Has the Internet Changed the Propaganda Model?

In their groundbreaking 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, professors Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky not only explained but documented with extensive case studies how mass media and public opinion are shaped in a democracy. Twenty years later, can their "propaganda model" still be used to explain modern media distortions? That was one of the main questions discussed last week at a conference in Windsor, Ontario, titled "20 Years of Propaganda?" Organized by Dr. Paul Boin, the conference drew hundreds of scholars and activists including myself, and more than 1,000 people attended a closing speech by Chomsky on May 17.

The "propaganda model" that Herman and Chomsky put forward in Manufacturing Consent has made the book notable (some would say notorious) as the most influential book by serious academics to challenge the common dogma of media objectivity in the United States. When it first appeared, it was almost unheard-of to suggest that U.S. media such as the New York Times, Time and Newsweek magazines and CBS News were propaganda vehicles.

Today things are somewhat different. Across the political spectrum, there is a widespread belief that disinformation, deception and propaganda pervade the media. On the internet, the initials MSM have become a standard term of disparagement for untrustworthy "mainstream media." The right has in fact far surpassed the left at denouncing the myth of media objectivity and has developed an entire industry of think tanks, media watchdogs and pundits such as Michelle Malkin or Anne Coulter, who devote themselves to discovering and denouncing purported instances of media bias -- while enjoying privileged media access themselves.

Based on my own experiences -- as a Central American solidarity and anti-war activist during the 1980s, as the co-author of two books about Iraq titled Weapons of Mass Deception and The Best War Ever, and as someone who studies the public relations industry and propaganda in general at the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) -- I see no shortage of evidence showing that propaganda is very much alive and well as a force shaping public opinion and public policy.

Propaganda model holds true for Iraq

When considering media coverage of the current war in Iraq, much of Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model is directly relevant. For example, they identify the differential treatment given to "worthy" vs. "unworthy" victims of violence as a signature characteristic of propaganda. "A propaganda system," they wrote, "will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy. The evidence of worth may be read from the extent and character of attention and indignation."

In The Best War Ever, John Stauber and I examined this aspect of media coverage of the war in Iraq in a chapter titled "Not Counting the Dead." One of the things that distinguishes the current war from past wars -- including World War II or even the Vietnam War -- is that even the U.S. soldiers who have died or suffered injuries are included among the "unworthy victims" whose suffering is to be treated in a sanitized, minimal way. As an example, we examined ABC-TV Nightline's broadcast of "The Fallen," an April 2004 program that consisted in its entirety of a narrator reading the names of the soldiers who had died by that date in Iraq, accompanied by still photographs of their faces. This broadcast, more than a year after the war began, was considered controversial at the time for its unusual frankness in mentioning the dead at all. One media company, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, ordered its ABC affiliates not to carry the broadcast on grounds that "appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq." In reality, the broadcast was an exercise in minimalism if we compare it to the photos that were published documenting the horrors of past wars. During the U.S. Civil War, for example, Mathew Brady's photographs of bodies sprawled across the battlefield at Antietam were incomparably more graphic, shocking and evocative than the limited, ceremonial and sanitized report that appeared on Nightline.