
Manufacturing Consent: The Propaganda Model
War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery.
Of a political system comprised of the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, the media acts as the final crucial tenant of such a structure. It plays the role of the intermediary between the public and the inherently oppressive structures of government by offering the unbiased information on which citizens can make decisions about the form of government they are willing to consent to. Why else would we be so concerned by the foreclosure of impartial media organizations in semi-totalitarian states or even more problematic, the monopolization of the sources of information in nations like Guatemala, with free advertising offered for Portillo’s presidential campaign by the media mogul Remigio Gonzalez skewing the democratic process immensely.
We trust a media industry to help to shape our political ideologies not with their own hands but by offering the relevant information on which we can decide our beliefs on what extent governments should involve themselves in wealth redistribution, free market corrections and interventionist foreign policy.
We would hope that the media was a source of challenge to government monopoly of ideological indoctrination, an avenue to question the merits of neo-liberalism and ‘trickle-down economics’. Whilst we both recognize and praise the pluralism of political stances held by a range of media outlets (FOX vs CNN) we note that whilst at times problematic they all at least have the moderating function of providing their viewership with the truth (the majority of the time). However the pressures of the propaganda model as argued by Chomsky would seem to put a rather significant spanner in these works. Noam Chomsky in his book Manufacturing Consent discusses the prolific nature of the propaganda model by which avenues of reporting that do not comply with the dominant frame of the government and ideological beliefs of the society at large are gradually foreclosed as viable avenues of dissent. Furthermore, the selection of dominant frames by which to exclusively explore given narratives and international events has the perverse effect of shutting down alternate means of interpretation for stories already within the public eye to the active detriment of the societies in which these beliefs circulate. In his book he discusses the four filters that havean effect on propaganda that would leave a totalitarian regime envious. The first is that of significant barriers to entry in terms of the cost of starting a newspaper meaning that only a select few have the ability to create a wide readership. This means that we have an automatic self-selection towards those that already hold significant amounts of wealth and a trend towards oligopolistic control of only a few select media organizations often under an overarching Rupert Murdoch-esque empire. The second is the need for advertising revenue and the aversion of advertising agencies to have their products associated with potentially critical or inflammatory documentaries making the likelihood of their creation decrease significantly. This form of chilling effect out of a fear of potential lost revenue is crucial given the first filter, the need for immense wealth to sustain your existence. The third filter is the fact that the source of the news comes overwhelmingly from the government and its institutions. We dutifully regurgitate the words of assurance from Mark Carney just as we did of Greenspan in the US in the weeks and months before the crash and because they come from sources of authority they often go unquestioned. Furthermore, due to the inherent structure of news broadcasting there is a heavy reliance on what are deemed “credible” sources of information and as Mark Fishman eloquently puts it there is the, “principle of bureaucratic affinity” whereby media organizations find themselves overly reliant on the hegemonic source of government offered information by virtue of their need to constantly pump out updates before their competition. The fourth and final filter is the greatest moderating function of them all and that is the flack machine, whereby public outrage at deviance from the previous three filters leads to a loss of viewership and perceived credibility meaning that the desire to rock the boat decreases significantly.
Perhaps telling of the time in which Chomsky is writing the last moderator that he puts forward is that of anti-communism as a control mechanism; that being the desire not to be deemed as being anti-American by virtue of your dissidence from the frame. This could in fact call into question whether or not the conception drawn by Chomsky is one that is still a relevant consideration. The propaganda model that he discusses comes at a time where news broadcasting is not omnipresent but instead comes in the forms of the morning newspaper and the evening news at eight. In this world propaganda can be easily spread through the singular source of information broadcasted into the homes of ordinary Americans. The advent of social media has acted as a mass democratization of both media access and its dissemination. The capacity to question the monopoly of information has increased dramatically even over only the last 20 years as a result of the growth of self-publishing. The rise of platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Medium allow for an immediate update of events as they happen and it is often through updates published by individuals online that established media outlets are even able to publish updates. Whilst this has at times led to an increase in false reporting as was seen in the case of false identification of the Boston bombers, it does mean that avenues for criticism have opened up for a larger number of people. The loss of the hegemonic control of the mass media has ultimately been a force for liberalization as effective propaganda is often heavily based on subliminal rhetoric going unchallenged rather than overt messaging demanded that you hand over your agency to the machine.
Chomsky discusses some rather frightening uses of the propaganda model to disseminate intentional misinformation to the public to the ends of bolstering American foreign policy. Hopefully, with the significant growth of social media since his writing of Manufacturing Consent, our capacity to continue in such a way has been successfully undermined.
