Propaganda model

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The propaganda model by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman shows how, in the opinion of the authors, objective reporting in the mass media is prevented by the usually uncontrolled and unconscious “filtering” of information.

The media science model is part of a socially critical concept of political sociology , according to which public opinion in formally democratic societies is manipulated in order to achieve a social sham consensus on economic, social and political decisions, from which ultimately only a small minority of society benefits , the economic and political power elite . This concept is in the tradition of socialism and critical theory .

Origin of the model

The propaganda model was first depicted in Hermans and Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media in 1988 and referred primarily to US mass media.

The title of the book as well as some of the criticized concepts go back to Walter Lippmann's work Public Opinion . Lippmann had used the expression manufacturing consent here and described the agenda setting such as the " gatekeeper " function and the media bias problem for the first time in the sense of news research . Lippmann also founded the news value theory. In his work A Test of the News , Lippmann himself had critically analyzed the reporting of the Times and in Liberty and the News he worked out the central importance of the media for democracy.

There is a similarity between the propaganda model and Upton Sinclair's journalism study The Brass Check (1919).

In the criticism of the power elite, Chomsky follows the tradition of C. Wright Mills , who in turn was inspired by Franz Leopold Neumann's elite theory in Behemoth .

Requirements of the model

The propaganda model assumes that the structure of today's mass media in capitalist societies prevents objective reporting from the outset, insofar as private media, which are in competition with one another and rely on advertising income or partial state funding, are in a conflict of interest . The primary interest of private mass media could not be to inform the population as comprehensively and objectively as possible. Instead, the media should be seen as companies that have to sell their readers or viewers news as a commodity. Furthermore, the readers or viewers themselves would also be "sold" to the newspaper's advertisers, since the income for advertising is measured according to the number of recipients.

thesis

The theory puts forward the thesis that large media corporations could form a non- conspiratorial propaganda system that would be able to establish a consensus in the interests of a social upper class described by the authors without central control and to promote public opinion via agenda setting and framing according to the perspectives to shape this upper class, while at the same time the appearance of a democratic process of opinion- forming and consensus-building is preserved.

method

The propaganda model tries to explain a tendentious reporting in the mass media assumed by the authors as a product of economic constraints and influence and to make it plausible using case studies.

The "Filters"

According to the propaganda model, there are five filters that keep unwanted messages away from the population. As an indication, the authors consult Lippmann's main work, the public , in which the author, according to Chomsky, did not shy away from portraying propaganda as indispensable for democracy. According to Chomsky, the thinking of liberal-democratic intellectuals is still characterized today by Lippmann's doctrine.

According to this, content is selected and categorized (framing) primarily according to political and economic aspects: critical perspectives and questions are sorted out (gate keeping), spectacular but banal information is brought to the fore (distraction).

Chomsky and Herman see the mechanisms of action of selection in five influencing factors, which they describe as “filters” that keep certain news or individual aspects out of the mass media. In their opinion, the media are functionalized so that the values ​​and interests of influential groups are taken into account. According to Herman and Chomsky, the messages processed in this way meet the criteria of propaganda . The filter model therefore represents a propaganda model of the mass media.

Chomsky and Herman attach great importance to the fact that filtering is not the result of a conspiracy but the product of economic, political and military constraints. While there is a very obvious functionalization of the media in authoritarian, undemocratic countries , this functionalization in Western countries is more subtle, mostly without external coercion, and therefore far more difficult to recognize.

Although Chomsky and Herman have mainly studied American media, they believe that the "filters" work on any mass media that exists in the capitalist environment of developed democracies, even if their studies focus primarily on the US media market.

The ownership structure

In the history of the mass media over the past 200 years, Chomsky and Herman point out various strands of development.

On the one hand, a high market entry barrier has developed over time. In the times of the first London weekly newspapers, in the 1830s, it was still possible to bring a newspaper onto the market for a three-digit amount, which then had at least a high four-digit number of copies (and was therefore a large medium), but one cost one to publish London daily newspaper in 1867 already 50,000 pounds. The development of the increasing demand for investments continued: In the 1920s, extensive financial resources were required for the establishment of a regional newspaper.

In their work, the authors stated the cost of establishing a serious weekly or daily newspaper in the tens of millions. Even more extensive resources were required to establish a new television or radio station. This filter ensures that de facto only a privileged layer has secure access to the media and thus also to the news market. On the other hand, it does not seem to be particularly difficult for the upper class or big industrialists to gain access to the mass media market: In 1986, General Electric , a US-American conglomerate with, according to the authors, "entanglements in the arms, energy and finance sectors" and bought In 2005 the fourth largest company in the world in terms of revenues, the television station NBC, and would have "bought" its entry into the mass media.

The second effective aspect of filters lies in the media concentration on a few protagonists. Although there were over 25,000 media units (such as newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations) in the US in 1986, Chomsky and Herman state, most of them already belonged to major national media corporations or were at least dependent on everything except local news them. In the meantime, media concentration in the USA is so advanced that one can only differentiate between a few large corporations (such as Disney , Time Warner , Viacom or General Electric-NBC). In this way, large oligopolies have emerged through mergers and acquisitions . The company Clear Channel Communications , according to the Institute for Media and Communication Policy only No. 25 in the list of the largest media companies in terms of sales, owned 1200 radio and 30 television stations. In 2005 , the Bush- friendly management of the company was able to ensure that the country band Dixie Chicks , which had repeatedly expressed criticism of Bush, suffered an enormous drop in popularity with a playback ban .

Concentrating on a few large companies does not mean that the supply will decrease in quantity. On the contrary, according to the authors, there is an ever larger range that also suggests a large variety of offers and competitive conditions. In reality, however, there are fewer and fewer providers on the market who are producing more and more offers. This means that the media offering is only superficially increasing, while the background is often the same interest of the parent companies. This interest sometimes lies outside the media market - for example, as already mentioned in the Dixie Chicks example, a government-friendly course can be made clear through subtle censorship interventions, through which the parent company promises, for example, tax advantages or corporate Senate decisions.

Another example of the authors is the so-called sensitization of the population to injustices in a certain other country in order to increase the willingness of the population to go to war and thus to generate higher sales for a parent company (see e.g. General Electric), which is also active in the arms market procure.

Due to the strong media concentration, the news corporations could also afford to forego expensive investigative journalism in favor of cheaper but spectacular banal fact-hunting. Even within the few remaining large media groups there are links. For example, influential media directors sit on the supervisory boards of various companies, or there are owner interfaces between various listed companies. Steve Jobs, for example, was co-founder and CEO of Apple and at the same time (since the takeover of Pixar by Disney) was the largest single shareholder of Disney.

The sources of income of the media

It is commonly assumed that media companies design their product in order to then sell it as a commodity to consumers - but this only applies to newspapers that are not financed by advertising and for which the production costs are completely covered by the selling costs of the newspapers. With a circulation of 1000 copies of a newspaper and production costs of 1000 dollars, for example, the newspaper would have to cost at least one dollar in order for the publisher to be able to break even if it was sold out.

When, in the historical development, the first newspaper included advertisers, i.e. advertisers, in its financing and thus sold advertising space within the newspaper, the scheme changed: If in the fictitious example the newspaper can recover $ 750 in production costs by selling advertising , then she could sell the newspaper for only 25 cents and still work economically. Thus, in the developing advertising industry, those newspapers that placed advertisements were privileged: the newspaper achieved a higher circulation due to the lower selling price. The authors call this development the beginning of an upward spiral - and at the same time a decline for newspapers that refused to advertise or, conversely, that potential advertising partners refused to accept, for example because the newspapers in question were considered to be unsuitable vehicles for their own product advertising or their readership would be viewed as having insufficient purchasing power . The concept of the advertising-free newspaper was thus doomed to failure or to exist in narrow niches.

At the time the book was published, there was no longer any mass media that could do without advertising. In the case of newspapers, only a paper protection fee would be charged, the financing would run entirely through the advertising included. Television broadcasters have now also largely financed themselves through advertising income, and even pay TV or fee-financed broadcasters only covered a fraction of their costs through other sources of income. This has also fundamentally changed the content of the media, which is no longer primarily from the point of view of critical reporting, but instead should represent an attractive advertising platform for potential advertisers with the attention of the largest possible, but more importantly, the most affluent audience .

According to the authors, the primary financing of the media by advertisers (“normative reference organizations”) at that time led to self-censorship, since nothing could be published in such a medium that contradicted the interests of the advertisers, without a decrease in the advertiser's interest in the medium and consequently To have to accept (often serious) decline in advertising revenue. For example, a television station would not risk broadcasting critical reports about the harmful effects of alcohol if breweries were major advertisers for the station. Critical reporting would be discriminated by this filter because it endangers the buying mood of consumers and therefore runs counter to the interests of the advertising industry or its clients.

The sources of the news

In the opinion of the authors, mass media require a steady flow of news in order to fulfill their function. Hardly any medium can manage to collect the information itself (ie to have an employee at every “news base”). The media are therefore dependent on suppliers who collect the news for them and then forward them in bundled form to editorial offices. In the industrialized media world, these tasks were taken over by various country-specific news agencies , which also had the ability to get the news first hand.

Every political authority and every company of a certain size employ a PR agency that issues press releases or holds press conferences on a regular basis, or runs its own public relations department . Press conferences in particular as a means of public relations are a grateful source for a news magazine: news shouldn't cost much and must be available quickly and constantly. Press conferences are the place where news can be generated quickly and cheaply. In most cases, the PR department holding the press conference would provide the participating reporters with a ready-made handout with the main theses or even quotations in order to speed up the editorial process. In the interests of the inviting party, the press conferences would take place at a clearly defined location and at a defined time so that a broadcast or issue can be published before the editorial deadline.

Basically, the truth is presumed with the rumored information - the assertion of an institution is used as knowledge. This would also make the media the mouthpiece of institutions. The information that is most promoted by the institutions is said to have the most media coverage. Presumed experts are hired by the PR agencies to legitimize the news and to dispel any doubts about the accuracy of the information. The competence of these "experts" - so one assertion - is not questioned or checked, the apparent information would therefore remain hypothetical and subjective from the viewer's point of view .

In addition to the PR agencies, news agencies are also central suppliers for the mass media. News agencies also acted as so-called gatekeepers . They categorized news as relevant and therefore worth reporting, so that they can be processed and forwarded or researched by correspondents and reporters on site. The agencies should proceed as objectively as possible and without political or economic coloring. But news agencies too are dependent on larger companies, domestic government agencies, foreign governments or informants working with them or at least not hindering their work. This is why information is filtered here, too, which is essentially colored according to the interests of the source provider and the exploitation claims of the media in the context of a news market.

"Flak"

Flak describes negative influence from the public. The media are very dependent on positive feedback, including feedback from other media. If certain news, attitudes or programs were criticized by official bodies (e.g. government institutions) or discussed negatively in other media, this could have costly consequences for the criticized media company, such as lawsuits for defamation, and could mean a loss of reputation. In addition to the possible negative effects on the flow of information (e.g. if a program is repeatedly branded as “too left-leaning”, it will be difficult to get a liberal or conservative politician to make a statement in the program), negative feedback on programs could also be possible Generate problems with advertisers. These would be forced to prevent flak by an offended group of customers - they put media companies under pressure to produce programs that are as suitable for the masses as possible.

Unlike the first three filters, Flak is not primarily an economic filter. Rather, more direct power interests are in the foreground with this filter: Politicians and large corporations want to intervene in media design through flak in order to influence the consensus in the population. In the development of targeted media criticism, institutions would be created with the support of commercial enterprises and PR agencies which systematically responded to attitudes represented in the media with negative feedback, i.e. specifically produced flak in order to achieve a goal corresponding to the interests of the supporting commercial enterprises.

Anti-communism or "anti-ideology"

According to the authors, so-called "anti-ideologies" mostly exist on the construction of binary and polar pairs of opposites. For Chomsky and Herman, who developed their theory against the backdrop of the Cold War , this pair of opposites was communism as the antithesis of the American way of life . Such an anti-ideology has an impact on the moral evaluation (and thus also the critical reporting) of military actions or on the credibility and legitimacy of experts in the media and in the social consensus.

For such ideological reasons, the American media, for example, have kept secret or downplayed atrocities by right-wing paramilitaries against communist-oriented civilians. One example is the illegal annexation of East Timor by Indonesia at a time when the USA needed Indonesia as an ally in the Vietnam War . In “Manufacturing Consent” the massacres carried out by the Indonesian armed forces are described as “the greatest genocide since the Holocaust ”. There was little coverage of the invasion of East Timor in the US media . On the other hand, a relatively comparable case at the same time, the genocide in Cambodia , received a lot of media attention. According to Chomsky, the lack of media presence would have prevented the UN from becoming active in East Timor. Although the UN condemned the invasion of Indonesia and imposed embargoes on the Southeast Asian state, it did not (for the time being) send any peacekeeping forces ( blue helmets ) to East Timor to prevent the genocide.

In the US of the late 1980s, anti-communism was so completely internalized as an ideology in the population and the media that Chomsky and Herman speak of "anticommunism" as the "dominant religion". Journalists were under constant pressure not to allow any doubts about their anti-communist stance. The ideology would have helped the population to clearly define an “enemy of the fatherland”, which would have made it easier for politicians to mobilize the population against this enemy. By vaguely describing the enemy as "communist (s)", the ideology could have been used to stigmatize as "hostile" all political movements that question property interests or even promote dialogue with communist states and radicals. In addition, the internalization of ideology led to an asymmetrical view of radicality: while a possible victory for communism was seen as the greatest possible evil, domestic support for neo-fascist groups was seen as a minor problem.

Today, after the end of the Cold War , after the fall of the Berlin Wall , the fall of the Iron Curtain and finally the attacks of September 11, 2001 , terrorism has established itself as the new antipode of the American way of life. Even this new anti-ideology cannot free itself from the imbalance of moral considerations: Anyone who speaks out against American foreign and war policy will in the best case be branded as “soft on terrorism” or even as potentially “terrorist” excluded from public discourse. Under the motto of the “war on terror” , dangerous combat missions by US troops could be legitimized in the US media, for example in Afghanistan and before the Iraq war .

Application examples Cambodia and East Timor

Chomsky and Herman applied the propaganda model as an example to the different reporting on human rights violations in Cambodia (under the rule of the Khmer Rouge ) and in East Timor . The events took place in both countries in the late 1970s and were retrospectively rated as genocide .

In Cambodia, the communist Khmer Rouge were in power and suppressed their political opponents with extreme severity. Approximately 1.7 million people died as a result of the later rule of the Khmer Rouge, after around 50,000 to 300,000 people were directly killed in the US air strikes during the Vietnam War .

Indonesia , whose military dictatorial regime was friendly towards the USA, occupied the former Portuguese colony of East Timor on the grounds of preventing the strengthening FRETILIN party from coming to power , which, according to Indonesia, was communist-oriented. Nine days after FRETILIN proclaimed East Timor's independence, Indonesia invaded East Timor. According to investigations by the Reception, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of East Timor, the invasion and occupation cost 183,000 lives, almost a third of the original 600,000 inhabitants of East Timor.

With the help of the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) organization, Chomsky and Herman collected and counted the New York Times reports on the genocide in Cambodia and compared these reports with those on East Timor. About the events in Cambodia "after the Vietnam War" the New York Times printed a total of 1175 inches (29.84 m) newspaper column length, about those in East Timor only 70 inches (1.78 m).

As the reason for the different portrayals of similar crimes, the authors postulated that Indonesia was an important political and economic ally of the USA in Southeast Asia , while Cambodia, as a communist state, was classified as a political opponent of the USA. The serious human rights violations by the Indonesian military in East Timor - how the events in Cambodia should be viewed as genocide - were hardly reported; those of the Khmer Rouge were strongly emphasized.

Reception and impact history

The propaganda model has been used by a large number of sociologists and communication scientists in many other countries since it was first presented and is considered by these researchers to be a valid, empirically proven model for studying the functioning of mass media in capitalist societies.

The propaganda function of the mass media was confirmed in Great Britain, Germany, Latin America and Spain, among others.

The topic of Chomsky's and Herman's first publication was deepened in Chomsky's work Media Control (1991).

literature

  • Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988, 2002): Manufacturing consent: the political economy of the mass media. Pantheon Books, New York.
  • Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (2006): Manufacturing consent: the political economy of the mass media. Vintage Books / Random House. ISBN 0-09-953311-1 .
  • Mark Achbar (Ed., 1994): Manufacturing consent: Noam Chomsky and the media: the companion book to the award-winning film by Peter Wintonick and Mark Achbar. Black Rose Books, Montréal. ISBN 1-55164-002-3 .
  • Mark Achbar (Ed., 2001): Ways to Intellectual Self-Defense: Media, Democracy and the Fabrication of Consensus. Translated by Helmut Richter. Nonetheless, fellow publishers. ISBN 3-922209-88-2 .
  • Pedro-Carañana, J., Broudy, D. and Klaehn, J. (eds.). 2018. The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness. London: University of Westminster Press. License: CC ‐ BY ‐ NC ‐ ND 4.0, available at: http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=1002463

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Chomsky, Noam,: Manufacturing consent: the political economy of the mass media . Updated ed. New York 2002, ISBN 0-375-71449-9 .
  2. ↑ Pamela J. Shoemaker, Timothy Vos: Gatekeeping Theory . Routledge, 2009, ISBN 978-1-135-86060-8 ( com.ph [accessed April 10, 2020]).
  3. ↑ Michele Tolela Myers, Gail E. Myers: Managing by Communication: An Organizational Approach . McGraw-Hill, 1982, ISBN 978-0-07-044235-1 ( com.ph [accessed April 10, 2020]).
  4. ^ The Journalism Quarterly . School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota, 1975 ( com.ph [accessed April 10, 2020]).
  5. ^ Andreas Rothe: Media System and News Selections in Namibia . LIT Verlag Münster, 2010, ISBN 978-3-643-11194-4 ( com.ph [accessed April 10, 2020]).
  6. ↑ Heinz Pürer: Journalism and Communication Studies: With the collaboration of Philip Baugut, Helena Bilandzic, Wolfgang Eichhorn, Andreas Fahr, Nayla Fawzi, Friederike Koschel, Marcus Maurer, Rudi Renger, Nina Springer, Jeffrey Wimmer, Susanne Wolf and Thomas Zerback . UTB, 2014, ISBN 978-3-8252-8533-3 ( com.ph [accessed April 10, 2020]).
  7. ^ Dean Starkman: The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism . Columbia University Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-231-53628-8 ( com.ph [accessed April 10, 2020]).
  8. ^ Evans Mary: Gender And Social Theory . McGraw-Hill Education (UK), 2003, ISBN 978-0-335-20864-7 ( com.ph [accessed April 11, 2020]).
  9. ↑ From politics and contemporary history: Supplement to the weekly newspaper parliament . 1974 ( com.ph [accessed April 11, 2020]).
  10. ^ Karl Willy Beer: The political opinion . Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, 1978 ( com.ph [accessed April 11, 2020]).
  11. ↑ Oliver Neun: On the topicality of C. Wright Mills: Introduction to his work . Springer-Verlag, 2018, ISBN 978-3-658-22376-2 ( com.ph [accessed April 11, 2020]).
  12. ↑ Chomsky, Noam .: Necessary illusions: thought control in democratic societies . House of Anansi Press, 2003, ISBN 0-88784-574-6 .
  13. ^ Günther Grewendorf: Noam Chomsky , Volume 574 of Beck'sche series: Denker, Verlag CHBeck, 2006, ISBN 978-3-406-54111-7 , p. 213
  14. ^ Jeffery Klaehn: Filtering the news . Black Rose Books, 2005, ISBN 978-1-55164-261-1 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  15. ↑ a b East Timor - a forgotten genocide. Wiener Zeitung, January 28, 1999
  16. ↑ Chomsky: mc-script ( Memento from June 27, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  17. ↑ Noam Chomsky: Why the mainstream media are mainstream. (No longer available online.) In: ZMag. July 15, 1997, archived from the original on December 12, 2007 ; Retrieved on March 30, 2019 (from the book "The Political Economy of Human Rights". With the kind permission of anyway Verlag, original article: "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream").
  18. ^ A b Jeffery Klaehn, Independent Scholar, CA: The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness . University of Westminster Press, 2018, ISBN 978-1-912656-16-5 , pp. 282 , doi : 10.16997 / book27 ( uwestminsterpress.co.uk [accessed March 29, 2019]).
  19. ^ Andrew Mullen, Jeffery Klaehn: The Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model: A Critical Approach to Analyzing Mass Media Behavior . In: Sociology Compass . tape 4 , no. 4 , 2010, ISSN  1751-9020 , p. 215-229 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1751-9020.2010.00275.x ( wiley.com [accessed March 29, 2019]).
  20. ^ Andrew Kennis: Indexing state – corporate propaganda? Evaluating the indexing, propaganda and media dependence models on CNN and CNN en Español's coverage of Fallujah, Iraq . In: Global Media and Communication . tape 11 , no. 2 , July 29, 2015, ISSN  1742-7665 , p. 103-130 , doi : 10.1177 / 1742766515589054 .
  21. ↑ Miri Moon: Manufacturing consent? The role of the international news on the Korean Peninsula . In: Global Media and Communication . tape 14 , no. 3 , December 2018, ISSN  1742-7665 , p. 265–281 , doi : 10.1177 / 1742766518780176 ( sagepub.com [accessed March 29, 2019]).
  22. ^ Won Yong Jang: News as propaganda: A comparative analysis of US and Korean press coverage of the Six-Party Talks, 2003-2007 . In: International Communication Gazette . tape 75 , no. 2 , March 2013, ISSN  1748-0485 , p. 188-204 , doi : 10.1177 / 1748048512465555 .
  23. ^ Jeffery Klaehn: Corporate Hegemony . In: Gazette (Leiden, Netherlands) . tape 64 , no. 4 , August 2002, ISSN  0016-5492 , p. 301-321 , doi : 10.1177 / 174804850206400401 .