argumentative essay

A Propaganda Model 25717

A Propaganda Model Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky

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 incul- cate 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 concen- trated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.1

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 com- pete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general com- munity 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 multi- level effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out 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: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertis- ing 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

From Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, “A propaganda model.” In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, pp. 1–35. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

258 Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky

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, 1984, 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,2 imposing its own agenda, and deliberately diverting attention from other material.3 It requires a macro, alongside a micro- (story-by-story), view of media operations, to see the pattern of manipulation and systematic bias.

Let us turn now to a more detailed examination of the main constituents of the propaganda model, which will be applied and tested in the chapters that follow.

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.”4 This was deemed a major threat by the ruling elites. One MP asserted that the working-class 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 immut- able laws which Providence has established for the regulation of civil society.”5 The result was an attempt to squelch the working-class media by libel laws and prosecu- tions, 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.

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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 1853 and 1869, 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 exclusive backing of a single national daily or Sunday paper.6

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 1837 was under a thousand pounds, with a break-even circulation of 6,200 copies. By 1867, the estimated start-up cost of a new London daily was 50,000 pounds. The Sunday Express, launched in 1918, spent over two million pounds before it broke even with a circulation of over 250,000.7

Similar processes were at work in the United States, where the start-up cost of a new paper in New York City in 1851 was $69,000; the public sale of the St. Louis Democrat in 1872 yielded $456,000; and city newspapers were selling at from $6 to $18 million in the 1920s.8 The cost of machinery alone, of even very small news- papers, has for many decades run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars; in 1945 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.”9

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.10 In 1986 there were some 1,500 daily newspapers, 11,000 magazines, 9,000 radio and 1,500 TV stations, 2,400 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.11

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.12

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

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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.13 It is this top tier, along with the government and wire services, that defines the news agenda and supplies much of the national and inter- national news to the lower tiers of the media, and thus for the general public.14

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.15 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.

Table 17.1 provides some basic financial data for the twenty-four media giants (or their controlling parent companies) that make up the top tier of media companies in the United States.16 This compilation includes: (1) the three television networks: 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 Publica- tions), 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,17 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 17.1 that all but one of the top companies for whom data are available have assets in excess of $1 billion, and the median size (middle item by size) is $2.6 billion. It can also be seen in the table that approximately three-quarters of these media giants had after-tax profits in excess of $100 million, with the median at $183 million.

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.18 This has encouraged the entry of speculators and increased the pressure and temptation to focus more intensively on profitability. Family owners have been

A Propaganda Model 261Table 17.1 Financial data for 24 large media corporations (or their parent firms), December 1986

Company Total Profits Profits Total assets before taxes after taxes revenue ($ millions) ($ millions) ($ millions) ($ millions)

Advance Publications (Newhouse)a 2,500 NA NA 2,200 Capital Cities/ABC 5,191 688 448 4,124 CBS 3,370 470 370 4,754 Cox Communicationsb 1,111 170 87 743 Dow Jones & Co. 1,236 331 183 1,135 Gannett 3,365 540 276 2,801 General Electric (NBC) 34,591 3,689 2,492 36,725 Hearstc 4,040 NA 215 2,100

(1983) (1983) Knight-Ridder 1,947 267 140 1,911 McGraw-Hill 1,463 296 154 1,577 News Corp. (Murdoch)d 8,460 377 170 3,822 New York Times 1,405 256 132 1,565 Reader’s Digeste NA 75–110 NA 1,400

(1985) (1985) Scripps-Howardf NA NA NA 1,062 Storerg 1,242 68 (-17) 537 Taft 1,257 (-11) (-53) 500 Time, Inc. 4,230 626 376 3,762 Times-Mirror 2,929 680 408 2,948 Triangleh NA NA NA 730 Tribune Co. 2,589 523 293 2,030 Turner Broadcasting 1,904 (-185) (-187) 570 U.S. News & World Report i 200+ NA NA 140 Washington Post 1,145 205 100 1,215 Westinghouse 8,482 801 670 10,731

NA = not available a The asset total is taken from Forbes magazine’s wealth total for the Newhouse family for 1985; the total revenue is for media sales only, as reported in Advertising Age, June 29, 1987. b Cox Communications was publicly owned until 1985, when it was merged into another Cox family company, Cox Enterprises. The data presented here are for year-end 1984, the last year of public ownership and disclosure of substantial financial information. c Data compiled in William Barrett, “Citizens Rich,” Forbes, Dec. 14, 1987. d These data are in Australian dollars and are for June 30, 1986; at that date the Australian dollar was worth 68 /100 of a U.S. dollar. e Data for 1985, as presented in the New York Times, Feb. 9, 1986. f Total revenue for media sales only, as reported in Advertising Age, June 29, 1987. g Storer came under the control of the Wall Street firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in 1985; the data here are for December 1984, the last period of Storer autonomy and publicly available information. h Total revenue for media sales only; from Advertising Age, June 29, 1987. i Total assets as of 1984–5, based on “Mort Zuckerman, Media’s New Mogul,” Fortune, Oct. 14, 1985; total revenue from Advertising Age, June 29, 1987.

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increasingly divided between those wanting to take advantage of the new opportun- ities and those desiring a continuation of family control, and their splits have often precipitated crises leading finally to the sale of the family interest.19

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.20 There has also been an abandon- ment 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.21

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.22 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.”23

While the stock of the great majority of large media firms is traded on the securit- ies 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 17.2. Also evident in the table is the enormous wealth possessed by the controlling families of the top media firms. For seven of the twenty-four, the market value of the media properties owned by the controlling families in the mid-1980s exceeded a billion dollars, and the median value was close to half a billion dollars.24

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.25

The control groups of the media giants axe 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 execut- ives. 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. Table 17.3 shows that 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.

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Table 17.2 Wealth of the control groups of 24 large media corporations (or their parent companies), February 1986

Company Controlling family Percentage of Value of or group voting stock by controlling

control group (%) stock interest ($ millions)

Advance Publications Newhouse family Closely held 2,200F

Capital Cities Officers and directors (ODs) 20.7 (Warren 711P

Buffett, 17.8) CBS ODs 20.6a 551P

Cox Communications Cox family 36 1,900F

Dow Jones & Co. Bancroft-Cox families 54 1,500P

Gannett ODs 1.9 95P

General Electric ODs Under 1 171P

Hearst Hearst family 33 1,500F

Knight-Ridder Knight and Ridder families 18 447P

McGraw-Hill McGraw family c.20 450F

News Corp. Murdoch family 49 300F

New York Times Sulzberger family 80 450F

Reader’s Digest Wallace estate managed by NA NA trustees; no personal beneficiaries

Scripps-Howard Scripps heirs NA 1,400F

Storer ODs 8.4 143P

Taft ODs 4.8 37P

Time, Inc. ODs 10.7 (Luce 4.6, 406P

Temple 3.2) Times-Mirror Chandlers 35 1,200P

Triangle Annenbergs Closely held 1,600F

Tribune Co. McCormick heirs 16.6 273P

Turner Broadcasting Turner 80 222P

U.S. News & World Zuckerman Closely held 176b

Report Washington Post Graham family 50+ 350F

Westinghouse ODs Under 1 42P

a These holdings include William Paley’s 8.1 percent and a 12.2 percent holding of Laurence Tisch through an investment by Loews. Later in the year, Loews increased its investment to 24.9 percent, and Laurence Tisch soon thereafter became acting chief executive officer. b This is the price paid by Zuckerman when he bought U.S. News in 1984. See Gwen Kinkead, “Mort Zuckerman, Media’s New Mogul,” Fortune, Oct. 14, 1985, p. 196. Sources: P means taken from proxy statements and computed from stock values as of February 1986; F. means taken from Forbes magazine’s annual estimate of wealth holdings of the very rich.

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Table 17.3 Affiliations of the outside directors of ten large media companies (or their parents) in 1986a

Primary affiliation Number Percent

Corporate executive 39 41.1 Lawyer 8 8.4 Retired (former corporate executive or banker) 13 (9) 13.7 (9.5) Banker 8 8.4 Consultant 4 4.2 Nonprofit organization 15 15.8 Other 8 8.4

Total 95 100.0

Other relationships

Other directorships (bank directorships) 255 (36) Former government officials 15 Member of Council on Foreign Relations 20

a Dow Jones & Co.; Washington Post; New York Times; Time, Inc.; CBS; Times-Mirror; Capital Cities; General Electric; Gannett; and Knight-Ridder.

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).26

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 inves- tors are also large owners of media stock. In the early 1980s, such institutions held 44 percent of the stock of publicly owned newspapers and 35 percent of the stock of publicly owned broadcasting companies.27 These investors are also frequently among the largest stockholders of individual companies. For example, in 1980–1, the Capital Group, an investment company system, held 7.1 percent of the stock of ABC, 6.6 percent of Knight-Ridder, 6 percent of Time, Inc., and 2.8 percent of Westinghouse.28 These holdings, individually and collectively, do not convey con- trol, but these large investors can make themselves heard, and their actions can affect the welfare of the companies and their managers.29 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 contemplat- ing 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

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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.30

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 net- work, and a radio-station network. GE and Westinghouse are both huge, diversified multinational companies heavily involved in the controversial areas of weapons pro- duction and nuclear power. It may be recalled that from 1965 to 1967, an attempt by International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) to acquire ABC was frustrated following a huge outcry that focused on the dangers of allowing a great multi- national corporation with extensive foreign investments and business activities to con- trol a major media outlet.31 The fear was that ITT control “could compromise the independence of ABC’s news coverage of political events in countries where ITT has interests.”32 The soundness of the decision disallowing the acquisition seemed to have been vindicated by the later revelations of ITT’s political bribery and involve- ment 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 organiza- tion, but one with a vast stake in “political” decisions.33 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.34 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 separate- ness, 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 televi- sion 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 160 countries. The Murdoch empire was originally based in Australia, and the controlling parent com- pany is still an Australian corporation; its expansion in the United States is funded by profits from Australian and British affiliates.35

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

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discipline the media, and media policies that stray too often from an establishment orientation could activate this threat.36 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. Table 17.3 shows that 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.37 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.38

The great media also depend on the government for more general policy sup- port. 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.39

In sum, the dominant media firms are quite large businesses; they are controlled by very wealthy people or by managers who are subject to sharp constraints by owners and other market-profit-oriented forces;40 and they are closely interlocked, and have important common interests, with other major corporations, banks, and govern- ment. 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 opin- ion 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.”41 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.”42

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-

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based system will tend to drive out of existence or into marginality the media com- panies 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.43 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.44 Even if ad-based media cater to an affluent (“upscale”) audience, they easily pick up a large part of the “down-scale” 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.45

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 1856 that some journals are poor vehicles because “their readers are not purchasers, and any money thrown upon them is so much thrown away.”46 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 1960 and 1967, 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. . . .”47 The death of the Herald, as well as of the News Chronicle and Sunday Citizen, was in large measure a result of progressive strangula- tion by lack of advertising support. The Herald, with 8.1 percent of national daily circulation, got 3.5 percent of net advertising revenue; the Sunday Citizen got one- tenth of the net advertising revenue of the Sunday Times and one-seventh that of the Observer (on a per-thousand-copies basis). Curran argues persuasively that the loss of these three papers was an important contribution to the declining fortunes of the Labour 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.”48 A mass movement without any major media support, and sub- ject to a great deal of active press hostility, suffers a serious disability, and struggles against grave odds.

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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 seg- ments in proportion to usage levels of advertisers’ products and services.”49 In short, the mass media are interested in attracting audiences with buying power, not audi- ences 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 spe- cialized staff to solicit advertisers and necessarily having to explain how their pro- grams 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,”50 whose requirements and demands the media must accommodate if they are to succeed.51

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.”52

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 1985 after the station showed the documentary “Hungry for Profit,” which contains material critical of multinational corporate activities in the Third World. Even before the program was shown, in anticipation of negative corporate reaction, station officials “did all we could to get the program sanitized” (according to one station source).53 The chief executive of Gulf + Western complained to the station that the program was “virulently anti-business if not anti-American,” and that the station’s carrying the program was not the behavior “of a friend” of the corporation. The London Economist says that “Most people believe that WNET would not make the same mistake again.”54

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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.55 Large corporate advertisers on television will rarely sponsor programs that engage in serious criti- cisms of corporate activities, such as the problem of environmental degradation, the workings of the military-industrial complex, or corporate support of and bene- fits 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.”56

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.57 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 program- ming that has significant public-affairs content.58

Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complex- ities 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 evolu- tion 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.”59 There are exceptional cases of companies willing to sponsor serious programs, sometimes a result of recent embarrassments that call for a public-relations offset.60 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 advertis- ing budgets,” but on public television, culture “has come to mean ‘other cultures.’ . . . American civilization, here and now, is excluded from consideration.”61

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 mater- ials 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

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programming trying to come into being or surviving on the periphery of the main- stream 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 import- ant rumors and leaks abound, and where regular press conferences are held. The White House, 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 depart- ment 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 prin- ciple of bureaucratic affinity: only other bureaucracies can satisfy the input needs of a news bureaucracy.”62

Government and corporate sources also have the great merit of being recogniz- able 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 know- ledge 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.63

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.64

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

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dollars every year and dwarfing not only the public-information resources of any dissenting individual or group but the aggregate of such groups. In 1979 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:

140 newspapers, 690,000 copies per week Airman magazine, monthly circulation 125,000 34 radio and 17 TV stations, primarily overseas 45,000 headquarters and unit news releases 615,000 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 speeches65

This excludes vast areas of the air force’s public-information effort. Writing back in 1970, Senator J. W. Fulbright had found that the air force public-relations effort in 1968 involved 1,305 full-time employees, exclusive of additional thousands that “have public functions collateral to other duties.”66 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 1,139 radio stations; it also produced 148 motion pictures, of which 24 were released for public consumption.67 There is no reason to believe that the air force public-relations effort has diminished since the 1960s.68

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 1971, an Armed Forces Journal survey revealed that the Pentagon was publishing a total of 371 magazines at an annual cost of some $57 million, an operation sixteen times larger than the nation’s biggest publisher. In an update in 1982, the Air Force Journal International indicated that the Pentagon was publishing 1,203 periodicals.69 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 1984–85 was under $500,000, with eleven staff people.70 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.71 The ratio of air force news releases and press conferences to those of the AFSC and NCC taken together are 150 to 1 (or 2,200 to 1 if we count hometown news releases of the air force), and 94 to 1 respectively. Aggregating the other services would increase the differential by a large factor.

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Only the corporate sector has the resources to produce public information and propaganda on the scale of the Pentagon and other government bodies. The AFSC and NCC cannot duplicate the Mobil Oil company’s multimillion-dollar purchase of newspaper space and other corporate investments to get its viewpoint across.72 The number of individual corporations with budgets for public information and lobbying in excess of those of the AFSC and NCC runs into the hundreds, perhaps even the thousands. A corporate collective like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had a 1983 budget for research, communications, and political activities of $65 million.73 By 1980, the chamber was publishing a business magazine (Nation’s Business) with a circula- tion of 1.3 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 128 commercial television stations.74

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 150,000 professionals,”75 and its resources are related to corporate income, profits, and the protective value of public-relations and lobbying outlays. Corporate profits before taxes in 1985 were $295.5 billion. When the cor- porate community gets agitated about the political environment, as it did in the 1970s, it obviously has the wherewithal to meet the perceived threat. Corporate and trade-association image and issues advertising increased from $305 million in 1975 to $650 million in 1980.76 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 con- tributions. Aggregate corporate and trade-association political advertising and grass- roots outlays were estimated to have reached the billion-dollar-a-year level by 1978, and to have grown to $1.6 billion by 1984.77

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 journal- ists advance copies of speeches and forthcoming reports; they schedule press con- ferences at hours well-geared to news deadlines;78 they write press releases in usable language; and they carefully organize their press conferences and “photo opportun- ity” sessions.79 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.”80

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 sub- sidy become “routine” news sources and have privileged access to the gates. Non- routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers. It should also be noted that in the case of the largesse of the Pentagon and the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy,81 the subsidy is at the taxpayers’ expense, so that, in effect, the citizenry pays to be propagandized in the interest of powerful groups such as military contractors and other sponsors of state terrorism.

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Because of their services, continuous contact on the beat, and mutual depend- ency, 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.82 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;83 Claire Sterling refused to participate in television-network shows on the Bulgarian Connection where her critics would appear.84 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 follow- ing a special agenda and framework (as we will show in detail in the chapters that follow).85 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 1984 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 1917–18 that one of the best means of controlling news was flooding news channels with ‘facts,’ or what amounted to official information.”86

The relation between power and sourcing extends beyond official and corporate provision of day-to-day news to shaping the supply of “experts.” The dominance of official sources is weakened by the existence of highly respectable unofficial sources that give dissident views with great authority. This problem is alleviated by “co- opting the experts”87 – i.e., putting them on the payroll as consultants, funding their research, and organizing think tanks that will hire them directly and help dissemin- ate 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.”88 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.”89 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.

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This process of creating the needed body of experts has been carried out on a deliberate basis and a massive scale. Back in 1972, Judge Lewis Powell (later elev- ated 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 credibil- ity to corporate studies and give business a stronger voice on the campuses.”90 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 tooth- paste, 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 dissemina- tion of the correct ideas to “thousands of newspapers,” it is possible to keep debate “within its proper perspective.”91

In accordance with this formula, during the 1970s and early 1980s 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.92 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 catapaulted them into the press.

As an illustration of how the funded experts preempt space in the media, Table 17.4 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-1980s. 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 (15.7 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 Inter- national 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.93 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.94

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 publi- cized their work; the Soviet defector Arkady Shevchenko became an expert on Soviet arms and intelligence because Time, ABC-TV, and the New York Times chose to feature him (despite his badly tarnished credentials).95 By giving these purveyors of the preferred view a great deal of exposure, the media confer status and make them the obvious candidates for opinion and analysis.

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

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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.96 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.97

Flak and the Enforcers: The Fourth Filter

“Flak” refers to negative response 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 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

Table 17.4 Experts on terrorism and defense on the “McNeil–Lehrer News Hour,” January 14, 1985, to January 27, 1986a

Category of expert No. % No. excluding % Excluding journalists journalists

Government official 24 20 24 27 Former government official 24 20 24 27 Conservative think tank 14 11.7 14 15.7 Academic 12 10 12 13.5 Journalist 31 25.8 — — Consultant 3 2.5 3 3.4 Foreign government official 5 4.2 5 5.6 Other 7 5.8 7 7.8

Totals 120 100 89 100

a This is a compilation of all appearances on the news hour concerning the Bulgarian Connection (3), the shooting down of the Korean airliner KAL 007 (5), and terrorism, defense, and arms control (33), from January 14, 1985, through January 27, 1986.

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

The 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 1970s and 1980s. 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.99 The powerful can also work on the media indirectly by complaining to their own constituencies (stock- holders, 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 1970s and 1980s, the corpor- ate 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 1980, has specialized in Fairness Doctrine complaints and libel suits to aid “media victims.” The Capital Legal Foundation, incorporated in 1977, was the Scaife vehicle for Westmoreland’s $120-million libel suit against CBS.100

The Media Institute, organized in 1972 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,101 but it underwrites works such as John Corry’s exposé of the alleged left-wing bias of the mass media.102 The chairman of the board of trustees of the institute in 1985 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-1980s as a “non-profit, non-partisan” 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.103

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AIM was formed in 1969, and it grew spectacularly in the 1970s. Its annual income rose from $5,000 in 1971 to $1.5 million in the early 1980s, with funding mainly from large corporations and the wealthy heirs and foundations of the cor- porate system. At least eight separate oil companies were contributors to AIM in the early 1980s, but the wide representation in sponsors from the corporate community is impressive.104 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.105

Freedom House, which dates back to the early 1940s, has had interlocks with AIM, the World Anticommunist League, Resistance International, and U.S. gov- ernment 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 1979 and found them “fair,” whereas the 1980 elections won by Mugabe under British super- vision it found dubious. Its election monitors also found the Salvadoran elections of 1982 admirable.106 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 defini- tion noble (see the extensive review of the Freedom House study in chapter 5 and appendix 3 [Herman and Chomsky 1988]). In 1982, when the Reagan administra- tion 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.107

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 flaks who regularly assail the “liberal media,” such as Michael Ledeen,108 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.109

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.”110

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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 commun- ism 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 accom- modation with Communist states and radicalism. It therefore helps fragment the left and labor movements and serves as a political-control mechanism. If the triumph of communism is the worst imaginable result, the support of fascism abroad is justified as a lesser evil. Opposition to social democrats who are too soft on Communists and “play into their hands” is rationalized in similar terms.

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 over- throw by the military after nine months in office had at least the tacit support of the United States.111 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 1964.112 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, 1947–54, and the military attacks on Nicaragua, 1981–7, 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.

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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.113 Pascal Delwit and Jean- Michel Dewaele point out that in France, too, the ideologues of anticommunism “can do and say anything.”114 Analyzing the new status of Annie Kriegel and Pierre Daix, two former passionate Stalinists now possessed of a large and uncritical audi- ence in France,115 Delwit and Dewaele note:

If we analyse their writings, we find all the classic reactions of people who have been disappointed in love. But no one dreams of criticising 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.116

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 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 require- ment 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.117

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 1980, and the U.S. business community has

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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 rightwing 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.118

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 1981 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 José 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.”119

Reports of the abuses of worthy victims not only pass through the filters; they may also become the basis of sustained propaganda campaigns. If the government or corporate community and the media feel that a story is useful as well as dramatic, they focus on it intensively and use it to enlighten the public. This was true, for example, of the shooting down by the Soviets of the Korean airliner KAL 007 in early September 1983, which permitted an extended campaign of denigration of an official enemy and greatly advanced Reagan administration arms plans. As Bernard Gwertzman noted complacently in the New York Times of August 31, 1984, U.S. officials “assert that worldwide criticism of the Soviet handling of the crisis has strengthened the United States in its relations with Moscow.” In sharp contrast, the shooting down by Israel of a Libyan civilian airliner in February 1973 led to no outcry in the West, no denunciations for “cold-blooded murder,”120 and no boycott. This difference in treatment was explained by the New York Times precisely on the grounds of utility: “No useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame for the downing of a Libyan airliner in the Sinai peninsula last week.”121 There was a very “useful purpose” served by focusing on the Soviet act, and a massive propaganda campaign ensued.122

Propaganda campaigns in general have been closely attuned to elite interests. The Red scare of 1919–20 served well to abort the union-organizing drive that followed World War I in the steel and other industries. The Truman–McCarthy Red scare helped inaugurate the Cold War and the permanent war economy, and it also served to weaken the progressive coalition of the New Deal years. The chronic focus on the plight of Soviet dissidents, on enemy killings in Cambodia, and on the Bulgarian

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Connection helped weaken the Vietnam syndrome, justify a huge arms buildup and a more aggressive foreign policy, and divert attention from the upward redistribu- tion of income that was the heart of Reagan’s domestic economic program.123 The recent propaganda–disinformation attacks on Nicaragua have been needed to avert eyes from the savagery of the war in El Salvador and to justify the escalating U.S. investment in counterrevolution in Central America.

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.124 Attention to the Indonesian massacres of 1965–6, or the victims of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor from 1975 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.125

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 Nicar- agua, 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.126 Some propaganda campaigns arc 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.127

For stories that are useful, the process will get under way with a series of govern- ment 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.

282 Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky

If the articles are written in an assured and convincing style, are subject to no criti- cisms 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 compre- hensively, 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 contra- diction 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.128

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.129 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.130 What is on the agenda in treating one case will be off the agenda in discussing the other.131 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 victimiza- tion 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,132 that the media’s liberal, adversarial (if not subversive) hostility to

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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 import- ant domestic power interests. This should be observable in dichotomized choices of story and in the volume and quality of coverage. In the chapters that follow we will see that such dichotomization in the mass media is massive and systematic: not only are choices for publicity and suppression comprehensible in terms of system advant- age, but the modes of handling favored and inconvenient materials (placement, tone, context, fullness of treatment) differ in ways that serve political ends.

Notes

1 See note 4 of the Preface [to Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent]. 2 Media representatives claim that what the government says is “newsworthy” in its own

right. If, however, the government’s assertions are transmitted without context or evaluation, and without regard to the government’s possible manipulative intent, the media have set themselves up to be “managed.” Their objectivity is “nominal,” not substantive.

In early October 1986, memos were leaked to the press indicating that the Reagan administration had carried out a deliberate campaign of disinformation to influence events in Libya. The mass media, which had passed along this material without ques- tion, expressed a great deal of righteous indignation that they had been misled. To compound the absurdity, five years earlier the press had reported a CIA-run “disinforma- tion program designed to embarrass Qaddafi and his government,” along with terrorist operations to overthrow Qaddafi and perhaps assassinate him (Newsweek, Aug. 3, 1981; P. Edward Haley, Qaddafi and the United States since 1969 [New York: Praeger, 1984], p. 272). But no lessons were learned. In fact, the mass media are gulled on an almost daily basis, but rarely have to suffer the indignity of government documents revealing their gullibility. With regard to Libya, the media have fallen into line for each propa- ganda ploy, from the 1981 “hit squads” through the Berlin discothèque bombing, swallowing each implausible claim, failing to admit error in retrospect, and apparently unable to learn from successive entrapment – which suggests willing error. See Noam Chomsky, Pirates & Emperors (New York: Claremont, 1986), chapter 3. As we show throughout the present book, a series of lies by the government, successively exposed, never seems to arouse skepticism in the media regarding the next government claim.

3 For a description of the government’s strategy of deflecting attention away from the Nicaraguan election by the fabricated MIG story, and the media’s service in this gov- ernment program, see chapter 3 [of Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent], under “The MIG Crisis Staged during the Nicaraguan Election Week.”

4 James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 24.

5 Quoted in ibid., p. 23. 6 Ibid., p. 34. 7 Ibid., pp. 38–9. 8 Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America (New York: Macmillan, 1937),

pp. 166, 173.

284 Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky

9 Earl Vance, “Freedom of the Press for Whom,” Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1945), quoted in Survival of a Free, Competitive Press: The Small Newspaper: Demo- cracy’s Grass Roots, Report of the Chairman, Senate Small Business Committee, 80th Cong., 1st session, 1947, p. 54.

10 Note that we are speaking of media with substantial outreach – mass media. It has always been possible to start small-circulation journals and to produce mimeographed or photocopied newsletters sent around to a tiny audience. But even small journals in the United States today typically survive only by virtue of contributions from wealthy financial angels.

11 In 1987, the Times–Mirror Company, for example, owned newspapers in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Denver, and Hartford, Connecticut, had book publishing and magazine subsidiaries, and owned cable systems and seven television stations.

12 Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 2nd ed. (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1987), p. xvi.

13 David L. Paletz and Robert M. Entman, Media, Power, Politics (New York: Free Press, 1981), p. 7; Stephen Hess, The Government/Press Connection: Press Officers and Their Offices (Washington: Brookings, 1984), pp. 99–100.

14 The four major Western wire services – Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, and Agence-France-Presse – account for some 80 percent of the international news circulating in the world today. AP is owned by member newspapers; UPI is privately owned; Reuters was owned mainly by the British media until it went public in 1984, but control was retained by the original owners by giving lesser voting rights to the new stockholders; Agence-France-Presse is heavily subsidized by the French government. As is pointed out by Jonathan Fenby, the wire services “exist to serve markets,” and their prime concern, accordingly, “is with the rich media markets of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, and increasingly with the business com- munity. . . .” They compete fiercely, but AP and UPI “are really U.S. enterprises that operate on an international scale. . . . Without their domestic base, the AP and UPI could not operate as international agencies. With it, they must be American organizations, subject to American pressures and requirements” (The International News Services [New York: Schocken, 1986], pp. 7, 9, 73–4). See also Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics of Information: How Western Culture Dominates the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), chapter 3.

15 The fourteenth annual Roper survey, “Public Attitudes toward Television and Other Media in a Time of Change” (May 1985), indicates that in 1984, 64 percent of the sample mentioned television as the place “where you usually get most of your news about what’s going on in the world today” (p. 3). It has often been noted that the television networks themselves depend heavily on the prestige newspapers, wire services, and government for their choices of news. Their autonomy as newsmakers can be easily exaggerated.

16 The members of the very top tier qualify by audience outreach, importance as setters of news standards, and asset and profit totals. The last half dozen or so in our twenty-four involve a certain amount of arbitrariness of choice, although audience size is still our primary criterion. McGraw-Hill is included because of its joint strength in trade books and magazines of political content and outreach.

17 As noted earlier, Storer came under the temporary control of the securities firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in 1985. As its ultimate fate was unclear at the time of writing, and as financial data were no longer available after 1984, we have kept Storer on the table and list it here, despite its uncertain status.

A Propaganda Model 285

18 John Kluge, having taken the Metromedia system private in a leveraged buyout in 1984 worth $1.1 billion, sold off various parts of this system in 1985–6 for $5.5 billion, at a personal profit of some $3 billion (Gary Hector, “Are Shareholders Cheated by LBOs?” Fortune, Jan. 17, 1987, p. 100). Station KDLA-TV, in Los Angeles, which had been bought by a management-outsider group in a leveraged buyout in 1983 for $245 million, was sold to the Tribune Company for $510 million two years later (Richard Stevenson, “Tribune in TV Deal for $510 Million,” New York Times, May 7, 1985). See also “The Media Magnates: Why Huge Fortunes Roll Off the Presses,” Fortune, October 12, 1987.

19 A split among the heirs of James E. Scripps eventually resulted in the sale of the Detroit Evening News. According to one news article, “Daniel Marentette, a Scripps family member and a self described ‘angry shareholder,’ says family members want a better return on their money. ‘We get better yields investing in a New York check- ing account,’ says Mr. Marentette, who sells race horses” (Damon Darlin, “Takeover Rumors Hit Detroit News Parent,” Wall Street Journal, July 18, 1985). The Bingham family division on these matters led to the sale of the Louisville Courier-Journal; the New Haven papers of the Jackson family were sold after years of squabbling, and “the sale price [of the New Haven papers], $185 million, has only served to publicize the potential value of family holdings of family newspapers elsewhere” (Geraldine Fabrikant, “Newspaper Properties, Hotter than Ever,” New York Times, Aug. 17, 1986).

20 The Reagan administration strengthened the control of existing holders of television- station licenses by increasing their term from three to five years, and its FCC made renewals essentially automatic. The FCC also greatly facilitated speculation and trading in television properties by a rule change reducing the required holding period before sale of a newly acquired property from three years to one year.

The Reagan era FCC and Department of Justice also refused to challenge mergers and takeover bids that would significantly increase the concentration of power (GE– RCA) or media concentration (Capital Cities–ABC). Furthermore, beginning April 2, 1985, media owners could own as many as twelve television stations, as long as their total audience didn’t exceed 25 percent of the nation’s television households; and they could also hold twelve AM and twelve FM stations, as the 1953 “7–7–7 rule” was replaced with a “12–12–12 rule.” See Herbert H. Howard, “Group and Cross-Media Ownership of Television Stations: 1985” (Washington: National Association of Broad- casters, 1985).

21 This was justified by Reagan-era FCC chairman Mark Fowler on the grounds that market options are opening up and that the public should be free to choose. Criticized by Fred Friendly for doing away with the law’s public-interest standard, Fowler replied that Friendly “distrusts the ability of the viewing public to make decisions on its own through the marketplace mechanism. I do not” (Jeanne Saddler, “Clear Channel: Broadcast Takeovers Meet Less FCC Static, and Critics Are Upset,” Wall Street Jour- nal, June 11, 1985). Among other problems, Fowler ignores the fact that true freedom of choice involves the ability to select options that may not be offered by an oligopoly selling audiences to advertisers.

22 CBS increased its debt by about $1 billion in 1985 to finance the purchase of 21 percent of its own stock, in order to fend off a takeover attempt by Ted Turner. The Wall Street Journal noted that “With debt now standing at 60 percent of capital, it needs to keep advertising revenue up to repay borrowings and interest” (Peter Barnes, “CBS Profit Hinges on Better TV Ratings,” June 6, 1986). With the slowed-up growth

286 Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky

of advertising revenues, CBS embarked on an employment cutback of as many as six hundred broadcast division employees, the most extensive for CBS since the loss of cigarette advertising in 1971 (Peter Barnes, “CBS Will Cut up to 600 Posts in Broad- casting,” Wall Street Journal, July 1, 1986). In June 1986, Time, Inc., embarked on a program to buy back as much as 10 million shares, or 16 percent of its common stock, at an expected cost of some $900 million, again to reduce the threat of a hostile takeover (Laura Landro, “Time Will Buy as Much as 16 percent of Its Common,” Wall Street Journal, June 20, 1986).

23 In response to the Jesse Helms and Turner threats to CBS, Laurence Tisch, of Loews Corporation, was encouraged to increase his holdings in CBS stock, already at 11.7 percent. In August 1986, the Loews interest was raised to 24.9 percent, and Tisch obtained a position of virtual control. In combination with William Paley, who owned 8.1 percent of the shares, the chief executive officer of CBS was removed and Tisch took over that role himself, on a temporary basis (Peter Barnes, “Loews Increases Its Stake in CBS to Almost 25 percent,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 12, 1986).

24 The number would be eight if we included the estate of Lila Wallace, who died in 1984, leaving the controlling stock interest in Reader’s Digest to the care of trustees.

25 As we noted in the preface, the neoconservatives speak regularly of “liberal” domina- tion of the media, assuming or pretending that the underlings call the shots, not the people who own or control the media. These data, showing the wealth position of media owners, are understandably something they prefer to ignore. Sometimes, however, the neoconservatives go “populist,” and – while financed by Mobil Oil Corporation and Richard Mellon Scaife – pretend to be speaking for the “masses” in opposition to a monied elite dominating the media. For further discussion, see Edward S. Herman’s review of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, “Michael Novak’s Promised Land: Unfettered Corporate Capitalism,” Monthly Review (October 1983).

26 Similar results are found in Peter Dreier, “The Position of the Press in the U.S. Power Structure,” Social Problems (February 1982), pp. 298–310.

27 Benjamin Compaine et al., Anatomy of the Communications Industry: Who Owns the Media? (White Plains, N.Y.: Knowledge Industry Publications, 1982), p. 463.

28 Ibid., pp. 458–60. 29 See Edward S. Herman, Corporate Control, Corporate Power (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1981), pp. 26–54. 30 For the interests of fifteen major newspaper companies in other media fields, and a

checklist of other fields entered by leading firms in a variety of media industries, see Compaine, Anatomy of the Communications Industry, tables 2.19 and 8.1, pp. 11 and 452–3.

31 The merger had been sanctioned by the FCC but was stymied by intervention of the Department of Justice. See “A broken engagement for ITT and ABC,” Business Week, January 6, 1967.

32 Ibid. 33 On the enormous and effective lobbying operations of GE, see Thomas B. Edsall,

“Bringing Good Things to GE: Firm’s Political Savvy Scores in Washington,” Washing- ton Post, April 13, 1985.

34 The widely quoted joke by A. J. Liebling – that if you don’t like what your newspaper says you are perfectly free to start or buy one of your own – stressed the impotence of the individual. In a favorable political climate such as that provided by the Reagan administration, however, a giant corporation not liking media performance can buy its own, as exemplified by GE.

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35 Allan Sloan, “Understanding Murdoch – The Numbers Aren’t What Really Matters,” Forbes, March 10, 1986, pp. 114ff.

36 On the Nixon–Agnew campaign to bully the media by publicity attacks and threats, see Marilyn Lashner, The Chilling Effect in TV News (New York: Praeger, 1984). Lashner concluded that the Nixon White House’s attempt to quiet the media “succeeded handily, at least as far as television is concerned” (p. 167). See also Fred Powledge, The Engineering of Restraint: The Nixon Administration and the Press (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1971), and William E. Porter, Assault on the Media: The Nixon Years (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976).

37 Of the 290 directors in his sample of large newspapers, 36 had high-level positions – past or present – in the federal government (Dreier, “The Position of the Press,” p. 303).

38 One study showed that out of sixty-five FCC commissioners and high-level staff per- sonnel who left the FCC between 1945 and 1970, twelve had come out of the private- communications sector before their FCC service, and thirty-four went into private-firm service after leaving the commission (Roger Noll et al., Economic Aspects of Television Regulation [Washington: Brookings, 1973], p. 123).

39 “The symbolic growth of American television and global enterprise has made them so interrelated that they cannot be thought of as separate. They are essentially the same phenomenon. Preceded far and wide by military advisers, lobbyists, equipment sales- men, advertising specialists, merchandising experts, and telefilm salesmen as advance agents, the enterprise penetrates much of the non-socialist world. Television is simply its most visible portion” (Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor [New York: Oxford University Press, 1978], p. 158). For a broader picture, see Herbert I. Schiller, Communication and Cultural Domination (White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976), especially chapters 3–4.

40 Is it not possible that if the populace “demands” program content greatly disliked by the owners, competition and the quest for profits will cause them to offer such pro- gramming? There is some truth in this, and it, along with the limited autonomy of media personnel, may help explain the “surprises” that crop up occasionally in the mass media. One limit to the force of public demand, however, is that the millions of customers have no means of registering their demand for products that are not offered to them. A further problem is that the owners’ class interests are reinforced by a variety of other filters that we discuss below.

41 Quoted in Curran and Seaton, Power without Responsibility, p. 31. 42 Ibid., p. 41. 43 “Producers presenting patrons [advertisers] with the greatest opportunities to make a

profit through their publics will receive support while those that cannot compete on this score will not survive” (Joseph Turow, Media Industries: The Production of News and Entertainment [New York: Longman, 1984], p. 52).

44 Noncommercial television is also at a huge disadvantage for the same reason, and will require a public subsidy to be able to compete. Because public television does not have the built-in constraints of ownership by the wealthy, and the need to appease advert- isers, it poses a threat to a narrow elite control of mass communications. This is why conservatives struggle to keep public television on a short leash, with annual funding decisions, and funding at a low level (see Barnouw, The Sponsor, pp. 179–82). Another option pursued in the Carter–Reagan era has been to force it into the commercial nexus by sharp defunding.

45 Bagdikian, Media Monopoly, pp. 118–26. “ ‘The dominant paper ultimately thrives,’ Gannett Chairman Allen H. Neuharth says. ‘The weaker paper ultimately dies’ ” (Joseph B. White, “Knight-Ridder’s No-Lose Plan Backfires,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 4, 1988).

288 Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky

46 Quoted in Curran and Seaton, Power without Responsibility, p. 43. 47 “Advertising and the Press,” in James Curran (ed.), The British Press: A Manifesto

(London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 252–5. 48 Ibid., p. 254. 49 1984 CBS Annual Report, p. 13. This is a further refinement in the measurement of

“efficiency” in “delivering an audience.” In the magazine business, the standard meas- ure is CPM, or “costs per thousand,” to an advertiser to reach buyers through a full- page, black-and-white ad. Recent developments, like CBS’s CAP, have been in the direction of identifying the special characteristics of the audience delivered. In selling itself to advertisers, the Soap Opera Digest says: “But you probably want to know about our first milestone: today Soap Opera Digest delivers more women in the 18–49 cat- egory at the lowest CPM than any other women’s magazine” (quoted in Turow, Media Industries, p. 55).

50 William Evan, Organization Theory (New York: Wiley, 1976), p. 123. 51 Turow asserts that “The continual interaction of producers and primary patrons plays a

dominant part in setting the general boundary conditions for day-to-day production activity” (Media Industries, p. 51).

52 Quoted in Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 253. 53 Pat Aufderheide, “What Makes Public TV Public?” The Progressive (January 1988). 54 “Castor oil or Camelot?” December 5, 1987. For further information on such interven-

tions, see Harry Hammitt, “Advertising Pressures on Media,” Freedom of Information Center Report no. 367 (School of Journalism, University of Missouri at Columbia, February 1977). See also James Aronson, Deadline for the Media (New York: Bobbs- Merrill, 1972), pp. 261–3.

55 According to Procter & Gamble’s instructions to their ad agency, “There will be no material on any of our programs which could in any way further the concept of busi- ness as cold, ruthless, and lacking in all sentiment or spiritual motivation.” The manager of corporate communications for General Electric has said: “We insist on a program environment that reinforces our corporate messages” (quoted in Bagdikian, Media Monopoly, p. 160). We may recall that GE now owns NBC-TV.

56 Barnouw, The Sponsor, p. 135. 57 Advertisers may also be offended by attacks on themselves or their products. On the

tendency of the media to avoid criticism of advertised products even when very import- ant to consumer welfare [e.g., the effects of smoking], see Bagdikian, Media Monopoly, pp. 168–73.

58 This is hard to prove statistically, given the poor data made available by the FCC over the years. The long-term trend in advertising time/programming time is dramatically revealed by the fact that in 1929 the National Association of Broadcasting adopted as a standard of commercial practice on radio the following: “Commercial announcements . . . shall not be broadcast between 7 and 11 P.M.” William Paley testified before the Senate Commerce Committee in 1930 that only 22 percent of CBS’s time was alloc- ated to commercially sponsored programs, with the other 78 percent sustaining; and he noted that advertising took up only “seven-tenths of 1 percent of all our time” (quoted in Public Service Responsibility of Broadcast Licenses, FCC [Washington: GPO, March 7, 1946], p. 42). Frank Wolf states in reference to public-affairs programming: “That such programs were even shown at all on commercial television may have been the result of FCC regulation” (Television Programming for News and Public Affairs [New York: Praeger, 1972], p. 138; see also pp. 99–139).

59 Barnouw, The Sponsor, p. 134.

A Propaganda Model 289

60 For Alcoa’s post-antitrust-suit sponsorship of Edward R. Murrow, and ITT’s post- early-1970s-scandals sponsorship of “The Big Blue Marble,” see Barnouw, The Sponsor, ibid., pp. 51–2, 84–6. Barnouw shows that network news coverage of ITT was sharply constrained during the period of ITT program sponsorship.

61 Barnouw, The Sponsor, p. 150. 62 Mark Fishman, Manufacturing the News (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980),

p. 143. 63 Ibid., pp. 144–5. 64 Gaye Tuchman, “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen’s

Notions of Objectivity,” American Journal of Sociology, 77, no. 2 (1972), pp. 662–4. 65 United States Air Force, “Fact Sheet: The United States Air Force Information Program”

(March 1979); “News Releases: 600,000 in a Year,” Air Force Times, April 28, 1980. 66 J. W. Fulbright, The Pentagon Propaganda Machine (New York: H. Liveright, 1970),

p. 88. 67 Ibid., p. 90. 68 An Associated Press report on “Newspapers Mustered as Air Force Defends BiB,”

published in the Washington Post, April 3, 1987, indicates that the U.S. Air Force had 277 newspapers in 1987, as compared with 140 in 1979.

69 “DOD Kills 205 Periodicals; Still Publishes 1,203 Others,” Armed Forces Journal Inter- national (August 1982), p. 16.

70 Its nine regional offices also had some public-information operations, but personnel and funding are not readily allocatable to this function. They are smaller than the central office aggregate.

The AFSC aggregate public-information budget is about the same size as the con- tract given by the State Department to International Business Communications (IBC) for lobbying on behalf of the contras ($419,000). This was only one of twenty-five contracts investigated by the GAO that “the Latin American Public Diplomacy office awarded to individuals for research and papers on Central America, said a GAO official involved in the investigation” (Rita Beamish, “Pro-contra Contracts are Probed,” Phila- delphia Inquirer, July 22, 1987, p. 4A).

71 The NCC’s news services are concentrated in the Office of Information, but it has some dispersed staff in communications functions elsewhere in the organization that produce a few newsletters, magazines, and some videotapes and filmstrips.

72 In 1980, Mobil Oil had a public-relations budget of $21 million and a public-relations staff of seventy-three. Between 1976 and 1981 it produced at least a dozen televised special reports on such issues as gasoline prices, with a hired television journalist interviewing Mobil executives and other experts, that are shown frequently on television, often without indication of Mobil sponsorship. See A. Kent MacDougall, Ninety Sec- onds To Tell It All (Homewood, Ill.: Dow Jones–Irwin, 1981), pp. 117–20.

73 John S. Saloma III, Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984), p. 79.

74 MacDougall, Ninety Seconds, pp. 116–17. 75 Thomas B. Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality (New York: Norton, 1984), p. 110. 76 Peggy Dardenne, “Corporate Advertising,” Public Relations Journal (November 1982),

p. 36. 77 S. Prakash Sethi, Handbook of Advocacy Advertising: Strategies and Applications (Cam-

bridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1987), p. 22. See also Edsall, New Politics, chapter 3, “The Politicization of the Business Community”; and Saloma, Ominous Politics, chapter 6, “The Corporations: Making Our Voices Heard.”

290 Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky

78 The April 14, 1986, U.S. bombing of Libya was the first military action timed to preempt attention on 7 P.M. prime-time television news. See Chomsky, Pirates & Emperors, p. 147.

79 For the masterful way the Reagan administration used these to manipulate the press, see “Standups,” The New Yorker, December 2, 1985, pp. 81ff.

80 Fishman, Manufacturing the News, p. 153. 81 See note 70. 82 On January 16, 1986, the American Friends Service Committee issued a news release,

based on extended Freedom of Information Act inquiries, which showed that there had been 381 navy nuclear-weapons accidents and “incidents” in the period 1965–77, a figure far higher than that previously claimed. The mass media did not cover this hot story directly but through the filter of the navy’s reply, which downplayed the signific- ance of the new findings and eliminated or relegated to the background the AFSC’s full range of facts and interpretation of the meaning of what they had uncovered. A typical heading: “Navy Lists Nuclear Mishaps: None of 630 Imperilled Public, Service Says,” Washington Post, January 16, 1986.

83 The Harvard professor in charge of the program, Harvey Mansfield, stated that the invitation to White had been a mistake anyway, as he “is a representative of the far left,” whereas the forum was intended to involve a debate “between liberals and conserva- tives” (Harvard Crimson, May 14, 1986).

84 See Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1986), pp. 123–4.

85 Mark Hertsgaard, “How Reagan Seduced Us: Inside the President’s Propaganda Fac- tory,” Village Voice, September 18, 1984; see also “Standups,” cited in note 79 above.

86 Stephen L. Vaughn, Holding Fast the Inner Lines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 194.

87 Bruce Owen and Ronald Braeutigam, The Regulation Game: Strategic Use of the Admin- istrative Process (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1978), p. 7.

88 See Edward S. Herman, “The Institutionalization of Bias in Economics,” Media, Cul- ture and Society (July 1982), pp. 275–91.

89 Henry Kissinger, American Foreign Policy (New York: Norton, 1969), p. 28. 90 Quoted in Alex Carey, “Managing Public Opinion: The Corporate Offensive” (Univer-

sity of New South Wales, 1986, mimeographed), p. 32. 91 Ibid., pp. 46–7, quoting Feulner papers given in 1978 and 1985. 92 For a good discussion of many of these organizations and their purpose, funding,

networking, and outreach programs, see Saloma, Ominous Politics, chapters 4, 6, and 9. 93 See Herman and Broadhead, Bulgarian Connection, p. 259; Fred Landis, “Georgetown’s

Ivory Tower for Old Spooks,” Inquiry, September 30, 1979, pp. 7–9. 94 The CSIS’s expert on terrorism, Robert Kupperman, was probably the most widely

used participant on radio and television talk shows on terrorism in the last several years. 95 On Sterling’s qualifications as an expert, see Herman and Broadhead, Bulgarian Connec-

tion, pp. 125–46; on Shevchenko, see Edward J. Epstein, “The Invention of Arkady Shevchenko, Supermole: The Spy Who Came in to be Sold,” New Republic, July 15– 22, 1985.

96 See David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), pp. 114–38, who stresses the import- ance of the lying informer. This McCarthyite pathology was replicated in Robert Leiken’s 1982 book on “Soviet hegemonism” – the standard Maoist phrase – which conjures up a Soviet strategy of taking over the Western hemisphere by means of Cuba and the

A Propaganda Model 291

Sandinistas, and guerrilla movements elsewhere (Leiken, Soviet Strategy in Latin America [New York: Praeger, 1982]).

97 Then and now, former dissidents are portrayed as especially valuable experts for the seeming authenticity they can bring to the mistakes of their former associates. The fact that their claims are often fraudulent is not a problem because the mass media refuse to point this out. Thus Jean Lacouture lent credence to his criticisms of the Khmer Rouge by claiming to have been a former sympathizer – not only a falsehood, as he was pro- Sihanouk, but an absurdity, as nothing had been known about the the Khmer Rouge. David Horowitz added to his value as a born-again patriot by claiming that along with protesters against the Vietnam War generally, he came “to acquire a new appreciation for foreign tyrants like Kim Il Sung of North Korea” (Peter Collier and David Horowitz, “Confessions of Two New-Left Radicals: Why We Voted for Reagan,” Washington Post National Weekly Edition, April 8, 1985). Robert Leiken became more potent as a critic of the Sandinistas as an alleged former peace-movement activist and early supporter of the Sandinistas. Each of these claims was a fabrication, but this fact went unmentioned in the mass media. On Leiken’s claims, and the “special force” his anti-Sandinista writings gained by his alleged conversion from “fan of the Sandinistas,” see Michael Massing, “Contra Aides,” Mother Jones (October 1987). While dismissing this pretense, Massing credits Leiken’s claim that he “was active in the antiwar movement,” but that is highly misleading. Activists in the Boston area, where he claims to have been an antiwar organizer, recall no participation by Leiken until about 1970 – at which time McGeorge Bundy could also have been described as an activist leader.

98 See above, note 55. 99 See “The Business Campaign Against ‘Trial by TV,’ ” Business Week, June 22, 1980,

pp. 77–9; William H. Miller, “Fighting TV Hatchet Jobs,” Industry Week, January 12, 1981, pp. 61–4.

100 See Walter Schneir and Miriam Schneir, “Beyond Westmoreland: The Right’s Attack on the Press,” The Nation, March 30, 1985.

101 An ad widely distributed by United Technologies Corporation, titled “Crooks and Clowns on TV,” is based on the Media Institute’s study entitled Crooks, Conmen and Clowns: Businessmen in TV Entertainment, which contends that businessmen are treated badly in television entertainment programs.

102 John Corry, TV News and the Dominant Culture (Washington: Media Institute), 1986. 103 See S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda Lichter, The Media Elite (Bethesda,

MD: Adler & Adler, 1986). For a good discussion of the Lichters’ new center, see Alexander Cockburn, “Ashes and Diamonds,” In These Times, July 8–21, 1987.

104 Louis Wolf, “Accuracy in Media Rewrites News and History,” Covert Action Informa- tion Bulletin (Spring 1984), pp. 26–9.

105 AIM’s impact is hard to gauge, but it must be recognized as only a part of a larger corporate right-wing campaign of attack. It has common funding sources with such components of the conservative labyrinth as AEI, Hoover, the Institute for Contemporary Studies, and others (see Saloma, Ominous Politics, esp. chapters 2, 3, and 6), and has its own special role to play. AIM’s head, Reed Irvine, is a frequent participant in television talk shows, and his letters to the editor and commentary are regularly published in the mass media. The media feel obligated to provide careful responses to his detailed attacks on their news and documentaries, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even helped fund his group’s reply to the PBS series on Vietnam. His ability to get the publisher of the New York Times to meet with him personally once a year – a first objective of any lobbyist – is impressive testimony to influence. On his contribution to

292 Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky

the departure of Raymond Bonner from the Times, see Wolf, “Accuracy in Media Rewrites News and History,” pp. 32–3.

106 For an analysis of the bias of the Freedom House observers, see Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, Demonstration Elections: U.S.-Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador (Boston: South End Press, 1984), appendix I, “Freedom House Observers in Zimbabwe Rhodesia and El Salvador.”

107 R. Bruce McColm, “El Salvador: Peaceful Revolution or Armed Struggle?” Perspectives on Freedom I (New York: Freedom House, 1982); James Nelson Goodsell, “Freedom House Labels US Reports on Salvador Biased,” Christian Science Monitor, February 3, 1982.

108 For a discussion of Ledeen’s views on the media, see Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Connection, pp. 166–70.

109 Among the contributors to AIM have been the Reader’s Digest Association and the DeWitt Wallace Fund, Walter Annenberg, Sir James Goldsmith (owner of the French L’Express), and E. W. Scripps II, board chairman of a newspaper-television-radio system.

110 George Skelton, White House correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, noted that in reference to Reagan’s errors of fact, “You write the stories once, twice, and you get a lot of mail saying, ‘You’re picking on the guy, you guys in the press make mistakes too.’ And editors respond to that, so after a while the stories don’t run anymore. We’re intimidated” (quoted in Hertsgaard, “How Reagan Seduced Us”).

111 Piero Gleijeses, The Dominican Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 95–9.

112 Jan K. Black, United States Penetration of Brazil (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva- nia Press, 1977), pp. 39–56.

113 See above, pp. 24–5; below, pp. 157–61. 114 “The Stalinists of Anti-Communism,” in Ralph Miliband, John Saville, and Marcel

Liebman, Socialist Register, 1984: The Uses of Anticommunism (London: Merlin Press, 1984), p. 337.

115 Daix, in 1949, referred to the Stalin concentration camps as “one of the Soviet Union’s most glorious achievements,” displaying “the complete suppression of man’s exploita- tion of man” (quoted in Miliband et al., Socialist Register, p. 337). Kriegel, formerly a hard-line Communist party functionary, was the author of a 1982 book explaining that the KGB organized the Sabra–Shatila massacres, employing German terrorists associ- ated with the PLO and with the tacit cooperation of the CIA, in order to defame Israel as part of the Soviet program of international terrorism. For more on this profound study, and its influence, see Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle (Boston: South End Press, 1983), pp. 291–2, 374–5.

116 Socialist Register, p. 345. 117 Where dissidents are prepared to denounce official enemies, of course, they can pass

through the mass-media filtering system, in the manner of the ex-Communist experts described in “Anticommunism as a Control Mechanism” (p. 29).

118 See chapter 2 [of Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent]: “Worthy and Unworthy Victims.” Of interest in the Turkish case is the Western press’s refusal to publicize the Turkish government’s attacks on the press, including the U.S. press’s own reporters in that country. UPI’s reporter Ismet Ismet, beaten up by the Turkish police and imprisoned under trumped-up charges, was warned by UPI not to publicize the charges against him, and UPI eventually fired him for criticizing their badly compromised handling of his case. See Chris Christiansen, “Keeping in with the Generals,” New Statesman, January 4, 1985.

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119 We believe that the same dichotomization applies in the domestic sphere. For example, both British and American analysts have noted the periodic intense focus on – and indignation over – “welfare chiselers” by the mass media, and the parallel de-emphasis of and benign attitudes toward the far more important fraud and tax abuses of business and the affluent. There is also a deep-seated reluctance on the part of the mass media to examine the structural causes of inequality and poverty. Peter Golding and Sue Middleton, after an extensive discussion of the long-standing “criminalization of poverty” and incessant attacks on welfare scroungers in Britain, point out that tax evasion, by con- trast; is “acceptable, even laudable,” in the press, that the tax evader “is not merely a victim but a hero.” They note, also, that “The supreme achievement of welfare capital- ism” has been to render the causes and condition of poverty almost invisible (Images of Welfare: Press and Public Attitudes to Poverty [Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982], pp. 66–7, 98–100, 186, 193).

In a chapter entitled “The Deserving Rich,” A. J. Liebling pointed out that in the United States as well, “The crusade against the destitute is the favorite crusade of the newspaper publisher,” and that “There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor” (The Press [New York: Ballantine, 1964], pp. 78–9). Liebling went into great detail on various efforts of the media to keep welfare expenses and taxes down “by saying that they [the poor] have concealed assets, or bad character, or both” (p. 79). These strategies not only divert, they also help split the employed working class from the unemployed and marginalized, and make these all exceedingly uncomfortable about participating in a degraded system of scrounging. See Peter Golding and Sue Middleton, “Attitudes to Claimants: A Culture of Contempt,” in Images of Welfare, pp. 169ff. President Reagan’s fabricated anecdotes about welfare chiselers, and his complete silence on the large-scale chiseling of his corporate sponsors, have fitted into a long tradition of cynical and heartless greed.

120 For a full discussion of this dichotomized treatment, see Edward S. Herman, “Gate- keeper versus Propaganda Models: A Critical American Perspective,” in Peter Golding, Graham Murdock and Philip Schlesinger (eds.), Communicating Politics (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), pp. 182–94.

121 Editorial, March 1, 1973. The Soviets apparently didn’t know that they were shooting down a civilian plane, but this was covered up by U.S. officials, and the false allegation of a knowing destruction of a civilian aircraft provided the basis for extremely harsh criticism of the Soviets for barbaric behavior. The Israelis openly admitted knowing that they were shooting down a civilian plane, but this point was of no interest in the West in this particular case.

122 The New York Times Index, for example, has seven full pages of citations to the KAL 007 incident for September 1983 alone.

123 Patriotic orgies, such as the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, the space-shuttle flights, and “Liberty Weekend,” perform a similar function in “bringing us all to- gether.” See Elayne Rapping, The Looking Glass World of Nonfiction TV (Boston: South End Press, 1987), chapter 5, “National Rituals.”

124 See below [see chapter 6 of Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent]. 125 On issues where the elite is seriously divided, there will be dissenting voices allowed in

the mass media, and the inflation of claims and suspension of critical judgment will be subject to some constraint. See the discussion of this point in the preface, and examples in the case studies that follow.

126 The role of the government in these cases cannot be entirely discounted, given the close ties of the Reader’s Digest to the CIA and the fact that Paul Henze, one of the

294 Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky

primary sources and movers in the Bulgarian Connection campaign, was a longtime CIA official. On the CIA–Reader’s Digest connection, see Epstein, “The Invention of Arkady Shevchenko,” pp. 40–1. On Henze, see below, chapter 4. On the strong likelihood that an influential Reader’s Digest best seller on Cambodia was in part a CIA disinformation effort, see below [see chapter 6 of Herman and Chomsky’s Manufactur- ing Consent] and sources cited.

127 We provide many illustrations of these points in the chapters that follow. Watergate and, more recently, the late-Reagan-era exposures of Iran-Contragate, which are put forward as counterexamples, are discussed below.

128 These points apply clearly to the case of the alleged Bulgarian Connection in the plot to assassinate the pope. See below.

129 We have noted elsewhere that the New York Times regularly relied upon Indonesian officials in “presenting the facts” about East Timor, which was being invaded by Indonesia, and ignored refugees, church sources, etc. In contrast, refugees, not state officials, were the prime source in the Times ’s reporting on postwar events in Vietnam and Cambodia (The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism [Boston: South End Press, 1979], pp. 151–2, 169–76, 184–7). On attempts to evade the obvious implications, see chapter 6 [of Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent], under “The Pol Pot Era” (pp. 284–5).

130 Thus when the CIA directs Nicaraguan contras to attack such “soft targets” as farming cooperatives, with explicit State Department approval, the media commentators, including doves, either applaud or offer philosophical disquisitions on whether such targets are legitimate, given that they are defended by lightly armed militia. Terrorist attacks on Israeli kibbutzim, also defended by armed settlers, are regarded somewhat differently. For details, see Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism (Boston: South End Press, 1988).

131 The variable use of agendas and frameworks can be seen with great clarity in the treatment of Third World elections supported and opposed by the United States.

132 Classic in their audacity are Michael Ledeen’s assertions that: (1) Qaddafi’s word is given more credence in the mass media than that of the U.S. government; and (2) “Relatively minor human rights transgressions in a friendly country (especially if ruled by an authoritarian government of the Right) are given far more attention and more intense criticism than far graver sins of countries hostile to us.” (Grave New World [New York: Oxford University Press, 1985], p. 131; Qaddafi’s superior credence is described on pp. 132–3) See chapter 2 [of Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent], for documentation on the reality of mass-media treatment of abuses by clients and enemy states.