Page 63 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

42 Mapping approaches and themes

through different mechanisms of control, all the more insidious for these
operations being disavowed by operatives and commentators right across the
system. The book also took up and re-presented the work of elite democracy
theorists of the early twentieth century including Lippman, Lasswell, Bernays
and others, affirming that these provided unabashed and explicit blueprints of
how the system works, written by its intellectual architects. Elite democratic
theory conceives governance as the province of an expert cadre, and democracy
as involving a problem of managing minds in mass society. For Herman and
Chomsky, the media mobilise support for the special interests of the most
powerful groups in society and in doing so purvey a systematic bias in coverage.
This occurs not just in what is said and reported, but in what is omitted,
distorted or marginalised:

Leaders of the media claim that their news choices rest on unbiased
professional and objective criteria … If, however, the powerful are able to
fix the premises of discourse, to decide what the general populace is allowed
to see, hear and think about, and to ‘manage’ public opinion by regular
propaganda campaigns, the standard view of how the system works is
seriously at odds with reality.
(Herman and Chomsky 1988: xi)

Manufacturing Consent is presented in some media textbooks (Barlow and Mills
2012) as a synecdoche for the critical political economy of media tradition. This
is misleading and problematic, as we will see, because it represents only one
highly contested strand. Yet, Herman and Chomsky’s account of the influences
on mass media does engage with central and common features across the CPE
tradition. In their metaphoric account of media processing, the ‘raw material of
the news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit
for print … The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissent …
results from the operation of these filters’ (Herman and Chomsky 1988: 2). Five
main filters are identified:

1 the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth and profit orientation of the
major mass media firms aligns and integrates them with dominant interests;
dominant media forms are ‘closely interlocked, and have important common
interests, with other major corporations, banks and government’ (1988: 14)
2 advertising as the primary income source of the mass media
3 the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business
and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of
power
4 ‘flak’, organised negative responses to media conduct, serves as a means of
disciplining the media and ‘trying to contain any deviations from the established
line’ (1988: 29)
5 anti-communism as a political control mechanism.