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.

We believe that what journalists do, what they see as newsworthy, and what they take for granted as premises of their work are frequently well explained by the incentives, pressures, and constraints incorporated into such a structural analysis.

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.

the media’s adherence to an official agenda with little dissent is likely to influence public opinion in the desired direction,

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. Robert McChesney notes that “the hallmark of the global media system is its relentless, ubiquitous commercialism.”7

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

The Internet is not an instrument of mass communication for those lacking brand names, an already existing large audience, and/or large resources.

The Boston Globe (a subsidiary of the New York Times) and the Washington Post are offering e-commerce goods and services; and Ledbetter notes that “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.”16 Former New York Times editor Max Frankel says that the more newspapers pursue Internet audiences, “the more will sex, sports, violence, and comedy appear on their menus, slighting, if not altogether ignoring, the news of foreign wars or welfare reform.”

The audience “interaction” facilitated by advancing interactive capabilities mainly help audience members to shop, but they also allow media firms to collect detailed information on their audiences, and thus to fine-tune program features and ads to individual characteristics as well as to sell by a click during programs. Along with reducing privacy, this should intensify commercialization.

The competition for advertising has become more intense and the boundaries between editorial and advertising departments have weakened further. Newsrooms have been more thoroughly incorporated into transnational corporate empires, with budget cuts and a further diminution of management enthusiasm for investigative journalism that would challenge the structures of power.

Studies of news sources reveal that a significant proportion of news originates in public relations releases. 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 triumph of capitalism and the increasing power of those with an interest in privatization and market rule have strengthened the grip of market ideology, at least among the elite, so that regardless of evidence, markets are assumed to be benevolent and even democratic (“market populism” in Thomas Frank’s phrase) and nonmarket mechanisms are suspect, although exceptions are allowed when private firms need subsidies, bailouts, and government help in doing business abroad.

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

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 public is not sovereign over the media—the owners and managers, seeking ads, decide what is to be offered, and the public must choose among these.

Polls regularly show that the public would like more news, documentaries, and other information, and less sex, violence, and other entertainment, even as they do listen to and watch the latter. 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.

U.S. Ambassador Peter Galbraith stating that “while Turkey represses its own Kurds, its cooperation is essential to an American-led mission to protect Iraq’s Kurds from renewed genocide at the hands of Saddam Hussein.”28 Turkey’s treatment of its Kurds was in no way less murderous than Iraq’s treatment of Iraqi Kurds, but for Galbraith, Turkey only “represses,” while Iraq engages in “genocide.”

They reported the CIA revelations tersely, with some still claiming that while the connection had not been proved it had not been disproved either (ignoring the frequent impossibility of proving a negative).

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.2 If, however, the powerful are able to fix the premises of discourse, to decide what the general populace is allowed to see, hear, and think about, and to “manage” public opinion by regular propaganda campaigns, the standard view of how the system works is at serious odds with reality.3

The special importance of propaganda in what Walter Lippmann referred to as the “manufacture of consent” has long been recognized by writers on public opinion, propaganda, and the political requirements of social order.4 Lippmann himself, writing in the early 1920s, claimed that propaganda had already become “a regular organ of popular government,” and was steadily increasing in sophistication and importance.5

In their analysis of the evolution of the media in Great Britain, James Curran and Jean Seaton describe how, in the first half of the nineteenth century, a radical press emerged that reached a national working-class audience. This alternative press was effective in reinforcing class consciousness: it unified the workers because it fostered an alternative value system and framework for looking at the world, and because it “promoted a greater collective confidence by repeatedly emphasizing the potential power of working people to effect social change through the force of ‘combination’ and organized action.”4 This was deemed a major threat by the ruling elites. One MP asserted that the working-class newspapers “inflame passions and awaken their selfishness, contrasting their current condition with what they contend to be their future condition—a condition incompatible with human nature, and those immutable laws which Providence has established for the regulation of civil society.”5 The result was an attempt to squelch the working-class media by libel laws and prosecutions, by requiring an expensive security bond as a condition for publication, and by imposing various taxes designed to drive out radical media by raising their costs. These coercive efforts were not effective, and by mid-century they had been abandoned in favor of the liberal view that the market would enforce responsibility.

Ben Bagdikian stresses the fact that despite the large media numbers, the twenty-nine largest media systems account for over half of the output of newspapers, and most of the sales and audiences in magazines, broadcasting, books, and movies. He contends that these “constitute a new Private Ministry of Information and Culture” that can set the national agenda.

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.18 This has encouraged the entry of speculators and increased the pressure and temptation to focus more intensively on profitability.

the dominant media firms are quite large businesses; they are controlled by very wealthy people or by managers who are subject to sharp constraints by owners and other market-profit–oriented forces;40 and they are closely interlocked, and have important common interests, with other major corporations, banks, and government. This is the first powerful filter that will affect news choices.

Before advertising became prominent, the price of a newspaper had to cover the costs of doing business. With the growth of advertising, papers that attracted ads could afford a copy price well below production costs. This put papers lacking in advertising at a serious disadvantage: their prices would tend to be higher, curtailing sales, and they would have less surplus to invest in improving the salability of the paper (features, attractive format, promotion, etc.). For this reason, an advertising-based system will tend to drive out of existence or into marginality the media companies and types that depend on revenue from sales alone. With advertising, the free market does not yield a neutral system in which final buyer choice decides. The advertisers’ choices influence media prosperity and survival.43 The ad-based media receive an advertising subsidy that gives them a price-marketing-quality edge, which allows them to encroach on and further weaken their ad-free (or ad-disadvantaged) rivals.44 Even if ad-based media cater to an affluent (“upscale”) audience, they easily pick up a large part of the “down-scale” audience, and their rivals lose market share and are eventually driven out or marginalized.

some journals are poor vehicles because “their readers are not purchasers, and any money thrown upon them is so much thrown away.”46

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!

The power of advertisers over television programming stems from the simple fact that they buy and pay for the programs—they are the “patrons” who provide the media subsidy. As such, the media compete for their patronage, developing specialized staff to solicit advertisers and necessarily having to explain how their programs serve advertisers’ needs. The choices of these patrons greatly affect the welfare of the media, and the patrons become what William Evan calls “normative reference organizations,”50 whose requirements and demands the media must accommodate if they are to succeed.51

Public-television station WNET lost its corporate funding from Gulf + Western in 1985 after the station showed the documentary “Hungry for Profit,” which contains material critical of multinational corporate activities in the Third World. Even before the program was shown, in anticipation of negative corporate reaction, station officials “did all we could to get the program sanitized” (according to one station source).53 The chief executive of Gulf + Western complained to the station that the program was “virulently anti-business if not anti-American,” and that the station’s carrying the program was not the behavior “of a friend” of the corporation. The London Economist says that “Most people believe that WNET would not make the same mistake again.”

With the rise in the price of advertising spots, the forgone revenue increases; and with increasing market pressure for financial performance and the diminishing constraints from regulation, an advertising-based media system will gradually increase advertising time and marginalize or eliminate altogether programming that has significant public-affairs content.

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.

Because of their services, continuous contact on the beat, and mutual dependency, the powerful can use personal relationships, threats, and rewards to further influence and coerce the media. The media may feel obligated to carry extremely dubious stories and mute criticism in order not to offend their sources and disturb a close relationship.

Perhaps more important, powerful sources regularly take advantage of media routines and dependency to “manage” the media, to manipulate them into following a special agenda and framework (as we will show in detail in the chapters that follow).85 Part of this management process consists of inundating the media with stories, which serve sometimes to foist a particular line and frame on the media (e.g., Nicaragua as illicitly supplying arms to the Salvadoran rebels), and at other times to help chase unwanted stories off the front page or out of the media altogether (the alleged delivery of MIGs to Nicaragua during the week of the 1984 Nicaraguan election). 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.”86