I am publishing another essay I recently wrote for the course I am doing. It is not a great essay – it is not as academic as it should be, is mostly concerned with my observations of the Media. But I suspect readers might find it interesting anyway.
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Andrew Judd
Political Economy of the Media
Assignment 1
Question 3: Does the ‘propaganda model’ of Manufacturing Consent still have validity in the diverse mute-platform environment of today?
In 1988, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky was published, a radically Leftist, almost Marxist, critique of the media. In this work the authors argued that the mass media was engaged in a concerted if unconscious effort to shape the opinions of the masses to serve the interests of governmental and corporate elites, elites that owned or influenced, and thus indirectly determined, the content of newspapers, television news shows, magazines, and other major media. The question is, does this model, if it ever had validity, still have validity today? This essay will first describe Chomsky’s and Herman’s Propaganda Model in more detail before pointing out a major flaw in it – the flaw being that it overlooks the fact that media organisations are commercial enterprises that tailor their content to suit the interests of their perceived consumers in order to maximise audience share. The second part of the essay will provide some observations of the media landscape as it is today to show how diverse viewpoints and voices have proliferated, how any semblance of consensus has disappeared and how the media that might have seemed largely monolithic in 1988 now in 2017 has fractured into multiple competing splinter groups.
The basic argument Chomsky and Herman present is simple. The media tend to be owned by members of an elite, a ruling class that dominates the business, academic and governmental sectors. This elite is cohesive and unified, sharing the same interests and aims, particularly with respect to protecting its own power and privilege. Journalists and editors tend to be recruited who are “right-minded”, who “align themselves with the interest of dominant elites” (Klaehn, 2002, p 151). Those who disagree even a little soon learn that in order to remain and advance within the profession they must conform with the opinions and viewpoints of their bosses. They must “internalise beliefs and attitudes which in turn influences media performance”. (p. 151) The model presumes that the media serve and protect elite interests by promoting some issues and suppressing others, by framing debates in certain ways, by endorsing some opinions and dismissing contrary ones. This is not, Chomsky and Herman insist, a deliberate conspiracy but rather an inevitable result of a system in which control and power lie in the hands of a relatively small ruling class. It is “self-censorship without significant coercion” in which newsmakers convince themselves that they are making their decisions based on professional news values and common sense.
Herman and Chomsky argue that before news reaches the masses it passes through five filters. The first filter is that the media is owned by a small number of wealthy, profit-orientated individuals. The second is that commercial media rely financially on advertising paid for by businesses that are themselves owned by members of the profit-orientated ruling class. The third is the media’s reliance on information and ‘experts’ emerging from governmental and corporate elites. The fourth is ‘flak’ (a way dominant institutions can pressure media into selling the message they want sold). The fifth is anti-communism. Since the end of the Cold War, this last filter has been rendered obsolete, but proponents of the Propaganda model have argued that anti-communism has today been replaced by anti-Islamism.
The argument in Manufacturing Consent is based on an analysis of news content reported by the mass media. For instance, Herman and Chomsky argue that the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s was vastly more widely reported than a comparable genocide that occurred in East Timor around the same time, because of a pro-American bias in the media. The Cambodian genocide was carried out by a Communist regime whereas the US was complicit in the East Timorese genocide. A flaw in the theory is that it is based on content and does not investigate in any depth the internal workings of the media. A second flaw is that although it assumes that the media act to stifle democracy by effectively brain-washing the general populace, it does not investigate the effects of media on the masses with any rigour. The authors seem simply to assume that ordinary people are all alike blank slates, passively absorbing and being shaped by the reportage and opinions the media disseminate.
We now come to what can be regarded as the basic flaw in the Propaganda model. In my own view, publics are heterogenous. Consumers are active participants in the world who think for themselves, pick and choose their news sources and are influenced by many factors outside mainstream media, such as family, friends, work-colleagues and innate temperament. Although Herman and Chomsky regard media operations as a top-down process, media organisations are commercial entities that seek to maximise their audience by appealing to particular groups and demographics, to individuals who have pre-existing views. A media organisation seeks to reflect the views of its audience, rather than shape those views– content is to a large extent driven from the bottom up. If Fox News is anti-Islamist, this is not because Rupert Murdoch wishes to push an anti-Muslim agenda, but rather because the audience for Fox News is already prejudiced against Muslims and wants their prejudice presented as legitimate by their preferred television channel. The pandering of media organisations to their audiences has become much more evident today than it was in 1988, now that media in all its forms has so greatly proliferated and splintered and the media environment has become so much more competitive. For instance, we can even imagine, today, that if a strong demand for Marxist readings of current events existed, some TV show, e-zine or website would immediately spring up to satisfy this demand. The willingness of news outlets to present even radical left-wing views is a paradoxical consequence of neo-liberalism, of the application of free-market principles to the media.
Since 1988, there have been a number of developments in the media which make the situation today different than when Manufacturing Consent was written. In 1996 Fox News was launched. Fox News presented itself as an alternative to the ‘mainstream media’ which it said had ‘a liberal bias’. From its launch until 2016, its slogan was “fair and balanced”. Arguably, Fox News is a cheerleader for the Republican Party but it was not launched to propagandise for the Republican Party but rather to cater to a largely untapped socially conservative public, often rural rather than urban, that pre-existed Fox News and who were already unhappy with other mainstream media. Also in 1996 The Daily Show was launched on the cable and television channel Comedy Central. The Daily Show soon became an important voice for the American Left, often criticising and satirising Fox News. Its long time host Jon Stewart was notable for opposing the Iraq war when the America media almost universally supported it. In recent years, the number of satiric Leftwing news shows has enormously multiplied and now includes Real Time with Bill Maher, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and Late Night with Seth Meyers among others. Media organisations in the US now wear their politics on their sleeves when once they would present themselves as detached and objective. There is a Democrat media and a Republican media; news shows of both the serious and satiric variety in the US have become increasingly partisan. The party divide in the American media, on TV, radio and in print, reflects the partisan divide among the American public; it is possible to speak of two Americas living side by side in separate bubbles, each receiving its own views reflected back at it by its chosen chorus masters, each being courted by advertisers whose aims are not to promulgate ideology but to make money. It is hard to speak of manufacturing consent when there is no media consensus.
Proponents of the Propaganda Model might argue that this apparent schism in the American media is simply cosmetic, conceals an underlying set of shared core assumptions. However, if the mainstream media is a cohesive block representing the views of the ruling capitalist class, some shows can certainly counterfeit anti-capitalist dissent quite convincingly. The satirical news show Last Week Tonight, produced by HBO, has won multiple Emmys since 2015 and so must be considered ‘mainstream’. In late September this year, the show ran a piece on corporate consolidation that is a pointed lesson in Political Economy; in it the host John Oliver attacks oligarchies, reports examples of the many industries dominated by only a few companies, and cites the striking fact that the manufacture and distribution of contact lenses is entirely controlled by a single business. During the show Oliver says, “"Full disclosure here, even our own parent company, Time Warner, is currently trying to merge with AT&T, which makes this story a little dangerous for us to do. That is, presuming that AT&T executives manage to get their shitty service working long enough to see it” (https://www.salon.com/2017/09/25/john-oliver-explains-why-corporate-consolidation-is-a-big-big-problem/). Oliver’s piece ends with him exhorting the US government to revamp its antitrust laws. The fact that Oliver was permitted to run an extended item criticising the way modern capitalism tends towards quasi-monopolistic practices when his ultimate employer is Time Warner supports my argument: HBO knows that Last Week Tonight appeals to young, educated, left-leaning viewers and presumably must consider the maintaining of high ratings more important than the propagandising of a pro-capitalist message or the promotion of its own parent company.
A less dramatic example of the media’s openness to dissenting opinion is the reverential interviews given to Noam Chomsky on the show Democracy Now!, an example less dramatic because Democracy Now! is syndicated around the world mainly on public-access TV channels rather than commercial channels. (https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/4/full_interview_noam_chomsky_on_democracy) A second-order prediction of the Propaganda Model is that media and academia will want to ignore or suppress the theory, and Chomsky’s appearance on this show, many academic speaking engagements in recent years and participation in interviews published on the Internet and Youtube, ironically weakens his argument, that the proof of his theory is the unwillingness of the media and academy to discuss it or him.
Although this essay has so far focussed on how the number of television channels and shows has proliferated since 1988, the most important technological innovation in the period since Manufacturing Consent was written has been the invention and growth of the Internet. The Internet has provided an extraordinary means for citizen journalists, for bloggers, pod-casters and amateur film-makers, to reach potentially enormous audiences. Much of the work uploaded to the Internet is unremunerated so Herman’s and Chomsky’s argument cannot apply – such contributors often do not belong to the dominant elite. Some sites are supported by advertising but it is infrequent for advertisers to influence content. Rather businesses simply seek to attach themselves to sites that receive a lot of hits. Through platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, ‘prosumers’ can distribute their own content to their circle of ‘friends’ or recommend Internet based news sites and articles. Social Media, as the term ‘Social Media’ suggests, breaks significantly with traditional media – where once there was a clear distinction between those in the media and those outside it, now potentially anyone can be a ‘journalist’ or a ‘publisher’. The development of Internet journalism and of Social Media makes the Propaganda Model far less tenable in the modern age – such prosumers are no longer employed by the capitalist elite and no longer have any reason to internalise or propagate the ruling ideology. If we accept the basic assumption of the Propaganda Model that the reason the media did so was because the media were “fully integrated into the institutional framework of society and act in unison with other ideological sectors, i.e. the academy, to establish, enforce, reinforce and police corporate hegemony” (Klaehn, p. 147) we must presume that such user-generated content is by definition not propagandistic.
The effect of the Internet has been to allow voices and viewpoints far outside the mainstream to reach large audiences. Much of the success of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign can be attributed to Alt-Right sites such as Breitbart News. Andrew Breitbart has said he founded it with "the aim of starting a site that would be unapologetically pro-freedom and pro-Israel. We were sick of the anti-Israel bias of the mainstream media and J-Street.” Breibart News has often been accused of promulgating misleading or false stories. Another site that indicates how far outside the mainstream a popular Internet site can be is Infowars, hosted by Alex Jones, a site which according to https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/infowars.com received on average around 297,000 unique visitors every day for the week ending 2 October. On this site Jones has argued that the US government was involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks and that the American government is putting chemicals in the water that turn frogs gay; he has been called a far-right conspiracy theorist. Although it is hard to know how many visitors to his site take Jones seriously, this indicates how far removed from the cautious and unified if potentially biased core media that existed in 1988 some sectors of the modern media have become. The Internet also provides access to popular left-wing sites such as The Huffington Post and Mother Jones. In the ‘diverse multi-platform environment of today’, consumers do not passively receive news but actively seek out media that reinforces their established world-views.
A significant issue with respect to the Internet is that although anyone can publish a piece or opinion online, it may be possible for large Internet providers and search engines to influence public opinion by promoting or making available some sites more than others. This is an issue Herman and Chomsky could never have anticipated in 1988.
If the mainstream media in the United States is now polarised into Republican and Democrat camps and the Internet contains viewpoints that range so far outside the mainstream as to seem delusional, there is also the absolute opposition between the Trump Administration and the mainstream media to be considered. The mainstream media in America has been attacking Trump daily since long before his election. The New York Times has gone so far as to write an article calling Trump a liar, headlined “Trump’s lies” (http://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2017/06/27/why-isnt-trump-suing-new-york-times/430127001/), a major step for a respected newspaper to take.Trump, for his part, often calls the media “fake news” and consistently bypasses the mainstream media entirely by using Twitter, dispatching Tweets that reach his supporters directly. In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky argue that the ruling class is essentially cohesive and unified and that any difference of opinion within it is simply a disagreement with respect to tactics; it is difficult to view what looks like open war between the mainstream media and the Trump administration as a squabble over tactics within the dominant elite. This raises a problem for the supporter of the Propaganda Model. If the mainstream media is an instrument of the ruling class, does that make Trump a representative of the common man? Or is the mainstream media not so sinister after all?
Manufacturing Consent is no longer valid today because the theory it presented had three serious defects. First, it assumed that the dominant elite is coherent and unified and that the media are simply an instrument of this elite; today the dominant elite at least in the US is deeply split and much of the media is independent of the ruling elite. Second, the theory assumed that consumers were homogenous and passive; today it has become evident that publics are heterogenous in their views and active in seeking out which news sources to patronise. Third, the model assumed that a principal function of the media was to distribute propaganda when in reality most media outlets are principally seeking to maximise audience numbers.
This essay has so far only considered the US media. The situation in New Zealand is quite different. A typical Aucklander will get his or her news mainly from the TV1 or TV3 news, from the radio and from the New Zealand Herald, and perhaps partly from Internet sites such as stuff.co.nz and the thespinooff.co.nz. The impression one gathers of the New Zealand media is that, unlike the US media, they largely do present a unified world view. In order to see whether the Propaganda Model applies to the New Zealand media it would be necessary to compare the content of a newspaper like the New Zealand Herald with what has actually happened in the real world and make value judgements about what should rightfully be considered important and newsworthy. This way of approaching the question of whether news agencies are properly fulfilling their function is the methodology Herman and Chomsky employ in Manufacturing Consent but such an analysis is beyond the scope of this essay. Nevertheless New Zealand media outlets such as the New Zealand Herald certainly do suggest an impression of propagandising, of promoting a unified, cohesive and often conservative world view, a consensus that excludes, disparages or ridicules dissenting opinion. It is rare, for instance, for a New Zealand journalist to praise or support Winston Peters. I suspect however that this impression of a consensus among journalists about political, commercial, scientific and ethical issues does not arise from journalists internalising the beliefs and attitudes of media owners but rather from their sense of who their audience is, from their identification with that audience and from their intention to speak to that audience, often called ‘middle New Zealand’. I have described the New Zealand media as ‘conservative’, but in fact the dominant ideology today is what is often described as ‘Political Correctness’ – that is, the New Zealand media today strive as much as possible to avoid any appearance of racism, sexism, homophobia or any other kind of discriminatory attitude. If we accept the assumptions of the Propaganda Model, we are forced to conclude that Political Correctness and Identity Politics, prominent in the US and New Zealand media today, must somehow serve the interests of the ruling elites, perhaps by diverting attention away from more important issues.
The current situation in the US and New Zealand is very different than when Manufacturing Consent was published in 1988. In 1988 a consensus existed about reality even if, as Herman and Chomsky argue, this consensus was biased in favour of dominant elites. Today there is no longer any consensus about what reality is. The internet has empowered ordinary people but this empowerment of individuals does more harm than good when people are uninformed or misinformed. Technology and media proliferation have permitted perspectives and opinions far removed from verifiable truth to be disseminated and there is a continual hubbub of conflicting viewpoints. Anyone with access to a computer can throw in his or her two cents. Occasionally a real voice can be heard through all the noise but this is rare indee
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