Noam Chomsky (18 page)

Smith, according to Chomsky, was thus much misunderstood in his arguments for a ‘free market’. Capitalism as we have it today is anything but ‘free’. Indeed Smith – however absurd it may sound – is not too far away from the ideas of anarcho-syndicalism in his call for individual freedom to engage in trade and commerce without the interference of any governmental or corporate superstructure (designed to stifle, control and suppress such freedoms, as the case may be). Chomsky refers to Rocker, who argued that classical liberalism (as espoused by Smith and others) was destroyed on the rock of capitalism, and that the anarchist tradition is its natural successor.

In any case, the metaphor of a ‘free market’ – where ‘free’ has the socialist libertarian meaning – can be transferred to a ‘free media’, as Herman and Chomsky do. The big question then is, why are the media not free? Why, at its worst, are the media merely a tool of crude propaganda? The answers to these questions, proffered by Herman and Chomsky, have now become widely accepted in radical media critiques – if not occasionally reaching even into mainstream critiques. The Herman and Chomsky ‘propaganda model’ posits four filters of control, detailed as follows:

Beginning with ‘Filter No. 1’, one may note that in theory anyone can start a newspaper, be it the
Freie Arbeiter Stimme
or the
New York Times
. That the former has a minute distribution compared to the latter is at the heart of the matter. The
Freie Arbeiter Stimme
simply doesn’t have the financial means to boost its circulation; in other words the
Freie Arbeiter Stimme
operates at the pre-industrial level while the
New York Times
is a fine example of having achieved a high level of the ‘industrialization of the press’.
⁹
The very idea of the ‘mass media’ is intimately connected to ‘mass production’, whereby enormous resources are required to get going in the first place. Capital and human resource investment is of such a magnitude that only the big players in the market can pull it off. Herman and Chomsky provide data for start-up costs for a New York City newspaper in 1851 to be in the vicinity of $69, 000, rising to between 6 and 18 million dollars in the 1920s. No data is available for estimated start-up costs today, but the figures are said to be in the billions. When media mogul Rupert Murdoch shifted production facilities in London in the mid-1980s, he not only defeated the printers’ unions but also introduced highly automated processes that dispensed with labour costs and thus increased his profit margins a thousand-fold. Print, radio and television became corporate conglomerates that raked in huge profits. Murdoch, as a prime example, extended his tentacles all over the world, creating one of the largest global corporations ever seen. No wonder the poor old
Freie Arbeiter Stimme
folded in 1977 while the
New York Times
becomes ever more profitable. Selling the news is thus no different from flogging cars and shampoo. It is painfully obvious that those owning and running the mass media couldn’t care less about anything as long as it sells, and sells well. To maintain a most favourable business climate with plenty of tax breaks and anti-union legislation there is a cosy symbiosis with the governments of the day, doing each other favours like no others. As Herman and Chomsky put it with a touch of irony, ‘the political ties of the media have been impressive’.
¹⁰

Filter no. 2 is in place for those that made it through Filter no. 1. Having somehow convinced our libertarian bankers that they should inject a few billion dollars into our new mass media syndicate, here comes the second obstacle – or saviour, as the case may be. The industrial age and mass production have come up with another amazing advance, namely to sell vast amounts of goods that nobody needs but everyone wants. The trick was to turn the consumer into Pavlov’s dog – through the use of advertising. The so-called science of behaviourism – the one Chomsky fought so hard against in linguistics and philosophy – has reached new heights in creating consumer demand even before the supply is ready to hit the shelves. The happy (and necessary) union of advertising and the mass media changed our world into the out and out consumer society we are now. There is now one, and only one,
raison d’être
for the ever increasing media circulation and exposure: enabling advertisers to reach larger and larger numbers of consumers, thus increasing sales for their clients, thus increasing profits for the corporations involved. We need ‘the advertising licence to do business’ that is Filter no. 2.

In taking our hypothetical mass-media newspaper to the next level we must squeeze through Filter no. 3. In between the advertising copy we need some actual news items to fill up the space, and provide some pretence for calling it a newspaper. We could just employ a few clever journalists to make it all up, but as that’s already being done quite successfully we must find another market niche. To send out our correspondents to the four corners of the world would be hugely expensive unless we could sell their news to all the other newspapers as well – but that’s also being done already by new agencies such as Reuters and
AP
. Yet there is more, much more. Herman and Chomsky demonstrate through many examples that a lot of the news is also pre-written by the
US
government and by the publicity machines of the corporations. The infamous government and corporate ‘press releases’ are only the tip of an iceberg. Every corporate and governmental structure these days includes a publicity department charged to put a positive spin on everything that happens. Those most adept at turning bad news into good news get the honorary title ‘spin doctor’. Finally, as Herman and Chomsky point out, this is the age of the ‘expert’ and every news item, especially when presented on radio and television, needs ‘expert analysis’ lest the audience make up their own minds as to what it all means. The news is thus a fully packaged industrial product, marketed and sold like fast food. The consumer of news only has to swallow what has been fully pre-digested for him and her. At least, now that Herman and Chomsky have told us all about it, it is possible to put a positive spin on such bad news, since we can now read between the lines and extract the real news by default. After all, some propaganda and ‘infotainment’ is so dumb it doesn’t need much effort to see through it. What remains the biggest problem for our ‘free’ media is how to source and how to report all the news that in the first instance was not deemed fit to print by the corporate media.

Should anyone be game enough – as the occasional idealistic journalist might be – to report on crimes committed by the
US
government, then Filter no. 4 sets in. Herman and Chomsky’s military metaphors of ‘flak and the enforcers’ are most apt for totalitarian states where inconvenient journalists are simply exiled, jailed or shot. In an open representative democracy, such as the us, more subtle methods must be applied. Even when internecine warfare breaks out among the political establishment, for example during the Watergate scandal, the media must be seen to be ‘fair’ at all times. It was only when the
FBI
leaked the news of Nixon’s crimes that the press was allowed to engage in a heroic act of ‘investigative journalism’ and spill the beans. Endless pontificating has followed the farcical revelation in 2005 of the identity of the
FBI
‘deep throat’; here is an example from the
Washington Post:

In relation to Watergate, Herman and Chomsky mention in passing in
Manufacturing Consent
that a far greater scandal at the time never received any mass-media coverage, namely that of the COINTELPRO, the
FBI
-led counter-activist programme discussed in chapter Three. Watergate was a tea party compared with the government crimes exposed in the courts when
COINTELPRO
was discovered. What was the difference? Watergate was a trivial annoyance to the very rich and powerful, while
COINTELPRO
was just doing things like murdering black organizers, illegally destroying small left journals, undermining the women’s movement, and so on. That tells us more about Watergate than the sum total that has been written about it in more than thirty years.

Hence, despite the penchant of the mass media for using hyperbole (‘the world was changed forever’), very little truly investigative journalism has in fact been allowed to be published in the us. Herman and Chomsky note various media watchdog organizations, such as Accuracy in Media (
AIM
), whose function is ‘to harass the media and put pressure on them to follow the corporate agenda and a hard-line, right-wing foreign policy’.
¹²
An example is provided by
AIM’S
reaction to statements from the ‘liberal media’, such as the
Washington Post:

This is a scarcely veiled warning to journalists to leave the incumbent president, George W. Bush, alone, even if he were to be implicated in crimes so horrendous that even the
FBI
couldn’t keep quiet about them. See what happens to supergrasses: they have ‘strokes’ and suffer from ‘dementia’. Thus ‘the producers of flak reinforce the command of political authority in its news-management activities’.
¹⁴

Given that our really ‘free’ media cannot even trickle through one filter, let alone through four, the chances of our
Freie Arbeiter Stimme
being relaunched as a daily with mass circulation are absolutely nil.

Manufacturing Consent
goes on to detail other propaganda tools before it concentrates on concrete examples of what gets reported and what not, the real crux of the matter. In the chapter entitled ‘Worthy and Unworthy Victims’ there is a statistical analysis of news reports about a murdered Polish priest (October 1984) versus some one hundred religious murder victims in Latin America. The
New York Times
yields a 100:51 ratio of column inches in favour of the Polish priest (coverage is for an eighteen-month period). In some ten tables and three extensive appendices there is a wealth of data, and the reader can make up his/her mind about the implications. Another example of ‘worthy’ versus ‘unworthy’ victims concerns the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia: when they terrorized the Cambodian population they were vilified in the American media (justly so), but when they later resisted the liberation of Cambodia itself via the Vietnamese, the scenario reversed in a perverse way, with the Khmer Rouge becoming freedom fighters and the Vietnamese the oppressors. According to Herman and Chomsky: ‘After early efforts to charge the Vietnamese with “genocide”, the condemnation of the official enemy shifted to the terrible acts of “the Prussians of Asia”, who have “subjugated and impoverished” Cambodia since overthrowing Pol Pot, according to the editors of the
New York Times
.’
¹⁵

It is of course not only the
New York Times
that is implicated, for Herman and Chomsky detail many other American media empires who conspire to ‘manufacture consent’. The exercise of comparing death and destruction on one side with death and destruction on the other has irritated many detractors, saying that it belittles death and destruction on both sides. However, this is clearly not the purpose of the book. It is rather the absolute claim that death and destruction is so abhorrent that all such acts must be reported with equal disdain and distaste. It is an absolute betrayal of human value when one death is vilified and the other is justified, or, in media terms, one death is news, the other is not. It comes down to a new barbarism that says evil people deserve to die without mention but the murder of a single good person is worthy of news. Since we know who the arbiters of good and evil are, we rest our case, as did George Orwell in
Nineteen Eighty-four
.

Manufacturing Consent
contains a mass of detail, meticulously researched and referenced. Some readers find the relentless onslaught of quotations and citations unsettling. Haven’t Herman and Chomsky already made their point?, one may ask. Well, this is a prime example of the scientific method – it’s not about scoring points but about presenting the indisputable facts of the matter: the reader can make up his or her mind accordingly. The book remains a bestseller among the Chomsky titles; its continuing topicality is indicated by
Filtering the News: Essays on Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model
, edited by Jeffery Klaehn and published in 2005 by another alternative-cum-anarchist media outlet, appropriately named Black Rose Books.

Given the apparent popularity of such media critiques, one does wonder, though, how the
New York Times
and all the other malefactors implicated in
Manufacturing Consent
, haven’t yet gone out of business. Is it the case that the many have heard about the book but only a few have actually read it? As mentioned before, the book was followed by a documentary of the same name; since the latter has achieved a certain cult status on the alternative film circuits, there has been much confusion as to what it all means. Since this is a media issue in itself, it is worth turning things around and looking at this phenomenon from the very perspective that Herman and Chomsky have given us.