Emma Caspi

Voices Editor

Photo via Medium

Discovering ways to control the public by analysing efficient modes of persuasion is nothing new. Aristotle analysed the modes of rhetoric most efficient in persuading the opposing party of his ideals, and Niccolò Machiavelli controlled other groups and maintained power through ideological instruments.

Many believe discreet methods of manipulation such as these were and still are used within the media, inciting fear among the public about the information they consume. In 1988, Edward S. Herman, an American economist, and Noam Chomsky, an American theoretical linguist, wrote Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media in an attempt to clarify the inner workings and operations of mainstream U.S. media.

36 years ago, Manufacturing Consent presented an unprecedented way of understanding the U.S. news media. Herman and Chomsky attempted to reveal the behaviour and performance of mainstream American media through the propaganda model.

Going against the Liberal and Conservative mainstream explanations, the propaganda model proposes that the dominant media is embedded in a decentralised and non-conspiratorial market system. Herman thinks the news “restricts assumptions,” depends heavily and uncritically “on elite information sources,” and participates in “propaganda campaigns helpful to elite interests.” The elite, though an ambiguous term, references profit-seeking businesses, advertisers, major business firms, etc.

Like a ventilation system, Herman classifies “ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and anticommunist ideology” as the 5 stages that information must pass through to reach the public. Herman and Chomsky observed that journalism has depreciated to sell more goods as an example of ‘post-processed’ news.

Through this lens, advertisement-ridden news is strategically chosen content that predicts the most virality. Max Frankel, a former New York Times editor, reveals that “sex, sports, violence and comedy” often trump “news of foreign wars or welfare reforms.” Similarly, Transnational corporate empires allegedly cut budgets and discourage investigative journalism, reducing ‘substantial’ news that threatens their hierarchical reign over the media.

The propaganda model also includes the idea that the relations industry monopolises journalistic conventions to serve corporate clients; more public industry individuals are manipulating the news than journalists are writing it.

Herman and Chomsky further accuse the elite of weakening the public sphere, making it difficult to debate and attain information crucial to engage in intellectual conversation by encouraging the market and capitalism’s grip on the media. Thus, the logic follows that If audiences are small, cause controversy, and if the public sphere rejects advertisements, then no one profits and the rich cannot become richer. Kevin Robins, a British Sociologist, consequently believes a “depoliticized consumer culture” has displaced the “political public sphere.”

The idea that the elite keeps people informatively in the dark to facilitate efficient media control is eerily redolent of Plato’s cave allegory: individuals with knowledge based solely on the manipulated shadows reflected on the cave walls will be ignorant of the truth above ground. However, what makes the world outside the cave truthful?

Professor Brian Redekopp, Profile Coordinator of Society & Technology at Dawson College, believes the propaganda model is more complex than Herman and Chomsky’s explanation. “It’s an age-old problem ever since there have been newspapers,” he says, “it is the profit motive versus the public interest motive. You might think that those two things are opposite, but it’s messy.”

Professor Redekopp validates the extensive research Herman and Chomsky collected to reify the propaganda model, yet thinks the theory is a “fundamentally abstract argument.” Both authors provide a cause-and-effect method of analysis to prove journalism’s corruption, but where and what exactly is it?

Posing this question incites further moral inquiry: what is ‘good’ journalism? What is the perfect ratio between profit motive and public interest motive? What makes journalism corrupt? What is the limit before we consider journalism as vitiated and a misrepresentation of the truth? All of these questions will yield substantially different answers since they have no inherent truth value, hence why there are no legitimate and logical answers.

To fully understand the propaganda model as a step towards ‘good’ journalism, we need to have the same objective outlook as Herman and Chomsky on what ‘good’ journalism is. Is it simply removing all that is harmful? What is harmful? Can information be objectively detrimental? As you can see, dismantling the system proposed by the propaganda model is harder than it appears.

Ultimately, we cannot successfully ‘eat the rich’ and dismantle industries that manipulate the media if we cannot universally classify the merits and demerits of journalism. We know undoubtedly that all journalism is orchestrated in one way or another to perform various functions, but when and if that guidance becomes exploitation is unverifiable.