Propaganda in the Information Age

Still Manufacturing Consent

Alan MacLeod

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429772627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Propaganda in the Information Age is a collaborative volume which updates Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model for the twenty-first-century media landscape and makes the case for the continuing relevance of their original ideas. It includes an exclusive interview with Noam Chomsky himself.

2018 marks 30 years since the publication of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's ground-breaking book Manufacturing Consent, which lifted the veil over how the mass media operate. The book's model presented five filters which all potentially newsworthy events must pass through before they reach our TV screens, smartphones or newspapers. In Propaganda in the Information Age, many of the world's leading media scholars, analysts and journalists use this model to explore the modern media world, covering some of the most pressing contemporary topics such as fake news, Cambridge Analytica, the Syrian Civil War and Russiagate. The collection also acknowledges that in an increasingly globalized world, our media is increasingly globalized as well, with chapters exploring both Indian and African media.

For students of Media Studies, Journalism, Communication and Sociology, Propaganda in the Information Age offers a fascinating introduction to the propaganda model and how it can be applied to our understanding not only of how media functions in corporate America, but across the world in the twenty-first century.

1

STILL MANUFACTURING CONSENT

An interview with Noam Chomsky

Alan MacLeod and Noam Chomsky

This interview took place on March 13th, 2018. Noam Chomsky and Alan MacLeod discussed the origins of Manufacturing Consent, the propaganda model today, Google and Facebook, Donald Trump and Russia, fake news and Syria.

Alan MacLeod (AM): I would first like to ask you about how Manufacturing Consent came about. How did you know Edward Herman? What was the division of labour with the book? What parts did you write and what parts did he write?

Noam Chomsky (NC): Ed wrote the basic framework, the institutional analysis, the corporate structure, the relations to government programmes and the fundamental institutional structure of the media – that was basically him. He also did parts on some of the specific studies like on the coverage comparison of a hundred religious martyrs in Latin America with one Polish priest. He did the comparison of the elections, which was partly drawn from a book that he had already done on demonstration elections. I did all the parts on Vietnam and on the Freedom House attack on the media. Of course, we interacted on all the chapters, but the main division of labour was that.

AM: And what was the reaction to it when it came out? Was it celebrated? Ignored? Attacked?

NC: The reaction was quite interesting. Mostly the journalists and the media did not like it at all, of course. And, interestingly, they did not like the defence of the integrity of journalism. The last part, which investigated Peter Braestrup’s (1977) major, two-volume Freedom House attack on the media for having been treacherous, for having lost the Vietnam War, and so on (which turned out to be a total fraud). I was probably the only person who read the actual document, both of the two volumes. One, the attack on the media, [the other] the documentary basis. Hardly any correlation between them! It was just literally total fraud! And what the results showed was that the journalists were courageous, honourable, they had integrity, they did their work seriously, but, of course, all within the framework of US government ideology. Like all the coverage of the war, like, say, David Halberstam. It was honest, serious, but, almost without exception within the framework of the assumption that the United States is making a mistake by trying to save democracy in South Vietnam from communist aggression. That is the picture. The idea that the United States was carrying out a major war crime by invading another country and destroying the indigenous resistance – the facts were there but not the framework of discussion. And they did not like that. Journalists would much prefer to be regarded as aggressive, independent, thinking for themselves and if they were treacherous, well, OK, maybe they went overboard attacking the US government – that they much preferred. So as far as the journalists themselves were concerned, aside from a few exceptions, they did not like that picture of journalism as being honest, courageous and with integrity.

There were very few reviews of the book but there was one critical discussion that I wrote about later by Nicholas Lehman (1989), a well-known scholar of journalism who wrote a review in which he disparaged it, saying, “This doesn’t mean anything.” For example, he discussed the chapter comparing the assassinations of a hundred religious martyrs in Central America, including an Archbishop, American nuns and leading Latin American intellectuals (where there was virtually no coverage) with the coverage of the assassination of one Polish priest where the assassins were immediately apprehended, tried, sentenced to jail (where there was vast reportage). This was one of our many examples of the way in which worthy victims are treated as compared with unworthy victims. He said “well this doesn’t mean anything, it is just because the media focused on one thing at a time, and they happened to be focusing on Poland not El Salvador.” So, out of curiosity I went to the New York Times index and it turned out there was more coverage of El Salvador than of Poland during that period. But it does not matter because this is a world of alternative facts. The media commentary is mostly propaganda and ideology. There were a few other critiques rather like that … but in the mainstream it was basically ignored.

The first book that Ed and I wrote together, Counterrevolutionary Violence, was published by a small publisher that was doing quite well. They published 20,000 copies of it and were ready to distribute it. The publisher was owned by a big conglomerate, Warner Brothers, now part of Time Warner. One of the Warner executives saw the advertising for the book, and did not like it. He asked to see the book and when he saw it he went berserk and ordered them to stop distributing it immediately. The publisher at first did not agree. They said they would publish a critical volume with contrary views, but that was not enough to prevent it from being published. In the course of the discussion he just put the whole publisher out of business, destroying all their stock, not only our book, but all their books. We brought this to the attention to some civil libertarians at the American Civil Liberties Union. They did not see any problem. It is not government censorship; it is just a corporation deciding to destroy a publisher to prevent them distributing a book.

We immediately started working on an expansion of the book: The Political Economy of Human Rights. The reaction to that was quite interesting. Many things were discussed but there were two major chapters where we compared two huge atrocities going on at the same time in the same place, in South East Asia. One in Cambodia under Pol Pot, the other in East Timor after the Indonesian invasion. They were very similar. Per capita the East Timor atrocities were worse as they killed a larger portion of the population, but they were comparable. The fundamental difference between them was that in one case you could blame it on an official enemy and there was absolutely nothing to do about it – nobody had a proposal as to how to stop it. In the other case, we were responsible. The United States and its allies were crucially responsible. The US blocked action at the United Nations, provided the arms for Indonesia – the more the atrocities increased the more the arms flowed, and there was everything you could do about it – you could just call it off. The reaction was not a word on our chapter about East Timor – that disappeared. But there was a huge attack on our discussion of Cambodia. There was a huge literature on this trying to show that we were apologists for Pol Pot. The reason for this was that we went through the media and said “we don’t know what the facts are, we can’t know, but we will compare the facts available with what came out of the media filter” and it was grotesque: there was lying at a level that would have astonished Stalin. So we went through that record. That led to total hysteria. Look it up, you will find a ton of literature about it. We recently published a new edition of the book and we didn’t change a comma because there was nothing wrong with it. But that is the kind of reaction you get with Manufacturing Consent.

AM: It’s now been almost 30 years since its publication and the media landscape has, in many ways, changed greatly since 1988. I think perhaps the largest difference is the arrival of the Internet and social media. One 2016 study showed that half of all British people get their news online now, with online news having overtaken television in its reach, and having far superseded it among those under 45 years old. Twenty-five per cent of the UK receives its news primarily through social media like Facebook or Twitter (Nielsen, 2016). In the United States, two-thirds of the adult population get news through social media, and that figure is growing at nearly 10 per cent a year. Even the majority of over-50s use social media for news (Shearer and Gottfried, 2017). Could you speak about the Internet and social media, its usage and the evolving media landscape with regard to the propaganda model?

NC: I don’t think the Internet and social media changes the propaganda model at all. The propaganda model was about the major media institutions and they remain, with all the social media and everything else, the primary source of news, information and commentary. The news that appears in social media is drawn from them. So, if you look at the news on Facebook it comes straight from the major media. They don’t do their own investigations. As far as the major media are concerned, there is no fundamental difference. In fact, in some ways they are a little more independent than they were back in the 1980s, partly because of changes in the society, which have opened things up to an extent. But fundamentally they are the same. In fact, Ed and I did a second edition of Manufacturing Consent about 16 years ago (2002) and we talked about the Internet and whether to write anything about it and we decided just to leave it alone.

As far as social media are concerned, they are interesting in themselves. There has been a certain amount of study of them. What they have done is create bubbles. If you read the New York Times, which, incidentally, young people did not read much in the 1980s either, but if you read the New York Times or the Washington Post or even if you watch television news, you get a certain range of opinion, not very broad – it goes from centre to far-right, but at least there is some discussion and occasionally you get a critical voice here and there. On social media that has declined. People tend to go to things that just reinforce their own opinions, so you end up with bubbles. And it is all across the spectrum. The people on what is called the left see the left media, the people on the right see the right media. And the level of material is, of course, much more shallow. The mainstream media, as we wrote in Manufacturing Consent, are a very significant source of news and information and provide very valuable material. The first thing I do every day is read the New York Times as it is the most comprehensive journal. You have to critically analyse what you read and understand the framework, what is left out and so forth, but that is not quantum physics, it is not hard to do. But it is a source of news. On social media you do not find that. There are exceptions; there are Internet journals that are very good, for example, The Intercept, but most of it (Internet and social media) is pretty shallow and has led to a decline in understanding of the world in many ways.

AM: And, of course, there is the increasingly close relationship between these massive online monopolies and the US state. For instance, Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post and Amazon, received a $600 million contract with the CIA. Meanwhile, Google has something of a revolving door with the State Department and shares enormous amounts of data about us with it and are constantly listening to us through products like Siri and Alexa. Its former CEO, Eric Schmidt’s book about technological imperialism came heartily endorsed by Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Madeline Albright, Tony Blair and the former head of the NSA, who called Google “part of the defence industrial base.” Julian Assange (2014) has called some of Google’s projects “Orwellian horrors.”

NC: To a certain extent that is true. They do things that are connected with state power but I think Google and Facebook and the other few conglomerates that monopolize the system are basically connected with advertisers. They are part of the business world. So they are essentially selling you to advertisers just as the major old media do. They are also selling audiences to advertisers, but in a different way. Google and Facebook are doing it by monitoring everything about you so that somehow advertisers will be able to make more money approaching you. And that is very dangerous. And some of the things that are done and are not reported are quite interesting. So take the last German elections, for example. There was a lot of talk about potential Russian interference, that the Russians would undermine the election and so on. It turns out there was interference in the election. It was not Russian. It was from the United States. A media company that works for nice guys like Trump, Le Pen and Netanyahu got together with Facebook and the Facebook office of Berlin provided them with extensive details of the kind they have on German voters so then the media company could microtarget ads to specific voters to try to influence them to vote in a certain way. For whom? For Alternative für Deutschland, the neo-fascist party! Which probably is a factor in their surprisingly high vote. This was reported in the business press so you can read about it in Bloomberg Businessweek (Silver, 2017). But try to find a report in the mainstream press. It is not the kind of electoral manipulation we like to talk about. That is typical of the kind of things we discussed in Manufacturing Consent. So, yes, there is interference in elections, this is a good example. But the main thing is the way in which people are individually tracked to monitor the environment in which they live so as to control them for the benefit of advertisers and business.

You may have read that there are recent studies showing that automobile manufacturers are now so flooded with data from drivers of cars that they have not yet worked out a way on how to get a business model to allow advertisers to follow you every moment of your life. There are already apps that you can get where they give you some free device and in return you agree to have advertisements posted on the car dashboard the whole time you are driving. So if you are approaching an area where there is a certain restaurant, there will be an ad for that restaurant, things like that. This is really insidious and it can be used in very dangerous ways and sooner or later will be I am sure.

AM: Are companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon too big to exist privately and in their current form?

NC: Any kind of near monopoly as these companies are is extremely dangerous. They have enormous power and outreach. I do not think that any organization at all should have that kind of power. Their ability to collect information and to devise means of controlling what you see and do is very dangerous. Even at the level of you looking up on a search engine, Google deciding what you are going to see first, second and so on is quite dangerous. And they can be quite insidious like what happened in the German election.

AM: In Chapter 4, I suggest that the anti-communist filter that you wrote about in the 1980s as one of the five crucial filters that affect news is being drawn upon to create a new “anti-Russian” filter, where journalists and political figures who do not toe the establishment line on war and foreign policy will be chided as “Russian agents” or “Putin’s puppets.” You mentioned The Intercept, its co-founder Glenn Greenwald is an archetypal example of this. Another would be Jeremy Corbyn. [Note: the day after this interview took place, the Sun, Britain’s largest newspaper by circulation, ran with the frontpage headline “Putin’s puppet: Corbyn refuses to blast Russia on spy attack” as the leader of the Labour Party did not unreservedly endorse sanctions on Russia.] What is your opinion about the #Russiagate allegations and the general political climate with regards to Russia?

NC: As you probably know, in the United Kingdom right now there are moves to remove people’s access to RT, which is another television outlet. When I am overseas I look at that and BBC and they give a lot of information and news from different perspectives. But you have to protect people in the UK from an alternative point of view. In the United States it is not a problem because practically nobody has heard of RT. And Al-Jazeera, for example, had to cancel its efforts to reach an American audience because practically no station would allow them to appear. So there is no state censorship, it is just Counterrevolutionary Violence business censorship again.

Let’s take the Russia business. Let’s say all the claims are true. Suppose Russia tried to interfere in the American elections. That ought to make people laugh hysterically. There is huge interference in American elections. It comes from the corporate sector. They practically buy the elections. In fact, there is extensive work in mainstream academic political science that demonstrates very convincingly that you can predict the electability, hence largely the votes, of people in Congress on major issues, just by looking at their campaign funding (see Ferguson, 1995; Ferguson et al., 2016). That is one factor, let alone lobbying and everything else. That is massive interference in elections. About 70 per cent of the population of the United States is not even represented, meaning that their own representatives pay no attention to their views and follow the views of the major funders. This is manipulation on an enormous level! Whatever the Russians might have done is not even a toothpick ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Propaganda in the information age
• 1. Still manufacturing consent: an interview with Noam Chomsky
• 2. A propaganda model for the TWENTY-FIRST century: structure-agency dynamics and the intersection of class, gender and race
• 3. Assessing the strength of the five filters today
• 4. Fake news, Russian bots and Putin’s puppets
• 5. Deflective source propaganda: a Syrian case study
• 6. Expanding the propaganda model to the entertainment industry: an interview with Matthew Alford
• 7. Still compromising news: obfuscation and evasion as dominant filters in Indian media’s coverage of the IL&FS financial scandal
• 8. International public relations and the propaganda model: a critical analysis of Bollywood blockbusters
• 9. Still manufacturing consent in the digital era: disinformation, “fake news” and propaganda in the 2017 elections in Kenya
• 10. Working inside the racket: an insider’s perspective to the elite media
• Conclusion: New media, same old rules
• Index