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Part 1
© By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
On 11th September,
in the space of an hour and a half, the United States faced a
sample of the same brand of terrorism that has been inflicted on
vast swathes of the world’s population throughout the twentieth
century by its own military forces. The destruction of the World
Trade Centre and the explosion that racked the Pentagon, left
America in shock and on high alert.
It was not long before the perpetrators of the attack had
supposedly been discovered. Osama Bin Laden and his international
terror network, Al-Qaeda, was blamed, and the Taliban was
pinpointed as a “government” harbouring Al-Qaeda. A war on
Afghanistan was justified, along with an unlimited militarisation
of US foreign policy, which has gone on to focus on key strategic
regions of the world as potential targets of US intervention, and
thus the expansion of US hegemony.
The official story around 11th September
espoused by the US government and propagated by the mass media
contains innumerable anomalies and discrepancies. Some of these
will be discussed in the second part of this paper. In this part,
we will focus on the principal reason why the official story
should be doubted by the public: the fact that the media amounts
to a propaganda machine for elite interests.
The
Independent Media: A Myth
For those who have inspected the facts, it is clear that the mass
media has failed to generate genuine public awareness of the
nature of Western policy. Majid Tehranian, Professor of
International Communication at the University of Hawaii and
Director of the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy
Research, points out that:
In their scholarship, William Appleton Williams, Noam Chomsky,
Richard Falk, Ramsey Clark, Ali Mazrui, and other critics of US
foreign policies have provided an abundance of evidence to
support the charges on the counter-democratic role of the United
States in much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.1
In an extensive study of the US-UK special relationship, British
historian Mark Curtis, former Research Fellow at the Royal
Institute for International Affairs in London, finds that:
Mutual Anglo-American support in ordering the affairs of key
nations and regions, often with violence, to their design has
been a consistent feature of the era that followed the Second
World War... Policy in, for example, Malaya, Kenya, British
Guiana and Iran was geared towards organising Third World
economies along guidelines in which British, and Western,
interests would be paramount, and those of the often
malnourished populations would be ignored or further undermined.
Similarly, US interventions overseas – in Vietnam, Nicaragua,
the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Chile, etcetera – were designed to
counter threats to the Western practice of assigning the Third
World to mere client status to Western business interests.
British and US forces have acted as mercenary – and often
extremely violent – mobs intended to restore ‘order’ in their
domains and to preserve the existing privileges of elites within
their own societies.2
Development specialist Dr. J. W. Smith, who is Director of
Research for the California-based Institute for Economic
Democracy, is even more explicit:
No society will tolerate it if they knew that they (as a
country) were responsible for violently killing 12 to 15 million
people since WW II and causing the death of hundreds of millions
more their economies were destroyed or those countries were
denied the right to restructure to care for their people.
Unknown as it is, and recognising that this has been standard
practice throughout colonialism, that is the record of the
Western imperial centres of capital from 1945 to 1990... While
mouthing peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule, all
over the world state-sponsored terrorists were overthrowing
democratic governments, installing and protecting dictators, and
preventing peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule.
Twelve to fifteen million mostly innocent people were
slaughtered in that successful 45 year effort to suppress those
breaks for economic freedom which were bursting out all over the
world... All intelligence agencies have been, and are still in,
the business of destabilising undeveloped countries to maintain
their dependency and the flow of the world’s natural wealth to
powerful nations’ industries at a low price and to provide
markets for those industries at a high price.3
It is obvious that the media has failed to accurately portray the
real nature of Western foreign policy to the public. The question
is, why does the media conform to the dubious agenda of the
government and corporate elite?
The answer lies in an analysis of how the media works. Probably
the most thorough analysis is Manufacturing Consent,
written by two leading US academics, Edward Herman (Professor
Emeritus of Finance at Wharton School in the University of
Pennsylvania) and Noam Chomsky (Institute Professor of Linguistics
and Philosophy at MIT).4
The principal reason to begin with this study is that it contains
arguably the most thoroughly researched and empirically verified
model of the media available. Herman and Chomsky’s landmark book
is recommended by America’s leading national media watchdog, the
Washington D.C.-based research group Fairness and Accuracy In
Reporting (FAIR). The Grand Rapids Institute for Information
Democracy (GRIID), affiliated to the U.S.-based Community Media
Centre (CMC) also recommends the book as an “essential resource
for media literacy”.5 The
Oxford-based research and publishing group Corporate Watch
describes the study as “one of the most incisive critiques of the
media’s role in society”.6 The
respected journal Publisher’s Weekly gives the following
review of Manufacturing Consent:
Herman of Wharton and Chomsky of MIT lucidly document their
argument that America’s government and its corporate giants
exercise control over what we read, see and hear. The authors
identify the forces that they contend make the national media
propagandistic – the major three being the motivation for profit
through ad revenue, the media’s close links to and often
ownership by corporations, and their acceptance of information
from biased sources. In five case studies, the writers show how
TV, newspapers and radio distort world events… Extensive
evidence is calmly presented, and in the end an indictment
against the guardians of our freedom is substantiated. A
disturbing picture emerges of a news system that panders to the
interest of America’s privileged and neglects its duties when
the concerns of minority groups and the underclass are at stake.
Indeed, according to the leading US media scholar Robert W.
McChesney – Research Professor in the Institute of Communications
Research and the Graduate School of Information and Library
Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – any
significant attempt to comprehend the structure and operation of
the mass media must begin with Herman and Chomsky’s study.7 He
observes that:
This book promises to be a seminal work in critical media
analysis and to open a door through which future media analysis
will follow… Manufacturing Consent is a work of
tremendous importance for scholars and activists alike… Each
chapter is meticulously researched and most draw heavily on the
authors’ earlier works in these areas.8
All this provides ample reason to understand Herman and Chomsky’s
model of the media.
A propaganda model does not entail a grandiose conspiracy theory.
Rather, it is based on analysing the politico-economic influences
on the mass media, and the extent to which those influences
condition the media’s reporting tendencies in accord with the
interests of power. The model can be described as a ‘guided free
market’ model, arguing that the media’s reporting is dominated by
the same factors that guide corporate activity: the maximisation
of profit. A propaganda model of the media asserts that the media
is fundamentally conditioned by the profit-orientated activities
of corporate elites. As US media scholar Professor Robert W.
McChesney observes:
Herman and Chomsky quickly dismiss the standard mainstream
critique of radical media analysis that accuses it of offering
some sort of ‘conspiracy’ theory for media behaviour; rather, they
argue, media bias arises from ‘the preselection of right-thinking
people, internalised preconceptions, and the adaptation of
personnel to the constraints’ of a series of objective filters
they present in their propaganda model. Hence the bias occurs
largely through self-censorship, which explains the superiority of
the US mass media as a propaganda system: it is far more credible
than a system which relies on official state censorship.9
Filter 1: Elite Ownership
Herman and Chomsky’s model describes five ‘filters’ that limit
what the media reports in accord with governmental and corporate
interests. Professor McChesney observes that:
Only stories with a strong orientation to elite interests can
pass through the five filters unobstructed and receive ample
media attention. The model also explains how the media can
conscientiously function when even a superficial analysis of the
evidence would indicate the preposterous nature of many of the
stories that receive ample publicity in the press and on the
network news broadcasts.10
The first filter consists of the size, concentrated ownership,
owner wealth and profit-orientation of the most dominant mass
media firms. Media ownership involves enormous costs, which
imposes rigid limits on who is able to run a media entity, even a
small one. To cater to a mass audience, a media organisation must
be a fairly sizeable corporation. Consequently, it will be owned
either directly by the state, or by wealthy individuals. In 1986,
out of 25,000 US media entities, a mere 29 largest media systems
accounted for over half the output of newspapers and for the
majority of sales and audiences in magazines, broadcasting, books
and films. These massive media firms are profit-orientated
corporations, owned and controlled by wealthy profit-orientated
people, which are also “closely interlocked, and have common
interests, with other major corporations, banks, and government”.11 Because
they are often fully integrated into the stock market, they become
subject to powerful pressures from stockholders, directors and
bankers to focus on profitability. This means that they are united
by a basic framework of special interests, even though they remain
in competition:
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 [the stock
market]. And they exercise the power of this strategic position,
if only by establishing the general aims of the company and
choosing its top management.12
Major media corporations thus tend to avoid news that questions
the status quo in terms of the actions of the wealthy: If media
entities are owned by profit-orientated corporations that have a
vested interest in maintaining the status quo, those corporations
are clearly not going to employ individuals who question the
status quo to run their media entities. McChesney observes:
Many of these corporations have extensive holdings in other
industries and nations. Objectively, their needs for profit
severely influence the news operations and overall content of
the media. Subjectively, there is a clear conflict of interest
when the media system upon which self-government rests is
controlled by a handful of corporations and operated in their
self-interest.13
A large amount of the information the public receives is
controlled by a very small number of media sources. Freedom House
records that within states, out of 187 governments, 92 have
complete ownership of the television broadcasting structure, while
67 have part ownership.14 Ownership
of the world’s media sources is growing increasingly concentrated.
Thousands of other sources do exist, but in comparison, their
influence is negligible. The leading US media analyst Ben Bagdikan
– former Dean at the Graduate School of Journalism at the
University of California, and a winner of almost every top prize
in American journalism including the Pulitzer – noting that
despite more than 25,000 media entities in the US only “23
corporations control most of the business in daily newspapers,
magazines, television, books, and motion pictures”, concludes that
this endows corporations with the extensive power to exercise
influence over “news, information, public ideas, popular culture,
and political attitudes”.15
The result is that a total of 12 corporations dominate the world’s
mass media. US media and communications expert Dr. Dean Alger –
former Fellow in the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press,
Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy
School of Government – lists this ‘dominant dozen’ as follows in
order of power: Disney – Capital Cities – ABC; Time Warner –
Turner; News Corporation; Bertelsmann; Tele-Communications (TCI) –
AT&T; General Electric – NBC; CBS Inc.; Newshouse/Advance
Publications; Viacom; Microsoft; Matra – Hachette – Filipacchi;
Gannet.
Leading journalists have commented on the implications. Journalist
and former top editor of the Chicago Tribunal, James
Squires, describes the concentration of media-ownership in
profit-orientated corporations:
In its struggle for relevance and financial security in the
modern information age, the press as an institution appears
ready to trade its tradition and its public responsibility for
whatever will make a buck. In the starkest terms, the news media
of the 1990s are a celebrity-oriented, Wall-Street dominated,
profit-driven entertainment enterprise dedicated foremost to
delivering advertising images to targeted groups of consumers.
Richard Clurman, who was for years a leading figure in Time
magazine, observes:
As the news media became bigger and bigger business, the
innovative traditions led by creative editorial dominance began
to erode... The media had grown from a nicely profitable,
creative business into a gigantic investment opportunity. It was
becoming harder to think of them as different from any other
business in free enterprise America.
Doug Underwood – former reporter for The Seattle Times and
the Gannett News Service, now Professor of Communications at the
University of Washington – also confirms the drastic
corporatisation of the media:
It’s probably no surprise that in an era of mass media
conglomerates, big chain expansion, and multimillion dollar
newspaper buy-outs, the editors of daily newspapers have begun
to behave more and more like the managers of any corporate
entity.16
The elites who dominate the various institutions of society share
a common set of values and associations linked with their
generally wealthy position as members of a highly privileged
class. These elites include the decision makers over politics,
investment, production, distribution; members of ideological
institutions involving editorial positions, control of journals
and so on; those in managerial positions, who manage corporations
and have similar roles. These different elite groups all
interpenetrate one another in accord with their shared values and
associations. Furthermore, due to their common social position,
they are largely socialised into the traditional values that
characterise their wealthy class. This has a significant impact on
their outlook on the world, and consequently their attitude
towards political affairs.17
In Britain, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) constitutes an
obvious example. The board of governors on the BBC tends to be
drawn from the ranks of the ‘great and good’ and to mirror the
predominance of the upper middle classes in the ranks of political
life in elected and non-elected positions of power…
Of the eighty-five governors who have served in the first fifty
years of the BBC’s history, fifty-six had a university education
(forty at Oxford or Cambridge) and twenty were products of Eton,
Harrow or Winchester. The political experience of Board members
has come mainly from the House of Lords although there have been
nineteen former MPs.18
Bob Franklin, Reader in Media and Communication Studies at the
University of Sheffield, observes that abundant documentation
proves that the elite “uses its privileged access to media
institutions to produce programming which is partial and
supportive of a particular class interest.” Franklin refers to the
series of Bad News studies by Glasgow University Media
Group (GUMG), offering ample evidence “of a systematic skew in the
reporting of certain kinds of news.”19 In
their first study, the Glasgow scholars concluded that “television
news is a cultural artifact; a sequence of socially-manufactured
messages which carry many of the culturally dominant assumptions
of our society.” In a later study titled More Bad News,
they found that television news reporting “consistently maintains
and supports a cultural framework within which viewpoints
favourable to the status quo are given preferred and
privileged readings.”20
Former Editor-in-Chief David Bowman of the Sydney Morning
Herald thus confirms that “having thrown off one yoke, the
press should now be falling under another, in the form of a tiny
and ever-contracting band of businessmen-proprietors. Instead of
developing as a diverse social institution, serving the needs of
democratic society, the press, and now the media, have become or
are becoming the property of a few, governed by whatever social,
political and cultural values the few think tolerable”.21 “The
danger”, he elsewhere observes, “is that the media of the future,
the channels of mass communication, will be dominated locally and
world-wide by the values – social, cultural and political – of a
few individuals and their huge corporations.”22
The mass media also broadly restricts the ideological orientation
of its staff, the result being that the media becomes largely
ideologically subservient to the assumptions and interests of the
elite. Bob Franklin notes that this is because, editors are simply
workers – albeit at a high grade – and, as such, remain subject to
the discipline of proprietors...
It would certainly be difficult to persuade an editor that
proprietors are no longer in control of their newspapers. A
succession of editors from Harold Evans to Andrew Neil acknowledge
the power of proprietors in autobiographies which invariably
detail their prompt removal from the editorial chair following a
disagreement with the owner... Proprietors’ power to ‘hire and
fire’ makes them formidable figures, but they also control all
aspects of a newspaper’s financial and staffing resources.23
Media expert Ben Bagdikan acknowledges the dictatorial control
over public life entailed by the increasing concentration in
corporate ownership:
In an authoritarian society there is a ministry, or a commissar,
or a directorate that controls what everybody will see and hear.
We call that a dictatorship. Here we have a handful of very
powerful corporations led by a handful of very powerful men and
women who control everything we see and hear beyond the natural
environment and our own families. That’s something which
surrounds us every day and night. If it were one person we’d
call that a dictatorship, a ministry of information.24
The extent of the power that elites have over the media can be
grasped when we recall that even Western intelligence agencies
control the press. For example, an internal committee of the CIA
reported in 1992 that:
We [i.e. the CIA] have relationships with reporters [that] have
helped us turn some intelligence failure stories into
intelligence success stories. Some responses to the media can be
handled in a one-shot phone call.25
Former CIA Director William Colby went further, admitting: “The
Central Intelligence Agency owns anyone of any significance in the
major media.”26
Consequently, the legitimacy of elite interests are presupposed by
the mass media in terms of a general all-pervading set of
assumptions. Since these assumptions are rooted in the elite
ideology, the mass media, owned by a corporate elite, is generally
unable to fundamentally question that ideology. Bob Franklin thus
concludes that “while it is possible to cite cases where the media
have toppled the powerful, there is a greater body of evidence to
suggest that their role is more typically to serve as a source of
support.”27
It is therefore not surprising that debate within the media is
largely restricted to the assumption of Western governmental and
corporate benevolence, the belief in the viability and legitimacy
of the status quo. Dissent that stretches beyond these limits by
choosing to question the very assumptions adopted at the outset by
the media, will be neglected. Certainly, due to the sheer mass of
news it is also predictable that the odd dissenting report may
filter through – but the substantial majority of reports will
“serve as a source of support” for elite interests.
As the American political scientist Michael Parenti writes, the
result of corporate ownership of the media where staffing will be
especially restricted to those who conform to the ideological
requirements of corporate power, is that journalists “rarely doubt
their own objectivity even as they faithfully echo the established
political vocabularies and the prevailing politico-economic
orthodoxy. Since they do not cross any forbidden lines, they are
not reined in. So they are likely to have no awareness they are on
an ideological leash.”28 A
propaganda model clarifies the institutional structure of the
media that prevents criticism of elite policy from receiving
little in-depth critical analysis by the mainstream media.
Permissible dissent then becomes powerless, unable to question the
ideological framework upon which the elite dominated social
structures are based. The result has been noted by media analyst
W. Lance Bennett:
The public is exposed to powerful persuasive messages from above
and is unable to communicate meaningfully through the media in
response to these messages... Leaders have usurped enormous
amounts of political power and reduced popular control over the
political system by using the media to generate support,
compliance, and just plain confusion among the public.29
Filter 2: Elite Funding
The second filter noted by Herman and Chomsky, related to the
first filter, is advertising. Professor McChesney notes that
advertising “has colonised the US mass media and is responsible
for most of the media’s income.”30 The
growth of advertising has meant that newspapers and other media
sources have a primary source of funds other than their selling
price. This means that the media’s reporting tendencies can be
influenced through the withdrawal or offer of economic support.
Since the mass media is largely financed through advertising, it
becomes financially dependent for its existence on advertising
revenue from corporations. All forms of media have to ensure that
their advertising profile is high to retain corporate investment
in advertising, and thereby to retain a source of funds. This is
ideally achieved by becoming ideologically appealing to an
audience with a high buying capacity: i.e. members of the elite
and generally members of the wealthiest classes. Newspapers that
are attractive to advertisers are able to lower their price below
the cost of producing them, due to advertising revenue.
Advertisers, of course, constitute corporate sponsors. This means
that newspapers that fail to attract such corporate sponsors, are
more likely to be either marginal or non-existent. Additionally, a
newspaper will be more favourable to advertisers if it is biased
towards the assumptions and values of a wealthy readership. With
newspapers having become so dependent on advertising to exist and
flourish, corporate sponsors effectively retain a significant
control over which newspapers survive, what they choose to report,
and how they do so. Consequently, newspapers unattractive to
advertisers can be undercut – without a good source of funds from
advertising, their prices tend to be higher, reducing sales and
reducing profit by which to invest in improving saleability (via
quality, format, promotions, etc.). Such newspapers can therefore
be effectively marginalised – in some cases, driven completely out
of existence.
In their authoritative history of the British press, James Curran
and Jean Seaton conclude that the growth in both advertising and
capital costs were critical in eliminating the popular radical
press that had emerged in the first half of the nineteenth
century. They record that “advertisers thus acquired a de facto
licensing authority since, without their support, newspapers
ceased to be economically viable”.31
These two filters mean that the mass media is institutionally
structured to be subservient to the corporate elite. It is at once
directly owned and thereby structurally controlled by that elite,
and indirectly influenced by financial pressures from corporate
sponsors related to advertising. The mass media as an
institution is intrinsically subservient to corporate
ideology. As Professor Edward Herman states, “capitalists control
the media and they do so to maximise profits”. What does this
entail? Herman explains:
The main element in corporate ideology is the belief in the
sublimity of the market and its unique capacity to serve as the
efficient allocator of resources. So important is the market in
this ideology that ‘freedom’ has come to mean the absence of
constraints on market participants, with political and social
democracy pushed into the background as supposed derivatives of
market freedom. This may help explain the tolerance by
market-freedom lovers of market-friendly totalitarians –
Pinochet or Marcos. A second and closely related constituent of
corporate ideology is the danger of government intervention and
regulation, which allegedly tends to proliferate, imposes
unreasonable burdens on business, and therefore hampers growth.
A third element in the ideology is that growth is the proper
national objective, as opposed to equity, participation, social
justice, or cultural advance and integrity. Growth should be
sustainable, which means that the inflation threat should be a
high priority and unemployment kept at the level to assure the
inflation threat is kept at bay. The resultant increasingly
unequal income distribution is also an acceptable price to pay.
Privatisation is also viewed as highly desirable in corporate
ideology, following naturally from the first two elements –
market sublimity and the threat of government. It also tends to
weaken government by depriving it of its direct control over
assets, and therefore has the further merit of reducing the
ability of government to serve the general population through
democratic processes... [P]rivatisation yields enormous payoffs
to the bankers and purchasers participating in the sale of
public assets.32
These ideological positions become implicit assumptions pervading
permissible political discourse within the media. It is therefore
extremely rare to find these principles being subjected to
fundamental critical examination by the corporate-owned media.
Filter 3: Elite Information Sources
The third filter constitutes the sources that the mass media
routinely relies on for news. Because the media needs a steady and
reliable source of news, resources are focused where news can be
most easily acquired. Unfortunately, central news terminals of
this type happen to be the White House, the Pentagon and the State
Department, as well as business corporations and trade groups. The
importance of such organisations as news sources is because they
possess the greatest resources for public relations and
promotional material. Consequently, “the mass media are drawn into
a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by
economic necessity and reciprocity of interest”.33 Alternative
media entities established by human rights organisations and other
groups are thus marginalised. The public then receives news and
analysis that fundamentally conforms to the elite ideology, and
facts largely cannot be scrutinised free from the assumptions of
that ideology. News is thus filtered in accordance with what is
suitable to the requirements of elite power and its interests.
McChesney explains:
The media rely heavily upon news provided them by corporate and
government sources, which have themselves developed enormous
bureaucracies to provide this material to the media. They have
developed great expertise at ‘managing’ the media. In effect,
these bureaucracies subsidise the media and the media must be
careful not to antagonise such an important supplier.
Furthermore, these corporate and government sources are
instantly credible by accepted journalistic practices.
Anti-elite sources, on the other hand, are regarded with utmost
suspicion and have tremendous difficulty passing successfully
through this filter.34
For example, the US Air Force publishes 140 newspapers per week,
issuing 45,000 headquarters and unit news releases per year. Other
government-related institutions produce a similar proportion of
information. This massive amount of news produced by the state and
corporations provides the media with ‘facts’ that easily acquired
and inexpensive. Herman and Chomsky observe that:
To consolidate their pre-eminent position as sources, government
and business-news promoters go to great pains to make things
easy for news organisations... In effect, the large
bureaucracies of the powerful subsidise the mass media,
and gain special access by their contribution to reducing the
media’s costs of acquiring the raw materials of, and producing,
news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become
‘routine’ news sources and have privileged access to the gates.
Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored
by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers.35
The impact of this, as Mark Fishman affirms, is that:
News workers are predisposed to treat bureaucratic accounts as
factual because news personnel participate in upholding a
normative order of authorised 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
recognise 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 labour: officials have and
give the facts”, which are therefore beyond question, however
tenuous or absurd, while “reporters merely get them” from the
bureaucratic elite.36
Filter 4: Elite Flak
The fourth filter Chomsky and Herman refer to is ‘flak’: the
negative responses to a media report in the form of letters, phone
calls, petitions, speeches, legal and parliamentary action, among
other methods of complaint. One of the most significant forms of
flak already discussed is the withdrawal of advertising revenue,
which in itself can be sufficient for editors to review their
product. This form of flak can lead to the entire elimination of a
media source that is unfavourable to corporate sponsors and their
interests. Flak can also serve as a deterrent to producing certain
kinds of programme or story, and can even prevent reporters from
investigating particular issues because of how unlikely it is that
such stories would be published. Business organisations often come
together to form organisations devoted solely to the mass
dissemination of flak, by which to impose immense pressure on the
media to follow the corporate lead.
In the US, the conservative media organisation Accuracy In Media
(AIM) is a clear example of this – formed at the instigation of
various giant corporations with the view to impose flak on
mainstream media sources who may occasionally produce a piece
questioning the legitimacy of elite ideology in some way. As
McChesney comments, right-wing corporate ‘flak’ producers such as
Accuracy in Media [act] to harass the mass media and to put
pressure upon them to follow the corporate agenda…
This filter was developed extensively in the 1970s when major
corporations and wealthy right-wingers became increasingly
dissatisfied with political developments in the West and with
media coverage… While ostensibly antagonistic to the media,
these flak machines provide the media with legitimacy and are
treated quite well by the media.37
One of the most potent disseminators of flak is the government
itself due to its enormous resources. Compared with such corporate
power, the ability of other organisations representing the poor,
the oppressed or the environment to pressurise the media is
dwarfed.38
Filter 5: Elite Ideology
Since the corporate ideology dominates the media by way of being
almost institutionally assumed, all ideologies that are in
fundamental opposition to the corporate ideology must similarly be
institutionally assumed incorrect: the fifth filter. Nationalist
social movements around the world that threatened the
international capitalist system under US hegemony were construed
as totalitarian Communist movements. The final filter is thus the
ideology of “anticommunism”, a stance that has become integral to
Western political culture. According to McChesney: “Anticommunism
has been ingrained into acceptable journalistic practices in the
United States, to the point that even in periods of ‘detente’ it
is fully appropriate and expected for journalists to frame issues
in terms of ‘our side’ versus the communist ‘bad guys’,” even when
Communism is not the real ‘threat’ at all.39
We can recall evidence for this when we compare the orthodox
interpretation of the Cold War espoused by most academic and media
commentators with the fact that there was no global Communist
threat. Major covert operations, such as the installation of the
Shah in Iran after the elimination of the democratically elected
government of Mussadeq, or the intervention in Nicaragua to
overthrow the popular Sandinista Front, were undertaken on the
pretext of preventing the violent rise of totalitarian Communism
and protecting the independence of local populations. Herman and
Chomsky observe: “When anticommunist fervour is aroused, the
demand for serious evidence in support for claims of ‘communist’
abuses is suspended by the media, and charlatans can thrive as
evidential sources”.40
Conversely, when journalists or editors challenge the prevailing
anticommunist orthodoxy, they “must meet far higher standards; in
fact standards are often imposed that can barely be met in the
natural sciences”.41 This
filter is, however, not limited to anticommunism – rather it is
related to the prevailing pretext for Western policy at the time.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the noble fight against
the non-existent international Communist threat could no longer be
pinpointed as a pretext for Western military operations that had
been undertaken for far more familiar reasons of economic
domination. Hence, it has been replaced by other diverse
ideological threats to be similarly exaggerated, distorted or even
fabricated. A particularly pertinent one in the present day is the
alleged threat to the United States and the West due to Islam and
global Islamic terrorism.42
The fifth filter is essentially synonymous with the elite
ideology, since it is in the context of this ideology that social
movements and ideas in opposition to the dominant ideology are
interpreted within the media. Other elements of the final filter
will therefore include the benevolence of one’s government, the
universal merits of private enterprise, the benign character of
corporations and their activities, and so on. All of these
inherently imply the demonisation of the perceived threat to US
hegemony with respect to these aspects.
In the second part of this paper, we will discuss in further
detail the new alleged threat that has come to the fore,
particularly in the aftermath of 11th September:
the threat of Islamic terrorism in the form of Osama Bin Laden’s
“Al-Qaeda”.
Notes:
1. Tehranian, Majid, ‘A Requiem for Realism?’, Peace & Policy,
3:1, Spring 1998.
2. Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy
Since 1945, Zed, London, 1995.
3. Smith, J. W., ‘Simultaneously Suppressing the World’s Break for
Freedom’, Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the
Twenty-First Century, M. E. Sharpe, New York, Armonk, 2000.
Excerpts of this study can be found at Institute for Economic
Democracy,
www.slonet.org/~ied.
In his Killing Hope, former State Department official and
investigative journalist William Blum confirms an even larger
number of direct deaths than that produced by Smith.
4. Herman, Edward S. and Chomsky, Noam, Manufacturing Consent:
The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Vintage, London,
1994.
5. FAIR, www.fair.org;
GRIID, affiliated with CMC,
www.grmc.org,
www.grcmc.org/griid.
6. ‘The Media’, Corporate Watch magazine, Issue 5 & 6.
7. McChesney, Robert W., ‘Introduction’ in Chomsky, Noam,
Profit Over People, op. cit.
8. McChesney, Robert, W., ‘Edward S. Herman on the propaganda
model’, Monthly Review, January 1989
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, op. cit., p.
14.
12. Ibid., p. 8
13. McChesney, Monthly Review, January 1989.
14. US News & World Report, 11 November 1996, p. 48.
15. Bagdikan, Ben H., The Media Monopoly, Beacon Press,
Boston, 1992, p. 4.
16. Alger, Dean, Megamedia: How Giant Corporations Dominate
Mass Media, Distort Competition, and Endanger Democracy,
Rowman & Littlefield, Oxford, 1998. See this book for references
on the previous citations.
17. All this is well understood. For studies of elite power in
relation to Britain see for instance John Scott, Who Rules
Britain?, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991; Mark Curtis’s study
in The Ambiguities of Power of the mainstream British media
is also very illuminating, disclosing the subservience of the
media in relation to Nicaragua and the Gulf War in particular. A
fairly competent analysis of the British media is Curran, James
and Seaton, Jean, Power without responsibility: The Press and
Broadcasting in Britain, Methuen, London, 1985; and especially
Franklin, Bob, Newszak & News Media, St. Martin’s Press,
New York, 1997. Also see Pilger, John, Distant Voices,
Vintage, London, 1992; Pilger, John, Hidden Agendas,
Vintage, London, 1998. Also see more general studies of the media
that focus particularly on the U.S., especially Chomsky and
Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The
Political Economy of Human Rights, South End Press, Boston,
1979; Smith, Anthony, The Geopolitics of Information: How
Western Culture Dominates the World, Faber & Faber, London,
1980; Herman, Beyond Hypocrisy: Decoding the News in an Age of
Propaganda, South End Press, 1992; Parenti, Michael,
Inventing Reality: The Politics of the News Media, St.
Martin’s Press, 1993; Herman, Edward S. and McChesney, Robert W.,
The Global Media and the New Missionaries of Global Capitalism,
Cassell, 1997.
18. Dearlove, J. and Saunders, P. An Introduction to British
Politics; cited in Franklin, Bob, Newszak & News Media,
St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1997, p. 41.
19. Franklin, Bob, ibid.
20. Cited in Ibid.
21. Cited in 24 Hours, Sydney, April 1996; Pilger, John,
Hidden Agendas, Vintage, London, 1998, p. 543.
22. Adelaide Review, February 1996.
23. Franklin, Bob, Newszak & News Media, op. cit. p. 40.
24. Ben Bagdikian interviewed by David Barsamian in ‘Navigating
the Media’, Z Magazine, September 1998.
25. Memorandum to Director of CIA, Task Force on Greater CIA
Openness, 18 Nov. 1991.
26. Cited in McGowan, David, Derailing Democracy, Common
Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 1999; from online e-mail bulletin,
Political Literacy Course, Common Courage Press, 20 March
2000,
www.commoncouragepress.com.
27. Franklin, Bob, Newszak and News Media, op. cit., p. 31.
28. Parenti cited in Pilger, John, Hidden Agendas,
op. cit., p. 4.
29. Bennet, W. Lance, News: The Politics of Illusion,
Longman, New York, 1988, p. 178-79.
30. McChesney, Monthly Review, January 1989.
31. Alger, Dan, Megamedia: How Giant Corporations Dominate Mass
Media, Distort Competition, and Endanger Democracy, Rowan &
Littlefield, Oxford, 1998, p. 154, 158; Curran, James and Seaton,
Jean, Power without responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting
in Britain, Methuen, London, 1985, p.31. Also see Barnouw,
Erik, The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate, Oxford
University Press, 1978.
32. Interview with Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney by
David Peterson, ‘The Global Media’, Z Magazine, June 1997.
33. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, op. cit., p.
14.
34. McChesney, Monthly Review, January 1989.
35. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, op. cit., p.
21-22.
36. Fishman, Mark, Manufacturing News, University of Texas
Press, Austin, 1980.
37. McChesney, Monthly Review, January 1989.
38. For an introductory discussion of how the propaganda model can
be extended to explain and reveal the corporate conditioning of
Western culture and academia, see Edwards, David, Free To Be
Human: Intellectual Self-Defence in an Age of Illusions, A
Resurgence Book, Green Books, Devon, 1995.
39. McChesney, Monthly Review, January 1989.
40. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, op. cit., p.
25.
41. Ibid., p. 291.
42. See for example, Masud, Enver, The War On Islam, The
Wisdom Fund, Madrasah Books Division, Arlington, 2000.
______________________________________________________________________________
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is a political analyst and human rights
activist, specialising in Western foreign policy and its impact on
human rights. He is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy
Research & Development (IPRD), an independent, interdisciplinary,
non-profit think tank based in Brighton, UK. The IPRD conducts
research and analysis of local and global society for the
promotion of human rights, justice and peace. For further
information, visit
www.globalresearch.org.
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