Conclusions
excerpted from the book
Manufacturing Consent
by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
Pantheon Books, 1988
Defending the media against the charge
that they have become too independent and too powerful for the
public good, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times writes that
The press is protected [by the First Amendment]
not for its own sake but to enable a free political system to
operate. In the end, the concern is not for the reporter or the
editor but for the citizen-critic of government.
What is at stake when we speak about freedom
of the press "is the freedom to perform a function on behalf
of the polity.'' Lewis cites Supreme Court Justice Powell, who
observed: "no individual can obtain for himself the information
needed for the intelligent discharge of his political responsibilities....
By enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political
process, the press performs a crucial function in effecting the
societal purpose of the First Amendment." Therefore, as Judge
Gurfein ruled in supporting the right of the New York Times to
publish the Pentagon Papers after the government had failed to
show any threat of a breach of security but only the possibility
of embarrassment: "a cantankerous press, an obstinate press,
a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order
to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and
the right of the people to know."
We do not accept the view that freedom
of expression must be defended in instrumental terms, by virtue
of its contribution to some higher good; rather, it is a value
in itself. But that apart, these ringing declarations express
valid aspirations, and beyond that, they surely express the self-image
of the American media. Our concern in this book has been to inquire
into the relation between this image and the reality. In contrast
to the standard conception of the media as cantankerous obstinate,
and ubiquitous in their search for truth and their independence
of authority, we have spelled out and applied a propaganda model
that indeed sees the media as serving a societal purpose, not
that of enabling the public to assert meaningful control over
the political process by providing them with the information needed
for the intelligent discharge of political responsibilities. On
the contrary, a propaganda model suggests that the "societal
purpose" of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic,
social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate
the domestic society and the state. The media serve this purpose
in many ways: through selection of topics, distribution of concerns,
framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone,
and by keeping debate within the bounds of acceptable premises.
We have sought to show that the expectations of this model are
realized, and often considerably surpassed, in the actual practice
of the media in a range of crucial cases. We quite agree with
Chief Justice Hughes, whom Lewis also cites, on "the primary
need of a vigilant and courageous press" if democratic processes
are to function in a meaningful way. But the evidence we have
reviewed indicates that this need is not met or even weakly approximated
in actual practice.
It is frequently asserted that the media
were not always as independent, vigilant, and defiant of authority
as they allegedly are today; rather, the experiences of the past
generation are held to have taught the media to exercise "the
power to root about in our national life, exposing what they deem
right for exposure," without regard to external pressures
or the dictates of authority (Lewis). It is this period, then,
that poses a challenge to a propaganda model, and we have therefore
taken it as the focus of our inquiry. Many of the examples we
discuss are from the past decade, when the liberal media were
allegedly in confrontation with a "conservative" administration
that they would have been expected to oppose vigorously. In a
further effort to ensure that we are not selecting exceptional
cases, we have cast the net widely. We have selected for close
examination cases that pose the most severe challenge to our model,
namely, those put forth by critics as demonstrating that the media
have gone too far in their exuberant independence and challenge
to authority, so far that they must be curbed if democracy is
to survive: for example, the coverage of the Tet offensive, the
prime illustration of alleged excesses of the media offered in
the I970s and I980s. Even these cases demonstrate the subordination
of the media to the requirements of the state propaganda system.
At the peak of alleged media independence, as the Vietnam War
entered its final period and the media were threatening Nixon's
presidency, the subordination to these demands never flagged,
as illustrated by the media coverage of the Paris peace treaty
of I973, one of the most flagrant examples of media misrepresentation
based on an uncritical reiteration of official claims and adherence
to the political agenda of the state.
We may illustrate the point in yet another
case, chosen by those who defend the standard version of the media
as their strongest ground: the Watergate affair. To many critics
of the media, this incident illustrates their irresponsible excesses;
to those who proudly defend the media, it illustrates their independence
of higher authority and commitment to the values of professional
journalism. What, then, are the lessons of Watergate?
The major scandal of Watergate as portrayed
in the mainstream press was that the Nixon administration sent
a collection of petty criminals to break into the Democratic party
headquarters, for reasons that remain obscure. The Democratic
party represents powerful domestic interests, solidly based in
the business community. Nixon's actions were therefore a scandal.
The Socialist Workers party, a legal political party, represents
no powerful interests. Therefore, there was no scandal when it
was revealed, just as passions over Watergate reached their zenith,
that the FBI had been disrupting its activities by illegal break-ins
and other measures for a decade, a violation of democratic principle
far more extensive and serious than anything charged during the
Watergate hearings. What is more, these actions of the national
political police were only one element of government programs
extending over many administrations to deter independent political
action, stir up violence in the ghettos, and undermine the popular
movements that were beginning to engage sectors of the generally
marginalized public in the arena of decision-making. These covert
and illegal programs were revealed in court cases and elsewhere
during the Watergate period, but they never entered the congressional
proceedings and received only limited media attention. Even the
complicity of the FBI in the police assassination of a Black Panther
organizer in Chicago was not a scandal, in marked contrast to
Nixon's "enemies list," which identified powerful people
who were denigrated in private but suffered no consequences. As
we have noted, the U.S. role in initiating and carrying out the
first phase of "the decade of the genocide" in Cambodia
entered the Watergate proceedings only marginally: not because
hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were slaughtered in the course
of a major war crime,-but because Congress was not properly notified,
so that its privileges were infringed, and even this was considered
too slight an infraction to enter the final charges. What was
true of Congress was also true of the media and their investigative
reporting that "helped force a President from office"
(Lewis) in what is held to be a most remarkable display of media
independence, or arrogance, depending on one's point of view.
History has been kind enough to contrive
for us a "controlled experiment" to determine just what
was at stake during the Watergate period, when the confrontational
stance of the media reached its peak. The answer is clear and
precise: powerful groups are capable of defending themselves;
not surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when
their position and rights are threatened. By contrast, as long
as illegalities and violations of democratic substance are confined
to marginal groups or distant victims of U.S. military attack,
or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general population,
media opposition is muted or absent altogether. This is why Nixon
could go so far, lulled into a false sense of security precisely
because the watchdog only barked when he began to threaten the
privileged.
Exactly the same lessons were taught by
the Iran-contra scandals and the media reaction to them. It was
a scandal when the Reagan administration was found to have violated
congressional prerogatives during the Iran-contra affair, but
not when it dismissed with contempt the judgment of the International
Court of Justice that the United States was engaged in the "unlawful
use of force" and violation of treaties-that is, violation
of the supreme law of the land and customary international law-in
its attack against Nicaragua. The sponsorship and support of state
terror that cost some 200,000 lives in Central America in the
preceding decade was not the subject of congressional inquiries
or media concern. These actions were conducted in accord with
an elite consensus, and they received steady media support...
In the case of the Vietnam War as well
... even those who condemn the media for their alleged adversarial
stance acknowledge that they were almost universally supportive
of U.S. policy until after large numbers of U.S. troops had been
engaged in the "intervention" in South Vietnam, heavy
casualties had been taken, huge dollar sums had been spent, and
elite protest had surfaced on grounds of threats to elite interests.
Only then did elements of the media undertake qualified reassessments
of the "cost-benefit" trade-off. But during the period
of growing involvement that eventually made extrication difficult,
the watchdog actually encouraged the burglar to make himself at
home in a distant land, and to bomb and destroy it with abandon.
In short, the very examples offered in
praise of the media for their independence, or criticism of their
excessive zeal, illustrate exactly the opposite. Contrary to the
usual image of an "adversary press" boldly attacking
a pitiful executive giant, the media's lack of interest, investigative
zeal, and basic news reporting on the accumulating illegalities
of the executive branch have regularly permitted and even encouraged
ever larger violations of law, whose ultimate exposure when elite
interests were threatened is offered as a demonstration of media
service "on behalf of the polity." These observations
reinforce the conclusions that we have documented throughout.
The existing level of media subordination
to state authority is often deemed unsatisfactory by critics.
We have discussed several examples. Thus, Freedom House and others
who are concerned to protect state authority from an intrusive
public condemn the media for lack of sufficient enthusiasm in
supporting official crusades, and even the limited challenge to
established authority during the Vietnam War and the Watergate
period aroused concerns over the excessive power of the media.
Quite commonly, the slight opening occasionally granted to dissent
is considered far too dangerous to permit. This perception sometimes
even takes the form of a paranoid vision of left-wing power that
sweeps all in its path: for example, the plea of Claire Sterling
and others who dominated media coverage of the Bulgarian Connection
that they could barely be heard above the din of Soviet propaganda.
A still more striking case is the Aikman-Shawcross fantasy, eagerly
echoed by many others, about the "silencing" of the
international media and governments by the left during the Pol
Pot era. In reality, there was a huge chorus of protest over Khmer
Rouge atrocities, which reached an extraordinary level of fabrication
and deceit. The significance of these facts, and of the pretense
of left-imposed "silence," is highlighted by the contrast
with the real silence over comparable atrocities in Timor at the
same time, and the evasions and suppressions during the first
phase of "the decade of the genocide," to mention two
cases where the United States was the responsible agent and protest
could have been effective in diminishing or terminating large-scale
atrocities.
A propaganda model provides a ready explanation
for this quite typical dichotomous treatment. Atrocities by the
Khmer Rouge could be attributed to the Communist enemy and valuable
propaganda points could be scored, although nothing useful could
be done, or was even proposed, for the Cambodian victims. The
image of Communist monsters would also be useful for subsequent
U.S. participation in terror and violence, as in its crusades
in Central America shortly after. In E1 Salvador, the United States
backed the murderous junta in its struggle against what was depicted
as "the Pol Pot left," while Jeane Kirkpatrick mused
darkly about the threat to E1 Salvador of "well-armed guerrillas
whose fanaticism and violence remind some observers of Pol Pot"-
shortly after the archbishop had denounced her junta friends for
conducting a "war of extermination and genocide against a
defenseless civilian population." Some are more circumspect-for
example, William Buckley, who observes that "the Sandinistas
have given their people genocide" and are clearly heading
in the direction of Pol Pot, although they have not quite reached
that level yet. The utility of the show of outrage over Pol Pot
atrocities is evident from the way the fate of these worthy victims
was immediately exploited to justify U.S. organization of atrocities
that, in fact, do merit comparison to Pol Pot.
Atrocities in East Timor, however, have
no such utilitarian function; quite the opposite. These atrocities
were carried out by our Indonesian client, so that the United
States could readily have acted to reduce or terminate them. But
attention to the Indonesian invasion would have embarrassed a
loyal ally and quickly disclosed the crucial role of the United
States in providing military aid and diplomatic support for aggression
and slaughter. Plainly, news about East Timor would not have been
useful, and would, in fact, have discomfited important domestic
power groups. The mass media-and the intellectual community generally-therefore
channeled their benevolent impulses elsewhere: to Cambodia, not
Timor.
... the U.S. media do not function in
the manner of the propaganda system of a totalitarian state. Rather,
they permit-indeed, encourage spirited debate, criticism, and
dissent, as long as these remain faithfully within the system
of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus,
a system so powerful as to be internalized largely without awareness.
No one instructed the media to focus on Cambodia and ignore East
Timor. They gravitated naturally to the Khmer Rouge and discussed
them freely-just as they naturally suppressed information on Indonesian
atrocities in East Timor and U.S. responsibility for the aggression
and massacres. In the process, the media provided neither facts
nor analyses that would have enabled the public to understand
the issues or the bases of government policies toward Cambodia
and Timor, and they thereby assured that the public could not
exert any meaningful influence on the decisions that were made.
This is quite typical of the actual "societal purpose"
of the media on matters that are of significance for established
power; not "enabling the public to assert meaningful control
over the political process," but rather averting any such
danger. In these cases, as in numerous others, the public was
managed and mobilized from above, by means of the media's highly
selective messages and evasions. As noted by media analyst W.
Lance Bennett,
The public is exposed to powerful persuasive
messages from above and is unable to communicate meaningfully
through the media in response to these messages.... Leaders have
usurped enormous amounts of political power and reduced popular
control over the political system by using the media to generate
support, compliance, and just plain confusion among the public.
More significantly for our particular
concerns here, the media typically provide their own independent
contribution even without being "used," in the manner
and for the reasons that we have discussed. Another media analyst,
Ben Bagdikian, observes that the institutional bias of the private
mass media "does not merely protect the corporate system.
It robs the public of a chance to understand the real world.
That conclusion is well supported by the
evidence we have reviewed. A propaganda model has a certain initial
plausibility on guided freemarket assumptions that are not particularly
controversial. In essence, the private media are major corporations
selling a product (readers and audiences) to other businesses
(advertisers). The national media typically target and serve elite
opinion, groups that, on the one hand, provide an optimal "profile"
for advertising purposes, and, on the other, play a role in decision-making
in the private and public spheres. The national media would be
failing to meet their elite audience's needs if they did not present
a tolerably realistic portrayal of the world. But their "societal
purpose" also requires that the media's interpretation of
the world reflect the interests and concerns of the sellers, the
buyers, and the governmental and private institutions dominated
by these groups.
A propaganda model also helps us to understand
how media personnel adapt, and are adapted, to systemic demands.
Given the imperatives of corporate organization and the workings
of the various filters, conformity to the needs and interests
of privileged sectors is essential to success. In the media, as
in other major institutions, those who do not display the requisite
values and perspectives will be regarded as "irresponsible,"
"ideological, or otherwise abberant, and will tend to fall
by the wayside. While there may be a small number of exceptions,
the pattern is pervasive, and expected. Those who adapt, perhaps
quite honestly, will then be free to express themselves with little
managerial control, and they will be able to assert, accurately,
that they perceive no pressures to conform. The media are indeed
free - for those who adopt the principles required for their "societal
purpose." There may be some who are simply corrupt, and who
serve as "errand boys" for state and other authority,
but this is not the norm. We know from personal experience that
many journalists are quite aware of the way the system operates,
and utilize the occasional openings it affords to provide information
and analysis that departs in some measure from the elite consensus,
carefully shaping it so as to accommodate to required norms in
a general way. But this degree of insight is surely not common.
Rather, the norm is a belief that freedom prevails, which is true
for those who have internalized the required values and perspectives.
These matters are of some importance.
We can readily understand why Guatemalan reporters do not report
the atrocities of the I980s; some fifty corpses dramatically illustrate
the costs of deviance from authority on the part of independent
journalists. To explain why American reporters avoid such topics,
and even go so far as to describe Guatemala as a model for Nicaragua
requires further explanation, and the same is true in innumerable
other similar cases, some of which we have analyzed in detail.
A propaganda model provides a basis for understanding this pervasive
phenomenon.
No simple model will suffice, however,
to account for every detail of such a complex matter as the working
of the national mass media. A propaganda model, we believe, captures
essential features of the process, but it leaves many nuances
and secondary effects unanalyzed There are other factors that
should be recognized. Some of these conflict with the "societal
purpose" of the media as described by the propaganda model;
some support it. In the former category, the humanity and professional
integrity of journalists often leads them in directions that are
unacceptable in the ideological institutions, and one should not
underestimate the psychological burden of suppressing obvious
truths and maintaining the required doctrines of benevolence (possibly
gone awry), inexplicable error, good intentions, injured innocence,
and so on, in the face of overwhelming evidence incompatible with
these patriotic premises. The resulting tensions sometimes find
limited expression, but more often they are suppressed either
consciously or unconsciously, with the help of belief systems
that permit the pursuit of narrow interest, whatever the facts.
In the category of supportive factors,
we find, first of all, elemental patriotism, the overwhelming
wish to think well of ourselves, our institutions, and our leaders.
We see ourselves as basically good and decent in personal life,
so it must be that our institutions function in accordance with
the same benevolent intent, an argument that is often persuasive
even though it is a transparent non sequitur. The patriotic premise
is reinforced by the belief that "we the people" rule,
a central principle of the system of indoctrination from early
childhood, but also one with little merit, as an analysis of the
social and political system will quickly reveal. There are also
real advantages in conformity beyond the rewards and privilege
that it yields. If one chooses to denounce Qaddafi, or the Sandinistas,
or the PLO, or the Soviet Union, no credible evidence is required.
The same is true if one repeats conventional doctrines about our
own society and its behavior-say, that the U.S. government is
dedicated to our traditional noble commitment to democracy and
human rights. But a critical analysis of American institutions,
the way they function domestically and their international operations,
must meet far higher standards; in fact, standards are often imposed
that can barely be met in the natural sciences. One has to work
hard, to produce evidence that is credible, to construct serious
arguments, to present extensive documentation-all tasks that are
superfluous as long as one remains within the presuppositional
framework of the doctrinal consensus. It is small wonder that
few are willing to undertake the effort, quite apart from the
rewards that accrue to conformity and the costs of honest dissidence.
There are other considerations that tend
to induce obedience. A journalist or commentator who does not
want to have to work too hard can survive, even gain respectability,
by publishing information (official or leaks) from standard sources;
these opportunities may well be denied to those who are not content
to relay the constructlons of state propaganda as fact. The technical
structure of the media virtually compels adherence to conventional
thoughts, nothing else can be expressed between two commercials,
or in seven hundred words. without the appearance of absurdity
that is difficult to avoid when one is challenging familiar doctrine
with no opportunity to develop facts or argument. In this respect,
the U.S. media are rather different from those in most other industrial
democracies. and the consequences are noticeable in the narrowness
of articulated opinion and analysis. The critic must also be prepared
to face a defamation apparatus against which there is little recourse
an inhibiting factor that is not insubstantial. Many such factors
exist, related to the essential structural features brought to
light by a propaganda model but nevertheless worthy of detailed
examination in themselves. The result is a powerful system of
induced conformity to the needs of privilege and power.
In sum, the mass media of the United States
are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry
out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market
forces, internalized assumptions and self-censorship, and without
significant overt coercion. This propaganda system has become
even more efficient in recent decades with the rise of the national
television networks, greater mass-media concentration right-wing
pressures on public radio and television, and the growth in scope
and sophistication of public relations and news management.
This system is not all-powerful, however.
Government and elite domination of the media have not succeeded
in overcoming the Vietnam syndrome and public hostility to direct
U.S. involvement in the destabilization and overthrow of foreign
governments. A massive Reagan-era disinformation and propaganda
effort, reflecting in large measure an elite consensus, did succeed
in its major aims of mobilizing support for the U.S. terror states
(the "fledgling democracies"), while demonizing the
Sandinistas and eliminating from Congress and the mass media all
controversy beyond tactical debate over the means that should
be employed to return Nicaragua to the "Central American
mode" and "contain" its "aggressiveness"
in attempting to defend itself from a murderous and destructive
U.S. assault on all fronts. But it failed to win public support
even for proxy army warfare against Nicaragua, and as the costs
to the U.S. mounted, and the proxy war accompanied by embargo
and other pressures succeeded in restoring the "Central American
mode" of misery and suffering in Nicaragua and aborting the
highly successful reforms and prospects for development of the
early years after the overthrow of Washington's ally Somoza, elite
opinion too shifted-quite dramatically, in fact-toward resort
to other, more cost-effective means to attain shared ends. The
partial failures of the very well organized and extensive state
propaganda effort, and the simultaneous rise of an active grass-roots
oppositional movement with very limited media access, was crucial
in making an outright U.S. invasion of Nicaragua unfeasible and
driving the state underground, to illegal clandestine operations
that could be better concealed from the domestic population-with,
in fact, considerable media complicity.
Furthermore, while there have been important
structural changes centralizing and strengthening the propaganda
system, there have been counterforces at work with a potential
for broader access. The rise of cable and satellite communications,
while initially captured and dominated by commercial interests,
has weakened the power of the network oligopoly and retains a
potential for enhanced local-group access. There are already some
3,000 public-access channels in use in the United States, offering
20,000 hours of locally produced programs per week, and there
are even national producers and distributors of programs for access
channels through satellites (e.g., Deep-Dish Television), as well
as hundreds of local suppliers, although all of them must struggle
for funding. Grass-roots and public-interest organizations need
to recognize and try to avail themselves of these media (and organizational)
opportunities.' Local nonprofit radio and television stations
also provide an opportunity for direct media access that has been
underutilized in the United States. ln France, many local groups
have their own radio stations. In a notable case, the progressive
cooperative Longo Mai, in Upper Provence, has its own 24-hours-a-day
Radio Zinzine, which has become an important community institution
that has helped inform and activate many previously isolated farmers.
The potential value of non-commercial radio can be perceived in
sections of the country where stations such as Pacifica Radio
offer a view of the world, depth of coverage, and scope of discussion
and debate that is generally excluded from the major media. Public
radio and television, despite having suffered serious damage during
the Reagan years, also represent an alternative media channel
whose resuscitation and improvement should be of serious concern
to those interested in contesting the propaganda system. The steady
commercialization of the publicly owned air waves should be vigorously
opposed. In the long run, a democratic political order requires
far wider control of and access to the media. Serious discussion
of how this can be done, and the incorporation of fundamental
media reform into political programs, should be high on progressive
agendas.
The organization and self-education of
groups in the community and workplace, and their networking and
activism, continue to be the fundamental elements in steps toward
the democratization of our social life and any meaningful social
change. Only to the extent that such developments succeed can
we hope to see media that are free and independent.
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