In the fall of 2003, President George W. Bush made public statements to the effect that the "good news about Iraq" is getting filtered out by the national media. The President maintained that to win the hearts and minds of his fellow Americans, "Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the American people." While one could argue

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky first presented their theory of propaganda in the classic 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. The basic concept is that there are institutional forces that shape what information gets presented as news by removing facts that are contrary to the economic interests, messages and ideals that dominate contemporary society. Perhaps President Bush imagines that the “liberal media” can not as an institution show U.S. soldiers building schools, promoting human rights, and establishing democracy and instead has to focus on the insurgency, torture, deaths and social chaos. Maybe it is more likely that some up-and-coming staffer saw the movie Manufacturing Consent in school and decided to use a term of media criticism against its original intent: poor Mr. President, try as he might, those darn national media filters keep the people from knowing all of the “good news”. Of course this line of thought would have to ignore the national media’s long record of cheerleading for the invasion and occupation of Iraq and reporting at face value just about any statement that comes from the current administration.

One of the main contributions of the Herman-Chomsky model is to remove the notion of agency from an analysis of bias in mainstream news. Unlike totalitarian regimes or the United States during World War Two, there is no room full of government employees who pre-read every national news story, line by line and word for word, and decide what facts and images are news and what are not. In the free press tradition of the United States, that kind of censorship is not openly acceptable (or constitutional), so other forces have to be understood to explain propaganda in our current media system. The institutional analysis also breaks down one of the main arguments people make to support the idea of a liberal media bias: that most reporters are more liberal than the average person as they tend to vote for Democrats, be pro-choice, etc. What the propaganda model shows is that it does not ultimately matter what the opinions of the writers or television reporters might be, because the reporters do not ultimately control the product. They work in the basic production of the news, but by no means have final say. An ambitious reporter will learn what stories will be rewarded and what will get criticized, edited out, or ignored.

Many would argue that the modern world is so complicated and that the volume of electronic communications is so overwhelming that people need filters, and there is truth to this. The Herman-Chomsky model is not intended as a cure; it is a method of understanding how facts get translated into news in the United States. The remedies for corporate control of the public debate and of the “colonialization of the mind” lie in independent media and an active population that creates diverse voices and perspectives. It is worth noting that the idea of filters that remove unwanted information from the news did not originate with Herman-Chomsky. An example of this idea that pre-dates the publishing of the book Manufacturing Consent comes from the environmentalist Rachel Carson. In 1964, she described the chemical industry’s influence on science and the greater culture this way:

"Is industry becoming a screen through which facts must be filtered, so that the hard, uncomfortable truths are kept back and only the harmless morsels are allowed to filter through? I know that many thoughtful scientists are deeply disturbed that their organizations are becoming fronts for industry. … here, the tailoring, the screening of basic truth, is done, not to suit any party line, but to accommodate to the short-term gain, to serve the gods of profit and production."

One has to wonder if Rachel Carson were alive today, would her statement be much different?

Nick Hess is Vice-President of Public Access of Indianapolis, and recently attended a conference marking the upcoming 20th anniversary of the book, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.” Selected audio files from the conference are available at www.indyaccess.org/video-library/media-issues/propaganda-conference/.