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.

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. These giants own all the world’s major film studios, TV networks, and music companies, and a sizable fraction of the most important cable channels, cable systems, magazines, major-market TV stations, and book publishers.

See prior section: in 1983 there were 50 media/news agencies

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.

McChesney adds that “it should come as no surprise that account after account in the late 1990s documents the fascination, even the obsession, of the world’s middle class youth with consumer brands and products.”8

Globalization, along with deregulation and national budgetary pressures, has also helped reduce the importance of noncommercial media in country after country.

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.”

the Internet has increased the efficiency and scope of individual and group networking.

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.

victims of enemy states will be found “worthy” and will be subject to more intense and indignant coverage than those victimized by the United States or its clients, who are implicitly “unworthy.”

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.

As the leader of the faction insisting on harsh sanctions against Iraq following the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the United States itself was responsible for a very large number of Iraqi civilians deaths in the 1990s.

However, as these deaths resulted from U.S. policy, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared on national television that these 500,000 child deaths were “worth it,”35 we would expect the U.S. media to find these victims unworthy, to give them little attention and less indignation, and to find the word “genocide” inapplicable to this case.

But Goodman’s and Ford’s testimony showed that this was the reverse of the truth, and that CIA heads William Casey and Robert Gates overrode the views of CIA professionals and falsified evidence to support a Soviet linkage.

The United States first intervened in Indochina immediately after World War II in support of French recolonization, after which it carried out a twenty-one-year effort (1954–75) to impose a government in the southern half of Vietnam that U.S. officials and analysts consistently recognized as lacking any substantial indigenous support, and in opposition to local nationalist—though Communist—forces that were understood to have a mass base. U.S. leaders operated on the belief that their overwhelming military might would not only enable them, but entitled them, to force submission to a minority government of U.S. choice. By normal word usage this would make the U.S. effort in Vietnam a case of “aggression.”

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.

President George Bush stated in 1992 that “Hanoi knows today that we seek only answers without the threat of retribution for the past.”59 That is, the Vietnamese had done things to us that might justify retribution on our part, but we only seek answers regarding our men missing in action.60 New York Times foreign affairs commentator Leslie Gelb justified classifying Vietnam an “outlaw” on the grounds that “they had killed Americans.”

A 1967 study prepared by the head of the Agronomy Section of the Japanese Science Council concluded that U.S. anticrop warfare had already ruined more than 3.8 million acres of arable land in South Vietnam, killing almost 1,000 peasants and over 13,000 livestock.65 This policy of attempting to force enemy capitulation by destroying its food supply was not only contrary to the rules of war,66 it was notable in that it “first and overwhelmingly affected small children.”

During the Vietnam war, the use of chemicals was reported and criticized in the U.S. media when first disclosed in 1966, but the subject was quickly dropped. The illegality of chemical warfare and a policy of starvation, and their effects on the victim population, were virtually unreported.

We also noted earlier that this ferocious U.S. assault on the South—which contradicted the claim that we were protecting South Vietnamese—remains invisible in the U.S. media.

Another important theme in the mainstream media for many years has been the notion that the United States was the victim in the Vietnam war, the Vietnamese the cruel villains. This remarkable inversion of reality has been accomplished by two processes: first, by a massive suppression of evidence on the consequences of the war for the Vietnamese; and second, by demonizing the victims, based in large measure on “the national beatification of POWs [prisoners of war] and the myth of POWs as martyrs still being tortured by Vietnam.”

“America’s vision of the war was being transformed. The actual photographs and TV footage of massacred villagers, napalmed children, Vietnamese prisoners being tortured and murdered, wounded GI’s screaming in agony, and body bags being loaded by the dozen for shipment back home were being replaced by simulated images of American POWs in the savage hands of Asian communists.”

In the health insurance controversy of 1992–93, the media’s refusal to take the single-payer option seriously, despite apparent widespread public support and the effectiveness of the system in Canada, served well the interests of the insurance and medical service complex.142 The uncritical media reporting and commentary on the alleged urgency of fiscal restraint and a balanced budget in the years 1992–96 fit well the business community’s desire to reduce the social budget and weaken regulation.143 The media’s gullibility in accepting the claim of a Social Security system “crisis,” which would require policy action some thirty-seven years ahead if certain conservative guesses were true and a number of easy corrections were ruled out, served the interests of conservative ideologues anxious to weaken a highly successful government program and a security industry eager to benefit from the partial or full privatization of Social Security.144 The applicability of the propaganda model in these and other cases, including the media’s handling of the “drug wars,” seems clear.

The mass media are not a solid monolith on all issues. Where the powerful are in disagreement, there will be a certain diversity of tactical judgments on how to attain generally shared aims, reflected in media debate. But views that challenge fundamental premises or suggest that the observed modes of exercise of state power are based on systemic factors will be excluded from the mass media even when elite controversy over tactics rages fiercely.

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,

In criticizing media priorities and biases we often draw on the media themselves for at least some of the facts. This affords the opportunity for a classic non sequitur, in which the citations of facts from the mainstream press by a critic of the press is offered as a triumphant “proof” that the criticism is self-refuting, and that media coverage of disputed issues is indeed adequate. That the media provide some facts about an issue, however, proves absolutely nothing about the adequacy or accuracy of that coverage. The mass media do, in fact, literally suppress a great deal, as we will describe in the chapters that follow. But even more important in this context is the question of the attention given to a fact—its placement, tone, and repetitions, the framework of analysis within which it is presented, and the related facts that accompany it and give it meaning (or preclude understanding).

In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite. It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance.

The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news “filters,” fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and “experts” funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) “flak” as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) “anticommunism” as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. 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.

Similar processes were at work in the United States, where the start-up cost of a new paper in New York City in 1851 was $69,000; the public sale of the St. Louis Democrat in 1872 yielded $456,000; and city newspapers were selling at from $6 to $18 million in the 1920s.8 The cost of machinery alone, of even very small newspapers, has for many decades run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars; in 1945 it could be said that “Even small-newspaper publishing is big business … [and] is no longer a trade one takes up lightly even if he has substantial cash—or takes up at all if he doesn’t.”

Many of the large media companies are fully integrated into the market, and for the others, too, the pressures of stockholders, directors, and bankers to focus on the bottom line are powerful. These pressures have intensified in recent years as media stocks have become market favorites, and actual or prospective owners of newspapers and television properties have found it possible to capitalize increased audience size and advertising revenues into multiplied values of the media franchises—and great wealth.

This trend toward greater integration of the media into the market system has been accelerated by the loosening of rules limiting media concentration, cross-ownership, and control by non-media companies.20 There has also been an abandonment of restrictions—previously quite feeble anyway—on radio-TV commercials, entertainment-mayhem programming, and “fairness doctrine” threats, opening the door to the unrestrained commercial use of the airwaves.

Many older newspaper-based media companies, fearful of the power of television and its effects on advertising revenue, moved as rapidly as they could into broadcasting and cable TV. Time, Inc., also, made a major diversification move into cable TV, which now accounts for more than half its profits. Only a small minority of the twenty-four largest media giants remain in a single media sector.

The great media also depend on the government for more general policy support. All business firms are interested in business taxes, interest rates, labor policies, and enforcement and nonenforcement of the antitrust laws. GE and Westinghouse depend on the government to subsidize their nuclear power and military research and development, and to create a favorable climate for their overseas sales. The Reader’s Digest, Time, Newsweek, and movie- and television-syndication sellers also depend on diplomatic support for their rights to penetrate foreign cultures with U.S. commercial and value messages and interpretations of current affairs. The media giants, advertising agencies, and great multinational corporations have a joint and close interest in a favorable climate of investment in the Third World, and their interconnections and relationships with the government in these policies are symbiotic.

Curran and Seaton give the growth of advertising a status comparable with the increase in capital costs as a factor allowing the market to accomplish what state taxes and harassment failed to do, noting that these “advertisers thus acquired a de facto licensing authority since, without their support, newspapers ceased to be economically viable.”

From the time of the introduction of press advertising, therefore, working-class and radical papers have been at a serious disadvantage. Their readers have tended to be of modest means, a factor that has always affected advertiser interest.

Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the “buying mood.” They seek programs that will lightly entertain and thus fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose of program purchases—the dissemination of a selling message.

The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest. 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.

Only the corporate sector has the resources to produce public information and propaganda on the scale of the Pentagon and other government bodies.

Powerful sources may also use their prestige and importance to the media as a lever to deny critics access to the media: the Defense Department, for example, refused to participate in National Public Radio discussions of defense issues if experts from the Center for Defense Information were on the program; Elliott Abrams refused to appear on a program on human rights in Central America at the Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University, unless the former ambassador, Robert White, was excluded as a participant;83 Claire Sterling refused to participate in television-network shows on the Bulgarian Connection where her critics would appear.84 In the last two of these cases, the authorities and brand-name experts were successful in monopolizing access by coercive threats.

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 chronic focus on the plight of Soviet dissidents, on enemy killings in Cambodia, and on the Bulgarian Connection helped weaken the Vietnam syndrome, justify a huge arms buildup and a more aggressive foreign policy, and divert attention from the upward redistribution of income that was the heart of Reagan’s domestic economic program.123 The recent propaganda-disinformation attacks on Nicaragua have been needed to avert eyes from the savagery of the war in El Salvador and to justify the escalating U.S. investment in counterrevolution in Central America.

Some propaganda campaigns are jointly initiated by government and media; all of them require the collaboration of the mass media. The secret of the unidirectionality of the politics of media propaganda campaigns is the multiple filter system discussed above: the mass media will allow any stories that are hurtful to large interests to peter out quickly, if they surface at all.

While the coverage of the worthy victim was generous with gory details and quoted expressions of outrage and demands for justice, the coverage of the unworthy victims was low-keyed, designed to keep the lid on emotions and evoking regretful and philosophical generalities on the omnipresence of violence and the inherent tragedy of human life. This qualitative difference is already apparent in placement and editorializing: ten front-page articles on Popieluszko is a statement about importance, as is the fact of three editorials denouncing the Poles, without a single editorial denunciation for the murderers of the unworthy victims.

“A police state is especially responsible for the actions of its police”

Only a few weeks prior to his murder he had written a forceful letter to President Jimmy Carter opposing the imminent granting of U.S. aid to the junta as destructive of Salvadoran interests. The Carter administration had been so disturbed by Romero’s opposition to its policies that it had secretly lobbied the pope to curb the archbishop.

In a remarkable feat of self-censorship, most of the mass media completely ignored the Dinges findings. Dinges’s report appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and some fifteen other papers, but not a word of it found its way into the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, or CBS News, and its leads were not pursued by any media. Instead, the media kept repeating the assurances of Duarte and U.S. officials that they were satisfied that the killings did not go beyond the local national guardsmen, and that the matter would be pursued diligently through proper legal channels.

The U.S. government also engaged in a systematic cover-up—of both the Salvadoran cover-up and the facts of the case. The U.S. mass media, while briefly noting the Salvadoran stonewalling, failed to call attention to the equally important lies and suppressions of their own government. As we have pointed out, both the Carter and Reagan administrations put protection of its client above the quest for justice for four U.S. citizens murdered by agents of that government. The U.S. government’s stonewalling to protect its client took many forms. One was an active collaboration in the Salvadoran cover-up. Former National Guard sergeant Dagoberto Martinez was allowed to emigrate to the United States in December 1980, and although a subsequent interview by the FBI indicated that Martinez admitted knowledge of the perpetrators of the crime and a failure to report that information—in violation of Salvadoran law—no action was taken against him. U.S. officials also reiterated that there was no reason to believe that higher-level officials knew about the crime or participated in it, when they had clear knowledge of a cover-up and a refusal to investigate.67 The State Department also regularly lied about the thoroughness of the investigation. Ambassador Hinton stated in public that national guardsman Pérez Nieto “was thoroughly interrogated and repeatedly denied that anyone superior to him had ordered him to watch the women.” A State Department cable, however, describes Nieto’s testimony ...

Part of the reason the administration wanted control was to allow it to claim reasonable progress in the pursuit of the case whenever the military government was due for more money. As with other right-wing satellites, “improvement” is always found at money-crunch time.

Before looking at the media’s handling of Guatemala, however, let us step back for a brief review of the crucial period 1945–54 and its sequel to set the stage for an examination of the media’s role in the 1980s. Arbenz and his predecessor, Juan Arévalo, led the first democratic system in Guatemalan history. During the decade of their rule, newspapers, social groups, unions, peasants, and political parties could organize without fear of repression or murder.72 But this fragile democracy rested on a base of concentrated land ownership and foreign control of land and strategic facilities that was a constant threat to its independence and political freedom, as well as a human disaster. The struggle for unionization and land reform during the democratic decade was motivated in part by a desire to build a mass constituency that would provide an institutional base for democracy.73 Each progressive move by both Arévalo and Arbenz was greeted with fierce hostility by the local oligarchy, the multinational corporate community, and the U.S. government.74 “Communism” was found to be in control, or a threat, from the time trade unions were allowed to organize in 1947, and Arbenz’s modest and effective land reform was the last straw.75 With U.S. initiative, organization, funding, and direct psychological warfare and terror operations, a tiny mercenary army ousted Arbenz and installed an “anti-Communist” regime. From 1954 to the present day, neither reform nor democracy, let alone radic...