Page 28 - Mass Media, Mass Propoganda Examining American News in the War on Terror

18 Chapter I

what issues are to be discussed or in terms of influencing what national "prob-
lems" people think about. These conclusions neglect major institutional factors,
analyzed by those who seek to criticize the ideology reinforcing profit motive as
the primary goal of media corporations. To better understand institutional analy-
sis, one must look to a different school of media criticism which is less prevalent
in many mainstream academic studies-ne in which the negative effects of
corporate ownership of the mainstream press is the major emphasis of study.

Institutional Analysis of Corporate Media

A number of critics have stepped forward to question corporate ownership of the
news in a time of increased media consolidation. These scholars and activists
view corporate ownership of the press as a means of ensuring the dominance of
pro-business views at the expense of views that are critical of corporations and
the American political establishment. Unfortunately, their works have often
been ignored, downplayed, or caricatured amongst mainstream communications
and political science academics. In their seminal work, Manufacturing Consent:
The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman
argue that the corporate "media serve the ends of a dominant elite" in order to
"inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will
integrate them into the [capitalist] institutional structures of the larger society. . .
The media serve this purpose in many ways: through selection of topics, distri-
bution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and
tone, and by keeping debate within the bounds of acceptable premises."50 In his
follow-up book, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies,
Chomsky further elaborates on this thesis as he maintains that the media are
primarily interested in "'selling' privileged audiences to other businesse~."~~
Michael Parenti describes the process by which media corporations seek to
infuse news viewers with pro-capitalist, pro-consumer sentiment: "the obvious
purpose of ads and commercials is to sell goods and services, but advertisers do
more than that. . . they sell an entire way of life, a way of experiencing social
reality that is compatible with the needs of mass-production, mass consumption,
and capitalist society."52
Corporate advertisers allocate massive resources to "selling" comrnodity-
driven lifestyles to viewers, and they are, to a striking level, very successful in
that endeavor. To put these efforts into better perspective, corporate advertising
in 2004 neared 250 billion dollars, as companies inundated consumers through
the use of television, radio, Internet, and newspaper advertising, among other ad
venues.53 By themselves, Internet ads accounted for between nine and ten billion
dollars, or 4.3 percent of the total corporate advertising for the year.s4 Corpora-
tions spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on advertising because it is
clearly successful in instilling the public with a consumerist, capitalist orienta-
tion, thereby directly reaffirming and reinforcing corporate ownership of media.
This fact is often lost in mainstream academic studies that neglect analysis of