Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

Well, if you look at these larger media outlets, they have some crucial features in common. First of all, the agenda-setting institutions are big corporations; in fact, they’re mega-corporations, which are highly profitable—and for the most part they’re also linked into even bigger conglomerates.33 And they, like other corporations, have a product to sell and a market they want to sell it to: the product is audiences, and the market is advertisers. So the economic structure of a newspaper is that it sells readers to other businesses. See, they’re not really trying to sell newspapers to people—in fact, very often a journal that’s in financial trouble will try to cut down its circulation, and what they’ll try to do is up-scale their readership, because that increases advertising rates.34 So what they’re doing is selling audiences to other businesses, and for the agenda-setting media like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, they’re in fact selling very privileged, elite audiences to other businesses—overwhelmingly their readers are members of the so-called “political class,” which is the class that makes decisions in our society.