Development specialist Dr. J. W. Smith, who is Director of Research for
the California-based Institute for Economic Democracy, is even more
explicit:
“No society will tolerate it if they knew that
they (as a country) were responsible for violently killing 12 to 15
million people since WW II and causing the death of hundreds of millions
more their economies were destroyed or those countries were denied the
right to restructure to care for their people. Unknown as it is, and
recognizing that this has been standard practice throughout colonialism,
that is the record of the Western imperial centers of capital from 1945
to 1990... While mouthing peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority
rule, all over the world state-sponsored terrorists were overthrowing
democratic governments, installing and protecting dictators, and
preventing peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule. Twelve to
fifteen million mostly innocent people were slaughtered in that
successful 45 year effort to suppress those breaks for economic freedom
which were bursting out all over the world... All intelligence agencies
have been, and are still in, the business of destabilizing undeveloped
countries to maintain their dependency and the flow of the world’s
natural wealth to powerful nations’ industries at a low price and to
provide markets for those industries at a high price.”[4]
That
the media has failed to accurately portray the real nature of Western
foreign policy to the public, playing instead the subservient role of a
propaganda machine for elite interests, is therefore quite obvious. The
question that then remains is, why does the media – conventionally
believed to be critical of the establishment - behave in a way that
conforms to the false picture presented by the government and corporate
elite of their own policies? The anwer is simple: in a nutshell, the
mass media is the establishment.
To
begin our analysis then, we will discuss a propaganda model of the mass
media. It is thus useful to begin with what is arguably the most
thorough model of the media - that proposed by Edward Herman (Professor
Emeritus of Finance at Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania)
and Noam Chomsky (Institute Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at
MIT), both of whom are leading critics of US foreign policy.[5]
There are particularly pertinent reasons to begin with their model - the
primary one being that it is arguably the most thoroughly researched and
empirically verified model available. Herman and Chomsky’s landmark
study, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,
comes under the recommendation of America’s leading national media
watchdog and research group, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR).
It is also recommended as an essential resource for media literacy by
the Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy (GRIID), affiliated
with the US-based Community Media Centre (CMC).[6]
The Oxford-based research and publishing group Corporate Watch (not to
be confused with the US-based organisation of the same name), which
works in cooperation with a variety of other human rights and
environmentalist organisations, describes the study as “one of the most
incisive critiques of the media’s role in society”.[7]
The respected journal Publisher’s Weekly gives the following
review of Manufacturing Consent:
“Herman of
Wharton and Chomsky of MIT lucidly document their argument that
America’s government and its corporate giants exercise control over what
we read, see and hear. The authors identify the forces that they contend
make the national media propagandistic - the major three being the
motivation for profit through ad revenue, the media’s close links to and
often ownership by corporations, and their acceptance of information
from biased sources. In five case studies, the writers show how TV,
newspapers and radio distort world events… Extensive evidence is calmly
presented, and in the end an indictment against the guardians of our
freedom is substantiated. A disturbing picture emerges of a news system
that panders to the interest of America’s privileged and neglects its
duties when the concerns of minority groups and the underclass are at
stake.”
Indeed,
according to the leading American media scholar Robert W. McChesney,
Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of
Illinois, any significant attempt to comprehend the structure and
operation of the mass media must begin with Herman and Chomsky’s study.[8] He further observes that:
“This book promises to be a seminal work in
critical media analysis and to open a door through which future media
analysis will follow… Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky are certainly well
qualified to provide a simple yet powerful model that explains how the
media function to serve the large propaganda requirements of the elite.
Together and individually, they have written numerous articles and books
which have chronicled the ways in which the US media have actively
promoted the agenda of the elite, particularly in regard to US
activities in the Third World. Manufacturing Consent is a work of
tremendous importance for scholars and activists alike… Each chapter is
meticulously researched and most draw heavily on the authors’ earlier
works in these areas.”[9]
All
this provides us with ample reason to begin with Herman and Chomsky’s
model.
Contrary to the claims
of the mainstream critique of radical media analysis, a propaganda model
does not entail a grandiose conspiracy theory. Rather, this model is
based on analysing the politico-economic influences on the mass media,
and considering the extent to which those influences both have the
potential to condition the media’s reporting tendencies in accord with
the interests of those who possess power. In other words, the model
constitutes a ‘guided free market’ model, advocating that the media’s
reporting is influenced by the same factors that dominate corporate
activities - the maximisation of profit and therefore the market. The
next step is to document the occurrences where this potential is
actualised. In this sense, according to the propaganda model the media
is conditioned by the profit-orientated considerations of corporate
elites. As Professor McChesney observes:
“Herman and Chomsky quickly dismiss the
standard mainstream critique of radical media analysis that accuses it
of offering some sort of ‘conspiracy’ theory for media behavior; rather,
they argue, media bias arises from ‘the preselection of right-thinking
people, internalized preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to
the constraints’ of a series of objective filters they present in their
propaganda model. Hence the bias occurs largely through self-censorship,
which explains the superiority of the US mass media as a propaganda
system: it is far more credible than a system which relies on official
state censorship.”[10]
Herman
and Chomsky have forwarded their propaganda model of the media in terms
of five ‘filters’ that act to limit what the media reports in accord
with governmental and corporate interests. As McChesney notes:
“Only stories with a strong orientation to elite
interests can pass through the five filters unobstructed and receive
ample media attention. The model also explains how the media can
conscientiously function when even a superficial analysis of the
evidence would indicate the preposterous nature of many of the stories
that receive ample publicity in the press and on the network news
broadcasts.”[11]
The
first filter consists of the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth
and profit-orientation of the most dominant mass media firms. Media
ownership involves enormous costs, which naturally implicates rigid
limits on who is able to run a media entity, even a small one. To cater
to a mass audience, a media organisation must inevitably be a sizeable
corporation. It will have to be owned either directly by the state or by
wealthy individuals. In 1986, out of about 25,000 media entities in the
US, a mere twenty-nine largest media systems accounted for over half the
output of newspapers and for the majority of sales and audiences in
magazines, broadcasting, books and films. These massive media firms are
profit-orientated corporations, owned and controlled by wealthy
profit-orientated people, which are also “closely interlocked, and have
common interests, with other major corporations, banks, and government”.[12]
Because they are often fully integrated into the stock market, they
become subject to powerful pressures from stockholders, directors and
bankers to focus on profitability. This means that they are united by a
basic framework of special interests, even though they remain in
competition:
“These control groups obviously have a special stake
in the status quo by virtue of their wealth and their strategic position
in one of the great institutions of society [the stock market]. And they
exercise the power of this strategic position, if only by establishing
the general aims of the company and choosing its top management.”[13]
As a
result, major media corporations tend to avoid reports that question the
status quo in terms of the actions of the wealthy: If media entities are
owned by profit-orientated corporations that have a vested interest in
maintaining the status quo, those corporations are clearly not going to
employ individuals who question the status quo to run their media
entities. McChesney observes:
“Many of these corporations have extensive holdings
in other industries and nations. Objectively, their needs for profit
severely influence the news operations and overall content of the media.
Subjectively, there is a clear conflict of interest when the media
system upon which self-government rests is controlled by a handful of
corporations and operated in their self-interest.”[14]
A remarkably large
amount of the information the public receives is controlled by a very
small number of media sources. Freedom House records that within states,
out of 187 governments, 92 have complete ownership of the television
broadcasting structure, while 67 have part ownership.[15]
Ownership of the world’s media sources is similarly increasingly
concentrated in a few giant corporations. Thousands of other sources do
exist, but in comparison their influence is negligible. The leading
American media analyst Ben Bagdikan, noting that despite more than
25,000 media entities in the US only “23 corporations control most of
the business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books, and
motion pictures”, concludes that this endows corporations with the
extensive power to exercise influence over “news, information, public
ideas, popular culture, and political attitudes”.[16]
The result today is that
about twelve corporations dominate the world’s mass media. In his study
of corporate leverage over the media, Megamedia, Dr. Dean Alger -
who was fellow in the Joan Shorenstein Center on the press, politics and
public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of
Government - lists this ‘dominant dozen’ as follows in order of power:
Disney - Capital Cities - ABC; Time Warner - Turner; News Corporation;
Bertelsmann; Tele-Communications (TCI) - AT&T; General Electric - NBC;
CBS Inc.; Newshouse/Advance Publications; Viacom; Microsoft; Matra -
Hachette - Filipacchi; Gannet. Alger quotes journalist and former top
editor of the Chicago Tribunal, James Squires, concerning the
escalating patterns of concentration of media-ownership in
profit-orientated corporations:
“In its struggle for
relevance and financial security in the modern information age, the
press as an institution appears ready to trade its tradition and its
public responsibility for whatever will make a buck. In the starkest
terms, the news media of the 1990s are a celebrity-oriented, Wall-Street
dominated, profit-driven entertainment enterprise dedicated foremost to
delivering advertising images to targeted groups of consumers.”
Richard Clurman, who
was for years a leading figure in Time magazine, has similarly
observed:
“As the news media
became bigger and bigger business, the innovative traditions led by
creative editorial dominance began to erode... The media had grown from
a nicely profitable, creative business into a gigantic investment
opportunity. It was becoming harder to think of them as different from
any other business in free enterprise America.”
Former newspaper
reporter who became a journalism professor, Doug Underwood, also
confirms this corporatisation of the media: “It’s probably no surprise
that in an era of mass media conglomerates, big chain expansion, and
multimillion dollar newspaper buy-outs, the editors of daily newspapers
have begun to behave more and more like the managers of any corporate
entity.”[17]
It is well documented
that the elites who dominate the various institutions of society share a
common set of values and associations linked with their generally
wealthy position as members of a highly privileged class. These elites
include the decision makers over politics, investment, production,
distribution; members of ideological institutions involving editorial
positions, control of journals and so on; those in managerial positions,
who manage corporations and have similar roles. These different elite
groups all interpenetrate one another in accord with their shared values
and associations. Furthermore, due to their common social position, they
are largely socialised into the traditional values that characterise
their wealthy class. This has a significant impact on their outlook on
the world, and consequently their attitude towards political affairs.[18]
In Britain, the British
Broadcasting Company (BBC) constitutes an obvious example. The board of
governers on the BBC “tends to be drawn from the ranks of the ‘great and
good’ and to mirror the predominance of the upper middle classes in the
ranks of political life in elected and non-elected positions of power…
“Of the eighty-five governers who have
served in the first fifty years of the BBC’s history, fifty-six had a
university education (forty at Oxford or Cambridge) and twenty were
products of Eton, Harrow or Winchester. The political experience of
Board members has come mainly from the House of Lords although there
have been nineteen former MPs.”[19]
Further documentation
observes Bob Franklin, Reader in Media and Communication Studies at the
University of Sheffield, illustrates that the elite “uses its privileged
access to media institutions to produce programming which is partial and
supportive of a particular class interest.” Franklin refers to the
series of Bad News studies by Glasgow University Media Group (GUMG),
offering ample evidence “of a systematic skew in the reporting of
certain kinds of news.”[20]
For example, in their first study the Glasgow scholars concluded that
“television news is a cultural artifact; a sequence of
socially-manufactured messages which carry many of the culturally
dominant assumptions of our society.” In a later study titled More
Bad News, they similarly concluded that television news reporting
“consistently maintains and supports a cultural framework within which
viewpoints favourable to the status quo are given preferred
and privileged readings.”[21]
Former editor-in-chief
David Bowman of the Australian newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald
therefore confirms that “having thrown off one yoke, the press should
now be falling under another, in the form of a tiny and ever-contracting
band of businessmen-proprietors. Instead of developing as a diverse
social institution, serving the needs of democratic society, the press,
and now the media, have become or are becoming the property of a few,
governed by whatever social, political and cultural values the few think
tolerable”.[22]
“The danger”, he elsewhere observes, “is that the media of the future,
the channels of mass communication, will be dominated locally and
world-wide by the values - social, cultural and political - of a few
individuals and their huge corporations.”[23]
The mass media may have
the ideological orientation of its staffing broadly restricted to the
agenda held by its corporate ownership, who obviously have significant
control over the media’s staffing. The cumulative result of this is that
the media may become subservient in its general ideological orientation
to the assumptions and interests of the elite. Bob Franklin elaborates
that this is because “editors are simply workers - albeit at a high
grade - and, as such, remain subject to the discipline of proprietors...
It would certainly be difficult to
persuade an editor that proprietors are no longer in control of their
newspapers. A succession of editors from Harold Evans to Andrew Neil
acknowledge the power of proprietors in autobiographies which invariably
detail their prompt removal from the editorial chair following a
disagreement with the owner... Proprietors’ power to ‘hire and fire’
makes them formidable figures, but they also control all aspects of a
newspaper’s financial and staffing resources.”[24]
The implications of
all this have been summarised well by American analyst David McGowan:
“Following the same course that virtually
every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless
series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of
the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths. The result has
been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the
American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has
become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state.”[25]
Former Dean at the
Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, and a
winner of almost every top prize in American journalism - including the
Pulitzer - Ben Bagdikian, acknowledges the massive control over public
life entailed by the increasing concentration in corporate ownership:
“In an authoritarian society there is a
ministry, or a commissar, or a directorate that controls what everybody
will see and hear. We call that a dictatorship. Here we have a handful
of very powerful corporations led by a handful of very powerful men and
women who control everything we see and hear beyond the natural
environment and our own families. That’s something which surrounds us
every day and night. If it were one person we’d call that a
dictatorship, a ministry of information.”[26]
The extent of the power
that elites have over the media can be well understood when it is noted
that even Western intelligence agencies have a grip over the press. For
example, an internal committee of the CIA reported in 1992 that: “We
[i.e. the CIA] have relationships with reporters [that] have helped us
turn some intelligence failure stories into intelligence success
stories. Some responses to the media can be handled in a one-shot phone
call.”[27]
Former CIA Director William Colby was more forthcoming when he admitted:
“The Central Intelligence Agency owns anyone of any significance in the
major media.”[28]
Consequently, it is easy to see how the legitimacy of elite interests
can henceforth be presupposed by the mass media in terms of a general
all-pervading set of assumptions. Since these assumptions are rooted in
the elite ideology, the mass media that is of course owned by the
corporate elite, is generally unable to question seriously that
ideology. Bob Franklin thus concludes that “while it is possible to cite
cases where the media have toppled the powerful, there is a greater body
of evidence to suggest that their role is more typically to serve as a
source of support.”[29]
It is therefore not surprising if debate within the media is largely
restricted to the assumption of Western governmental and corporate
benevolence; the belief in the viability and legitimacy of the status
quo. In this context, one can predict that dissent which stretches
beyond these limits by choosing to question the very assumptions adopted
at the outset by the media, will be neglected. Certainly, due to the
sheer mass of news it is also predictable that the odd dissenting report
may filter through - but the substantial majority of reports will “serve
as a source of support” for elite interests.
As the American
political scientist Michael Parenti documents, the result of corporate
ownership of the media where staffing will be especially restricted to
those who conform to the ideological requirements of corporate power, is
that journalists “rarely doubt their own objectivity even as they
faithfully echo the established political vocabularies and the
prevailing politico-economic orthodoxy. Since they do not cross any
forbidden lines, they are not reined in. So they are likely to have no
awareness they are on an ideological leash.” The distinguished British
correspondent John Pilger - who has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of Journalist of the Year, as well as several other
major awards - thus comments that “the true nature of power is not
revealed, its changing contours are seldom explored, its goals and
targets seldom identified. This is counterfeit journalism because the
surface of events is not disturbed.”[30]
A propaganda model thus clarifies the institutional structure of the
media that explains why the facts of elite policy receive little
in-depth critical analysis by the mainstream media. On this basis one
may reasonably argue that permissible dissent becomes meaningless, being
unable to question the ideological framework upon which the elite
dominated social structures are based. The result has been noted by
media analyst W. Lance Bennett:
“The public is exposed to powerful
persuasive messages from above and is unable to communicate meaningfully
through the media in response to these messages... Leaders have usurped
enormous amounts of political power and reduced popular control over the
political system by using the media to generate support, compliance, and
just plain confusion among the public.”[31]
The
second filter noted by Herman and Chomsky that is related to the first
filter, is advertising, which Professor McChesney notes “has colonized
the US mass media and is responsible for most of the media’s income.”[32]
Other than the points already indicated, the growth of advertising has
meant that newspapers and other media sources have an alternative
primary source of funds other than their selling price. This alone means
that the media’s tendencies in reporting can be influenced and
manipulated by the significant withdrawing or forwarding of economic
support. Since the mass media is largely financed through advertising,
it becomes financially dependent for its existence on advertising
revenue from corporations. One reason for this is that all forms of
media have to ensure that their advertising profile is high to retain
corporate investment in advertising, and thereby to retain a source of
funds. This is ideally achieved by becoming ideologically appealing to
an audience with a high buying capacity: members of the elite and
generally members of the wealthiest classes. Newspapers that are
attractive to advertisers are able to lower their price below the cost
of producing them, thanks to the revenue that advertising brings in.
This
means that newspapers unattractive to advertisers can be undercut,
because without any source of funds from advertising their prices tend
to be higher, reducing sales, and reducing profit by which to invest in
improving saleability (via quality, format, promotions, etc.). Such
newspapers can therefore be effectively marginalised, if not completely
driven out of existence. Advertisers, of course, constitute corporate
sponsors. This means that newspapers that fail to attract such corporate
sponsors, are more likely to be either marginal or non-existent.
Additionally, a newspaper will be more favourable to advertisers if it
is biased towards the assumptions and values of a wealthy readership.
With newspapers having become so dependent on advertising to exist and
flourish, corporate sponsors effectively retain a significant control
over which newspapers survive, what they choose to report, and how they
do so. For instance, James Curran and Jean Seaton in their authoritative
history of the British press conclude that the growth in both
advertising and capital costs were critical in eliminating the popular
radical press, which had emerged in the first half of the nineteenth
century. They observe that “advertisers thus acquired a de facto
licensing authority since, without their support, newspapers ceased to
be economically viable”.[33]
The
above two filters essentially mean that the mass media is
institutionally organised in such a way as to be subservient to the
corporate elite, since it is at once directly owned and thereby
structurally controlled by that elite, and indirectly influenced by
financial pressures related to advertising. Institutionally the mass
media is thus undoubtedly subservient to corporate ideology. Effectively
then, as Professor Edward Herman states, “capitalists control the media
and they do so to maximize profits”, while also generally adhering quite
tightly to the assumptions of the corporate ideology.
“The main
element in corporate ideology is the belief in the sublimity of the
market and its unique capacity to serve as the efficient allocator of
resources. So important is the market in this ideology that ‘freedom’
has come to mean the absence of constraints on market participants, with
political and social democracy pushed into the background as supposed
derivatives of market freedom. This may help explain the tolerance by
market-freedom lovers of market-friendly totalitarians - Pinochet or
Marcos. A second and closely related constituent of corporate ideology
is the danger of government intervention and regulation, which allegedly
tends to proliferate, imposes unreasonable burdens on business, and
therefore hampers growth. A third element in the ideology is that growth
is the proper national objective, as opposed to equity, participation,
social justice, or cultural advance and integrity. Growth should be
sustainable, which means that the inflation threat should be a high
priority and unemployment kept at the level to assure the inflation
threat is kept at bay. The resultant increasingly unequal income
distribution is also an acceptable price to pay. Privatization is also
viewed as highly desirable in corporate ideology, following naturally
from the first two elements - market sublimity and the threat of
government. It also tends to weaken government by depriving it of its
direct control over assets, and therefore has the further merit of
reducing the ability of government to serve the general population
through democratic processes... [P]rivatization yields enormous payoffs
to the bankers and purchasers participating in the sale of public
assets”.
These
ideological positions become implicit assumptions pervading permissible
political discourse within the media, and it is thus extremely rare to
find these principles being subjected to fundamental critical
examination by the corporate-owned media.[34]
The
third filter simply constitutes the sources that the mass media
routinely relies on for its information. Naturally, since the media
needs a steady and reliable source of news, resources are focused where
such news can be most easily acquired. It so happens, unfortunately,
that central news terminals of this type are the White House, the
Pentagon and the State Department, as well as business corporations and
trade groups. The same is the case for other Western countries. The
importance of such organisations as news sources is due to the
elementary fact that they possess the greatest resources for public
relations and promotional material, the result being that “the mass
media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of
information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest”.[35]
Alternative media entities established by human rights
organisations and other groups are resultantly marginalised;
consequently, the public is in consistent reception of news and analysis
which is in fundamental ideological conformity to the elite ideology,
thus being unable to scrutinise facts in a way free from the assumptions
of that ideology. This means that news will be filtered in accordance
with what is suitable to the requirements of elite power and its
interests. McChesney explains:
“The media rely heavily upon news provided them by
corporate and government sources, which have themselves developed
enormous bureaucracies to provide this material to the media. They have
developed great expertise at ‘managing’ the media. In effect, these
bureaucracies subsidize the media and the media must be careful not to
antagonize such an important supplier. Furthermore, these corporate and
government sources are instantly credible by accepted journalistic
practices. Anti-elite sources, on the other hand, are regarded with
utmost suspicion and have tremendous difficulty passing successfully
through this filter.”[36]
For example,
consider the fact that the US Air Force publishes 140
newspapers per week, issuing 45,000 headquarters and unit news
releases per year. Other government-related institutions
produce a similar proportion of information. This massive
amount of information produced by the state and corporations in
tandem provides the media with news that is not only easily
acquired, but also inexpensive. Herman and Chomsky observe
that:
“To consolidate their pre-eminent position
as sources, government and business-news promoters go to great pains to
make things easy for news organisations... In effect, the large
bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special
access by their contribution to reducing the media’s costs of acquiring
the raw materials of, and producing, news. The large entities that
provide this subsidy become ‘routine’ news sources and have privileged
access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and
may be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers.”[37]
The impact
of this, as Mark Fishman affirms, is that:
“News workers are
predisposed to treat bureaucratic accounts as factual because news
personnel participate in upholding a normative order of authorized
knowers in the society. Reporters operate with the attitude that
officials ought to know what it is their job to know... In particular, a
newsworker will recognize an official’s claim to knowledge not merely as
a claim, but as a credible, competent piece of knowledge.”
“This amounts to a moral
division of labour: officials have and give the facts”, which are
therefore beyond question, however tenuous or absurd, while “reporters
merely get them” from the bureaucratic elite.
[38]
The
fourth filter Chomsky and Herman refer to they call ‘flak’, a term that
designates the negative responses to a media report in the form of
letters, phone calls, petitions, speeches, legal and parliamentary
action, among other methods of complaint. One of the most significant
forms of flak already indicated is the withdrawal of advertising
revenue, which in itself can be sufficient for editors to review their
product. As has already been noted, this form of flak can lead to the
entire elimination of a media source that is unfavourable to corporate
sponsors and their interests. Flak can also serve as a deterrent to
producing certain kinds of programme or story, and can even prevent
reporters from investigating particular issues because of how unlikely
it is that such stories would be published. Business organisations often
come together to form organisations devoted solely to the mass
dissemination of flak, by which to impose immense pressure on the media
to follow the corporate lead.
In the
US, the conservative media organisation Accuracy In Media (AIM) is a
clear example of this, having been formed at the instigation of various
giant corporations with the view to impose flak on mainstream media
sources who may occasionally produce a piece questioning the legitimacy
of elite ideology in some way. As McChesney comments, “right-wing
corporate ‘flak’ producers such as Accuracy in Media [act] to harass the
mass media and to put pressure upon them to follow the corporate agenda…
“This filter was developed extensively in the 1970s
when major corporations and wealthy right-wingers became increasingly
dissatisfied with political developments in the West and with media
coverage… While ostensibly antagonistic to the media, these flak
machines provide the media with legitimacy and are treated quite well by
the media.”[39]
However, it is obvious that one of the most
potent disseminators of flak is the government itself due to
its enormous resources. Compared with such corporate power, the
ability of other organisations representing the poor, the
oppressed or the environment to pressurise the media is
dwarfed. Hence, the mass media remains within the confines of
the corporate agenda.[40]
The fifth filter essentially follows from the other
filters. Since the corporate ideology dominates the media by way of
being almost institutionally assumed, all ideologies that are in
fundamental opposition to the corporate ideology must similarly be
institutionally assumed incorrect. In this context, nationalist social
movements around the world that threatened the international capitalist
system under US hegemony were construed as totalitarian Communist
movements. The final filter is thus the ideology of anticommunism, a
stance that has become integral to Western political culture. According
to McChesney: “Anticommunism has been ingrained into acceptable
journalistic practices in the United States, to the point that even in
periods of ‘détente’ it is fully appropriate and expected for
journalists to frame issues in terms of ‘our side’ versus the communist
‘bad guys’,” even when Communism is not the real ‘threat’ at all.[41]
We can recall evidence for this when we compare the
orthodox interpretation of the Cold War espoused by most academic and
media commentators with the fact that there was no global Communist
threat. Major covert operations, such as the installation of the Shah in
Iran after the elimination of the democratically elected government of
Mussadeq, or the intervention in Nicaragua to overthrow the popular
Sandinista Front, were undertaken on the pretext of preventing the
violent rise of totalitarian Communism and protecting the independence
of local populations. Herman and Chomsky observe: “when anticommunist
fervor is aroused, the demand for serious evidence in support for claims
of ‘communist’ abuses is suspended by the media, and charlatans can
thrive as evidential sources”.[42]
Conversely, when journalists or editors attempt to
challenge the prevailing anticommunist assumptions as well as pass
through the other four filters, they “must meet far higher standards; in
fact standards are often imposed that can barely be met in the natural
sciences”.[43] This filter is, however, not limited to anticommunism, but
rather is related to the prevailing pretext for Western policy at the
time. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the noble fight against
the non-existent international Communist threat could no longer be
pinpointed as a pretext for Western military operations that had
actually been undertaken for far more familiar reasons of economic
domination. Thus, other diverse ideological threats to be similarly
exaggerated, distorted or even fabricated, have had to take its place; a
particularly pertinent one in the present day is the alleged threat to
the United States and the West due to Islam and global Islamic terrorism
- which has been similarly exaggerated[44] (See Chapter VIII below for further discussion).
Apart from this, it is clear that the fifth filter is
essentially synonymous with the elite/corporate ideology in general, and
it is in the context of this ideology that social movements and ideas in
opposition to the dominant ideology are interpreted within the media.
Other elements of the final filter will therefore include the
benevolence of one’s government, the universal merits of private
enterprise, the benign character of corporations and their activities,
and so on. All of these inherently imply the deionization of the
perceived threat to US hegemony with respect to these aspects.
Summarising the politico-economic structure of the media,
former business executive David Edwards writes that “powerful state and
business elites seek to determine the basic framework of modern social
goals: maximum economic growth generated by maximised corporate profit,
fuelled by mass production, fuelled by mass consumerism…
“By
‘pouring’ news, information and ideas into this basic economic
framework, a version of reality progressively suited to the requirements
of the framework is inevitably produced... [while] conscious design is
not required beyond the initial framing conditions (which... business
elites do consciously try to maintain: any threat to compromise the
basic, unchallengeable goal of maximum economic growth from maximum
corporate profit is vigorously and consciously opposed at home and
abroad). So long as the basic framework is maintained, the pyramid will
simply ‘build itself’. Thus supportive media, editors and journalists
will find a stable place in the economic pyramid, while their
unsupportive counterparts will either be moved, or will bounce out (of
business).”[45]
The result is that the media effectively serves elite
interests by the appropriate selection of topics, distribution of
concerns, framing of issues, disparity in emphasis, and the filtering of
information. Lee Bollinger, dean of the University of Michigan Law
School, comments that:
“The press can exclude important points
of view, operating as a bottleneck in the marketplace of ideas. It can
distort knowledge of public issues not just by omission but also through
active misrepresentations... It can also exert an adverse influence over
the tone and character of public debate in subtle ways, by playing to
personal biases... or by making people fearful... It can fuel ignorance
and pettiness by avoiding serious issues altogether, favoring
simple-minded fare or cheap entertainment over serious discussion... Of
course, all these concerns become more serious as the number of those
who control the press become fewer.”[46]
As Anthony Bevins, political correspondent of the respected
British newspaper The Observer (but who also worked for The
Sun, the Daily Mail, The Times and The Independent)
testifies:
“Journalists cannot ignore the
pre-set ‘taste’ of their newspapers, use their own news sense in
reporting the truth of any event, and survive. They are ridden by news
desks and backbench executives, have their stories spiked on a
systematic basis, they face the worst sort of newspaper punishment -
byline deprivation.”[47]
Similarly, Gene Roberts, former executive editor of the
Philadelphia Inquirer and former managing editor of the New York
Times, affirms that though corporately owned newspaper chains “will
tell you they don’t interfere with local coverage, they simply insist
that each newspaper return an ‘acceptable’ level of profits to the
central corporation... This alone is enough to cause newspapers... to
weaken their coverage by slashing newsholes [i.e. the amount of space
devoted to news as opposed to ads] and newsroom staff. But there are
problems even beyond these.” Due to the overall corporate domination of
media-entities, “News coverage is being shaped by corporate executives
at headquarters far from the local scene.”[48]
That the mass media therefore amounts to a propaganda
system for Western elite interests; its framework of investigation and
understanding having been established from the outset by the elite due
to their institutional power over the media; is in light of this
analysis hardly a very unreasonable or shocking concept, given the very
nature of the media’s relation to domestic and international
politico-economic structures. It is due to the media’s structural
subservience to corporate control in accordance with the institutionally
established filters just discussed, that the media becomes generally
unable to question the corporate ideology. Accordingly, Western policy,
which is formulated to meet the corporate/elite interests who have the
greatest leverage on the state, generally cannot be widely disclosed in
a way that reveals its anti-humanitarian character. Structurally-induced
filters cause the media to convey Western policy in a way that will not
generate fundamental opposition to the elite interests behind policy
formulation. In this way, while specific policies may or may not be
criticised, elite interests will rarely be exposed for what they are and
will furthermore not be questioned as to their legitimacy. Thus, debate
over policy will only rarely be capable of criticising elite interests.
That necessarily involves disinformation, misinterpretation and often
fabrication. As the internationally acclaimed political scientist
Michael Parenti observes:
“The news media’s daily performance
is not a failure but a skillfully evasive success. Their job is not to
inform, but to disinform, not to advance democratic discourse but to
mute it. The media gives every appearance of being vigorously concerned
about events of the day, saying so much, meaning so little, offering so
many calories and so few nutrients. When we understand this, we move
from a liberal complaint about the press’s sloppy performance to a
radical analysis of how the media serve the ruling circles”.[49]
In the space of an hour, the United States faced a sample
of the same brand of terrorism that has been inflicted on vast swathes
of the world’s population throughout the twentieth century by its own
military forces. The destruction of the World Trade Centre, the
explosion that racked the Pentagon, and the plane crash near Camp David
have left America in shock and on high alert. The attacks have resulted
in thousands of deaths. Innocent civilians have been killed and injured.
Many states throughout the country have declared states of emergency.
What has happened is an atrocious, but predictabl
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