Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

by Edward S. Herman

It is our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The

In our view, the same underlying power sources that own the media and fund them as advertisers, that serve as primary definers of the news, and that produce flak and proper-thinking experts, also play a key role in fixing basic principles and the dominant ideologies.

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 United States and other Western governments have pressed the interests of their home-country firms eager to expand abroad, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have done the same, striving with considerable success to enlarge transnational corporate access to media markets across the globe.

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.

short, the changes in politics and communication over the past dozen years have tended on balance to enhance the applicability of the propaganda model. The increase in corporate power and global reach, the mergers and further centralization of the media, and the decline of public broadcasting, have made bottom-line considerations more influential both in the United States and abroad. 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.

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

years.23 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.

This reflects the common establishment view, implicit in Bush’s comment, that nobody has a right of self-defense against this country, even if it intervenes across the ocean to impose by force a government that the people of that country reject.

U.S. leaders have opposed the use of chemical warfare—by enemy states—but it is a different matter when they choose to use such weaponry themselves, or when a client state does the same.

the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.

It can be seen in table 1–1 that all but one of the top companies for whom data are available have assets in excess of $1 billion, and the median size (middle item by size) is $2.6 billion. It can also be seen in the table that approximately three-quarters of these media giants had after-tax profits in excess of $100 million, with the median at $183 million.

active corporate executives and bankers together account for a little over half the total of the outside directors of ten media giants; and the lawyers and corporate-banker retirees (who account for nine of the thirteen under “Retired”) push the corporate total to about two-thirds of the outside-director aggregate.

These investors are a force helping press media companies toward strictly market (profitability) objectives.

Only a small minority of the twenty-four largest media giants remain in a single media sector.

In sum, 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.

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.

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.

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!

For a television network, an audience gain or loss of one percentage point in the Nielsen ratings translates into a change in advertising revenue of from $80 to $100 million a year, with some variation depending on measures of audience “quality.”

an advertising-based media system will gradually increase advertising time and marginalize or eliminate altogether programming that has significant public-affairs

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.

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

ought to know what it is their job to know . . . In particular, a newsworker will recognize an official’s claim to knowledge not merely as a claim, but as a credible, competent piece of knowledge. This amounts to a moral division of labor: officials have and give the facts; reporters merely get them.

taking information from sources that may be presumed credible reduces investigative expense, whereas material from sources that are not prima facie credible, or that will elicit criticism and threats, requires careful checking and costly research.

In 1971, an Armed Forces Journal survey revealed that the Pentagon was publishing a total of 371 magazines at an annual cost of some $57 million, an operation sixteen times larger than the nation’s biggest publisher.

lobbying, and political and think-tank contributions. Aggregate corporate and trade-association political advertising and grass-roots outlays were estimated to have reached the billion-dollar-a-year level by 1978, and to have grown to $1.6 billion by 1984.

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.

in the case of the largesse of the Pentagon and the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy,81 the subsidy is at the taxpayers’ expense, so that, in effect, the citizenry pays to be propagandized in the interest of powerful groups such as military contractors and other sponsors of state terrorism.

Although the flak machines steadily attack the mass media, the media treat them well. They receive respectful attention, and their propagandistic role and links to a larger corporate program are rarely mentioned or analyzed.

Communism as the ultimate evil has always been the specter haunting property owners, as it threatens the very root of their class position and superior status.

If the triumph of communism is the worst imaginable result, the support of fascism abroad is justified as a lesser evil.

“Concentrate on the victims of enemy powers and forget about the victims of friends.”

Our hypothesis is that worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically, that they will be humanized, and that their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will generate reader interest and sympathetic emotion. In contrast, unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage.

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.

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.

Studies by Amnesty International (AI), Americas Watch (AW), and other human-rights monitors have documented a military machine run amok, with the indiscriminate killing of peasants (including vast numbers of women and children), the forcible relocation of hundreds of thousands of farmers and villagers into virtual concentration camps, and the enlistment of many hundreds of thousands in compulsory civil patrols.

From the beginning, the administration strove to embrace and provide arms to the military governments. Ongoing mass murder was merely an inconvenience.

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 a...

The Reagan administration chose to support and provide regular apologetics for a genocidal government that was using a policy of massacre to destroy a purely indigenous revolt.

in the Dominican Republic in 1966, and periodically thereafter, the United States organized what have been called “demonstration elections” in its client states, defined as those whose primary function is to convince the home population that the intervention is well intentioned, that the populace of the invaded and occupied country welcomes the intrusion, and that they are being given a democratic choice.1

That is, the favored elections will be found to legitimize, no matter what the facts; the disfavored election will be found deficient, farcical, and failing to legitimize—again, irrespective of facts.

the government used a well-nigh perfect system of Orwellian doublethink: forgetting a criterion “that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, . . . draw[ing] it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed.”

The United States is not obliged to apply the same standard of judgment to a country whose government is avowedly hostile to the U.S. as for a country like El Salvador, where it is not. These people [the Sandinistas] could bring about a situation in Central America which could pose a threat to U.S. security. That allows us to change our yardstick.

The 1984–85 elections followed the greatest era of mass murder in modern Guatemalan history—under the regimes of Lucas García, Ríos Montt, and Mejía Víctores.

MIG ploy was, nevertheless, entirely successful. A tone of crisis was manufactured, and “options” against the hypothetical Sandinista “threat” were placed at the center of public attention.

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.