One of the pillars of the “propaganda model” in the original Manufacturing Consent was that the media used anti-communism as an organizing religion. The ongoing Cold War narrative helped the press use anti-communism as a club to batter heretical thinkers, who as luck would have it were often socialists. They even used it as a club to police people who weren’t socialists (I would see this years later, when Howard Dean was asked a dozen times a day if he was “too left” to be a viable candidate). But the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet empire took a little wind out of
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