Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

 ...Now, the way the media work, there are some media which kind of set the agenda, you know, the most important ones, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, big national media, they set the agenda. If the government wants a story to get into television that evening, what it does is leak it to get into the front page of The Washington Post and The New York Times, on the assumption that television will pick it up and say, ok that’s important, so we’ll give it the front news. The same is true of national television. It sets- it sets the agenda that makes people think. The New York Times front page is sent over the wire services the afternoon of the day before — there is a thing, if you read the- you know, you look at that stuff that’s ground out of the AP wire, you’ll notice around four o’clock comes something that says, The New York Times front page tomorrow is going to look like so-and-so. Well, if you’re an editor of a journal in some small town, you read it and you say, oh, that’s what the important news is, and you frame your own reporting that way. Now, you know, it’s not, sort of, a hundred percent, but there is a kind of an agenda setting media — New York Times, Washington Post, the three television channels, a few others that participate to some extent in this.

Well, ask yourself what those institutions are. Answer: those institutions are first of all major corporations, some of the biggest corporations in the country. Furthermore, they’re integrated with, and in many cases owned by, even larger corporations, you know, like General Electric, and so on. So what you have is major corporations and conglomerates. Now, like other corporations, they sell a product to a market. The market in this case is advertisers; that’s what keeps them alive. The product is audiences. They sell audiences to advertisers. In fact for the major media, they try to sell privileged audiences to advertisers. That raises advertising rates, and those are the people they’re trying to reach anyway.

So, what you have is businesses- corporations, which are selling relatively privileged audiences to other businesses. Well, just ask yourself the natural question: what do you expect to come out of this interaction — major corporations selling privileged audiences to other corporations. Well, what you expect to come out of it, on no further assumptions, is an interpretation of the world that reflects the interests and the needs of the sellers, the buyers, and the product. That wouldn’t be very surprising, in fact it would be kind of surprising if it weren’t true. So on relatively- and that, of course, means the propaganda model. So what you expect on relatively uncontroversial, sort of, free market assumptions, with nothing else said, is that you’ll get- the media will function in accord with the propaganda model.

Now, if you look more closely, there are many other factors which interact to lead to the same expectation. The ideological managers — the editors, and the columnists, and the, you know, the anchormen, and all that stuff — they’re very privileged people. They are wealthy, privileged people, whose associations and interests and concerns are closely related to those of the groups that dominate the economy, and that dominate the State, and in fact, it’s just a constant flow and interaction among all those groups. They’re basically the same group. They’re ultimately the people who own the country, or the ones who serve their interests. And, again, it wouldn’t be terribly surprising to discover that these people share the perceptions and concerns and feelings and interests and, you know, attitudes of their associates and the people they’re connected with, and the people whose positions they aspire to take when they move on to the next job, and so on and so forth. Again, that wouldn’t be very surprising. And on and on, I won’t proceed. There are many other factors which tend in the same direction.

Well, that’s my second point. The second point is that the propaganda model has a kind of prior plausibility.

A third point, which is not too well known, is that the propaganda model is assumed to be true by most of the public. That is, in polls — contrary to what you hear — when people are asked in polls, you know, what do you think about the media, and so on, the general reaction is, they’re too conformist, they’re too subservient to power, you know, they’re too obedient. ThatÕs the either plurality or sometimes even the majority view. And they’re not critical enough of government, for example, that’s the standard view.

Well, we have three observations now. The propaganda model has elite advocacy — that is, elites believe that’s the way it ought to be- the media ought to be. It has prior plausibility, it’s very plausible on uncontroversial free market assumptions. And it’s accepted as valid by a large part, probably the majority of the population. Well, those three facts don’t prove that it’s valid of course, but they do suggest that it might be part of the discussion. It’s not. It’s off the agenda, exactly as the propaganda model itself predicts. That’s interesting. That’s an interesting collection of facts.

Well, what about the factual matter of how the media behave? On this there are by now literally thousands of pages of documentation, detailed documentation, case studies and so on, which have put the model to a test in the harshest ways that anybody can dream up. I’ll talk about some of the ways of doing it later, you know, in discussion if you want, but I think it’s been subjected to quite a fair test, in fact a very harsh test. There’s no challenge to it as far as I know. If there is, I’ve missed it. The few cases where there’s any discussion of it, the level of argument is so embarrassingly bad that it just tends to reinforce the plausibility of the model. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that this is one of the best confirmed theses in the social sciences. But in accord with its predictions, it’s off the agenda. You can’t even discuss it....

...Well, outside the spectrum of debate there’s another view. The other view says that the factual assumption is wrong — the factual assumption that’s taken for granted, not even argued, is just wrong. According to this alternative view, the media do fulfill a societal purpose, but it’s quite a different one. The societal purpose is exactly what is advocated by the elite view that I’ve described. The society inculcate and defend the economic and social and political agenda of particular sectors — privileged groups that dominate the domestic society, those that own the society and therefore ought to govern it — and they do this in all kind of ways. They do it by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by the way they frame issues, by the way they filter information, by the way they tell lies, like about revolutions without borders, by emphasis and tone, all sorts of ways, the most crucial of which is just the bounding of debate. What they do is say, here’s the spectrum of permissible debate, and within that you can have, you know, great controversy, but you can’t go outside it....

https://chomsky.info/19890315/