In this latest presidential campaign, it’s time to remind our selves and brush up a bit on our “Chomsky”.
The US main stream media is nothing more than the propaganda machine of Elite Consensus. Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model is just as relevant today, as it was back then in 1988, when it was first published in their seminal work "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media".
"In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky provide a systematic "propaganda model" to account for the behavior of the corporate news media in the United States. They preface their discussion of the propaganda model by noting their fundamental belief that the mass media "serve to mobilize support for the special interests that dominate the state and private support for the special interests that dominate the state and private activity." Although propaganda is not the sole function of the media, it is "a very important aspect of their overall service" (p. xi), especially "in a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest" (p.1).”
Excerpted from Manufacturing Consent, 1988
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 behavior 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.
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 that 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: (I) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (~) 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) "anticommunism" 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.
With the above in mind, Amy Goodman explains how this “manufacturing of Consent” has actually created the Trump phenomenon, and has been behind the media black out of Senator Sanders presidential campaign.
Nine months ago Thom Hartman discussed the “Wave of Silence” by major media on Senator Sanders.
Published in Oct 2015, Rachel Maddow reports about the Bernie Bias in media.
“MSNBC edited out a key portion of his speech critical of the media, Citizens United, inequality, and oligarchy. Ana Kasparian (The Point), John Iadarola (Think Tank), and Margaret Howell (Lip TV), hosts of the The Young Turks, break it down.”
A phone interview with Noam Chomsky on if Donald Trump becomes president.
On March 16th, FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) reports:
Bernie Sanders, while well behind, is still a viable candidate and is very much staying in the race. One wouldn’t know this, however, from watching last night’s cable news coverage, because the three major 24-hour news networks–CNN, MSNBC and Fox News–cut away from Sanders’ speech. As the Huffington Post reported late Tuesday night:
Fox News, CNN and MSNBC all declined to carry Sanders’ speech, instead offering punditry about the evening, with the chyrons promising, “AWAITING TRUMP” and “STANDING BY FOR TRUMP.”
Hillary Clinton last week got similarly dissed by the networks in favor of Trump.
The New York Times Reports:
Over the course of the campaign, he has earned close to $2 billion worth of media attention, about twice the all-in price of the most expensive presidential campaigns in history. It is also twice the estimated $746 million that Hillary Clinton, the next best at earning media, took in. Senator Bernie Sanders has earned more media than any of the Republicans except Mr. Trump.
You might want to check out that NYT article because it has a great chart that displays the disproportionate amount of media coverage Trump is actually receiving, most of it FREE.
Of course you may or may not be aware the Washington Post, published 16 hit pieces on Senator Sanders in 16 hours, as USUNCUT reports:
The Washington Post actually released sixteen articles with an anti-Sanders slant between 7:20 PM PST on Sunday and 12:54 PM PST on Monday, March 7th, a span that includes coverage during the Democratic debate in Flint, Michigan.
Snip
The Washington Post is owned by right wing libertarian Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon who is worth approximately $49.8 billion dollars.
….
Amazon also has $600 million in contracts with the CIA, which Sanders said he wanted to abolish in 1974, and still “had a lot of problems with.” In the past, FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) slammed the Washington Post for leaving out the fact that Bezos owns over $1 billion in Uber stock when reporting on the company.
From MediaMatters:
81:1.
Does that ratio seem out of whack? That's the ratio of TV airtime that ABC World News Tonight has devoted to Donald Trump's campaign (81 minutes) versus the amount of TV time World News Tonight has devoted to Bernie Sanders' campaign this year. And even that one minute for Sanders is misleading because the actual number is closer to 20 seconds.
For the entire year.
81:1 ratio. Let that sink in.
“RT’s Ed Schultz is joined by Democracy for America’s Charles Chamberlain and The Nation’s John Nichols to take a look at how the media has failed the candidates.”
Let me rant for a moment. I know many around these “reality based” parts think RT is nothing but a Putin propaganda mouth piece, why has some of the US’s best, and most progressive journalist moved over to RT? Heck, RT has spent more time discussing the media blackout of Senator Sanders than any of the US MSM even acknowledging it’s happening.
I didn’t write this diary to be a pro Sanders diary, I wrote it because this presidential race is a PERFECT example of the Herman / Chomsky propaganda model in action, unfolding right before our eyes.
Here’s my own little video about the topic.
With only 6 corporations controlling the vast majority of TV, printed and radio media, as well as acquiring a growing segment of online properties, we are facing an ever growing threat to our democratic republic and loosing perspective of what reality actually is. We live in a virtual echo chamber of “elite” consensus, if you don’t go outside of the MSM.
The media, through elite consensus, is denying the American, ALL the relevant information about our political candidates, not their chosen preference.
I seem to remember somewhere that this was OUR country, not theirs. Where is the debate on the policy issues and not this clowning around horse shit about the size of someone’s thingy?
How do we influence the media to do better reporting? How do we break the propaganda Model?