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.

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.

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.

“the hallmark of the global media system is its relentless, ubiquitous commercialism.”

There are, by one count, 20,000 more public relations agents working to doctor the news today than there are journalists writing it.19

The steady advance, and cultural power, of marketing and advertising has caused “the displacement of a political public sphere by a depoliticized consumer culture.”

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.

There is little reason to believe that they would not like to understand why they are working harder with stagnant or declining incomes, have inadequate medical care at high costs, and what is being done in their name all over the world. If they are not getting much information on these topics, the propaganda model can explain why: the sovereigns who control the media choose not to offer such material.

This bias is politically advantageous to U.S. policy-makers, for focusing on victims of enemy states shows those states to be wicked and deserving of U.S. hostility; while ignoring U.S. and client-state victims allows ongoing U.S. policies to proceed more easily, unburdened by the interference of concern over the politically inconvenient victims.

That the same massive political bias displayed earlier in the coverage of Popieluszko and the hundred religious victims in Latin America continues today is suggested by the media’s usage of the word “genocide” in the 1990s, as shown in the accompanying table. “Genocide” is an invidious word that officials apply readily to cases of victimization in enemy states, but rarely if ever to similar or worse cases of victimization by the United States itself or allied regimes.

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. As an illustration, we may consider the contrasting media treatment of the alleged killing of some forty Albanians by the Serbs at Racak, Kosovo, on January 15, 1999, and the Indonesian army-militia killing of “up to 200” East Timorese at Liquica in East Timor on April 6, 1999.38 The former was seen as useful by U.S. officials,39 who were trying to ready the U.S. and Western publics for an imminent NATO attack on Yugoslavia. Although the facts in the Racak killings, which occurred

in the course of fighting between the Serbian military and Kosovo Liberation Army insurgents within Yugoslavia, were and remain in dispute—and recent evidence raises further doubts about the NATO-KLA account of events there40—the deaths were immediately denounced and featured by U.S. and NATO officials as an intolerable “massacre.” The U.S. mainstream media did the same and gave this reported massacre heavy and uncritical attention.41 This helped create the moral basis for the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia that began on March 24, 1999.

But all through this period and later, the Times (and its media rivals) did not focus on fraud or call these elections rigged; in both news stories and editorials they portrayed these deeply flawed elections as steps toward democracy and legitimizing.

Putin had built his popularity by conducting a brutal counterinsurgency war against Chechnya, and his electoral success rested heavily on the fact that the powerful state TV and radio stations campaigned furiously on his behalf and denigrated and gave no broadcasting time to his opponents.

A September 2000 exposé of the Putin election campaign by the expatriate Moscow Times, based on a six-month investigative effort, uncovered compelling evidence of election fraud, including ballot stuffing, ballot destruction, and the creation of 1.3 million “dead souls” inflating the election rolls.50 The U.S. mainstream media, however, never found any evidence of fraud at the time of the election, and they have been reluctant

to report the findings of the Moscow Times study.51 Putin is another “reformer,” like Yeltsin, supported by the West, so that it follows once again that for the mainstream media a flawed election—ha...

According to Vietnamese estimates, the war had cost them 3 million killed, 300,000 missing, 4.4 million wounded, and 2 million harmed by toxic chemicals; and its land was left ravaged by bombs and Rome plows as well as chemical weapons. With 58,000 killed, the U.S. death toll from the war was under one-tenth of 1 percent of its population; Vietnam’s death toll was 17 percent of its population, and only Vietnam’s people were attacked by chemical warfare and had their countryside devastated.

In 1961 and 1962 the Kennedy administration authorized the use of chemicals to destroy rice crops in South Vietnam—in violation of a U.S. tradition as well as international law (Admiral William Leahy, in response to a proposal to destroy Japanese rice crops in 1944, stated that this would “violate every Christian ethic I have ever heard of and all known laws of war”).62