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McQuail(EJC)-3281-11.qxd 8/16/2005 6:32 PM Page 147

A Critical Review and Assessment of Herman and Chomsky’s ‘Propaganda Model’ 147

According to the PM, these filter constraints are the most dominant elements
in the news production process, and they continuously interact with one another
and operate on an individual and institutional basis (Herman and Chomsky,
1988: 2; Rai, 1995: 40). According to Herman and Chomsky, the filter constraints
excise the news that powerful interests deem not fit to print. [...]
Herman and Chomsky state that these five filter constraints capture the
essential ingredients of the PM. The authors argue that there is ‘a systematic and
highly political dichotomization in news coverage based on serviceability to
important domestic power interests’ (Herman and Chomsky, 1988: 35). Herman
and Chomsky contend that this dichotomy is routinely observable in ‘choices of
story and in the volume and quality of coverage’ (Herman and Chomsky, 1988: 35).
They maintain that choices for publicity and suppression are bound to the five
filter constraints just outlined. The authors argue that media shape public
opinion by controlling how ideas are presented, and also by limiting the range
of credible alternatives. [...]

Media: threatening democracy, inducing
avoidance, self-indulgently hypocritical?

The PM argues that the elite agenda-setting media legitimize dominant
ideological principles and social institutions by systematically defending the
principal ‘economic, social and political agendas’ of dominant elites and social
institutions (Herman and Chomsky, 1988: 298). In Chomsky’s view, it is not
surprising that they fulfil this function:

If you look at the institutional structure of media and the pressures that act on
them and so forth and so on, you would tend on relatively uncontroversial
assumptions to expect that the media would serve this function. 31

As noted, Herman and Chomsky’s view of media as an ideological apparatus for
elites mirrors the thesis put forth by William Domhoff (1979) in The Powers That
Be: Processes of Ruling Class Domination in America. [...]
Like Herman and Chomsky, Domhoff stresses that the ideological network is
both ‘extremely diverse and diffuse’ (Domhoff, 1979: 173), and such that media
interact with other institutional sectors in circulating knowledge and shaping
public opinion on a range of foreign policy and key domestic issues, such as the
functioning of the economy (Domhoff, 1979: 179–83). 32
It bears noting that Herman and Chomsky appropriated the phrase
‘manufacturing consent’ from the influential American journalist Walter
Lippmann, who advocated consent engineering early in the 20th century. For
Lippmann, the ‘manufacture of consent’ was both necessary and favourable,
predominantly because, in Lippmann’s view, ‘the common interests’ – meaning,
presumably, issues of concern to all citizens in democratic societies – ‘very
largely elude public opinion entirely’. Lippmann postulated that ‘the common
good’ ought to be ‘managed’ by a small ‘specialized class’ (Lippmann, cited in