Barack Obama has over 100,000 followers on twitter. According to Twitterholic, that’s a lot more than anyone else. On Facebook, Obama has 2.2 million “friends” compared to 745,000 for McCain. On MySpace during the US Presidential Election, Obama had 588,000 friends compared to McCain’s 188,000.
Thanks largely to unprecedented use of the internet, Obama’s campaign attracted 632,000 new donors in September 2008. By some estimates Obama’s internet activities have now raised more than 1 billion dollars since he started campaigning. That’s more than ten times as much as John Kerry raised over the internet just four years ago.
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As I discussed last time, the "Propaganda model" views the private media as businesses selling a non-media product — readers and demographic groups — to other businesses (advertisers). The theory postulates five general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five filters are:
1. Ownership of the medium
2. Medium's funding sources
3. Sourcing
4. Flak
5. Anti-Ideology
Ownership
Herman and Chomsky argue that since mainstream media outlets are either large corporations or part of conglomerates (e.g. Westinghouse or General Electric), the information presented to the public will be biased with respect to these interests. Such conglomerates frequently extend beyond traditional media fields, and thus have extensive financial interests that may be endangered when certain information is widely publicized. According to this reasoning, news items that most endanger the corporate financial interests of those who own the media will face the greatest bias and censorship.
It then follows that if to maximize profit means sacrificing news objectivity, then the news sources that ultimately survive must be fundamentally biased, with regard to news in which they have a conflict of interest.
Funding
Since the mainstream media depend heavily on advertising revenues to survive, the model suggests that the interests of advertisers come before reporting the news. Chomsky and Herman argue that, as a business, a newspaper has a product which it offers to an audience. The product is composed of the affluent readers who buy the newspaper — who also comprise the educated decision-making sector of the population — while the audience includes the businesses that pay to advertise their goods. According to this "filter", the news itself is nothing more than "filler" to get privileged readers to see the advertisements which makes up the real content, and will thus take whatever form is most conducive to attracting educated decision-makers. Stories that conflict with their "buying mood", it is argued, will tend to be marginalized or excluded, along with information that presents a picture of the world that collides with advertisers' interests. The theory argues that the people buying the newspaper are themselves the product which is sold to the businesses that buy advertising space; the news itself has only a marginal role as the product.
Sourcing
The third filter concerns the mass media's need for a continuous flow of information to fill their demand for daily news. In an industrialized economy where consumers demand information on numerous worldwide events unfolding simultaneously, they argue that this task can only be filled by major business and government sectors that have the necessary material resources. This includes mainly The Pentagon and other governmental bodies. Chomsky and Herman then argue that a symbiotic relationship arises between the media and parts of government which is sustained by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest. On the one hand, government and news-promoters strive to make it easier for news organizations to buy their services; according to the authors (p. 22), they
- provide them with facilities in which to gather
- give journalists advance copies of speeches and forthcoming reports
- schedule press conferences at hours well-geared to news deadlines
- write press releases in usable language
- carefully organize their press conferences and "photo opportunity" sessions
On the other hand, the media become reluctant to run articles that will harm corporate interests that provide them with the resources that the media depend upon. Chomsky and Herman state (p. 22),
It is very difficult to call authorities on whom one depends for daily news liars, even if they tell whoppers.
This theoretical relationship also gives rise to a "moral division of labor", in which "officials have and give the facts," and "reporters merely get them". Journalists are then supposed to adopt an uncritical attitude that makes it possible for them to accept corporate values without experiencing cognitive dissonance.
During the year 2005 in the USA, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) criticized the George W. Bush administration for the preparation and distribution of videos which falsely give the impression of being interviews made independently of the administration. The New York Times reported that "more than 20 federal agencies, including the State Department and the Defense Department, now create fake news clips. The Bush administration spent $254 million in its first four years on contracts with public relations firms, more than double the amount spent by the Clinton administration." In April 2008, the New York Times revealed how the US Pentagon and Defense Department traded access to valuable information and powerful decision makers to ex-military officers, many now military contractors, who were parroting administration talking-points and providing favorable "analysis" regarding the Iraq War and related topics on/in major television, radio and print media.
Flak
For Chomsky and Herman "flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. The term "flak" has been used to describe what Chomsky and Herman see as targeted efforts to discredit organizations or individuals who disagree with or cast doubt on the prevailing assumptions which Chomsky and Herman view as favorable to established power (e.g., "The Establishment"). Unlike the first three "filtering" mechanisms — which are derived from analysis of market mechanisms — flak is characterized by concerted and intentional efforts to manage public information.
Flak from the powerful can be either direct or indirect. The direct could include the following hypothetical scenarios:
- Letters or phone calls from the White House to Dan Rather
- Inquiries from the FCC to major television networks requesting documents used to plan and assemble a program
- Messages from irate executives representing advertising agencies or corporate sponsors to media officials threatening retaliation if not granted on-air reply time.
The powerful can also work on the media indirectly by:
- Complaints delivered en masse to their own constituencies (e.g., stockholders, employees) about media bias,
- Generation of mass advertising that does the same,
By funding watchdog groups or think tanks engineered to expose and attack deviations in media coverage that endanger vital elite interests. - By funding political campaigns that elect politicians who will be more willing to curb any such media deviations.
Anti-Ideologies
A final filter is anti-ideology. Anti-ideologies exploit public fear and hatred of groups that pose a potential threat, either real, exaggerated, or imagined. Communism once posed the primary threat according to the model. Communism and socialism were portrayed by their detractors as endangering freedoms of speech, movement, press, etc. They argue that such a portrayal was often used as a means to silence voices critical of elite interests.
With the Soviet Union's collapse, proponents of the propaganda model have argued that the functionality and credibility of anti-communism has been fundamentally compromised. Proponents state that new, more functional anathemas have arisen to take its place. Chomsky and Herman argue that one possible replacement for anti-communism seems to have emerged in the form of "anti-terrorism".
I would assert that to an extent social networking and the Read/Write Web has provided a means to enable people to circumvent the traditional filters of information dissemination. I would suggest that attempts to discredit the Obama campaign largely failed (or in some cases even rebounded on the proponents of the flak) due to the availability of information through channels other than the national and local broadcasters and print media, for example.
However, we must ensure our enthusiasm for the seemingly democratic nature of social media is tempered with rational analysis and reflection. In the previous paragraph I said that the RWW negated the five filters "to an extent" because much (but certainly not all) of the information distributed over the channels originated from the Democrat's campaign, and as such must be assessed as adhering to their agenda, to achieve their goals. In this context then, consumers of content would be well-advised to apply the same level of critical thinking to social media channels as to the traditional media.
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References:
Buzz News [Internet] Available from: http://www.culture-buzz.com/blog/Top-5-Barack-Obama-s-Viral-Marketing-1875.html
Accessed 12 November 2008
Herman, E.S., Chomsky, N (2002). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books.
Manufacturing dissent: Noam Chomsky and the crisis of the Western Left. [Internet] Available from: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Manufacturing+dissent:+Noam+Chomsky+and+the+crisis+of+the+Western...-a0127013020 Accessed 12 November 2008
Wikipedia contributors, "Propaganda model" Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model Accessed November 6, 2008.
