% FROM THE NOAM CHOMSKY ARCHIVE
% http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu:/usr/tp0x/chomsky.html
% ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/user/cap/chomsky/
% Filename:    articles/chomsky-herman.pr.propaganda-model
% Title:       A Propaganda Model
% Author:      Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman
% Appeared-in: Propaganda Review, Winter 1988, Number 3
% Source:      Dan Epstein 
% Keywords:    propaganda model
% Synopsis:    How media relays government propaganda
% See-also:    

		       A PROPAGANDA MODEL
		 Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman


[Edward S. Herman is professor of finance at the Wharton School of
the University of Pennsylvania.  Noam Chomsky is Institute
Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Reprinted by permission
of Pantheon Books.  Copyright) 1988 by Edward S. Herman and Noam
Chomsky.

The materials excerpted here are from Chapter One, ``A Propaganda
Model,'' taken from _Manufacturing Consent---The Political
Economy of the Mass Media_, Pantheon Books, NY, 1988, and
represent some of the clearest thinking about propaganda and the
media that Propaganda Review has seen to date.

Each of the five ``filters'' noted here are treated in great
detail in the original text.  The chapter also has a section
describing how the filters contribute to the mounting of
propaganda campaigns when needed by the national establishment.
Normally, we don't print previously published material, but, we
think that this is required reading for propaganda analysts and
wish it as wide a distribution as possible.  Special thanks to
Pantheon Books and Linda Pennell, as well as Edward Herman and
Noam Chomsky, for making this reprint possible.]

			      * * *

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 the media
serve the ends of a dominant elite.  It is much more difficult to
see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and
formal censorship is absent.  This is especially true where the
media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate
and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves
as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest.
What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the
limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality
in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a
private media system and on its behavior and performance.

A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power
and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices.
It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter
out 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) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media;

(3) the reliance of the media on information provided by
    government, business, and ``experts'' funded and approved by
    these primary sources and agents of power;

(4) ``flak'' as a means of disciplining the media; and

(5) ``anti-communism'' 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.

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.''{note: James
Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility: The Press
and Broadcasting in Britain, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1985), p.
24.} 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 immutable laws which
Providence has established for the regulation of civil
society.''{note: Ibid., p. 23.} The result was an attempt to
squelch the working-class media by libel laws and prosecutions,
by requiring an expensive security bond as a condition for
publication, and by imposing various taxes designed to drive out
radical media by raising their costs.  These coercive efforts
were not effective, and by mid-century they had been abandoned in
favor of the liberal view that the market would enforce
responsibility.

Curran and Seaton show that the market did successfully
accomplish what state intervention failed to do.  Following the
repeal of the punitive taxes on newpapers 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.{note: Ibid, p. 34.}

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.

Thus the first filter--the limitation on ownership of media with
any substantial outreach by the requisite large size of
investment--was applicable a century or more ago, and it has
become increasingly effective over time.

In arguing for the benefits of the free market as a means of
controlling dissident opinion in the mid-nineteenth century, the
Liberal chancellor of the British exchequer, Sir George Lewis,
noted that the market would promote those papers ``enjoying the
preference of the advertising public.''{note: Ibid., p. 31.}
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.''{note: Ibid., p. 41.}

Before advertising became prominent, the price of a newspaper had
to cover the costs of doing business.  With the growth of
advertising, papers that attracted ads could afford a copy price
well below production costs.  This put papers lacking in
advertising at a serious disadvantage: their prices would tend to
be higher, curtailing sales, and they would have less surplus to
invest in improving the salability of the paper (features,
attractive format, promotion, etc.).  For this reason, an
advertising-based system will tend to drive out of existence or
into marginality the media companies and types that depend on
revenue from sales alone.  With advertising, the free market does
not yield a neutral system in which final buyer choice decides.
The advertisers' choices influence media prosperity and
survival.

The 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.  Economics dictates that they
concentrate their resources where significant news often occurs,
where important rumors and leaks abound, and where regular press
conferences are held.  The White House, the Pentagon, and the
State Department, in Washington, D.C., are central nodes of such
news activity.  On a local basis, city hall and the police
department are the subject of regular news ``beats'' for
reporters.  Business corporations and trade groups are also
regular and credible purveyors of stories deemed newsworthy.
These bureaucracies turn out a large volume of material that
meets the demands of news organizations for reliable, scheduled
flows.  Mark Fishman calls this ``the principle of bureaucratic
affinity: only other bureaucracies can satisfy the input needs of
a news bureaucracy.''{note: Mark Fishman, Manufacturing the News
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), p. 143.}

Government and corporate sources also have the great merit of
being recognizable and credible by their status and prestige.
This is important to the mass media.  As Fishman notes,

   Newsworkers are predisposed to treat bureaucratic accounts as
   factual because news personnel participate in upholding a
   normative order of authorized knowers in the society.  Reporters
   operate with the attitude that officals ought to know what it is
   their job to know. . . .  In particular, a newsworker will
   recognize an official's claim to knowledge not merely as a claim,
   but as a credible, competent piece of knowledge.  This amounts to
   a moral division of labor: officials have and give the facts;
   reporters merely get them.{note: Ibid., pp. 144--45.}

Another reason for the heavy weight given to official sources is
that the mass media claim to be ``objective'' dispensers of the
news.  Partly to maintain the image of objectivity, but also to
protect themselves from criticisms of bias and the threat of
libel suits, they need material that can be portrayed as
presumptively accurate.  This is also partly a matter of cost:
taking information from sources that may be presumed credible
reduces investigative expense, whereas material from sources that
are not _prima facie_ credible, or that will elicit criticism and
threats, requires careful checking and costly research.

``Flak'' refers to negative responses to a media statement or
program.  It may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone
calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and bills before Congress,
and other modes of 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.  If
certain kinds of fact, position, or program are thought likely to
elicit flak, this prospect can be a deterrent.

Freedom House, an example of a well-funded flak organization
which dates back to the early 1940s, has had interlocks with AIM
(Accuracy in Media), the World Anti-Communist League, Resistance
International, and U.S. government bodies such as Radio Free
Europe and the CIA, and has long served as a virtual propaganda
arm of the government and international right wing.  It has
expended substantial resources in criticizing the media for
insufficient sympathy with US foreign-policy ventures and
excessively harsh criticism of US client states.  Its most
notable publication of this genre was Peter Braestrup's _Big
Story_, which contended that the media's negative portrayal of
the Tet offensive helped lose the war.  The work is a travesty of
scholarship, but more interesting is its premise: that the mass
media not only should support any national venture abroad, but
should do so with enthusiasm, such enterprises being by
definition noble.

A final filter is the ideology of anticommunism.  Communism as
the utlimate evil has always been the specter haunting property
owners, as it threatens the very root of their class position and
superior status.  The Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were
traumas to Western elites, and the ongoing conflicts and the
well-publicized abuses of Communist states have contributed to
elevating opposition to communism to a first principle of Western
ideology and politics.  This ideology helps mobilize the populace
against an enemy, and because the concept is fuzzy it can be used
against anybody advocating policies that threaten property
interests or support accommodation with Communist states and
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.

The five filters narrow the range of news that passes through the
gates, and even more sharply limit what can become ``big news,''
subject to sustained news campaigns.  By definition, news from
primary establishment sources meets one major filter requirement
and is readily accomodated 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.

			      * * *

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