Page 64 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Paradigms of media power 43

The first two filters address key political–economic factors of ownership and
financing. The third filter addresses the media–source relationship in ways that
connect with broader liberal scholarship but provides a critical account of media
dependency on elite sources of information, such as governments, and resource-
access inequalities, for instance between police and protestors. Herman and
Chomsky (1988: 22) highlight the ability of state and corporate institutions to
produce massive PR campaigns which far exceed the resources that opponents
can muster:

the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidise the mass media, and gain
special access by their contribution to reducing the media’s costs of acquiring
the raw materials of, and producing, news.

The fourth filter, using a term flak derived from anti-aircraft shells, includes the
activities of governments, political parties, corporations and lobbying groups
seeking to discipline media through criticism of output. The fifth filter is ideolo-
gical; anti-communism, they argue, has been used to mobilise popular sentiment
against those who threaten US state–corporate interests. While anti-communism
remains a potent mobilisation by the Right, they acknowledge and address
how, following the break-up of the Soviet Union and expansion of state-
capitalism by China, the same function is realised by other mobilisations such as
the neoliberal promotion of free markets, the ‘war on terror’ and ‘humanitarian’
interventions.
Their approach follows a tradition inspired by C. Wright Mills’s work on the
power elite, tracing the linkages between media owners, managers and senior
personnel with the rest of an elite ruling class, through operational and ideolo-
gical business and cultural associations (Mosco 2009: 190–91). For Chomsky
(1989) the propaganda model (PM) makes predictions (about how the media
function, how media performance will be discussed in society and how the model
itself will be evaluated) whereby ‘the needs of established power’ will be asserted
and predominate at each level. Focusing on ‘the spectrum of opinion allowed
expression’ (Chomsky 1989: 59), their work is based predominantly on content
analysis of news output and qualitative analysis of the dichotomous treatment of
geopolitical, labour and social justice issues that generate ‘systematic selectivity’,
‘worthy and unworthy victims’ and propaganda campaigns on behalf of
corporate–state interests, notably those of the United States and its allies.
Herman (1986: 176) argues:

The US mass media, for example, tend to focus often and indignantly on
the trials and tribulations of dissidents in enemy states while ignoring
equally or more severe victimisation in the ‘colonies’. This dichotomous
treatment extends not merely to isolated news items; there is also an observable
tendency for enemy victims to be subject to intense coverage … which are
almost never applied to victims in friendly states.