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.

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 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 privatization of the Internet’s hardware, the rapid commercialization and concentration of Internet portals and servers and their integration into non-Internet conglomerates—the AOL–Time Warner merger was a giant step in that direction—and the private and concentrated control of the new broadband technology, together threaten to limit any future prospects of the Internet as a democratic media vehicle.

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.

Alex Carey, Stuart Ewen, John Stauber, and Sheldon Rampton have helped us see how the public relations industry has been able to utilize journalistic conventions to serve its—and its corporate clients’—ends.18 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.

When the Soviet economy stagnated in the 1980s, it was attributed to the absence of markets; when capitalist Russia disintegrated in the 1990s, this was blamed not on the now ruling market but on politicians’ and workers’ failure to let markets work their magic.20 Journalism has internalized this ideology. Adding it to the residual power of anticommunism in a world in which the global power of market institutions makes nonmarket options seem utopian gives us an ideological package of immense strength.

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.

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.

The victims of Pol Pot, a Communist leader, were worthy, although after he was ousted by the Vietnamese in 1978, Cambodians ceased to be worthy, as U.S. policy shifted toward support of Pol Pot in exile.32

New York Times foreign affairs commentator Leslie Gelb justified classifying Vietnam an “outlaw” on the grounds that “they had killed Americans.”61 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.

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.”

the other establishment figures who have used this argument have ever questioned the U.S. right to intervene by force to stop the “march of communism” in a country where the Communists had led a nationalist revolution, were recognized by all official and nonofficial authorities to command the support of a large majority of the population, and where their defeat would require open aggression, mass killing, and the virtual destruction of a distant society.

These movies turned history on its head. As Vietnam war historian H. Bruce Franklin points out, “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.”83 The powerful cultural myth of abused POWs as the central feature of the Vietnam war not only allowed the war to be extended, it helped justify the U.S. failure to aid its victim in accord with end-of-war promises and it provided the basis for an eighteen-year economic war against the victim country. It also functioned as a potent agent of militarization and force weakening the “Vietnam syndrome.”

In his book Golden Rule, political scientist Thomas Ferguson argues that where the major investors in political parties and elections agree on an issue, the parties will not compete on that issue, no matter how strongly the public might want an alternative. He contends that for ordinary voters to influence electoral choices they would have to have “strong channels that directly facilitate mass deliberation and expression.”101 These would include unions and other intermediate organizations that might, through their collective power, cause the interests of ordinary voters to be given greater weight in the political system.

“over the past dozen years . . . U.S. industry has conducted one of the most successful union wars ever,” helped by “illegally firing thousands of workers for exercising their right to organize,” with unlawful firings occurring in “one-third of all representation elections in the late ’80s.”123 But this successful war was carried out quietly, with media cooperation. The decertification of unions, use of replacement workers, and long, debilitating strikes like that involving Caterpillar were treated in a very low key manner.

the media’s performance often surpassed expectations of media subservience to government propaganda demands.

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.

The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news “objectively” and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; 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.

Indeed, the eclipse of the national radical press was so total that when the Labour Party developed out of the working-class movement in the first decade of the twentieth century, it did not obtain the exclusive backing of a single national daily or Sunday paper.6

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.

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

The Herald, with 8.1 percent of national daily circulation, got 3.5 percent of net advertising revenue; the Sunday Citizen got one-tenth of the net advertising revenue of the Sunday Times and one-seventh that of the Observer (on a per-thousand-copies basis). Curran argues persuasively that the loss of these three papers was an important contribution to the declining fortunes of the Labor party, in the case of the Herald specifically removing a mass-circulation institution that provided “an alternative framework of analysis and understanding that contested the dominant systems of representation in both broadcasting and the mainstream press.”

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!

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.”

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.

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

Only the corporate sector has the resources to produce public information and propaganda on the scale of the Pentagon and other government bodies. The AFSC and NCC cannot duplicate the Mobil Oil company’s multimillion-dollar purchase of newspaper space and other corporate investments to get its viewpoint across.72 The number of individual corporations with budgets for public information and lobbying in excess of those of the AFSC and NCC runs into the hundreds, perhaps even the thousands.

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. The large entities that provide this subsidy become “routine” news sources and have privileged access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers. It should also be noted that 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.

The relation between power and sourcing extends beyond official and corporate provision of day-to-day news to shaping the supply of “experts.” The dominance of official sources is weakened by the existence of highly respectable unofficial sources that give dissident views with great authority. This problem is alleviated by “co-opting the experts”87—i.e., putting them on the payroll as consultants, funding their research, and organizing think tanks that will hire them directly and help disseminate their messages. In this way bias may be structured, and the supply of experts may be skewed in the direction desired by the government and “the market.”

The mass media themselves also provide “experts” who regularly echo the official view. John Barron and Claire Sterling are household names as authorities on the KGB and terrorism because the Reader’s Digest has funded, published, and publicized their work; the Soviet defector Arkady Shevchenko became an expert on Soviet arms and intelligence because Time, ABC-TV, and the New York Times chose to feature him (despite his badly tarnished credentials).95 By giving these purveyors of the preferred view a great deal of exposure, the media confer status and make them the obvious candidates for opinion and analysis.

It is interesting to observe how the former sinners, whose previous work was of little interest or an object of ridicule to the mass media, are suddenly elevated to prominence and become authentic experts. We may recall how, during the McCarthy era, defectors and ex-Communists vied with one another in tales of the imminence of a Soviet invasion and other lurid stories.

During the McCarthy years, many advertisers and radio and television stations were effectively coerced into quiescence and blacklisting of employees by the threats of determined Red hunters to boycott products. Advertisers are still concerned to avoid offending constituencies that might produce flak, and their demand for suitable programming is a continuing feature of the media environment.98 If certain kinds of fact, position, or program are thought likely to elicit flak, this prospect can be a deterrent.

The function of AIM is to harass the media and put pressure on them to follow the corporate agenda and a hard-line, right-wing foreign policy. It presses the media to join more enthusiastically in Red-scare band-wagons, and attacks them for alleged deficiencies whenever they fail to toe the line on foreign policy. It conditions the media to expect trouble (and cost increases) for violating right-wing standards of bias.

The Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were traumas to Western elites, and the ongoing conflicts and the well-publicized abuses of Communist states have contributed to elevating opposition to communism to a first principle of Western ideology and politics. This ideology helps mobilize the populace against an enemy, and because the concept is fuzzy it can be used against anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests or support accommodation with Communist states and radicalism. It therefore helps fragment the left and labor movements and serves as a political-control mechanism. If the triumph of communism is the worst imaginable result, the support of fascism abroad is justified as a lesser evil. Opposition to social democrats who are too soft on Communists and “play into their hands” is rationalized in similar terms.

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.117

Reports of the abuses of worthy victims not only pass through the filters; they may also become the basis of sustained propaganda campaigns. If the government or corporate community and the media feel that a story is useful as well as dramatic, they focus on it intensively and use it to enlighten the public. This was true, for example, of the shooting down by the Soviets of the Korean airliner KAL 007 in early September 1983, which permitted an extended campaign of denigration of an official enemy and greatly advanced Reagan administration arms plans. As Bernard Gwertzman noted complacently in the New York Times of August 31, 1984, U.S. officials “assert that worldwide criticism of the Soviet handling of the crisis has strengthened the United States in its relations with Moscow.” In sharp contrast, the shooting down by Israel of a Libyan civilian airliner in February 1973 led to no outcry in the West, no denunciations for “cold-blooded murder,”120 and no boycott. This difference in treatment was explained by the New York Times precisely on the grounds of utility: “No useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame for the downing of a Libyan airliner in the Sinai peninsula last week.”121 There was a very “useful purpose” served by focusing on the Soviet act, and a massive propaganda campaign ensued.

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.

Any possible U.S. connection to the crime was, of course, “far out,” and could not be raised in the U.S. media. That we don’t do this sort of thing is an ideological premise of the patriotic press, no matter what the facts of recent history tell us.

The sponsor government tries to associate the election with the happy word “democracy” and the military regime it backs with support of the elections (and hence democracy). It emphasizes what a wonderful thing it is to be able to hold any election at all under conditions of internal conflict, and it makes it appear a moral triumph that the army has agreed to support the election (albeit reluctantly) and abide by its results.

In brief, 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.”9 It even acknowledges this fact: a senior U.S. official told members of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) observing the Nicaraguan election: 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.10

It should also be emphasized that no party could organize and run candidates in El Salvador that put high priority on terminating the war by negotiations with the rebels. What makes this especially important is that reporters and observers were unanimous in 1982 that the main thing the public wanted out of the election was peace. The propaganda formula for getting out the vote in 1982 was “ballots versus bullets,” with the implication that ballots were a possible route to a reduction in the use of bullets. If, in fact, no peace candidate was eligible to run, the election was a fraud for this reason alone.

It is a highly significant fact that neither then, nor before, was there any detectable questioning of the righteousness of the American cause in Vietnam, or of the necessity to proceed to full-scale “intervention.” By that time, of course, only questions of tactics and costs remained open, and further discussion in the mainstream media was largely limited to these narrow issues.

Representing the more dovish view, David Fromkin and James Chace assert without argument that “the American decision to intervene in Indochina was predicated on the view that the United States has a duty to look beyond its purely national interests,” and that, pursuant to its “global responsibilities,” the United States must “serve the interests of mankind.” “As a moral matter we were right to choose the lesser of two evils” and to oppose “communist aggression” by the Vietnamese in Vietnam, but on the “practical side” it was “wrong” because “our side was likely to lose.” The moral imperatives of our service “to the interests of mankind” do not, however, require that we intervene to overthrow governments that are slaughtering their own populations, such as the Indonesian government we supported in 1965, or our Guatemalan and Salvadoran clients of the 1980s. On the contrary, they observe, the success of our Indonesian allies in destroying the domestic political opposition by violence in 1965 was a respectable achievement that should have led us to reconsider our Vietnam policy.

As the elite consensus eroded in the late 1960s, criticism of the “noble cause” on grounds of its lack of success became more acceptable, and the category of “wild men in the wings” narrowed to those who opposed the war on grounds of principle—the same grounds on which they opposed the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and, later, Afghanistan.

In reporting the war in Afghanistan, it is considered essential and proper to observe it from the standpoint of the victims. In the case of Indochina, it was the American invaders who were regarded as the victims of the “aggression” of the Vietnamese, and the war was reported from their point of view, just as subsequent commentary, including cinema, views the war from this perspective.

While the press corps in those years diligently reported what the government said about Vietnam, and questioned the inconsistencies as they arose, too few sought out opposing viewpoints and expertise until too late, when events and the prominence of the Vietnam dissent could no longer be ignored. In coverage of the war, the press corps’ job narrowed down to three basic tasks—reporting what the government said, finding out whether it was true, and assessing whether the policy enunciated worked. The group did a highly professional job on the first task. But it fell down on the second and third, and there is strong evidence the reason is too many reporters sought the answers in all three categories from the same basic source—the government.

Putting this interesting perspective to the side, as far as this period is concerned we may dismiss the conception that the media “lost the war,” although it would be quite accurate to conclude that they encouraged the United States to enter and pursue a war of aggression, which they later were to regard as “a tragedy,” or “a blunder,” while never acknowledging their fundamental contribution to rallying public support for the policies that they were ultimately to deplore. Given the conformism and obedience of the media during this crucial period, when the basis for U.S. aggression was firmly and irrevocably laid, it is small wonder that public concern was so slight, and that opposition was so negligible as to be entirely without significance. Only the most ardent researcher could have developed a moderately clear understanding of what was taking place in Indochina.