This book centers in what we call a "PROPAGANDA MODEL", an analytical framework that attempts to explain the performance of the US media in terms of the basic institutional structures and relationships within which they operate. It is our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy. This is normally not accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors' and working journalists' internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution's policy.
Structural factors are those such as ownership and control, dependence on other major funding sources (notably, advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media and those who make the news and have the power to define it and explain what it means. The propaganda model also incorporates other closely related factors such as the ability to complain about the media's treatment of news (that is, produce "flak"), to provide "experts" to confirm the official slant on the news, and to fix the basic principles and ideologies that are taken for granted by media personnel and the elite, but are often resisted by the general population.1 In our view, the same underlying power sources that own the media and fund them as advertisers, that serve as primary definers of the news, and that produce flak and proper-thinking experts, also play a key role in fixing basic principles and the dominant ideologies. We believe that what journalists do, what they see as newsworthy, and what they take for granted as premises of their work are frequently well explained by the incentives, pressures, and constraints incorporated into such a structural analysis.
UPDATING
THE PROPAGANDA MODEL
The propaganda model, spelled out in detail in chapter I,
explains the broad sweep of the mainstream media's behavior
and performance by their corporate character and integration
into the political economy of the dominant economic system.
For this reason, we focused heavily on the rise in scale
of media enterprise, the media's gradual centralization
and concentration, the growth of media conglomerates that
control many different kinds of media (motion picture studios,
TV networks, cable channels, magazines, and book publishing
houses), and the spread of the media across borders in a
globalization process. We also noted the gradual displacement
of family control by professional managers serving a wider
array of owners and more closely subject to market discipline.
All of these trends, and greater competition for advertising across media boundaries, have continued and strengthened over the past dozen years, making for an intensified bottom-line orientation. Thus, centralization of the media in a shrinking number of very large firms has accelerated, virtually unopposed by republican and democratic administrations and regulatory authority. Ben Bagdikian notes that when the first edition of his Media Monopoly was published in 1983, fifty giant firms dominated almost every mass medium; but just seven years later, in 1990, only twenty-three firms occupied the same commanding position. 4
Since 1990, a wave of massive deals and rapid globalization have left the media industries further centralized in nine transnational conglomerates--Disney, AOL Time Warner, Viacom (owner of CBS), News Corporation (FOX), Bertelsmann, GE (owns NBC), Sony, AT&T-Liberty Media, and Vivendi Universal. These giants own all the world's major film studios, TV networks, and music companies, and a sizable fraction of the most important cable channels, cable systems, magazines, major-market TV stations, and book publishers. The largest, the recently merged AOL Time Warner, has integrated the leading internet portal into the traditional media system. Another fifteen firms round out the system, meaning that two dozen firms control nearly the entirety of media experienced by most US citizens. Bagdikian concludes that "it is the overwhelming collective power of these firms, with their corporate interlocks and unified cultural and political values, that raises troubling question about the individual's role in the American democracy." 5
Of the nine giants that now dominate the media universe, all but GE have extensively conglomerated within the media, and are important in both producing content and distributing it. Four of them--Disney, AOL, Viacom, and News Corp.--produce movies, books, magazines, newspapers, TV programs, music, videos, toys, and theme parks, among other things; and they have extensive distribution facilities via broadcasting and cable ownership, retail stores, and movie-theater chains. They also provide news and occasional investigative reports and documentaries that address political isues, but the leaders of these pop-cultural behemoths are mainly interested in entertainment, which produces large audiences with shows like ABC TV's "Who wants to be a millionaire" and CBS's "Survivor", or with movies like Disney's Lion King that also make possible the cross-selling "synergies" that are a focal point of their attention and resources.
Important branches of the media such as movies and books have had substantial global markets for many years, but only in the past two decades has a global media system come into being that is having major effects on national media systems, culture, and politics.6 It has been fueled by the globalizaiton of business more generally, the associated rapid growth of global advertising, and improved communications technology that has facilitated cross-border operations and control. It has also been helped along by government policy and the consolidation of neoliberal ideology. The US and other western governments have pressed the interests of their home-country firms eager to expand abroad, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have done the same, striving with considerable success to enlarge transnational corporate access to media markets across the globe. Neoliberal ideology has provided the intellectual rationale for policies that have opened up the ownership of broadcasting stations and cable and satellite systems to private transnational investors.
The culture and ideology fostered in this globalization process relate largely to "lifestyle" themes and goods and their acquisition; and they tend to weaken any sense of community helpful to civic life. Robert McChesney notes that "the hallmark of the global media system is its relentless, ubiquitous commercialism."7 Shopping channels, "infomercials," and product placement are booming in the global media system. McChesney adds that "it should come as no surprise that account after account in the late 1990s documents the fascination, even the obsession, of the world's middle class youth with consumer brands and products." The global media's "news" attention in recent years, aside from reporting on crusades such as "Operation Allied Force" (the NATO war against Yugoslavia) and on national elections, has been inordinately directed to sensationalism, as in their obsessive focus on the OJ Simpson trial, the Lewinsky scandal, and the deaths of two of the west's supercelebrities, Princess Diana and JFK Jr.
Globalization, along with deregulation and national budgetary pressures, has also helped reduce the importance of noncommercial media in country after country. This has been especially important in Europe and Asia, where public broadcasting systems were dominant, in contrast to the US. The financial pressures on public broadcasters has forced them to shrink or emulate the commercial systems in fund-raising and programming, and some have been fully commercialized by policy change or privatizaiton. The global balance of power has shifted decisively toward commercial systems. James Ledbetter points out that in the US, under incessant right-wing political pressure and financial stringency, "the 90s have seen a tidal wave of commercialism overtake public broadcasting," with public broadcasters "rushing as fast as they can to merge their services with those offered by commercial networks."9 And in the process of what Ledbetter calls the "malling" of public broadcasting, its already modest differences from the commercial networks have almost disappeared. Most important, in their programming "they share either the avoidance or the defanging of contemporary political controversy, the kind that would bring trouble from powerful patrons."10
In his book Golden Rule, political scientist Thomas Ferguson argues that where the major investors in political parties and elections agree on an issue, the parties will not compete on that issue, no matter how strongly the public might want an alternative. He contends that for ordinary voters to influence electoral choices they would have to have "strong channels that directly facilitate mass deliberation and expression." 101 These would include unions and other intermediate organizations that might cause the interests of ordinary voters to be given greater weight in the political system.
The propaganda model, and the institutional arrangements that it reflects, suggests that the same forces that preclude competition among the parties on issues on which the major investors agree, will also dominate media choices and rule out "mass deliberation and expression" on those issues. For example, polls regularly indicate that, except in periods of war and intense war propaganda, the public wants a smaller defense budget and favors a spending shift from defense to education and other civil functions. 102 But because the major investors agree that a large defense budget is desirable, the two dominant parties compete only on whether one or the other is stinting on military expenditures, with both promising to enlarge it (as both Bush and Gore did in the presidential election campaign of 2000). And the mainstream media do the same, limiting debate to the terms defined by the two parties and excluding deliberation and expression of the position that large cuts are desirable. The alternative presidential candidate, Ralph Nader, called for such cuts, but the media denied him a voice on the issues, some of them explicitly defending his exclusion from the presidential debates on the grounds that the options afforded by the two parties sufficed. 103
The US corporate community has favored an immense defense budget--currently more than five times the size of that of a steadily weakening Russia, the second biggest spender--because of the great benefits its members derive from military spending. These include weapons and other contracting business, direct and indirect subsidies in research, 104 and the role played by military power in supporting the global economic expansion in which many US transnational corporations are active participants and beneficiaries. Business also benefits from the market-opening actions of trade agreements and from the supportive operations of the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF. But these trade agreements and the activities of the international financial institutions have generated controversy and political struggle, because while their benefits to business are clear, their costs are borne heavily by workers forced to compete in a global job market. Furthermore, globalization and trade agreements strengthen the political as well as the economic power of the corporate community, in part because they shift decision-making authority from democratic polities to bankers and technocrats who more reliably serve the transnational corporate interest. Here also, as in the case of defense vs. civilian oriented budgets, polls show a sharp dichotomy between corporate and public preferences, with the latter generally hostile to the agreements and institutional arrangements favored by business. 105
The propaganda model fits well the media's treatment of this range of issues. Consider, for example, their coverage of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the subsequent Mexican financial crisis and meltdown of 1994-5. Polls taken before its enactment consistently showed substantial majorities opposed to NAFTA--and later to the bailout of investors in Mexican securities--but the elite in favor. Media editorials, news coverage, and selection of 'experts" in opinion columns were heavily skewed toward the elite preference; their judgment was that the benefits of NAFTA were obvious, were agreed to by all qualified authorities, and that only demagogues and "special interests" were opposed.106 The "special interests" who might be the "losers" included women, minorities, and a majority of the workforce. 107 The media dealt with the awkward fact that polls showed steady majority opposition to the agreement mainly by ignoring it, but occasionally they suggested that the public was uninformed and didn't recognize its own true interests. 108 The effort of labor to influence the outcome of the NAFTA debates was sharply attacked in both the New York Times and the Washington Post, with no comparable criticism of corporate or governmental lobbying and propaganda. And while labor was attacked for its alleged position on these issues, the press refused to allow the actual position to be expressed. 109
In December, 1994, only eleven months after NAFTA went into effect, Mexico suffered a major financial crisis, including a massive flight of capital, a devaluation of the currency, and a subsequent bailout by the IMF that required Mexico to carry out painful deflationary measures. Despite the fact that the meltdown occurred within a year of the introduction of NAFTA, which the media had portrayed as ushering in a prospective golden age of economic advance, they were unanimous that NAFTA was not to blame. And in virtual lock-step they supported the Mexican (investor) bailout, despite poll reports of general public opposition in the US. Experts and media pundits and editorialists repeatedly explained that one great merit of NAFTA was that it had "locked Mexico in" so that it couldn't alter its overall policy direction or resort to controls to protect itself from severe deflation and unemployment. They were oblivious to the profoundly undemocratic nature of this lock-in, made more questionable by the fact that it had been negotiated by a Mexican government that ruled as a result of electoral fraud. 110
More recently, when the growing global opposition to the policies of the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank led to mass protests at the WTO conference in Seattle in November and December 1999, and then at the annual meeting of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington D.C., in April 2000, media coverage of these events was derisive and hostile to the protesters and almost uniformly failed to deal with the substantive issues that drove the protests. The media portrayed the Seattle protesters as "all-purpose agitators" (US News & World Report), "terminally aggrieved" (Philadelphia Enquirer), simply "against world trade" (ABC News), and making "much ado about nothing" (CNN), but the bases of the protesters' grievances were almost entirely unexplored. 111 Similarly, in the case of the Washington, D.C., protests, the media repeatedly reported on activists' attire, looks, body odors, faddism, and claimed a lack of "anything that can coherently be called a cause" (Washington Post), and they continued their refusal to address issues. 112 There were many informed protesters with coherent agendas in Seattle and Washington--including reputable economists, social theorists, and veteran organizers from around the world 113--but the media did not seek them out, preferring to stereotype antiglobalizaton activists as ignorant troublemakers. On op-ed pages, there was a major imbalance hostile to the protesters. TV bias was at least as great, and often misleading on the facts. In his November 29, 1999, backgrounder on the WTO, Dan Rather explained that the organization had ruled on many environmental issues, implying that those rulings were protective of the environment when in fact they privileged trade rights over environmental needs.
Another notable feature of media reporting on both the Seattle and Washington, D.C., protests, and a throwback to their biased treatment of the protests of the Vietnam War era (1965-75), was their exaggeration of protester violence, their downplaying of police provocations and violence, and their complaisance at illegal police tactics designed to limit all protester actions, peaceful or otherwise. 115 Although the Seattle police resorted to force and used chemical agents against many nonviolent protesters well before a handful of individuals began breaking windows, both then and later the media reversed this chronology, stating that the police violence was a response to protester violence. In fact, the vandals were largely ignored by the police, while peaceful protesters were targeted for beatings, tear gas, torture with pepper spray, and arrest.
In their eighty-seven-page report, Out of Control: Seattle's Flawed Response to Protests Against the WTO, the ACLU stated that "demonstrators were overwhelmingly peaceful. Not so the police. The response of the Seattle police to the protests was characterized by draconian violations of civil liberties, including widespread use of chemical weapons, rubber bullets and clubs against peaceful protesters and bystanders alike." But NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all ignored the release of the ACLU's findings, which ran counter to their own uniformly pro-police and anti-protester line.
As is suggested by the media's treatment of NAFTA and of labor's right to participate in it's debates, as well as the media coverage of Watergate, COINTELPRO, and major events in the earlier history of labor-management conflict, the propaganda model applies to domestic as well as foreign policy issues. labor has been under renewed siege in the US for the past several decades, its condition adversely affected by the deflationary policies of the early 1980s, corporate downsizing, globalization, a vigorous business campaign to defeat unions, and government support of the damage being inflicted on unions and workers.
President Reagan's firing of 11,000 striking air-controllers in 1981 "put the government seal of approval on strike-breaking and a new era of industrial relations opened." 122 But you would hardly know this from reading or listening to the mainstream media. An exceptional 1994 Business Week article noted that "over the past dozen years US industry has conducted one of the most successful union wars ever, helped by illegally firing thousands of workers for exercising their right to organize, with unlawful firings occurring in one-third of all representation elections in the late 80s."123 But this successful war was carried out quietly, with media cooperation. The decertification of unions, use of replacement workers, and long, debilitating strikes like that involving Caterpillar were treated in a very low key manner. In a notable illustration of the applicability of the propaganda model, the nine-month-long Pittston miners' strike that began in April 1989 was accorded much less attention, and less friendly treatment, than the Soviet miners' strikes of the summer of that same year. 124
From 1977 to 1999, while the incomes of the top 1 percent of households grew by 84.8 percent and the top 10 percent by 44.6 percent, the bottom 60 percent lost ground and the income of the lowest 20 perecent fell by 12.5 percent. This, along with the adverse trend of social indicators in the same period, 127, suggests that the welfare of the majority declined in this era of high employment, a "new economy", and a spectacular upswing in the stock market. In its euphoria phase, which ended abruptly with the collapse of the dot.com market in 1999 and 2000, the mainstream media hardly noticed that only a minority had been the beneficiaries;128 In the 2000 election campaign, once again the two major party candidates said nothing about the failure of the majority to be lifted in the supposed "rising tide" that would benefit everybody; only Ralph Nader and other marginalized candidates did, and the dominant media found that the agenda of the major parties was all that they could ask for.
Another striking application of the propaganda model can be seen in the media's treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. Because of the industry's power, as well as the media's receptivity to the demands of the business community, the media have normalized a system described by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring as "deliberately poisoning us, then policing the results."129 Industry is permitted to produce and sell chemicals and bio-engineered foods without independent and prior proof of safety, and the "policing" by the EPA has been badly compromised by underfunding and political limits on both law enforcement and testing.130 A major National Research Council study of 1984 found that there was no health hazard data available for 78 percent of the chemicals in commerce, and an Envirommental Defense Fund update found little change had occurred a dozen years later. The federal government's National Toxicology Program tests about ten to twenty chemicals a year for carcinogenicity, while five hundred to a thousand new chemicals enter commerce annually, so our knowledge base steadily declines. 131
With the media's help, the chemical industry has also gained wide acceptance of its view that chemicals should be evaluated individually on the basis of an analysis of their risks to individuals and individual tolerances. But it is very hard to measure such risks and tolerances for humans, since damage may show up years later, chemicals may interact with others in the environment, and the breakdown products of chemicals may have their own dangers.
The chemical industry has produced, and long denied any harm from, innumerable products--from tetraethyl lead in gasoline and PCBs in batteries to asbestos, DDT, and Agent Orange--that are now well established as seriously harmful, only withdrawing them under overwhelming legal and regulatory pressure. For the products they have wanted to sell, they have always found scientists who would testify to their harmlessness.
CHAPTER 1--A PROPAGANDA MODEL
The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages
and symbols to the general populace. It is their function
to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals
with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will
integrate them into the institutional structures of the
larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major
conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires
systematic propaganda.(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 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 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) 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.
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 constrainsts 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 US government's urgent claims of a shipment of MIGs to Nicaragua on Novermber 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-, view of media operations, to see the pattern of manipulation and systematic bias.