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A Critical Review and Assessment of Herman and Chomsky’s ‘Propaganda Model’ 141

media reflect the consensus of powerful elites of the state-corporate nexus
generally, including those who object to some aspect of government policy,
typically on tactical grounds. The model argues, from its foundations, that
the media will protect the interests of the powerful, not that it will protect
state managers from their criticisms; the persistent failure to see this point
may reflect more general illusions about our democratic system. (Chomsky,
1989: 149)

The PM is to be distinguished from the ‘gate-keeper model’ of media
operations. The PM does not assume that news workers and editors are typically
coerced or instructed to omit certain voices and accentuate others. Rather, the
model outlines circumstances under which media will be relatively ‘open’ or
‘closed’ (see Herman, 2000). 10 Whereas the PM is an ‘institutional critique’ of
media performance (see Herman and Chomsky, 1988: 34), the gate-keeper model
is principally concerned with micro-analysis and focuses on how decisions of
particular editors and journalists influence news production and news selection
processes (see White, 1964; Carter, 1958).

The kind of micro-analyses is not the task of the Propaganda Model. The model
provides an overview of the system at work, making sense out of a confusing
picture by extracting the main principles of the system. (Rai, 1995: 46)

Ericson et al. (1989: 378) point out that the instrumentalist underpinnings of
the gate-keeper model are empirically unspecifiable due to ‘variation in who
controls the process, depending on the [particular] context, the types of sources
involved, the type of news organizations involved, and what is at issue’. Thus,
the gate-keeper model of media operations is generally regarded as overly
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simplistic (Cohen and Young, 1973: 19). The PM acknowledges that journalists
and editors do play central roles in disseminating information and mobilizing
media audiences in support of the special interest groups that dominate the state
and private economy. But the PM assumes that the processes of control are often
unconscious. Its basic argument in this context is that meanings are essentially
‘filtered’ by the constraints that are built into the system. Herman and Chomsky
(1988: 2) argue that meanings are formed and produced at an unconscious level,
such that conscious decisions are typically understood to be natural, objective,
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commonsense. [...]
In presuming that media personnel act in ways that effectively serve the
interests of dominant elites, however, ‘the PM can be seen to infer structural
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processes by appealing to psychological processes in individuals.’ At the same
time, it can be seen to presume various ‘self-interested’ or ideological motives
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from structural patterns in news coverage. The PM argues that how events are
analysed, represented and evaluated by the elite media effectively demonstrates
the extent to which editors and reporters can be seen to have ‘adapted’ to constraints
of ownership, organization, market and political power. It contends further that
elite media interlock with other institutional sectors in ownership, management
and social circles, effectively circumscribing their ability to remain analytically
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detached from other dominant institutional sectors. [...]