Andy Mullen | ukwatch.net

Twenty Years at the Margins

Ellie Keen — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:52:20 +0000

The Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model, 1988-2008

2008 marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. This comment briefly assesses how the Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model (PM) has been received within the field of media and communication studies in the United Kingdom.

Britain has a proud record of media and communication scholars adopting a critical/structuralist approach to media analysis, addressing key issues such as bias, ideology, ownership, power, etc. Such a framework infused two readers, Mass Communication and Society and Culture, Society and the Media, published in 1976 and 1982 respectively, and the Media, Culture and Society journal, launched in 1979. It also underpinned the work of the Glasgow University Media Group, which put out a number of publications in the 1980s. Therefore, it seems reasonable to surmise that the PM would have found a natural home within this political economy tradition. However, this has not been the case.

Herman and Chomsky sought to explain the behaviour and performance of the mass media in the United States (US) by advancing and empirically testing a number of hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that the propaganda system only works effectively where there is consensus amongst the elite, specifically the government, plus the leaders of the corporate and media sectors. Herman argued that where the elite are united in their concern about an issue, and where the general public is apathetic or ignorant, the media would effectively serve elite interests. A similar thesis was advanced by Ferguson, who argued that where the major investors in political parties agree on an issue, the parties will not compete on that issue, no matter how strongly the public might want an alternative. Conversely, Herman and Chomsky conceded that the propaganda system doesn’t work as efficiently when there is dissensus; where the elite disagree over a particular issue, such division will be reflected in the media coverage of that issue in a way that opens up space for dissent. In this situation, the media, and critical voices within and without it, can influence the policy process rather than just reflect elite interests. Indeed, the political contest model put forward by Wolfsfeld (The Media and Political Conflict, 1997) and the policy-media interaction model advanced by Robinson (‘Theorising the Influence of Media on World Politics: Models of Media Influence on Foreign Policy’, European Journal of Communication, 2001) suggest that the media may play an active rather than merely passive role in elite policy formation.

The second hypothesis is that in capitalist, liberal-democratic regimes, such as the US, where the mass media is under corporate rather than state control, media coverage is shaped by what is, in effect, a ‘guided market system’ underpinned by five filters – the operative principles of the PM. In their own words:

‘Money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalise dissent and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their message 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 governments, 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 premise of discourse and interpretation, and the definitions of what is newsworthy in the first place (Herman and Chomsky, 1988: 2).

The third hypothesis relates to the way in which the PM will be received within academia and wider society. As Chomsky explained in Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies:

‘The model also makes second-order predictions about how media performance will be discussed and evaluated. And it makes third-order predictions about the reactions to studies of media performance. The general prediction, at each level, is that what enters the mainstream will support the needs of established power’ (1989:153).

Since its publication in 1988, the PM has received very little attention within the field of media and communication studies, the wider social sciences or society more generally, as Herman and Chomsky predicted. Those who did engage with the PM were overwhelmingly negative, again as predicted. Such criticisms, emanating from a variety of sources on the left and right of the political spectrum, included the notion that the PM presented a conspiratorial view of the media, that it overstated the power of the propaganda system and downplayed popular opposition to elite preferences, that it was deterministic, functionalist and simplistic, that it neglected of impact of journalistic professionalism, that it was overly ambitious, projecting a ‘total’ and ‘finalising’ perspective, and that, in the post-Cold War period, given the redundancy of anti-communism, it too is obsolete. Furthermore, one scholar questioned whether the PM supported or opposed liberal principles, whether those involved in the propaganda system were conscious of its operation and effects, and whether, by deploying notions such as ‘brainwashing under freedom’ and ‘thought control’, the PM was indeed concerned with media effects rather than just media behaviour and performance.

Since its publication, several scholars have presented evidence in support of the central hypotheses of the PM. However, as predicted, this work has received very little attention. Furthermore, although they did not utilise the PM, a number of other scholars in Britain and the US concurred that the mass media tended to manufacture consent for elite preferences, both in terms of domestic and foreign policy. Again, this work was marginalised. While the PM has been applied within the Canadian and US contexts, and while a number of scholars have alluded to its explanatory potential in terms of the British media, there has been no attempt to empirically test the PM within the British context. Indeed, one critic questioned whether it could be applied in countries with very different media systems and political structures.

These criticisms, which were rebutted by Herman and Klaehn, are little more than obfuscation, for none of these critics, some of whom used to work within the political economy tradition, have actually addressed or engaged with the operative principles of the PM, its predications nor the vast amount of empirical, supportive data presented by Herman and Chomsky. Why is this? First, scholars neglect the PM, and the work of Herman and Chomsky more generally, because they are seen as ‘outsiders’ to the discipline; consequently they are not considered to be ‘legitimate’ analysts within the field of media and communication studies. Second, Chomsky in particular has been regularly smeared by his opponents as an apologist for totalitarian regimes and a ‘self-hating Jew’. Consequently many scholars avoid such a seemingly ‘controversial’ figure. Third, following the ‘cultural turn’ in media and communication studies in the 1980s and 1990s, with its focus on culture, discourse and identity, there has been a move away from empirical and political economy-based studies of the media, of which the PM is exemplary. Fourth, the PM challenges the mainstream consensus. That the PM should be ignored by liberals and those on the centre-left should come as no surprise; after all, the model, or more specifically its predictions and the wealth of empirical evidence that support these, effectively demolish their worldview of how the media and political systems operate. What is more surprising is how many academics on the left, who probably claim to be empirical social scientists, have also neglected the PM and its radical implications for the operation of the mass media in contemporary capitalist societies.

The practical implications of such marginalisation are lamentable. Media and communication students are often not exposed to the PM as it rarely features in mainstream textbooks and seldom appears in the curricula of undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Likewise, media and communication scholars do not engage in debates about the PM in their journals or at their conferences. The result has been twenty years at the margins; a devastating indictment of the state of academia given that the PM is, as Chomsky argued, one of the most tested models in the social sciences.

Guardians of Power Review

Alex Doherty — Tue, 02 May 2006 13:23:04 +0000

David Edwards and David Cromwell (2005) Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media

London: Pluto. 241 pages. ISBN 0-7453-2482-7. £14.99 paperback.

David Edwards and David Cromwell are part of the MediaLens team – a British web-based project that provides documented evidence of bias and omissions in the British media. This book, which uses the Propaganda Model of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky as its conceptual framework, constitutes a well-referenced collection of MediaLens email alerts on a range of subjects, each of which is set within an historical context. Rather than focus on the media output of the tabloids, where bias and omission is often glaringly obvious, Edwards and Cromwell analyse the output of the so-called liberal media, specifically the Guardian and Independent newspaper groups and the BBC and Channel 4 television channels. This section of the media, representing the centre-left of the political spectrum, is generally perceived to be balanced, fair and objective in its reporting. In Herman and Chomsky’s model, such media give the impression that there is considerable dissent within the mainstream media. In reality, however, as Herman and Chomsky amply demonstrate, such dissent at the margins serves to effectively circumscribe the bounds of ‘thinkable thought’. In other words, dissent is tolerated, but within certain limits. Using a range of examples, this thesis is tested by Edwards and Cromwell.

The first test case is that of the sanctions against Iraq, imposed after the first Gulf War. The supposedly balanced, fair and objective liberal media was uniform in its acceptance of the elite view: that the Iraqi regime, and not the West, was responsible for the suffering of the Iraqi people under the sanctions. Edwards and Cromwell document how Iraq, before the first Gulf War, had one of the best health care systems in the Middle East; how Iraq was bombed back to the Dark Ages in 1991; how, according to the Humanitarian Panel convened by the UN Security Council, the Oil-for-Food programme could not meet the needs of the Iraqi people; how there was no truth in the assertion that Saddam Hussein blocked the benefits of the programme; how Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck resigned from the UN in protest at the programme; and that sanctions, according to the UN, had killed 500,000 children and thousands of other vulnerable Iraqis. The liberal media dwelt on none of this, instead shifting responsibility from the West, or more specifically Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, to the Iraqi regime. When challenged by the MediaLens team as to why they had not reported these facts, the journalists in question, such as The Observer’s Nick Cohen, retreated to excuses and resorted to offence in an attempt to evade the charges against them. Edwards and Cromwell then turn their forensic analysis to a host of other case studies. These include the 1991-1998 weapons inspections in Iraq, the civilian death count (or lack of) as a result of the 2003 Iraq war and the myths of humanitarian concern during the bombing of Serbia (1999) and Afghanistan (2001). They also discuss the examples of East Timor, Haiti and global warming. In each case, Edwards and Cromwell find that liberal media reporting serves to promote the interests and views of the elite rather than the facts.

There are a number of substantial criticisms that can be made of this book however. First, it does not fully explain and explore Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model, making the assumption that readers will be aware of their work. Second, it does not focus on each of the model’s five filters and how they operate within the British context (Herman and Chomsky’s work refers to the operation of the media in the United States). Third, there is no attempt to locate the Propaganda Model within the wider academic literature on the media. This oversight may well play into the hands of academics who wish to leave this book off the recommended reading lists of media courses on account of it ‘not being academic enough’. As I am sure Edwards and Cromwell are aware, even critical scholars need to play the academic game if they are to stand a chance of presenting an alternative, factual account of the social world.

Nevertheless, this is an invaluable book and an interesting read. It also includes a list of resources of alternative sources of information and analysis of the media, for those who are interested in intellectual self-defence in an age of illusions.

Andy Mullen, Northumbria University.

For more on Guardians of Power: http://medialens.org/bookshop/guardians_of_power.php

Filtering the News

eddie — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 21:21:42 +0000

Jeffery Klaehn (Ed.) (2005) Filtering the News: Essays on Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model

London: Black Rose Books (224 pages; Paperback ISBN: 1-55164-260-3 $24.99/£17.99)

This edited collection is a welcome addition to the sparse literature on the Propaganda Model of media operations advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (1994, 2002). Manufacturing Consent argues that, in contrast to state-controlled media in the former Soviet bloc, the media in the capitalist, liberal-democratic West is based on a guided market system. The outcome, however, is similar; in both cases, the media operates to mobilise support for the interests of the economic and political elite. As such, it represents a powerful tool for thought control, which, in the West, is in the hands of private corporations and their political representatives. Basing their model on media operations in the United States (US), Herman and Chomsky (1994: 2) explain that their model focuses upon the:

‘inequality of wealth and power and its multi-level effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the route by which money and power and able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalise dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their message 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 “exports” 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 amounts to propaganda campaigns.’

Klaehn opens the collection with a critical assessment of the Propaganda Model, highlighting its first-order prediction – that the five filters will effectively shape the discourse of the mainstream media. Herman and Chomsky (1994, 2002) amply demonstrate that this is the case by providing copious amounts of empirical evidence. Klaehn also discusses its second-order prediction – that, if the first-order prediction is correct, the model will be excluded from intellectual debate on media behaviour and media discourse. This assertion is also borne out: the Propaganda Model is often omitted from university media courses and it has been ignored within the academic literature. Indeed, in a challenge to their critics, such as Schlesinger (1989) who dismissed the model as ‘highly determinist’, Herman (2000: 111) threw down the gauntlet, proclaiming ‘we are still waiting for our critics to provide a better model.’

In his review of the operation of the Propaganda Model, Klaehn observes that in the post-Cold War period the dichotomy of ‘otherness’ has replaced the now redundant anti-communism as the fifth filter. The current ‘War on Terror’ is the latest, and arguably most effective, attempt to construct an ideological basis for the maintenance of thought control. Subsequent contributors then applied the Propaganda Model to a range of contemporary events, as reported in the mainstream media in Canada and the US. These include the media coverage of the 2003 Iraq war; a demolition of the claim that the media is biased against Israel; the case of the 1987-1991 civil war in El Salvador; the propaganda utility of Dan Rather’s (CBS News) ‘patriotic journalism’; and the systematic marginalisation of protestors’ voices.

There are also two chapters devoted to empirically testing the Propaganda Model. The first investigates the Canadian media’s coverage of the events in East Timor between 1975 and 1991. Using the two methodological devices of the Propaganda Model – contrasting media coverage of paired examples of concurrent historical events whilst identifying the boundaries of permissible opinion – Klaehn compares the Canadian media’s coverage of the genocidal events in Cambodia and East Timor. He concludes that the mainstream media downplayed the genocide in East Timor, where Canada had important economic and geopolitical interests, while giving considerable coverage to comparable events in Cambodia, just as the Propaganda Model would predict. The second chapter looked at the discourse of Canadian newspapers on the environment, specifically global warming and the Kyoto Protocol, concluding that their coverage reflected business interests, again just as the Propaganda Model would predict. In the final chapter, Klaehn explores the criticisms that have been made of the Propaganda Model by both academics and commentators. He explodes the myth that the model is conspiratorial, that it is deterministic, that it fails to account for micro-processes of media behaviour (which the structuralist Propaganda Model never set out to do), and that it fails to theorise audience effects (which was never the intention of the Propaganda Model).

To conclude, there are two substantive criticisms that can be levelled at this collection. The first is the absence of an introduction and conclusion to draw together the salient arguments and to point the way forward. The second is that it would have benefited from an index. Nevertheless, this collection is an important contribution to the literature and it deserves to be widely read. Furthermore, is it not time that media scholars in Britain acknowledged the Propaganda Model and tested its utility in terms of explaining the operation of the British media?

Dr Andy Mullen, Politics Division, Northumbria University.

Bibliography

Herman, E. (1996) ‘The Propaganda Model Revisited’, Monthly Review, July.

Herman, E. (2000) ‘The Propaganda Model: A Retrospective’, Journalism Studies, Vol.1, No.1, pp.101-112.

Herman, E. and Chomsky, N. (1994) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, London: Vintage.

Herman, E. and Chomsky, N. (2002) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, New York: Pantheon Books.

Schlesinger, P. (1989) ‘From Production to Propaganda’ in Media, Culture and Society, Vol.11, pp. 283-306.