Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

by Edward S. Herman

the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy. This is normally not accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy. Structural factors are those such as ownership and control, dependence on other major funding sources (notably, advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media and those who make the news and have the power to define it and explain what it means.

individual and professional values influence media work, that policy is imperfectly enforced, and that media policy itself may allow some measure of dissent and reporting that calls into question the accepted viewpoint. These considerations all work to assure some dissent and coverage of inconvenient facts.2 The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.

centralization of the media in a shrinking number of very large firms has accelerated, virtually unopposed by Republican and Democratic administrations and regulatory authority.

Since 1990, a wave of massive deals and rapid globalization have left the media industries further centralized in nine transnational conglomerates—Disney, AOL Time Warner, Viacom (owner of CBS), News Corporation, Bertelsmann, General Electric (owner of NBC), Sony, AT&T-Liberty Media, and Vivendi Universal.

The culture and ideology fostered in this globalization process relate largely to “lifestyle” themes and goods and their acquisition; and they tend to weaken any sense of community helpful to civic life.

Could cozy up next to Deneen

The financial pressures on public broadcasters has forced them to shrink or emulate the commercial systems in fund-raising and programming, and some have been fully commercialized by policy change or privatization. The global balance of power has shifted decisively toward commercial systems. James Ledbetter points out that in the United States, under incessant right-wing political pressure and financial stringency, “the 90s have seen a tidal wave of commercialism overtake public broadcasting,” with public broadcasters “rushing as fast as they can to merge their services with those offered by commercial networks.”

“it’s troubling that none of the newspaper portals feels that quality journalism is at the center of its strategy … because journalism doesn’t help you sell things.”

The steady advance, and cultural power, of marketing and advertising has caused “the displacement of a political public sphere by a depoliticized consumer culture.”21 And it has had the effect of creating a world of virtual communities built by advertisers and based on demographics and taste differences of consumers. These consumption- and style-based clusters are at odds with physical communities that share a social life and common concerns and which participate in a democratic order.22 These virtual communities are organized to buy and sell goods, not to create or service a public sphere.

Is this really accurate?

But entertainment has the merit not only of being better suited to helping sell goods; it is an effective vehicle for hidden ideological messages.24 Furthermore, in a system of high and growing inequality, entertainment is the contemporary equivalent of the Roman “games of the circus” that diverts the public from politics and generates a political apathy that is helpful to preservation of the status quo.

The double standard reflected in the politicized use of “genocide” is applicable to the treatment of news events more broadly, with the media regularly focusing on the abuse of worthy victims and playing down or neglecting altogether the plight of unworthy victims.

Labor has been under renewed siege in the United States for the past several decades, its condition adversely affected by the deflationary policies of the early 1980s, corporate downsizing, globalization, a vigorous business campaign to defeat unions, and government support of, or indifference to, the damage being inflicted on unions and workers.

This effort reflects our belief, based on many years of study of the workings of the media, that they serve to mobilize support for the special interests that dominate the state and private activity,

Perhaps this is an obvious point, but the democratic postulate is that the media are independent and committed to discovering and reporting the truth, and that they do not merely reflect the world as powerful groups wish it to be perceived. Leaders of the media claim that their news choices rest on unbiased professional and objective criteria, and they have support for this contention in the intellectual community.

Censorship is largely self-censorship, by reporters and commentators who adjust to the realities of source and media organizational requirements, and by people at higher levels within media organizations who are chosen to implement, and have usually internalized, the constraints imposed by proprietary and other market and governmental centers of power.

The power of the government to fix frames of reference and agendas, and to exclude inconvenient facts from public inspection, is also impressively displayed in the coverage of elections in Central America, discussed in chapter 3, and throughout the analysis of particular cases in the chapters that follow.

It is possible that the volume of inconvenient facts can expand, as it did during the Vietnam War, in response to the growth of a critical constituency (which included elite elements from 1968).

During and after the Vietnam War, apologists for state policy commonly pointed to the inconvenient facts, the periodic “pessimism” of media pundits, and the debates over tactics as showing that the media were “adversarial” and even “lost” the war. These allegations are ludicrous, as we show in detail in chapter 5 and appendix 3, but they did have the dual advantage of disguising the actual role of the mass media and, at the same time, pressing the media to keep even more tenaciously to the propaganda assumptions of state policy.

It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.

The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.

working-class and radical papers have been at a serious disadvantage.

Marxist

In short, the mass media are interested in attracting audiences with buying power, not audiences per se; it is affluent audiences that spark advertiser interest today, as in the nineteenth century. The idea that the drive for large audiences makes the mass media “democratic” thus suffers from the initial weakness that its political analogue is a voting system weighted by income!

advertisers also choose selectively among programs on the basis of their own principles. With rare exceptions these are culturally and politically conservative.

It seems to have switched these days

The media need a steady, reliable flow of the raw material of news. They have daily news demands and imperative news schedules that they must meet. They cannot afford to have reporters and cameras at all places where important stories may break. Economics dictates that they concentrate their resources where significant news often occurs, where important rumors and leaks abound, and where regular press conferences are held. The White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department, in Washington, D.C., are central nodes of such news activity.

“the principle of bureaucratic affinity: only other bureaucracies can satisfy the input needs of a news bureaucracy.”

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.

This strategy can be traced back at least as far as the Committee on Public Information, established to coordinate propaganda during World War I, which “discovered in 1917–18 that one of the best means of controlling news was flooding news channels with ‘facts,’ or what amounted to official information.”

Flak from the powerful can be either direct or indirect. The direct would include letters or phone calls from the White House to Dan Rather or William Paley, or from the FCC to the television networks asking for documents used in putting together a program, or from irate officials of ad agencies or corporate sponsors to media officials asking for reply time or threatening retaliation.99 The powerful can also work on the media indirectly by complaining to their own constituencies (stockholders, employees) about the media, by generating institutional advertising that does the same, and by funding right-wing monitoring or think-tank operations designed to attack the media.

Messages from and about dissidents and weak, unorganized individuals and groups, domestic and foreign, are at an initial disadvantage in sourcing costs and credibility, and they often do not comport with the ideology or interests of the gatekeepers and other powerful parties that influence the filtering process.

These victims would be generally acknowledged by the managers of the filters to be worthy. The mass media never explain why Andrei Sakharov is worthy and José Luis Massera, in Uruguay, is unworthy—the attention and general dichotomization occur “naturally” as a result of the working of the filters, but the result is the same as if a commissar had instructed the media: “Concentrate on the victims of enemy powers and forget about the victims of friends.”

Propaganda campaigns in general have been closely attuned to elite interests. The Red scare of 1919–20 served well to abort the union-organizing drive that followed World War I in the steel and other industries. The Truman-McCarthy Red scare helped inaugurate the Cold War and the permanent war economy, and it also served to weaken the progressive coalition of the New Deal years.

The modern history of Guatemala was decisively shaped by the U.S.-organized invasion and overthrow of the democratically elected regime of Jacobo Arbenz in June 1954. Since that time, while Guatemala has remained securely within the U.S. sphere of influence, badly needed economic and social reforms were put off the agenda indefinitely, political democracy was stifled, and state terror was institutionalized and reached catastrophic levels in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The U.S. establishment found the pluralism and democracy of the years 1945–54 intolerable, and it eventually ended that experiment.79 In the succeeding thirty-two years of U.S. guidance, not only has Guatemala gradually become a terrorist state rarely matched in the scale of systematic murder of civilians, but its terrorist proclivities have increased markedly at strategic moments of escalated U.S. intervention.

As in many U.S. client states, the military used its power to carve out economic opportunities and to steal, directly or indirectly.

It is evident that we have here a consistent pattern that may be formulated into a quasi-law: in the case of a terrorist state with which the administration wants “constructive engagement,” things are always OK and improving; but when that regime is ousted, its record deteriorates ex post facto and looks most unfavorable compared with the humanistic and sensitive one now in power! This droll pattern of identical apologetics for each successor terrorist, and ex post denigration of the one ousted, is an Orwellian process that the Western press associates with totalitarian states, but it happens here. And it can only occur if the mass media are cooperative.

In its concern to protect the Guatemalan generals in their terroristic assault on the population, the Reagan administration took umbrage at organizations like Amnesty International and Americas Watch and mounted a systematic campaign in 1981 and 1982 to discredit them as left-wing and politically biased.

“Off the agenda” for the government in its own sponsored elections are all of the basic parameters that make an election meaningful or meaningless prior to the election-day proceedings. These include: (1) freedom of speech and assembly; (2) freedom of the press; (3) freedom to organize and maintain intermediate economic, social, and political groups (unions, peasant organizations, political clubs, student and teacher associations, etc.); (4) freedom to form political parties, organize members, put forward candidates, and campaign without fear of extreme violence; and (5) the absence of state terror and a climate of fear among the public.

This is in accordance with the hypothesis that the real purpose of the election was to placate the home population of the United States and render them willing to fund more war and terror.

Pravda could hardly be more subservient to state demands than Time in its coverage of demonstration elections.

Given the earlier similar performance of the mass media in the cases of the U.S.-sponsored elections in the Dominican Republic in 1966 and Vietnam in 1967, we offer the tentative generalization that the U.S. mass media will always find a Third World election sponsored by their own government a “step toward democracy,” and an election held in a country that their government is busily destabilizing a farce and a sham.

Big Brother’s

References to orwell throughout

Free-Market Disinformation as “News”

It is widely held that the media “lost the war” by exposing the general population to its horrors and by unfair, incompetent, and biased coverage reflecting the “adversary culture” of the sixties. The media’s reporting of the Tet offensive has served as the prime example of this hostility to established power, which, it has been argued, undermines democratic institutions and should be curbed, either by the media themselves or by the state. A propaganda

“For the first time in history,” Robert Elegant writes, “the outcome of a war was determined not in the battlefield, but on the printed page, and above all, on the television screen,” leading to the defeat of the United States in Vietnam. The belief that the media, particularly television, were responsible for U.S. government failures is widely expressed. It was endorsed by the right-wing media-monitoring organization Accuracy in Media in its hour-long “Vietnam Op/Ed” aired by public television in response to its own thirteen-part series on the war.2 According to a more “moderate” expression of this view, the media had become a “notable new source of national power” by 1970 as part of a general “excess of democracy,” contributing to “the reduction of governmental authority” at home and a resulting “decline in the influence of democracy abroad.”

New York Times television critic John Corry defends the media as merely “unmindful,” not “unpatriotic” as the harsher critics claim. They are not “anti-American,” despite their adversarial stance; rather, “they reflect a powerful element of the journalistic-literary-political culture,” where “the left wins battles … by default” because “its ideas make up the moral and intellectual framework for a large part of the culture,” and “television becomes an accomplice of the left when it allows the culture to influence its news judgments,” as in his view it regularly does.

There was, no doubt, increased pessimism within the German general staff after Stalingrad. Similarly, Soviet elites openly expressed concern over the wisdom of “the defense of Afghanistan” and its costs, and some might have been “overly pessimistic” about the likelihood of success in this endeavor. But in neither case do we interpret these reactions as a departure from service to the national cause as defined by the state authorities.

Unable to develop any political base in the south, the U.S. government proceeded to expand the war. It was able to do this by continually manipulating the political scene in South Vietnam to assure the attainment of its objective: continued fighting until an anti-Communist regime, susceptible to American will, was established in the South.

But all of this would be nonsense, whatever is discovered; serious evaluation of the media is effectively over when we discover that the basic principle of state propaganda—the principle that the USSR is defending Afghanistan from terrorist attack—is adopted as the unquestioned framework for further reporting and discussion. The same is true in the case of U.S. aggression in Indochina.

The Geneva settlement was quickly undermined by the United States and its client regime because it was taken for granted on all sides that elections would lead to a unified Vietnam under Viet Minh rule. “American intelligence sources were unanimous that Diem [the U.S.-imposed client] would lose any national election,” George Kahin concludes from a close inspection of the available record. The Viet Minh had agreed to the Geneva decision

More generally, through 1956 “the press insured that the reading public would view the war as a struggle between Communism and the Free World,” Susan Welch observes on the basis of her survey of several leading journals. Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were presented as “merely agents of Moscow and Peking whose primary means of gaining support was through terror and force (although occasional mention was made of their nationalist appeal),” while France was “a gallant ally … fighting alongside the United States to preserve liberty and justice in Asia,” a cause carried on by the United States alone after Geneva.

left the United States only one option: to shift the struggle away from the political arena, where it was weak, to the arena of violence, where it was strong.