PROPAGANDA MODEL

Herman and Chomsky''s propaganda model

Propaganda Model

Introduction

In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic command over the newspapers, often supplemented by authorized censorship, makes it clear the newspapers serve the ends of a superior elite. It is much more tough to see a propaganda system at work where the newspapers are personal and prescribed censorship is absent. This is especially factual where the newspapers dynamically contend, occassionally strike and expose business and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively depict themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. What is not apparent (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the restricted environment of such critiques, as well as the gigantic inequality in order of resources, and its result both on access to a personal newspapers system and on its demeanour and performance.(Chomsky,1989,123)

Discussion

A propaganda form focuses on this inequality of riches and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which cash and power are adept to filter out the news fit to publish, marginalize dissent, and permit the government and superior personal interests to get their messages across to the public.(Stauber, 1995,66) The essential ingredients of our propaganda form, or set of news "filters," drop under the next headings:

the size, intensified ownership, proprietor riches, and earnings orientation of the superior mass-media firms; advertising as the prime earnings source of the mass media;

the reliance of the newspapers on data supplied by government, business, and "experts" financed and accepted by these prime sources and agents of power;

"flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and

"anti-communism" as a nationwide belief and command mechanism.

These elements combine with and strengthen one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, departing only the cleansed residue fit to print. They rectify the premises of discourse and understanding, and the delineation of what is newsworthy in the first location, and they interpret the basis and operations of what allowance to propaganda campaigns.(Bailey,1948,23)

In their analysis of the evolution of the newspapers in Great Britain, James Curran and Jean Seaton describe how, in the first half of the nineteenth 100 years, a fundamental press appeared that come to a nationwide working-class audience. This alternate press was productive in strengthening class consciousness: it unified the workers because it fostered an alternate worth system and structure for looking at the world, and because it "promoted a larger collective self-assurance by frequently emphasizing the promise power of employed persons to result social change through the force of 'combination' and coordinated action." (Stauber, 1995,66) This was regarded a foremost risk by the ruling elites. One MP asserted that the working-class newspapers "inflame passions and aroused their selfishness, contrasting their present status with what they argue to be their future status - a status incompatible with human environment, and those immutable laws which Providence has established for the guideline of municipal society." (Herman, 1999,213)The result was an try to squelch the working-class newspapers by libel laws and prosecutions, by needing an expensive security bond as a status for publication, and by imposing various taxes designed to propel out fundamental newspapers by raising their costs...