy, and capitalism

The Democratic Postulate: A Mirage?

  • Generally, we believe that the media in democratic societies are independent, fair, and committed to reporting the truth

    • Expected to operate transparently

    • Watchdogs of society

    • Forums of public debate

    • News choices should be objectively unbiased

  • Herman and Chomsky suggest that if the powerful can fix the premises of discourse where they decide what the public sees, hears, and thinks about, then the standard view of a fair press is problematic

  • Common belief: Media in democracies is independent and objective.

  • Challenge to this belief: Powerful entities control the information flow and public discourse.

The Manufacture of Consent

  • Herman and Chomsky developed their argument from the ideas of Walter Lippman and Jacques Ellul

  • Lippman’s writing in the 1920s pointed to the social importance of propaganda

    • Propaganda’s ability as a regular organ of popular movement was through the ‘manufacture of consent’

    • “That consent sought from the public gave governments the tacit agreement to rule and was gaining immense importance as the time.” - Walter Lippman (Public Opinion, 1920)

  • By extension, Herman and Chomsky were interested in consent as an important aspect of the propaganda function of the media

  • Essentially, they build on Lippman’s notion of propaganda as a tool for gaining public consent for governance.

  • The term "manufacture of consent" addresses how media shapes public support.

Veiled Intentions

  • Jacques Ellul elaborates on an essential feature of propaganda:

    • “The propagandist naturally cannot reveal the true intentions of the principal for whom he acts…That would be to submit the projects to public discussion, to the scrutiny of public opinion and thus to prevent their success…Propaganda must serve instead as a veil for such projects masking true intention.” (Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, 1965, pp. 58-69, quoted in Herman and Chomsky)

The Propaganda Model

An Overview of the Model

  • The ‘manufacture of consent’ and the ‘veiling’ aspect of propaganda lays the groundwork for a Propaganda Model by Herman and Chomsky.

  • This model describes the forces that cause the mass media to play a propaganda role that mobilizes bias in the choices that we see.

  • The model offers a political economy analysis of media ownership, its organizational and market structures, and its political power.

Naturalness Questioned

To understand the Propaganda Model, first we must examine the role of the mass media in society:

  • The mass media is a form of communication with the purpose of informing and entertaining the public

  • In doing so, it instills attitudes, ideas, and behaviours in people allowing them to be a part of larger structures of societal systems

  • “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 behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.” (Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, 1988, p. 1).

  • Herman and Chomsky say that the communication and ideological role of the media works hand in hand with its operation of power, class interests, and money within a capitalistic framework.

  • It is important to note that Herman and Chomsky’s model was developed as a critique of dominant media in the United States. While the model may apply to other countries, it cannot be used for all Western and democratic (or pseudo-democratic) societies.

The Media’s Hidden Components

  • Media control by the powerful tends to be more evident in authoritarian systems, where power is in the hands of an elite and state bureaucracy

    • In such cases, the monopolistic control of the media, used with other forms of control (e.g., censorship) allows the media to fulfill the needs of the dominant elite

  • However, it’s harder to see a propaganda system at play where there is private ownership of the media in ‘so-called’ democratic spaces. This seems especially true where these media compete, expose corporate wrong behaviour and present themselves as spokespeople of free speech.

    • What isn’t evident in such media is the limited nature of critique and the surrounding resources that affect the media’s behaviour and performance (Herman & Chomsky)

The Propaganda Model Exposed

  • The model outlines processes where power and finances filter out the news that gets broadcasted or printed

  • Privileges government and private interests in getting their messages to the public

  • “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.” (Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, 1988, p. 2).

  • These filters are integrated into media systems, which journalists cannot avoid.

  • Filters strengthen the elite’s power over the media and marginalize opposing views, making it nearly impossible for news people to select alternative messages

The Propaganda Model: Five Filters

Filter One - Media Ownership

The size, concentrated ownership, and profit orientation of the mass media can:

  • Affect orientation, programming, and types of stories

    • Left-leaning media and right-leaning media often adopt different story angles to support different views

  • Many media outlets are owned by the same parent companies

    • Disney owns Marvel, 21st Century Fix, Polaris, Touchstone Pictures, ESPN, ABC News, and much more

    • CBS Corporation owns Showtime, Metacritic, Chowhound, GameSpot, Simon & Schuster, the Smithsonian Channel, and much more

    • Amazon owns Kindle, Audible, ComiXology, Twitch, Echo, Cloud Drive, and much more

  • A few media companies control over 50% of media output

    • This includes television, books, radio shows, films and more

  • These powerful media outlets have the power to set the national public agenda

  • In this scenario, media today tends to be increasingly part of large corporations whose ultimate function is to make a profit

Herman and Chomsky note that these large powerful media companies are integrated into the market and are subject to pressures of stockholders, directors, and bankers.

  • Operate in volatile, competitive environments with interconnections beyond media.

  • Non-media companies have strong ‘familial ties’ and interests in mass media companies, alongside having relationships with governments

    • Obtaining licenses and franchises that are potentially subject to government controls

    • CNN or CBS follow this ownership structure

  • “In sum, the dominant media firms are quite large businesses; they are controlled by very wealthy people or by managers who are subject to sharp constraints by owners and other market-profit-oriented forces; and they are closely interlocked, and have important common interests, with other major corporations.” (Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, 1988, p. 14).

  • The first filter of media ownership is influential in managing what we see and what we don’t see in the media. This speaks directly to how media content affects profit, how they protect or expose related companies, and interest in a dominant system of shared interests.

Filter Two: Advertising

  • The role of advertising is critical in the Propaganda Model

  • Is the primary source of income for these media

  • Advertising’s ability to produce large incomes for media subsidizes the costs of producing news content or other expenses

  • Audiences can access media at reduced costs because of this

  • Advertising also draws attention to the role of the audience being bought and sold to advertisers

  • Relationship among the audience, profit, and media content and suggests that advertising (not content) that is the media’s most important commodity

In this model, the advertiser is viewed as powerful with the power to influence content. How is this so?

  • “The power of advertisers over television programming stems from the simple fact that they buy and pay for the programs - they are the ‘patrons’ who provide the media subsidy.” (Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, 1988, p. 16).

  • Content is tailored to not affect the well-being of the advertiser

    • Stories that may harm certain advertisers may not be covered

    • When harmful stories are covered, they are tailored to not offend the interests of powerful advertising and owners.

  • Advertisers discriminate in selectively choosing which programs they advertise in (e.g., a sports company will advertise in a sports channel, not an investigative news channel due to the compatibility of the sports channel with their brand)

  • Networks tailor their productions to attract advertising and maintain audience flow and levels, to keep people watching to sustain high advertising ratings and revenue

  • Advertising, therefore, has a powerful inconspicuous role in the content that we see, and thus serves as a powerful filter

Filter Three: Sourcing Mass Media News

The third filter draws attention to the source of mass media news.

  • “The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest.” (Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, 1988, p. 18).

  • The media requires a steady, reliable flow of the raw materials of news

    • Cannot afford all daily news demands (e.g., cameras and reporters at all places where important stories may break)

    • So, resources are concentrated where important news occurs, where leaks and news conferences are available

    • Media also depends on press releases in mediatized language

      • Advances speeches

      • Press conferences

      • Photos/videos

  • Governments and business use highly-developed public-relations processes to influence the news.

    • Meet and provide sourcing to journalists

    • Provide subject specialist to the news as experts that balance the need for accuracy with a claim of objectivity

    • Provide many raw materials that subsidize costs associated with producing news, and as a result, highly influence news content, flows, and routines

  • This filter acts as a powerful manager of the media that manipulates them into following particular agendas and frameworks.

Filter Four: Flak and Enforcers

Herman and Chomsky referred to the fourth filter as ‘flak’. Flak functions as a means of disciplining the media.

  • Flak refers to negative responses to a media statement or program often in the form of letters, calls, petitions, lawsuits, legislation, governmental laws, and so on.

  • Advertisers can withdraw patronage or boycott a network they aren’t happy with in terms of coverage.

    • Can take on the form of threats or punitive action, which can be uncomfortable and costly for the media

    • The propagandistic role of flak and the way it controls media functioning isn’t often discussed in the public domain

    • Media pay attention to flak in making decisions regarding what to include or exclude, or where their focus should be

  • The potential of flak in effect greatly influences what we do not see.

Filter Five: The Common Enemy

The final filter is that of the ideology of a common enemy. It is used as a control mechanism by the mass media.

  • The common enemy is a constructed target that media, governments, and the wider political and social systems ideologically unite around and work to defeat.

    • This enemy surpasses internal differences such as right-wing or left-wing politics, rather being an external threat to a social system

    • The enemy threatens the very class and power systems in which the media as a power broker itself operates

  • Herman and Chomsky use the example of anti-communism as the ultimate enemy during the Cold War as the existentialist threat to western democracy that the media worked to eliminate in conjunction with other powerful social players

  • Of late, the common enemy has become the threat of terrorism.

    • This ideology helps mobilize the populace against an enemy, but because the concept is fuzzy, it can be used against anybody advocating policies that threaten security

  • This filter allows for simple binarized framing of omplex subjects around good and evil, for instance.

  • To Herman and Chomsky, the underlying media reporting though the controls of this filter offers, in large measure representation of the USA as inherently benign, peace-loving, and an indisputable leader of humanity.

  • This filter helps the framing, presentation, and angle of much media content

Complexity of the Filters

The five filters influence the news in quite extraordinary ways (seen as restraints of expression rather than freedom through the Propaganda Model):

  • Quality of coverage

  • Placement

  • Headlining

  • Word usage

  • Media balance

This also speaks to prominent absences, those deemed as ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims in story narratives. Worthy victims refer to those who are humanized in story frames through a focus on their lives in story construct.

The Propaganda Model:

  • Requires a systemic critique of the media environment that takes away its naturalness as free, fair, and operating within a democratic process.

  • Points to the power of the media:

    • Ownership structure

    • Interconnections

    • Influences

    • Surrounding institutions that feed it

  • Requires a complex, critical view of media that points to its production of and sustenance of dominant interests, ideologies, and values.

  • Model adopts an approach viewing the media as large, complex entities that function like free-market enterprises whose aim is profit.

  • Controls that manipulate the media have major implications for the representations that are produced and circulated about the world.

    • This is particular to the production of a noble, human, and free west vs. the rest.

Conclusion

The Propaganda model:

  • Foregrounds the structural workings of the media.

  • Suggests the corporate media is structured though its:

    • Ownership models

    • Reliance on advertising

    • Sourcing practices

      • This creates major conflicts of interest that significantly impact content displayed in the media.

  • The media produces hegemonic discourse;

    • Allows debate within acceptable boundaries that resemble free speech, but is in fact not

    • Distorts the representation of the world that it produces and circulates

Critiques

It has been over 30 years since the Propaganda Model’s development, which has since received much critique by media scholars and practitioners.

  • Some critiques focus on the large monolith and grand generalizations about the media that this model itself produces.

  • These generalizations don’t account for alternative views within the mainstream media (e.g., alternative and/or small independent media)

  • It also ignores audience agency, including audience feedback and critique

  • While the model addresses mainstream media, particularly television and print, it doesn’t address social media, which was not at play at the time of writing.

What are some of your own critiques?

What does this say more specifically about media audiences?