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Manufacturing Consent
A Propaganda Model
excerpted from the book
Manufacturing Consent
by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
Pantheon Books, 1988
The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It
is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs,
and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a
world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires
systematic propaganda.
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.
A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on
mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out
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the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to
get their messages across to the public. The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of
news "filters," fall under the following headings: (I) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth,
and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (~) 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.
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. In assessing the newsworthiness of the
U.S. government's urgent claims of a shipment of MIGs to Nicaragua on November 5, I984, the media
do not stop to ponder the bias that is inherent in the priority assigned to government-supplied raw
material, or the possibility that the government might be manipulating the news, imposing its own
agenda, and deliberately diverting attention from other material. It requires a macro, alongside a
micro- (story-by-story), view of media operations, to see the pattern of manipulation and systematic
bias.
SIZE, OWNERSHIP, AND PROFIT ORIENTATION OF THE MASS MEDIA: THE FIRST FILTER
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." This was deemed a major threat by the ruling elites. One MP asserted that the
workingclass 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."
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.
Curran and Seaton show that the market did successfully accomplish what state intervention failed to
do. Following the repeal of the punitive taxes on newspapers between I853 and I869, a new daily local
press came into existence, but not one new local working-class daily was established through the rest of
the nineteenth century. Curran and Seaton note that
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
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exclusive backing of a single national daily or Sunday paper.
One important reason for this was the rise in scale of newspaper enterprise and the associated increase
in capital costs from the mid-nineteenth century onward, which was based on technological
improvements along with the owners' increased stress on reaching large audiences. The expansion of
the free market was accompanied by an "industrialization of the press." The total cost of establishing a
national weekly on a profitable basis in I837 was under a thousand pounds, with a break-even
circulation of 6,200 copies. By I867, the estimated start-up cost of a new London daily was 50,000
pounds. The Sunday Express, launched in I9I8, spent over two million pounds before it broke even
with a circulation of over 200,000.
Similar processes were at work in the United States, where the start-up cost of a new paper in New
York City in I85I was $69,000; the public sale of the St. Louis Democrat in I872 yielded $456,000; and
city newspapers were selling at from $6 to $I8 million in the I920s. The cost of machinery alone, of
even very small newspapers, has for many decades run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars; in
I945 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."
Thus the first filter-the limitation on ownership of media with any substantial outreach by the requisite
large size of investment-was applicable a century or more ago, and it has become increasingly effective
over time. In I986 there were some I,500 daily newspapers, 11,000 magazines, 9,000 radio and I,500 TV
stations, Z,400 book publishers, and seven movie studios in the United States-over 25,000 media
entities in all. But a large proportion of those among this set who were news dispensers were very small
and local, dependent on the large national companies and wire services for all but local news. Many
more were subject to common ownership, sometimes extending through virtually the entire set of
media variants.
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.
Actually, while suggesting a media autonomy from corporate and government power that we believe to
be incompatible with structural facts (as we describe below), Bagdikian also may be understating the
degree of effective concentration in news manufacture. It has long been noted that the media are
tiered, with the top tier-as measured by prestige, resources, and outreach-comprising somewhere
between ten and twenty-four systems. It is this top tier, along with the government and wire services,
that defines the news agenda and supplies much of
the national and international news to the lower tiers of the media, and thus for the general public.
Centralization within the top tier was substantially increased by the post-World War II rise of
television and the national networking of this important medium. Pre-television news markets were
local, even if heavily dependent on the higher tiers and a narrow set of sources for national and
international news; the networks provide national and international news from three national sources,
and television is now the principal source of news for the public. The maturing of cable, however, has
resulted in a fragmentation of television audiences and a slow erosion of the market share and power
of the networks.
... the twenty-four media giants (or their controlling parent companies) that make up the top tier of
media companies in the United States. This compilation includes: (I) the three television networks:
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ABC (through its parent, Capital Cities), CBS, and NBC (through its ultimate parent, General Electric
[GE]); (2) the leading newspaper empires: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times
(Times-Mirror), Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones), Knight-Ridder, Gannett, Hearst, Scripps-Howard,
Newhouse (Advance Publications), and the Tribune Company; (3) the major news and general-interest
magazines: Time, Newsweek (subsumed under Washington Post), Reader's Digest, TV Guide
(Triangle), and U.S. News ~ World Report; (4) a major book publisher (McGraw-Hill); and (5) other
cable-TV systems of large and growing importance: those of Murdoch, Turner, Cox, General Corp.,
Taft, Storer, and Group W (Westinghouse). Many of these systems are prominent in more than one
field and are only arbitrarily placed in a particular category (Time, Inc., is very important in cable as
well as magazines; McGraw-Hill is a major publisher of magazines; the Tribune Company has become
a large force in television as well as newspapers; Hearst is important in magazines as well as
newspapers; and Murdoch has significant newspaper interests as well as television and movie
holdings).
These twenty-four companies are large, profit-seeking corporations, owned and controlled by quite
wealthy people. It can be seen in table I-I that all but one of the top companies for whom data are
available have assets in excess of $I billion, and the median size (middle item by size) is $z.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 $I83 million.
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 has encouraged the entry of speculators and increased the pressure and temptation
to focus more intensively on profitability. Family owners have been increasingly divided between those
wanting to take advantage of the new opportunities and those desiring a continuation of family control,
and their splits have often precipitated crises leading finally to the sale of the family interest.
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. 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.
The greater profitability of the media in a deregulated environment has also led to an increase in
takeovers and takeover threats, with even giants like CBS and Time, Inc., directly attacked or
threatened. This has forced the managements of the media giants to incur greater debt and to focus
ever more aggressively and unequivocally on profitability, in order to placate owners and reduce the
attractiveness of their properties to outsiders. They have lost some of their limited autonomy to
bankers, institutional investors, and large individual investors whom they have had to solicit as
potential "white knights."
While the stock of the great majority of large media firms is traded on the securities markets,
approximately two-thirds of these companies are either closely held or still controlled by members of
the originating family who retain large blocks of stock. This situation is changing as family ownership
becomes diffused among larger numbers of heirs and the market opportunities for selling media
properties continue to improve, but the persistence of family control is evident in the data shown in
table I-Z. Also evident in the table is the enormous wealth possessed by the controlling families of the
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top media firms. For seven of the twenty-four, the market value of the media properties owned by the
controlling families in the mid-I980s exceeded a billion dollars, and the median value was close to half
a billion dollars. These control groups obviously have a special stake in the status quo by virtue of their
wealth and their strategic position in one of the great institutions of society. And they exercise the
power of this strategic position, if only by establishing the general aims of the company and choosing
its top management.
The control groups of the media giants are also brought into close relationships with the mainstream of
the corporate community through boards of directors and social links. In the cases of NBC and the
Group W television and cable systems, their respective parents, GE and Westinghouse, are themselves
mainstream corporate giants, with boards of directors that are dominated by corporate and banking
executives. Many of the other large media firms have boards made up predominantly of insiders, a
general characteristic of relatively small and owner-dominated companies. The larger the firm and the
more widely distributed the stock, the larger the number and proportion of outside directors. The
composition of the outside directors of the media giants is very similar to that of large non-media
corporations. ... 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 95 outside directors had directorships in an additional 36 banks and
255 other companies (aside from the media company and their own firm of primary affiliation).
In addition to these board linkages, the large media companies all do business with commercial and
investment bankers, obtaining lines of credit and loans, and receiving advice and service in selling
stock and bond issues and in dealing with acquisition opportunities and takeover threats. Banks and
other institutional investors are also large owners of media stock. In the early I980s, such institutions
held 44 percent of the stock of publicly owned newspapers and 35 percent of the stock of publicly
owned broadcasting companies. These investors are also frequently among the largest stockholders of
individual companies. For example, in I980-8I, the Capital Group, an investment company system,
held 7.I percent of the stock of ABC, 6.6 percent of KnightRidder, 6 percent of Time, Inc., and z.8
percent of Westinghouse. These holdings, individually and collectively, do not convey control, but these
large investors can make themselves heard, and their actions can affect the welfare of the companies
and their managers. If the managers fail to pursue actions that favor shareholder returns, institutional
investors will be inclined to sell the stock (depressing its price), or to listen sympathetically to outsiders
contemplating takeovers. These investors are a force helping press media companies toward strictly
market (profitability) objectives.
So is the diversification and geographic spread of the great media companies. Many of them have
diversified out of particular media fields into others that seemed like growth areas. 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 large media companies have also diversified beyond the media field, and non-media companies
have established a strong presence in the mass media. The most important cases of the latter are GE,
owning RCA, which owns the NBC network, and Westinghouse, which owns major
television-broadcasting stations, a cable network, and a radio station network. GE and Westinghouse
are both huge, diversified multinational companies heavily involved in the controversial areas of
weapons production and nuclear power. It may be recalled that from I965 to I967, an attempt by
International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) to acquire ABC was frustrated following a huge outcry
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that focused on the dangers of allowing a great multinational corporation with extensive foreign
investments and business activities to control a major media outlet. The fear was that ITT control
"could compromise the independence of ABC's news coverage of political events in countries where
ITT has interests." The soundness of the decision disallowing the acquisition seemed to have been
vindicated by the later revelations of ITT's political bribery and involvement in attempts to overthrow
the government of Chile. RCA and Westinghouse, however, had been permitted to control media
companies long before the ITT case, although some of the objections applicable to ITT would seem to
apply to them as well. GE is a more powerful company than ITT, with an extensive international
reach, deeply involved in the nuclear power business, and far more important than ITT in the arms
industry. It is a highly centralized and quite secretive organization, but one with a vast stake in
"political" decisions. GE has contributed to the funding of the American Enterprise Institute, a
right-wing think tank that supports intellectuals who will get the business message across. With the
acquisition of ABC, GE should be in a far better position to assure that sound views are given proper
attention. The lack of outcry over its takeover of RCA and NBC resulted in part from the fact that
RCA control over NBC had already breached the gate of separateness, but it also reflected the more
pro-business and laissez-faire environment of the Reagan era.
The non-media interests of most of the media giants are not large, and, excluding the GE and
Westinghouse systems, they account for only a small fraction of their total revenue. Their
multinational outreach, however, is more significant. The television networks, television syndicators,
major news magazines, and motion-picture studios all do extensive business abroad, and they derive a
substantial fraction of their revenues from foreign sales and the operation of foreign affiliates.
Reader's Digest is printed in seventeen languages and is available in over I60 countries. The Murdoch
empire was originally based in Australia, and the controlling parent company is still an Australian
corporation; its expansion in the United States is funded by profits from Australian and British
affiliates.
Another structural relationship of importance is the media companies' dependence on and ties with
government. The radio-TV companies and networks all require government licenses and franchises
and are thus potentially subject to government control or harassment. This technical legal dependency
has been used as a club to discipline the media, and media policies that stray too often from an
establishment orientation could activate this threat. The media protect themselves from this
contingency by lobbying and other political expenditures, the cultivation of political relationships, and
care in policy. The political ties of the media have been impressive. ... fifteen of ninety-five outside
directors of ten of the media giants are former government officials, and Peter Dreier gives a similar
proportion in his study of large newspapers. In television, the revolving-door flow of personnel
between regulators and the regulated firms was massive during the years when the oligopolistic
structure of the media and networks was being established.
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. 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
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market-profit-oriented forces; 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.
THE ADVERTISING LICENSE TO DO BUSINESS: THE SECOND FILTER
In arguing for the benefits of the free market as a means of controlling dissident opinion in the
mid-nineteenth century, the Liberal chancellor of the British exchequer, Sir George Lewis, noted that
the market would promote those papers "enjoying the preference of the advertising public.''
Advertising did, in fact, serve as a powerful mechanism weakening the working-class press. 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."
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 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. Even if ad-based media cater to an affluent ("upscale") audience, they easily
pick up a large part of the "downscale" audience, and their rivals lose market share and are eventually
driven out or marginalized.
In fact, advertising has played a potent role in increasing concentration even among rivals that focus
with equal energy on seeking advertising revenue. A market share and advertising edge on the part of
one paper or television station will give it additional revenue to compete more effectively-promote
more aggressively, buy more salable features and programs-and the disadvantaged rival must add
expenses it cannot afford to try to stem the cumulative process of dwindling market (and revenue)
share. The crunch is often fatal, and it helps explain the death of many large-circulation papers and
magazines and the attrition in the number of newspapers.
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. One advertising executive stated in I856 that some journals are
poor vehicles because "their readers are not purchasers, and any money thrown upon them is so much
thrown away." The same force took a heavy toll of the post-World War II social-democratic press in
Great Britain, with the Daily Herald, News Chronicle, and Sunday Citizen failing or absorbed into
establishment systems between I960 and I967, despite a collective average daily readership of 9.3
million. As James Curran points out, with 4.7 million readers in its last year, "the Daily Herald
actually had almost double the readership of The Times, the Financial Times and the Guardian
combined." What is more, surveys showed that its readers "thought more highly of their paper than
the regular readers of any other popular newspaper," and "they also read more in their paper than the
readers of other popular papers despite being overwhelmingly working class...." The death of the
Herald, as well as of the News Chronicle and Sunday Citizen, was in large measure a result of
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progressive strangulation by lack of advertising support. The Herald, with 8.I 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." A mass movement without any major media support, and
subject to a great deal of active press hostility, suffers a serious disability, and struggles against grave
odds.
The successful media today are fully attuned to the crucial importance of audience "quality": CBS
proudly tells its shareholders that while it "continuously seeks to maximize audience delivery," it has
developed a new "sales tool" with which it approaches advertisers: "Client Audience Profile, or CAP,
will help advertisers optimize the effectiveness of their network television schedules by evaluating
audience segments in proportion to usage levels of advertisers' products and services." 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," whose requirements and demands the media must accommodate if they are to succeed.
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." The stakes in audience size and affluence are thus
extremely large, and in a market system there is a strong tendency for such considerations to affect
policy profoundly. This is partly a matter of institutional pressures to focus on the bottom line, partly a
matter of the continuous interaction of the media organization with patrons who supply the revenue
dollars. As Grant Tinker, then head of NBC-TV, observed, television "is an advertising supported
medium, and to the extent that support falls out, programming will change."
Working-class and radical media also suffer from the political discrimination of advertisers. Political
discrimination is structured into advertising allocations by the stress on people with money to buy. But
many firms will always refuse to patronize ideological enemies and those whom they perceive as
damaging their interests, and cases of overt discrimination add to the force of the voting system
weighted by income. Public-television station WNET lost its corporate funding from Gulf + Western in
I985 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). 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."
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In addition to discrimination against unfriendly media institutions, advertisers also choose selectively
among programs on the basis of their own principles. With rare exceptions these are culturally and
politically conservative. Large corporate advertisers on television will rarely sponsor programs that
engage in serious criticisms of corporate activities, such as the problem of environmental degradation,
the workings of the military-industrial complex, or corporate support of and benefits from Third
World tyrannies. Erik Barnouw recounts the history of a proposed documentary series on
environmental problems by NBC at a time of great interest in these issues. Barnouw notes that
although at that time a great many large companies were spending money on commercials and other
publicity regarding environmental problems, the documentary series failed for want of sponsors. The
problem was one of excessive objectivity in the series, which included suggestions of corporate or
systemic failure, whereas the corporate message "was one of reassurance."
Television networks learn over time that such programs will not sell and would have to be carried at a
financial sacrifice, and that, in addition, they may offend powerful advertisers.' 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. Thus over time, instead of programs like "The Selling of the Pentagon," it is a natural
evolution of a market seeking sponsor dollars to offer programs such as "A Bird's-Eye View of
Scotland," "Barry Goldwater's Arizona," "An Essay on Hotels," and "Mr. Rooney Goes to Dinner"-a
CBS program on "how Americans eat when they dine out, where they go and why." There are
exceptional cases of companies willing to sponsor serious programs, sometimes a result of recent
embarrassments that call for a public-relations offset. But even in these cases the companies will
usually not want to sponsor close examination of sensitive and divisive issues-they prefer programs on
Greek antiquities, the ballet, and items of cultural and national history and nostalgia. Barnouw points
out an interesting contrast: commercial-television drama "deals almost wholly with the here and now,
as processed via advertising budgets," but on public television, culture "has come to mean 'other
cultures.' . . . American civilization, here and now, is excluded from consideration.''
Television stations and networks are also concerned to maintain audience "flow" levels, i.e., to keep
people watching from program to program, in order to sustain advertising ratings and revenue. Airing
program interludes of documentary-cultural matter that cause station switching is costly, and over
time a "free" (i.e., ad-based) commercial system will tend to excise it. Such
documentary-cultural-critical materials will be driven out of secondary media vehicles as well, as these
companies strive to qualify for advertiser interest, although there will always be some cultural-political
programming trying to come into being or surviving on the periphery of the mainstream media.
SOURCING MASS-MEDIA NEWS: THE THIRD FILTER
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. The White House,
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the Pentagon, and the State Department, in Washington, D.C., are central nodes of such news activity.
On a local basis, city hall and the police department are the subject of regular news "beats" for
reporters. Business corporations and trade groups are also regular and credible purveyors of stories
deemed newsworthy. These bureaucracies turn out a large volume of material that meets the demands
of news organizations for reliable, scheduled flows. Mark Fishman calls this "the principle of
bureaucratic affinity: only other bureaucracies can satisfy the input needs of a news bureaucracy."
Government and corporate sources also have the great merit of being recognizable and credible by
their status and prestige. This is important to the mass media. As Fishman notes,
Newsworkers are predisposed to treat bureaucratic accounts as factual because news personnel
participate in upholding a normative order of authorized knowers in the society. Reporters operate
with the attitude that officials 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.
Another reason for the heavy weight given to official sources is that the mass media claim to be
"objective" dispensers of the news. Partly to maintain the image of objectivity, but also to protect
themselves from criticisms of bias and the threat of libel suits, they need material that can be
portrayed as presumptively accurate. This is also partly a matter of cost: 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.
The magnitude of the public-information operations of large government and corporate bureaucracies
that constitute the primary news sources is vast and ensures special access to the media. The Pentagon,
for example, has a public-information service that involves many thousands of employees, spending
hundreds of millions of dollars every year and dwarfing not only the public-information resources of
any dissenting individual or group but the aggregate of such groups. In I979 and 1980, during a brief
interlude of relative openness (since closed down), the U.S. Air Force revealed that its
public-information outreach included the following:
I40 newspapers, 690,000 copies per week Airman magazine, monthly circulation I25,000 34 radio and
I7 TV stations, primarily overseas 45,000 headquarters and unit news releases 6I5,000 hometown news
releases 6,600 interviews with news media 3,200 news conferences 500 news media orientation flights
50 meetings with editorial boards 11,000 speeches
This excludes vast areas of the air force's public-information effort. Writing back in I970, Senator J.
W. Fulbright had found that the air force public-relations effort in I968 involved I,305 full-time
employees, exclusive of additional thousands that "have public functions collateral to other duties."
The air force at that time offered a weekly film-clip service for TV and a taped features program for
use three times a week, sent to I,I39 radio stations; it also produced I48 motion pictures, of which 24
were released for public consumption. There is no reason to believe that the air force public-relations
effort has diminished since the I960s.
Note that this is just the air force. There are three other branches with massive programs, and there is
a separate, overall public-information program under an assistant secretary of defense for public
affairs in the Pentagon. In I97I, an Armed Forces Journal survey revealed that the Pentagon was
publishing a total of 37I magazines at an annual cost of some $57 million, an operation sixteen times
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larger than the nation's biggest publisher. In an update in I982, the Air Force Journal International
indicated that the Pentagon was publishing I,203 periodicals. To put this into perspective, we may note
the scope of public-information operations of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and
the National Council of the Churches of Christ (NCC), two of the largest of the nonprofit organizations
that offer a consistently challenging voice to the views of the Pentagon. The AFSC's main office
information-services budget in I984-85 was under $500,000, with eleven staff people. Its
institution-wide press releases run at about two hundred per year, its press conferences thirty a year,
and it produces about one film and two or three slide shows a year. It does not offer film clips, photos,
or taped radio programs to the media. The NCC Office of Information has an annual budget of some
$350,000, issues about a hundred news releases per year, and holds four press conferences annually.
The ratio of air force news releases and press conferences to those of the AFSC and NCC taken
together are I50 to I (or 2,200 to 1, if we count hometown news releases of the air force), and 94 to I
respectively. Aggregating the other services would increase the differential by a large factor.
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. 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.
A corporate collective like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had a I983 budget for research,
communications, and political activities of $65 million. By I980, the chamber was publishing a business
magazine (Nation's Business) with a circulation of I.3 million and a weekly newspaper with 740,000
subscribers, and it was producing a weekly panel show distributed to 400 radio stations, as well as its
own weekly panel-discussion programs carried by I28 commercial television stations.
Besides the U.S. Chamber, there are thousands of state and local chambers of commerce and trade
associations also engaged in public relations and lobbying activities. The corporate and
trade-association lobbying network community is "a network of well over I50,000 professionals," and
its resources are related to corporate income, profits, and the protective value of public-relations and
lobbying outlays. Corporate profits before taxes in I985 were $295.5 billion. When the corporate
community gets agitated about the political environment, as it did in the I970s, it obviously has the
wherewithal to meet the perceived threat. Corporate and trade-association image and issues
advertising increased from $305 million in I975 to $650 million in I980. So did direct-mail campaigns
through dividend and other mail stuffers, the distribution of educational films, booklets and
pamphlets, and outlays on initiatives and referendums, 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 I978, and to have grown to $I.6 billion
by I984.
To consolidate their preeminent position as sources, government and business-news promoters go to
great pains to make things easy for news organizations. They provide the media organizations with
facilities in which to gather; they give journalists advance copies of speeches and forthcoming reports;
they schedule press conferences at hours well-geared to news deadlines; they write press releases in
usable language; and they carefully organize their press conferences and "photo opportunity" sessions.
It is the job of news officers "to meet the journalist's scheduled needs with material that their beat
agency has generated at its own pace."
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
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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, 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.
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. It is very difficult to call authorities on whom one depends for daily
news liars, even if they tell whoppers. Critical sources may be avoided not only because of their lesser
availability and higher cost of establishing credibility, but also because the primary sources may be
offended and may even threaten the media using them.
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; Claire Sterling refused to participate in television-network shows on the
Bulgarian Connection where her critics would appear. In the last two of these cases, the authorities
and brand-name experts were successful in monopolizing access by coercive threats.
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). 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 I984 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 I9I7-I8 that one of the best means of
controlling news was flooding news channels with 'facts,' or what amounted to official information."
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"-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." As Henry Kissinger has pointed out, in this
"age of the expert," the "constituency" of the expert is "those who have a vested interest in commonly
held opinions; elaborating and defining its consensus at a high level has, after all, made him an
expert." It is therefore appropriate that this restructuring has taken place to allow the commonly held
opinions (meaning those that are functional for elite interests) to continue to prevail.
This process of creating the needed body of experts has been carried out on a deliberate basis and a
massive scale. Back in I972, Judge Lewis Powell (later elevated to the Supreme Court) wrote a memo
to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urging business "to buy the top academic reputations in the
country to add credibility to corporate studies and give business a stronger voice on the campuses."
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One buys them, and assures that-in the words of Dr. Edwin Feulner, of the Heritage Foundation-the
public-policy area "is awash with in-depth academic studies" that have the proper conclusions. Using
the analogy of Procter & Gamble selling toothpaste, Feulner explained that "They sell it and resell it
every day by keeping the product fresh in the consumer's mind." By the sales effort, including the
dissemination of the correct ideas to "thousands of newspapers," it is possible to keep debate "within
its proper perspective.''
In accordance with this formula, during the I970s and early I980s a string of institutions was created
and old ones were activated to the end of propagandizing the corporate viewpoint. Many hundreds of
intellectuals were brought to these institutions, where their work was funded and their outputs were
disseminated to the media by a sophisticated propaganda effort. The corporate funding and clear
ideological purpose in the overall effort had no discernible effect on the credibility of the intellectuals
so mobilized; on the contrary, the funding and pushing of their ideas catapulted them into the press.
As an illustration of how the funded experts preempt space in the media, table I-4 describes the
"experts" on terrorism and defense issues who appeared on the "McNeil-Lehrer News Hour" in the
course of a year in the mid-I980s. We can see that, excluding journalists, a majority of the participants
(54 percent) were present or former government officials, and that the next highest category (I5.7
percent) was drawn from conservative think tanks. The largest number of appearances in the latter
category was supplied by the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an
organization funded by conservative foundations and corporations, and providing a revolving door
between the State Department and CIA and a nominally private organization. On such issues as
terrorism and the Bulgarian Connection, the CSIS has occupied space in the media that otherwise
might have been filled by independent voices.
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). 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.
Another class of experts whose prominence is largely a function of serviceability to power is former
radicals who have come to "see the light." The motives that cause these individuals to switch gods,
from Stalin (or Mao) to Reagan and free enterprise, is varied, but for the establishment media the
reason for the change is simply that the ex-radicals have finally seen the error of their ways. In a
country whose citizenry values acknowledgement of sin and repentance, the turncoats are an
important class of repentant sinners. 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. They found that news coverage was a function of their trimming their accounts to the
prevailing demand. The steady flow of ex-radicals from marginality to media attention shows that we
are witnessing a durable method of providing experts who will say what the establishment wants said.
FLAK AND THE ENFORCERS: THE FOURTH FILTER
"Flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. It may take the form of letters,
telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and bills before Congress, and other modes of
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complaint, threat, and punitive action. It may be organized centrally or locally, or it may consist of the
entirely independent actions of individuals.
If flak is produced on a large scale, or by individuals or groups with substantial resources, it can be
both uncomfortable and costly to the media. Positions have to be defended within the organization and
without, sometimes before legislatures and possibly even in courts. Advertisers may withdraw
patronage. Television advertising is mainly of consumer goods that are readily subject to organized
boycott. 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. If certain kinds of fact, position, or program are thought likely to elicit flak, this prospect
can be a deterrent.
The ability to produce flak, and especially flak that is costly and threatening, is related to power.
Serious flak has increased in close parallel with business's growing resentment of media criticism and
the corporate offensive of the I970s and I980s. Flak from the powerful can be either direct or indirect.
The direct would include letters or phone calls from the White House to Dan Rather or William Paley,
or from the FCC to the television networks asking for documents used in putting together a program,
or from irate officials of ad agencies or corporate sponsors to media officials asking for reply time or
threatening retaliation. The powerful can also work on the media indirectly by complaining to their
own constituencies (stockholders, employees) about the media, by generating institutional advertising
that does the same, and by funding right-wing monitoring or think-tank operations designed to attack
the media. They may also fund political campaigns and help put into power conservative politicians
who will more directly serve the interests of private power in curbing any deviationism in the media.
Along with its other political investments of the I970s and I980s, the corporate community sponsored
the growth of institutions such as the American Legal Foundation, the Capital Legal Foundation, the
Media Institute, the Center for Media and Public Affairs, and Accuracy in Media (AIM). These may
be regarded as institutions organized for the specific purpose of producing flak. Another and older
flak-producing machine with a broader design is Freedom House. The American Legal Foundation,
organized in I980, has specialized in Fairness Doctrine complaints and libel suits to aid "media
victims." The Capital Legal Foundation, incorporated in I977, was the Scaife vehicle for
Westmoreland's $I20-million libel suit against CBS.
The Media Institute, organized in I972 and funded by corporate-wealthy patrons, sponsors monitoring
projects, conferences, and studies of the media. It has focused less heavily on media failings in foreign
policy, concentrating more on media portrayals of economic issues and the business community, but its
range of interests is broad. The main theme of its sponsored studies and conferences has been the
failure of the media to portray business accurately and to give adequate weight to the business point of
view, but it underwrites works such as John Corry's expose of the alleged left-wing bias of the mass
media. The chairman of the board of trustees of the institute in I985 was Steven V. Seekins, the top
public-relations officer of the American Medical Association; chairman of the National Advisory
Council was Herbert Schmertz, of the Mobil Oil Corporation.
The Center for Media and Public Affairs, run by Linda and Robert Lichter, came into existence in the
mid-I980s as a "non-profit, nonpartisan" research institute, with warm accolades from Patrick
Buchanan, Faith Whittlesey, and Ronald Reagan himself, who recognized the need for an objective and
fair press. Their Media Monitor and research studies continue their earlier efforts to demonstrate the
liberal bias and anti-business propensities of the mass media.
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AIM was formed in I969, and it grew spectacularly in the I970s. Its annual income rose from $5,000 in
I97I to $I.5 million in the early I980s, with funding mainly from large corporations and the wealthy
heirs and foundations of the corporate system. At least eight separate oil companies were contributors
to AIM in the early I980s, but the wide representation in sponsors from the corporate community is
impressive. 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 bandwagons, 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.
Freedom House, which dates back to the early I940s, has had interlocks with AIM, the World
Anticommunist League, Resistance International, and U.S. government bodies such as Radio Free
Europe and the CIA, and has long served as a virtual propaganda arm of the government and
international right wing. It sent election monitors to the Rhodesian elections staged by Ian Smith in
I979 and found them "fair," whereas the I980 elections won by Mugabe under British supervision it
found dubious. Its election monitors also found the Salvadoran elections of I982 admirable. It has
expended substantial resources in criticizing the media for insufficient sympathy with U.S.
foreign-policy ventures and excessively harsh criticism of U.S. client states. Its most notable
publication of this genre was Peter Braestrup's Big Story, which contended that the media's negative
portrayal of the Tet offensive helped lose the war. The work is a travesty of scholarship, but more
interesting is its premise: that the mass media not only should support any national venture abroad,
but should do so with enthusiasm, such enterprises being by definition noble. In I982, when the Reagan
administration was having trouble containing media reporting of the systematic killing of civilians by
the Salvadoran army, Freedom House came through with a denunciation of the "imbalance" in media
reporting from El Salvador.
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. AIM head, Reed Irvine's diatribes are frequently published, and right-wing
network flacks who regularly assail the "liberal media," such as Michael Ledeen, are given Op-Ed
column space, sympathetic reviewers, and a regular place on talk shows as experts. This reflects the
power of the sponsors, including the well-entrenched position of the right wing in the mass media
themselves.
The producers of flak add to one another's strength and reinforce the command of political authority
in its news-management activities. The government is a major producer of flak, regularly assailing,
threatening, and "correcting" the media, trying to contain any deviations from the established line.
News management itself is designed to produce flak. In the Reagan years, Mr. Reagan was put on
television to exude charm to millions, many of whom berated the media when they dared to criticize
the "Great Communicator.''
ANTICOMMUNISM AS A CONTROL MECHANISM
A final filter is the ideology of anticommunism. 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. 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
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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.
Liberals at home, often accused of being pro-Communist or insufficiently anti-Communist, are kept
continuously on the defensive in a cultural milieu in which anticommunism is the dominant religion. If
they allow communism, or something that can be labeled communism, to triumph in the provinces
while they are in office, the political costs are heavy. Most of them have fully internalized the religion
anyway, but they are all under great pressure to demonstrate their anti-Communist credentials. This
causes them to behave very much like reactionaries. Their occasional support of social democrats often
breaks down where the latter are insufficiently harsh on their own indigenous radicals or on popular
groups that are organizing among generally marginalized sectors. In his brief tenure in the Dominican
Republic, Juan Bosch attacked corruption in the armed forces and government, began a land-reform
program, undertook a major project for mass education of the populace, and maintained a remarkably
open government and system of effective civil liberties. These policies threatened powerful internal
vested interests, and the United States resented his independence and the extension of civil liberties to
Communists and radicals. This was carrying democracy and pluralism too far. Kennedy was
"extremely disappointed" in Bosch's rule, and the State Department "quickly soured on the first
democratically elected Dominican President in over thirty years." Bosch's overthrow by the military
after nine months in office had at least the tacit support of the United States. Two years later, by
contrast, the Johnson administration invaded the Dominican Republic to make sure that Bosch did not
resume power. The Kennedy liberals were enthusiastic about the military coup and displacement of a
populist government in Brazil in I964. A major spurt in the growth of neo-Fascist national-security
states took place under Kennedy and Johnson. In the cases of the U.S. subversion of Guatemala,
I947-54, and the military attacks on Nicaragua, I98I-87, allegations of Communist links and a
Communist threat caused many liberals to support counterrevolutionary intervention, while others
lapsed into silence, paralyzed by the fear of being tarred with charges of infidelity to the national
religion.
It should be noted that when anti-Communist fervor is aroused, the demand for serious evidence in
support of claims of "communist" abuses is suspended, and charlatans can thrive as evidential sources.
Defectors, informers, and assorted other opportunists move to center stage as "experts," and they
remain there even after exposure as highly unreliable, if not downright liars. Pascal Delwit and
Jean-Michel Dewaele point out that in France, too, the ideologues of anticommunism "can do and say
anything.'' Analyzing the new status of Annie Kriegel and Pierre Daix, two former passionate Stalinists
now possessed of a large and uncritical audience in France, Delwit and Dewaele note:
If we analyze their writings, we find all the classic reactions of people who have been disappointed in
love. But no one dreams of criticizing them for their past, even though it has marked them forever.
They may well have been converted, but they have not changed.... no one notices the constants, even
though they are glaringly obvious. Their best sellers prove, thanks to the support of the most indulgent
and slothful critics anyone could hope for, that the public can be fooled. No one denounces or even
notices the arrogance of both yesterday's eulogies and today's diatribes; no one cares that there is
never any proof and that invective is used in place of analysis. Their inverted hyper-Stalinism-which
takes the usual form of total manicheanism-is whitewashed simply because it is directed against
Communism. The hysteria has not changed, but it gets a better welcome in its present guise.
The anti-Communist control mechanism reaches through the system to exercise a profound influence
on the mass media. In normal times as well as in periods of Red scares, issues tend to be framed in
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terms of a dichotomized world of Communist and anti-Communist powers, with gains and losses
allocated to contesting sides, and rooting for "our side" considered an entirely legitimate news
practice. It is the mass media that identify, create, and push into the limelight a Joe McCarthy, Arkady
Shevchenko, and Claire Sterling and Robert Leiken, or an Annie Kriegel and Pierre Daix. The
ideology and religion of anticommunism is a potent filter.
DICHOTOMIZATION AND PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGNS
The five filters narrow the range of news that passes through the gates, and even more sharply limit
what can become "big news," subject to sustained news campaigns. By definition, news from primary
establishment sources meets one major filter requirement and is readily accommodated by the mass
media. 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.
Thus, for example, the torture of political prisoners and the attack on trade unions in Turkey will be
pressed on the media only by human rights activists and groups that have little political leverage. The
U.S. government supported the Turkish martial-law government from its inception in I980, and the
U.S. business community has been warm toward regimes that profess fervent anticommunism,
encourage foreign investment, repress unions, and loyally support U.S. foreign policy (a set of virtues
that are frequently closely linked). Media that chose to feature Turkish violence against their own
citizenry would have had to go to extra expense to find and check out information sources; they would
elicit flak from government, business, and organized right-wing flak machines, and they might be
looked upon with disfavor by the corporate community (including advertisers) for indulging in such a
quixotic interest and crusade. They would tend to stand alone in focusing on victims that from the
standpoint of dominant American interests were unworthy.
In marked contrast, protest over political prisoners and the violation of the rights of trade unions in
Poland was seen by the Reagan administration and business elites in I98I as a noble cause, and, not
coincidentally, as an opportunity to score political points. Many media leaders and syndicated
columnists felt the same way. Thus information and strong opinions on human-rights violations in
Poland could be obtained from official sources in Washington, and reliance on Polish dissidents would
not elicit flak from the U.S. government or the flak machines. These victims would be generally
acknowledged by the managers of the filters to be worthy. The mass media never explain why Andrei
Sakharov is worthy and Jose Luis Massera, in Uruguay, is unworthy-the attention and general
dichotomization occur "naturally" as a result of the working of the filters, but the result is the same as
if a commissar had instructed the media: "Concentrate on the victims of enemy powers and forget
about the victims of friends.''
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 I983, 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 3I, I984, 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 I973 led to no outcry in
the West, no denunciations for "cold-blooded murder,'' and no boycott. This difference in treatment
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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.'' 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 I9I9-20
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. The recent propaganda-disinformation attacks on Nicaragua
have been needed to avert eyes from the savagery of the war in E1 Salvador and to justify the
escalating U.S. investment in counterrevolution in Central America.
Conversely, propaganda campaigns will not be mobilized where victimization, even though massive,
sustained, and dramatic, fails to meet the test of utility to elite interests. Thus, while the focus on
Cambodia in the Pol Pot era (and thereafter) was exceedingly serviceable, as Cambodia had fallen to
the Communists and useful lessons could be drawn by attention to their victims, the numerous victims
of the U.S. bombing before the Communist takeover were scrupulously ignored by the U.S. elite press.
After Pol Pot's ouster by the Vietnamese, the United States quietly shifted support to this "worse than
Hitler" villain, with little notice in the press, which adjusted once again to the national political
agenda. Attention to the Indonesian massacres of I965-66, or the victims of the Indonesian invasion of
East Timor from I975 onward, would also be distinctly unhelpful as bases of media campaigns, because
Indonesia is a U.S. ally and client that maintains an open door to Western investment, and because, in
the case of East Timor, the United States bears major responsibility for the slaughter. The same is true
of the victims of state terror in Chile and Guatemala, U.S. clients whose basic institutional structures,
including the state terror system, were put in place and maintained by, or with crucial assistance from,
U.S. power, and who remain U.S. client states. Propaganda campaigns on behalf of these victims would
conflict with government-business-military interests and, in our model, would not be able to pass
through the filtering system.
Propaganda campaigns may be instituted either by the government or by one or more of the top media
firms. The campaigns to discredit the government of Nicaragua, to support the Salvadoran elections as
an exercise in legitimizing democracy, and to use the Soviet shooting down of the Korean airliner KAL
007 as a means of mobilizing public support for the arms buildup, were instituted and propelled by the
government. The campaigns to publicize the crimes of Pol Pot and the alleged KGB plot to assassinate
the pope were initiated by the Reader's Digest, with strong follow-up support from NBC-TV, the New
York Times, and other major media companies. 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.
For stories that are useful, the process will get under way with a series of government leaks, press
conferences, white papers, etc., or with one or more of the mass media starting the ball rolling with
such articles as Barron and Paul's "Murder of a Gentle Land" (Cambodia), or Claire Sterling's "The
Plot to Kill the Pope," both in the Reader's Digest. If the other major media like the story, they will
follow it up with their own versions, and the matter quickly becomes newsworthy by familiarity. If the
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articles are written in an assured and convincing style, are subject to no criticisms or alternative
interpretations in the mass media, and command support by authority figures, the propaganda themes
quickly become established as true even without real evidence. This tends to close out dissenting views
even more comprehensively, as they would now conflict with an already established popular belief.
This in turn opens up further opportunities for still more inflated claims, as these can be made without
fear of serious repercussions. Similar wild assertions made in contradiction of official views would
elicit powerful flak, so that such an inflation process would be controlled by the government and the
market. No such protections exist with system-supportive claims; there, flak will tend to press the
media to greater hysteria in the face of enemy evil. The media not only suspend critical judgment and
investigative zeal, they compete to find ways of putting the newly established truth in a supportive
light. Themes and facts-even careful and well-documented analyses-that are incompatible with the now
institutionalized theme are suppressed or ignored. If the theme collapses of its own burden of
fabrications, the mass media will quietly fold their tents and move on to another topic.
Using a propaganda model, we would not only anticipate definitions of worth based on utility, and
dichotomous attention based on the same criterion, we would also expect the news stories about worthy
and unworthy victims (or enemy and friendly states) to differ in quality. That is, we would expect
official sources of the United States and its client regimes to be used heavily-and uncritically-in
connection with one's own abuses and those of friendly governments, while refugees and other
dissident sources will be used in dealing with enemies. We would anticipate the uncritical acceptance of
certain premises in dealing with self and friends-such as that one's own state and leaders seek peace
and democracy, oppose terrorism, and tell the truth-premises which will not be applied in treating
enemy states. We would expect different criteria of evaluation to be employed, so that what is villainy
in enemy states will be presented as an incidental background fact in the case of oneself and friends.
What is on the agenda in treating one case will be off the agenda in discussing the other. We would also
expect great investigatory zeal in the search for enemy villainy and the responsibility of high officials
for abuses in enemy states, but diminished enterprise in examining such matters in connection with
one's own and friendly states.
The quality of coverage should also be displayed more directly and crudely in placement, headlining,
word usage, and other modes of mobilizing interest and outrage. In the opinion columns, we would
anticipate sharp restraints on the range of opinion allowed expression. 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.
Meanwhile, because of the power of establishment sources, the flak machines, and anti-Communist
ideology, we would anticipate outcries that the worthy victims are being sorely neglected, that the
unworthy are treated with excessive and uncritical generosity, that the media's liberal, adversarial (if
not subversive) hostility to government explains our difficulties in mustering support for the latest
national venture in counterrevolutionary intervention.
In sum, a propaganda approach to media coverage suggests a systematic and highly political
dichotomization in news coverage based on serviceability to important domestic power interests. This
should be observable in dichotomized choices of story and in the volume and quality of coverage... such
dichotomization in the mass media is massive and systematic: not only are choices for publicity and
suppression comprehensible in terms of system advantage, but the modes of handling favored and
inconvenient materials (placement, tone, context, fullness of treatment) differ in ways that serve
political ends.
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