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Harold Adams Innis FRSC (November 5, 1894 – November 8, 1952) was a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on media, communication theory, and Canadian economic history. He helped develop the staples thesis, which holds that Canada's culture, political history, and economy have been decisively influenced by the exploitation and export of a series of "staples" such as fur, fish, lumber, wheat, mined metals, and coal. The staple thesis dominated economic history in Canada from the 1930s to 1960s, and continues to be a fundamental part of the Canadian political economic tradition.[7]
Innis's writings on communication explore the role of media in shaping the culture and development of civilizations.[8] He argued, for example, that a balance between oral and written forms of communication contributed to the flourishing of Greek civilization in the 5th century BC.[9] He warned, however, that Western civilization is now imperiled by powerful, advertising-driven media obsessed by "present-mindedness" and the "continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity."[10] His intellectual bond with Eric A. Havelock formed the foundations of the Toronto School of communication theory, which provided a source of inspiration for future members of the school Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Snow Carpenter.[11]
Innis laid the basis for scholarship that looked at the social sciences from a distinctly Canadian point of view. As the head of the University of Toronto's political economy department, he worked to build up a cadre of Canadian scholars so that universities would not continue to rely as heavily on British or American-trained professors unfamiliar with Canada's history and culture. He was successful in establishing sources of financing for Canadian scholarly research.[12]
As the Cold War grew hotter after 1947, Innis grew increasingly hostile to the United States. He warned repeatedly that Canada was becoming a subservient colony to its much more powerful southern neighbor. "We are indeed fighting for our lives", he warned, pointing especially to the "pernicious influence of American advertising.... We can only survive by taking persistent action at strategic points against American imperialism in all its attractive guises."[13] His views influenced some younger scholars, including Donald Creighton.[14]
Innis also tried to defend universities from political and economic pressures. He believed that independent universities, as centres of critical thought, were essential to the survival of Western civilization.[15] His intellectual disciple and university colleague, Marshall McLuhan, lamented Innis's premature death as a disastrous loss for human understanding. McLuhan wrote: "I am pleased to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing."[16]
Rural roots
Early life
The one-room schoolhouse in Otterville, officially known as S.S.#1 South Norwich. The photo was taken around 1906. Innis is the boy with the cap, fifth from the right, back row. Innis would later teach for a few months at the school.
Innis was born on November 5, 1894, on a small livestock and dairy farm near the community of Otterville in southwestern Ontario's Oxford County. As a boy he loved the rhythms and routines of farm life and he never forgot his rural origins.[17] His mother, Mary Adams Innis, had named him Herald, hoping he would become a minister in the strict evangelical Baptist faith that she and her husband William shared. At the time, the Baptist church was an important part of life in rural areas. It gave isolated families a sense of community and embodied the values of individualism and independence. Its far-flung congregations were not ruled by a centralized, bureaucratic authority.[18] Innis became an agnostic in later life, but never lost his interest in religion.[19] According to his friend and biographer Donald Creighton, Innis's character was moulded by the church:
The strict sense of values and the feeling of devotion to a cause, which became so characteristic of him in later life, were derived, in part at least, from the instruction imparted so zealously and unquestioningly inside the severely unadorned walls of the Baptist Church at Otterville.[20]
Innis attended the one-room schoolhouse in Otterville and the community's high school. He travelled 20 miles (32 km) by train to Woodstock, Ontario, to complete his secondary education at a Baptist-run college. He intended to become a public-school teacher and passed the entrance examinations for teacher training, but decided to take a year off to earn the money he would need to support himself at an Ontario teachers' college. At age 18, therefore, he returned to the one-room schoolhouse at Otterville to teach for one term until the local school board could recruit a fully qualified teacher. The experience made him realize that the life of a teacher in a small, rural school was not for him.[21]
University studies
The original home of McMaster University at 273 Bloor Street West, Toronto
In October 1913, Innis started classes at McMaster University (then in Toronto). McMaster was a natural choice for him because it was a Baptist university and many students who attended Woodstock College went there. McMaster's liberal arts professors encouraged critical thinking and debate.[22] Innis was especially influenced by James Ten Broeke [Wikidata], the university's one-man philosophy department. Ten Broeke posed an essay question that Innis pondered for the rest of his life: "Why do we attend to the things to which we attend?"[23]
Before his final undergraduate year at McMaster, Innis spent a summer teaching at the Northern Star School in the frontier farming community of Landonville near Vermilion, Alberta. The experience gave him a sense of the vastness of Canada. He also learned about Western grievances over high interest rates and steep transportation costs.[24] In his final undergraduate year, Innis focused on history and economics. He kept in mind a remark made by history lecturer W. S. Wallace that the economic interpretation of history was not the only possible one but that it went the deepest.[25]
First World War service
Harold Innis in uniform
After graduating from McMaster, Innis felt that his Christian principles compelled him to enlist in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He was sent to France in the fall of 1916 to fight in the First World War.[26] Trench warfare with its "mud and lice and rats" had a devastating effect on him.[27]
Innis's role as an artillery signaller gave him firsthand experience of life (and death) on the front lines as he participated in the successful Canadian attack on Vimy Ridge.[28] Signallers, or spotters, watched where each artillery shell landed, then sent back aiming corrections so that the next shells could hit their targets more accurately. On July 7, 1917, Innis received a serious shrapnel wound in his right thigh that required eight months of hospital treatment in England.[29]
Innis's war was over. His biographer, John Watson, notes the physical wound took seven years to heal, but the psychological damage lasted a lifetime. Innis experienced recurring bouts of depression and nervous exhaustion because of his military service.[30]
Watson also notes that the Great War influenced Innis's intellectual outlook. It strengthened his Canadian nationalism; sharpened his opinion of what he thought were the destructive effects of technology, including the communications media that were used so effectively to "sell" the war; and led him, for the first time, to doubt his Baptist faith.[31]
Graduate studies
McMaster and Chicago
Harold Innis completed a Master of Arts degree at McMaster, graduating in April 1918. His thesis, called The Returned Soldier, "was a detailed description of the public policy measures that were necessary, not only to provide a supportive milieu to help veterans get over the effects of the war, but also to move on with national reconstruction."[32]
Innis did his postgraduate work at the University of Chicago and was awarded his PhD, with a dissertation on the history of Canadian Pacific Railway,[33] in August 1920.[34] His two years at Chicago had a profound influence on his later work. His interest in economics deepened and he decided to become a professional economist. The economics faculty at Chicago questioned abstract and universalist neoclassical theories, then in vogue, arguing that general rules for economic policy should be derived from specific case studies.[35]
Innis was influenced by the university's two eminent communications scholars, George Herbert Mead and Robert E. Park. Although he did not attend any of those famous professors' classes, Innis did absorb their idea that communication involved much more than the transmission of information. James W. Carey writes that Mead and Park "characterized communication as the entire process whereby a culture is brought into existence, maintained in time, and sedimented into institutions."[36]
While at Chicago, Innis was exposed to the ideas of Thorstein Veblen, the iconoclastic thinker who drew on his deep knowledge of philosophy and economics to write scathing critiques of contemporary thought and culture. Veblen had left Chicago years before, but his ideas were still strongly felt there. Years later, in an essay on Veblen, Innis praised him for waging war against "standardized static economics."[37]
Innis got his first taste of university teaching at Chicago, where he delivered several introductory economics courses. One of his students was Mary Quayle, the woman he would marry in May 1921 when he was 26 and she 22.[38] Together they had four children, Donald (1924), Mary (1927), Hugh (1930), and Anne (1933).[39] Mary Quayle Innis was herself a notable economist and writer. Her book, An Economic History of Canada, was published in 1935.[40] Her novel, Stand on a Rainbow appeared in 1943.[41] Her other books include Mrs. Simcoe's Diary (1965), The Clear Spirit: Canadian Women and Their Times (1966) and Unfold the Years (1949), a history of the Young Women's Christian Association.[40] She also edited Harold Innis's posthumous Essays in Canadian Economic History (1956) and a 1972 reissue of his Empire and Communications.[40]
Donald Quayle Innis became a geography professor at the State University of New York. Mary married a surgeon and did graduate work in French literature. Hugh Innis became a professor at Ryerson University where he taught communications and economics. Anne Innis Dagg did doctoral work in biology and became an advisor for the independent studies program at the University of Waterloo and published books on zoology, feminism, and Canadian women's history.[42]
History of the CPR
Donald Alexander Smith drives the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway at Craigellachie, BC—November 7, 1885
Harold Innis wrote his PhD thesis on the history of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). The completion of Canada's first transcontinental railway in 1885 had been a defining moment in Canadian history. Innis's thesis, eventually published as a book in 1923, can be seen as an early attempt to document the railway's significance from an economic historian's point of view. It uses voluminous statistics to underpin its arguments. Innis maintains that the difficult and expensive construction project was sustained by fears of American annexation of the Canadian West.[43]
Innis argues that "the history of the Canadian Pacific Railroad is primarily the history of the spread of Western civilization over the northern half of the North American continent."[44] As Robert Babe notes, the railway brought industrialization, transporting coal and building supplies to manufacturing sites. It was also a kind of communications medium that contributed to the spread of European civilization. Babe writes that, for Innis, the CPR's equipment "comprised a massive, energy-consuming, fast-moving, powerful, capital-intensive 'sign' dropped into the very midst of indigenous peoples, whose entire way of life was disrupted, and eventually shattered as a result.[45]
Communications scholar Arthur Kroker argues that Innis's study of the Canadian Pacific Railway was only the first in which he attempted to demonstrate that "technology is not something external to Canadian being; but on the contrary, is the necessary condition and lasting consequence of Canadian existence."[46] It also reflected Innis's lifelong interest in the exercise of economic and political power. His CPR history ends, for example, with a recounting of Western grievances against economic policies, such as high freight rates and the steep import tariffs designed to protect fledgling Canadian manufacturers. Westerners complained that the National Policy funnelled money from Prairie farmers into the pockets of the Eastern business establishment. "Western Canada," Innis wrote, "has paid for the development of Canadian nationality, and it would appear that it must continue to pay. The acquisitiveness of Eastern Canada shows little sign of abatement."[47]
Staples thesis
Harold Innis is considered the leading founder of a Canadian school of economic thought known as the staples theory. It holds that Canada's culture, political history and economy have been decisively shaped by the exploitation and export of a series of "staples" such as fur, fish, wood, wheat, mined metals and fossil fuels.[7] Innis theorized that the reliance on exporting natural resources made Canada dependent on more industrially advanced countries and resulted in periodic disruptions to economic life as the international demand for staples rose and fell; as the staple itself became increasingly scarce; and, as technological change resulted in shifts from one staple to others.[48] Innis pointed out, for example, that as furs became scarce and trade in that staple declined, it became necessary to develop and export other staples such as wheat, potash and especially lumber. The export of the new staples was made possible through improved transportation networks that included first canals and later railways.[49]
"Dirt" research
In 1920, Innis joined the department of political economy at the University of Toronto. He was assigned to teach courses in commerce, economic history and economic theory. He decided to focus his scholarly research on Canadian economic history, a hugely neglected subject, and he settled on the fur trade as his first area of study. Furs had brought French and English traders to Canada, motivating them to travel west along the continent's interlocking lake and river systems to the Pacific coast. Innis realized that he had to search out archival documents to understand the history of the fur trade and also travel the country himself gathering masses of firsthand information and accumulating what he called "dirt" experience.[50]
Thus, Innis travelled extensively beginning in the summer of 1924 when he and a friend paddled an 18-foot (5.5 m) canvas-covered canoe hundreds of miles down the Peace River to Lake Athabasca; then down the Slave River to Great Slave Lake. They completed their journey down the Mackenzie, Canada's longest river, to the Arctic Ocean on a small Hudson's Bay Company tug.[51] During his travels, Innis supplemented his fur research by gathering information on other staple products such as lumber, pulp and paper, minerals, grain and fish. He travelled so extensively that by the early 1940s, he had visited every part of Canada except for the Western Arctic and the east side of Hudson Bay.[52]
Everywhere that Innis went, his methods were the same: he interviewed people connected with the production of staple products and listened to their stories.[53]
Fur trade in Canada
Main article: The Fur Trade in Canada
North American beaver, castor canadensis. Innis argued that it is impossible to understand Canadian history without some knowledge of the beaver's life and habits.
Harold Innis's interest in the relationship between empires and colonies was developed in his classic study, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (1930). The book chronicles the trade in beaver fur from the early 16th century to the 1920s. Instead of focusing on the "heroic" European adventurers who explored the Canadian wilderness as conventional histories had done, Innis documents how the interplay of geography, technology and economic forces shaped both the fur trade and Canada's political and economic destiny.[54] He argues that the fur trade largely determined Canada's boundaries, and he comes to the conclusion that the country "emerged not in spite of geography but because of it."[49]
In line with that observation, Innis notably proposes that European settlement of the Saint Lawrence River Valley followed the economic and social patterns of indigenous peoples, making for a Canadian historical and cultural continuity that predates and postdates European settlement. Unlike many historians who see Canadian history as beginning with the arrival of Europeans, Innis emphasizes the cultural and economic contributions of First Nations peoples.[55] "We have not yet realized," he writes, "that the Indian and his culture was fundamental to the growth of Canadian institutions."[56]
The Innisian perspective on the development of Canadian political, economic and social institutions was an early form of neo-institutionalism, which became an accepted part of the Canadian political science tradition well before American and European counterparts.[57] The Fur Trade in Canada concludes by arguing that Canadian economic history can best be understood by examining how one staple product gave way to another—furs to timber, for example, and the later importance of wheat and minerals.[58] Reliance on staples made Canada economically dependent on more industrially advanced countries and the "cyclonic" shifts from one staple to another caused frequent disruptions in the country's economic life.[48]
The Fur Trade in Canada also describes the cultural interactions among three groups of people: the Europeans in fashionable metropolitan centres who regarded beaver hats as luxury items; the European colonial settlers who saw beaver fur as a staple that could be exported to pay for essential manufactured goods from the home country, and First Nations peoples who traded furs for industrial goods such as metal pots, knives, guns and liquor.[59] Innis describes the central role First Nations peoples played in the development of the fur trade. Without their skilled hunting techniques, knowledge of the territory and advanced tools such as snowshoes, toboggans and birch-bark canoes, the fur trade would not have existed.[60] However, dependence on European technologies disrupted First Nations societies. "The new technology with its radical innovations," Innis writes, "brought about such a rapid shift in the prevailing Indian culture as to lead to wholesale destruction of the peoples concerned by warfare and disease."[61] Historian Carl Berger argues that by placing First Nations culture at the centre of his analysis of the fur trade, Innis "was the first to explain adequately the disintegration of native society under the thrust of European capitalism."[62]
Cod fishery
Main article: The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy
After the publication of his book on the fur trade, Innis turned to a study of an earlier staple, the cod fished for centuries off the eastern coasts of North America. The result was The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy published in 1940, 10 years after the fur trade study. Innis tells the detailed history of competing empires in the exploitation of a teeming natural resource, a history that ranges over 500 years. While his study of the fur trade focused on the continental interior with its interlocking rivers and lakes, The Cod Fisheries looks outward at global trade and empire, showing the far-reaching effects of one staple product both on imperial centres and on marginal colonies such as Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and New England.
Communications theories
Main article: Harold Innis's communications theories
Innis's study of the effects of interconnected lakes and rivers on Canadian development and European empire sparked his interest in the complex economic and cultural relationships between transportation systems and communications.[63] During the 1940s, Innis also began studying pulp and paper, an industry of central importance to the Canadian economy. The research provided an additional crossover point from his work on staple products to his communications studies.[64] Biographer Paul Heyer writes that Innis "followed pulp and paper through its subsequent stages: newspapers and journalism, books and advertising. In other words, from looking at a natural resource-based industry he turned his attention to a cultural industry in which information, and ultimately knowledge, was a commodity that circulated, had value, and empowered those who controlled it."[1]
A Greek copy of Plato's Symposium from a papyrus roll. Innis argued that Plato's dialogues combined the vitality of the spoken word with the power of writing, a perfect balance between time and space.
One of Innis's primary contributions to communications studies was to apply the dimensions of time and space to various media. He divided media into time-binding and space-binding types. Time-binding media are durable and include clay or stone tablets. Space-binding media are more ephemeral and include modern media such as radio, television, and mass circulation newspapers.[65]
Innis examined the rise and fall of ancient empires as a way of tracing the effects of communications media. He looked at media that led to the growth of an empire; those that sustained it during its periods of success, and then, the communications changes that hastened an empire's collapse. He tried to show that media 'biases' toward time or space affected the complex interrelationships needed to sustain an empire. The interrelationships included the partnership between the knowledge (and ideas) necessary to create and maintain an empire and the power (or force) required to expand and defend it. For Innis, the interplay between knowledge and power was always a crucial factor in understanding empire.[66]
Innis argued that a balance between the spoken word and writing contributed to the flourishing of Ancient Greece in the time of Plato.[67] The balance between the time-biased medium of speech and the space-biased medium of writing was eventually upset, Innis argued, as the oral tradition gave way to the dominance of writing. The torch of empire then passed from Greece to Rome.[68]
Innis's analysis of the effects of communications on the rise and fall of empires led him to warn grimly that Western civilization was now facing its own profound crisis. The development of powerful communications media such as mass-circulation newspapers had shifted the balance decisively in favour of space and power, over time, continuity and knowledge. The balance required for cultural survival had been upset by what Innis saw as "mechanized" communications media used to transmit information quickly over long distances. The new media had contributed to an obsession with "present-mindedness", wiping out concerns about past or future.[69] Innis wrote,
The overwhelming pressure of mechanization evident in the newspaper and the magazine, has led to the creation of vast monopolies of communication. Their entrenched positions involve a continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity.[10]
Western civilization could be saved, Innis argued, only by recovering the balance between space and time. For him, that meant reinvigorating the oral tradition within universities while freeing institutions of higher learning from political and commercial pressures. In his essay, A Plea for Time, he suggested that genuine dialogue within universities could produce the critical thinking necessary to restore the balance between power and knowledge. Then, universities could muster the courage to attack the monopolies that always imperil civilization.[70]
Although Innis remains appreciated and respected for the grand and unique nature of his later efforts regarding communications theories, he was not without critics. Particularly, the fragmentary and mosaic writing style exemplified in Empire and Communications has been criticized as ambiguous, aggressively nonlinear, and lacking connections between levels of analysis.[71] Biographers have suggested that the style may have been a result of Innis's illness late in his career.[72]
Academic and public career
Influence in the 1930s
Aside from his work on The Cod Fisheries, Innis wrote extensively in the 1930s about other staple products such as minerals and wheat as well as Canada's immense economic problems in the Great Depression. During the summers of 1932 and 1933, he travelled to the West to see the effects of the Depression for himself.[73] The next year, in an essay entitled, The Canadian Economy and the Depression, Innis outlined the plight of "a country susceptible to the slightest ground-swell of international disturbance" but beset by regional differences that made it difficult to devise effective solutions. He described a prairie economy dependent on the export of wheat but afflicted by severe drought, on the one hand, and the increased political power of Canada's growing cities, sheltered from direct reliance on the staples trade, on the other. The result was political conflict and a breakdown in federal–provincial relations. "We lack vital information on which to base prospective policies to meet this situation," Innis warned, because of "the weak position of the social sciences in Canada."[74]
Radio, a new medium, drew a scathing rebuke from Harold Innis for promoting "small talk" and "bores." Innis believed that both radio and mass circulation newspapers encouraged stereotypical thinking.
Innis's reputation as a public intellectual was growing steadily and, in 1934, Premier Angus Lewis Macdonald invited him to serve on a Royal Commission to examine Nova Scotia's economic problems. The next year, he helped establish The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science. In 1936, he was appointed a full University of Toronto professor and a year later, became the head of the university's Department of Political Economy.[75]
Innis was appointed president of the Canadian Political Science Association in 1938. His inaugural address, The Penetrative Powers of the Price System, must have baffled his listeners as he ranged over centuries of economic history jumping abruptly from one topic to the next linking monetary developments to patterns of trade and settlement.[76] The address was an ambitious attempt to show the disruptive effects of new technologies culminating in the modern shift from an industrial system based on coal and iron to the newest sources of industrial power, electricity, oil, and steel. Innis also tried to show the commercial effects of mass circulation newspapers, made possible by expanded newsprint production, and of the new medium of radio, which "threatens to circumvent the walls imposed by tariffs and to reach across boundaries frequently denied to other media of communication." Both media, Innis argued, stimulated the demand for consumer goods and both promoted nationalism.[77]
Innis was also a central participant in an international project that produced 25 scholarly volumes between 1936 and 1945. It was a series called The Relations of Canada and the United States overseen by James T. Shotwell, director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Innis edited and wrote prefaces for the volumes contributed by Canadian scholars. His own study of the cod fisheries also appeared as part of the series. His work with Shotwell enabled Innis to gain access to Carnegie money to further Canadian academic research. As John Watson points out, "the project offered one of the few sources of research funds in rather lean times."[78]
Politics and the Great Depression
R. B. Bennett was the Conservative Prime Minister of Canada from 1930 to 1935, during the depths of the Great Depression. Although Innis advocated staying out of politics, he did correspond with Bennett urging him to strengthen the law against business monopolies.
The era of the "Dirty Thirties" with its mass unemployment, poverty and despair gave rise to new Canadian political movements. In Alberta, for example, the radio evangelist William "Bible Bill" Aberhart led his populist Social Credit party to victory in 1935. Three years earlier in Calgary, Alberta, social reformers had founded a new political party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). It advocated democratic socialism and a mixed economy with public ownership of key industries. Frank Underhill, one of Innis's colleagues at the University of Toronto was a founding member of the CCF. Innis and Underhill had both been members of an earlier group at the university that declared itself "dissatisfied with the policies of the two major [political] parties in Canada" and that aimed at "forming a definite body of progressive opinion." In 1931, Innis presented a paper to the group on "Economic Conditions in Canada", but he later recoiled from participating in party politics, denouncing partisans like Underhill as "hot gospellers."[79]
Innis maintained that scholars had no place in active politics and that they should instead devote themselves, first to research on public problems, and then to the production of knowledge based on critical thought. He saw the university, with its emphasis on dialogue, open-mindedness and skepticism, as an institution that could foster such thinking and research. "The university could provide an environment," he wrote, "as free as possible from the biases of the various institutions that form the state, so that its intellectuals could continue to seek out and explore other perspectives."[80]
Although sympathetic to the plight of western farmers and urban, unemployed workers, Innis did not embrace socialism. Eric Havelock, a left-leaning colleague explained many years later that Innis distrusted political "solutions" imported from elsewhere, especially those based on Marxist analysis with its emphasis on class conflict. He worried, too, that as Canada's ties with Britain weakened, the country would fall under the spell of American ideas instead of developing its own based on Canada's unique circumstances. Havelock added:
He has been called the radical conservative of his day — not a bad designation of a complex mind, clear sighted, cautious, perhaps at bottom pessimistic in areas where thinkers we would label 'progressive' felt less difficulty in taking a stand; never content to select only one or two elements in a complicated equation in order to build a quick-order policy or program; far ranging enough in intellect to take in the whole sum of the factors, and comprehend their often contradictory effects.[81]
Late career and death
In the 1940s, Harold Innis reached the height of his influence in both academic circles and Canadian society. In 1941, he helped establish the American-based Economic History Association and its Journal of Economic History. He later became the association's second president. Innis played a central role in founding two important sources for the funding of academic research: the Canadian Social Science Research Council (1940) and the Humanities Research Council of Canada (1944).[82]
In 1944, the University of New Brunswick awarded Innis an honorary degree, as did his alma mater, McMaster University. Université Laval, the University of Manitoba and the University of Glasgow would also confer honorary degrees in 1947–48.[83]
In 1945, Innis spent nearly a month in the Soviet Union where he had been invited to attend the 220th anniversary celebrations marking the founding of the country's Academy of Sciences.[84] Later, in his essay Reflections on Russia, he mused about the differences between the Soviet "producer" economy and the West's "consumer" ethos:
[A]n economy which emphasizes consumer's goods is characterized by communication industries largely dependent on advertising and by constant efforts to reach the largest number of readers or listeners; an economy emphasizing producer's goods is characterized by communications industries largely dependent on government support. As a result of this contrast, a common public opinion in Russia and the West is hard to achieve.[85]
Innis's trip to Moscow and Leningrad came shortly before US–Soviet rivalry led to the hostility of the Cold War. Innis lamented the rise in international tensions.[86] He saw the Soviet Union as a stabilizing counterbalance to the American emphasis on commercialism, the individual and constant change. For Innis, Russia was a society within the Western tradition, not an alien civilization. He abhorred the nuclear arms race and saw it as the triumph of force over knowledge, a modern form of the medieval Inquisition. "The Middle Ages burned its heretics," he wrote, "and the modern age threatens them with atom bombs."[87]
In 1946, Innis was elected president of the Royal Society of Canada, the country's senior body of scientists and scholars. The same year, he served on the Manitoba Royal Commission on Adult Education and published Political Economy in the Modern State, a collection of his speeches and essays that reflected both his staples research and his new work in communications. In 1947, Innis was appointed the University of Toronto's dean of graduate studies. In 1948, he delivered lectures at the University of London and Nottingham University. He was elected an International Member of the American Philosophical Society that same year.[88] He also gave the prestigious Beit lectures at Oxford, later published in his book Empire and Communications. In 1949, Innis was appointed as a commissioner on the federal government's Royal Commission on Transportation, a position that involved extensive travel at a time when his health was starting to fail.[89] The last decade of his career, during which he worked on his communications studies, was an unhappy time for Innis. He was academically isolated because his colleagues in economics could not fathom how the new work related to his pioneering research in staples theory. Biographer John Watson writes that "the almost complete lack of positive response to the communications works, contributed to his sense of overwork and depression."[90]
Innis died of prostate cancer on November 8, 1952, a few days after his 58th birthday. In commemoration, Innis College at the University of Toronto and Innis Library at McMaster University were named in his honour.
Following his premature death, Innis' significance increasingly deepened as scholars in several academic disciplines continued to build upon his writings. Marshall Poe's general media theory that proposes two sub-theories were inspired by Innis. Douglas C. North expanded on Innis' "vent for surplus" theory of economic development by applying it to regional development in the United States and underdeveloped countries.[91] In addition, James W. Carey adopted Innis as a "reference point in his conception of two models of communication."
Innis and McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan was a colleague of Innis's at the University of Toronto. As a young English professor, McLuhan was flattered when he learned that Innis had put his book The Mechanical Bride on the reading list of the fourth-year economics course.[92] McLuhan built on Innis's idea that in studying the effects of communications media, technological form mattered more than content. Biographer Paul Heyer writes that Innis's concept of the "bias" of a particular medium of communication can be seen as a "less flamboyant precursor to McLuhan's legendary phrase 'the medium is the message.'"[93] Innis, for example, tried to show how printed media such as books or newspapers were "biased" toward control over space and secular power, while engraved media such as stone or clay tablets were "biased" in favour of continuity in time and metaphysical or religious knowledge.[94] McLuhan focused on what may be called a medium's "sensory bias" arguing, for example, that books and newspapers appealed to the rationality of the eye, while radio played to the irrationality of the ear.[95] The differences in the Innisian and McLuhanesque approaches were summarized by the late James W. Carey:
Both McLuhan and Innis assume the centrality of communication technology; where they differ is in the principal kinds of effects they see deriving from this technology. Whereas Innis sees communication technology principally affecting social organization and culture, McLuhan sees its principal effect on sensory organization and thought. McLuhan has much to say about perception and thought but little to say about institutions; Innis says much about institutions and little about perception and thought.[96]
Biographer John Watson notes that Innis's work was profoundly political while McLuhan's was not. He writes that "the mechanization of knowledge, not the relative sensual bias of media, is the key to Innis's work. That also underlies the politicization of Innis's position vis-a-vis that of McLuhan." Watson adds that Innis believed very different media could produce similar effects. "For Innis, the yellow press of the United States and the Nazi loudspeaker had the same form of negative effect: they reduced men from thinking beings to mere automatons in a chain of command." Watson argues that while McLuhan separated media according to their sensory bias, Innis examined a different set of interrelationships, the "dialectic of power and knowledge" in specific historical circumstances. For Watson, Innis's work is therefore more flexible and less deterministic than McLuhan's.[97]
As scholars and teachers, Innis and McLuhan shared a similar dilemma since both argued that book culture tended to produce fixed points of view and homogeneity of thought; yet both produced many books. In his introduction to the 1964 reprint of The Bias of Communication, McLuhan marvelled at Innis's technique of juxtaposing "his insights in a mosaic structure of seemingly unrelated and disproportioned sentences and aphorisms." McLuhan argued that although that made reading Innis's dense prose difficult ("a pattern of insights that are not packaged for the consumer palate"), Innis's method approximated "the natural form of conversation or dialogue rather than of written discourse." Best of all, it yielded "insight" and "pattern recognition" rather than the "classified knowledge" so overvalued by print-trained scholars. "How exciting it was to encounter a writer whose every phrase invited prolonged meditation and exploration," McLuhan added.[98] McLuhan's own books with their reliance on aphorisms, puns, quips, "probes" and oddly juxtaposed observations also employ that mosaic technique.
Innis's theories of political economy, media and society remain highly relevant: he had a profound influence on critical media theory and communications and, in conjunction with McLuhan, offered groundbreaking Canadian perspectives on the function of communication technologies as key agents in social and historical change. Together, their works advanced a theory of history in which communication is central to social change and transformation.[99]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolies_of_knowledge
Monopolies of knowledge arise when the ruling class maintains political power through control of key communications technologies.[2] The Canadian economic historian Harold Innis developed the concept of monopolies of knowledge in his later writings on communications theories.[3]
Wherever new media arise, so too do monopolies of knowledge concerning how to use the technologies to reinforce the power and control of elite groups. [[???]]
Origins of the concept
When discussing the monopolies of knowledge, Innis focuses much of his concern on the United States, where he feared that mass-circulation newspapers and magazines along with privately owned broadcasting networks had undermined independent thought and local cultures and rendered audiences passive in the face of what he calls the "vast monopolies of communication".[9] James W. Carey notes that Innis worried about the centralized control of information and entertainment by advertising-driven media. "The very existence of a commodity such as 'information' and an institution called 'media' make each other necessary," Carey writes. "More people spend more time dependent on the journalist, the publisher, and the program director. Every week they wait for Time [magazine]."[10]
In order to fashion his concept of monopolies of knowledge, Innis drew on several fields of study, including economics, history, communications and technology.
[[ see manufactured consent ]]
Economics and the price system
In his 1938 essay, The Penetrative Powers of the Price System, Innis anticipates his later concept of monopolies of knowledge. Although he does not precisely define what he means by the "price system", he does show how trade and technology shaped modern industrial economies.[11] Innis suggests, for example, that the shift from coal and iron to oil and electricity had profound implications that no one in industrial societies could escape. He mentions the growth of cities with people living in large apartment buildings made possible by developments in electrical equipment on the one hand, and the dispersal of populations over wide metropolitan areas as a result of the automobile and paved roads, on the other.
The inhabitants of modern industrial societies even eat differently than their more rural forebears. "The demands of population in congested areas, under the direction of scientific work in nutrition," Innis writes, "have shifted from carbohydrates to vitamins or from wheat to dairy products, live-stock, fruits and vegetables."[12] At the same time, he adds, city dwellers are influenced by cheap, mass-circulation newspapers which peddle political stereotypes along with department store ads.[13] For Innis, the industrial economy monopolizes how people live, work, communicate and think.[14]
History and classical studies
Innis's concept of monopolies of knowledge was also influenced by the scholar Solomon Gandz who published a lengthy paper in 1939 on the significance of the oral tradition in the development of civilizations.[15] Gandz advanced the idea that the control of language in the oral tradition was grounded in religious institutions which ensured a civilization's continuity by preserving its traditions. At the same time, however, religious elites often shared their power with political elites who controlled the use of military force, thereby ensuring a civilization's success in conquering and holding territory.[16]
Significance of writing
Writing
"The sword and the pen worked together," Innis writes. "The written record signed, sealed, and swiftly transmitted was essential to military power and the extension of government. Small communities were written into large states and states were consolidated into empire." Innis adds that the monarchies of Egypt and Persia as well as the Roman empire "were essentially products of writing."[24]
Rome's adoption of papyrus facilitated the spread of writing and the growth of bureaucratic administration needed to govern vast territories.[25] The efficiency of the alphabet strengthened monopolies of knowledge in a variety of ancient empires.[26] Innis warns about the power of writing to create mental "grooves" which determine "the channels of thought of readers and later writers."[27]
Printing and paper
Innis believed that the printing press was a decisive invention in the history of the West. Lewis Mumford pointed out that printing was "a completely mechanical achievement...the type for all future instruments of reproduction: for the printed sheet...was the first completely standardized product."[28] Thus, for Innis, the printing press and the accompanying medium of paper ushered in not just the mechanization that would become characteristic of an industrial society based on mass production, but also the mechanization of knowledge itself. By that, Innis meant that printing led to the production of beliefs and practices that reinforced monopolies of knowledge characteristic of industrial culture.[29]
the printing [press] and paper : the mechanization of knowledge itself.
Innis also warned that printed books could produce conformity of thought akin to the regimentation of workers in industrial factories.[31] He repeats the Biblical commandment against worshiping graven images, but suggests that in our unconscious society, this prohibition is not interpreted to apply to the printed word.[32]
According to William Kuhns, societies dominated by print media regard only printed knowledge as "essentially valid." Textbook publishers exert a huge influence on education at all levels while schools and universities refuse to accept knowledge in other than printed forms. "The monopoly of knowledge protects its own with wary vigilance," Kuhns writes.[33] Or in Mumford's words, with the advent of the printed book, learning "became book-learning."[34]
Paul Levinson writes that "[l]iteracy probably constitutes the most significant monopoly of knowledge in human history."[35] He adds, however, that in open, democratic societies, public education systems are dedicated to breaking this monopoly by teaching students how to read and write, thereby giving them full access to printed knowledge.[36]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolies_of_knowledge
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.[1] The title refers to consent of the governed, and derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent" used by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922).[2] The book was honored with the Orwell Award.
A 2002 revision takes account of developments such as the fall of the Soviet Union. A 2009 interview with the authors notes the effects of the internet on the propaganda model.[3]
Background
Origins
Chomsky credits the impetus of Manufacturing Consent to Alex Carey, the Australian social psychologist, to whom the book is dedicated.[4] The book was greatly inspired by Herman's earlier financial research.
Authorship
Herman was a professor of finance at Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania,[5] and Chomsky is a linguist and activist scholar, who has written many other books, such as Towards a New Cold War.[5] Before Manufacturing Consent was published in 1988, the two authors had previously collaborated on the same subject. Their book Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda, a book about American foreign policy and the media, was published in 1973. The publisher for the book, a subsidiary of Warner Communications Incorporated, was deliberately put out of print after publishing 20,000 copies of the book, most of which were destroyed, so the book was not widely known.[6]
According to Chomsky, "most of the book [Manufacturing Consent]" was the work of Edward S. Herman[7].[8]: 8 Herman describes a rough division of labor in preparing the book whereby he was responsible for the preface and chapters 1–4 while Chomsky was responsible for chapters 5–7.[8]: 204 According to Herman, the propaganda model described in the book was originally his idea, tracing it back to his 1981 book Corporate Control, Corporate Power.[8]: 205 The main elements of the propaganda model (though not so-called at the time) were discussed briefly in volume 1 chapter 2 of Herman and Chomsky's 1979 book The Political Economy of Human Rights, where they argued, "Especially where the issues involve substantial U.S. economic and political interests and relationships with friendly or hostile states, the mass media usually function much in the manner of state propaganda agencies."[9]
Propaganda model of communication
Main article: Propaganda model
The book introduced the propaganda model of communication, which is still developing today.
The propaganda model for the manufacture of public consent describes five editorially distorting filters, which are said to affect reporting of news in mass communications media. These five filters of editorial bias are:
1. Size, ownership, and profit orientation: The dominant mass-media are large profit-based operations, and therefore they must cater to the financial interests of the owners such as corporations and controlling investors. The size of a media company is a consequence of the investment capital required for the mass-communications technology required to reach a mass audience of viewers, listeners, and readers.
2. The advertising license to do business: Since the majority of the revenue of major media outlets derives from advertising (not from sales or subscriptions), advertisers have acquired a "de facto licensing authority".[10] Media outlets are not commercially viable without the support of advertisers. News media must therefore cater to the political prejudices and economic desires of their advertisers. This has weakened the working class press, for example, and also helps explain the attrition in the number of newspapers.
3. Sourcing mass media news: Herman and Chomsky argue that "the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special access [to the news], by their contribution to reducing the media's costs of acquiring [...] and producing, news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become 'routine' news sources and have privileged access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers." Editorial distortion is aggravated by the news media's dependence upon private and governmental news sources. If a given newspaper, television station, magazine, etc., incurs disfavor from the sources, it is subtly excluded from access to information. A news organisation loses readers or viewers, and ultimately, advertisers. To minimize such financial danger, news media businesses editorially distort their reporting to favor government and corporate policies to stay in business.[11][clarification needed]
4. Flak and the enforcers: "Flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program (e.g. letters, complaints, lawsuits, or legislative actions). Flak can be expensive to the media, either due to loss of advertising revenue, or due to the costs of legal defense or defense of the media outlet's public image. Flak can be organized by powerful, private influence groups (e.g. think tanks). The prospect of eliciting flak can be a deterrent to the reporting of certain kinds of facts or opinions.[11]
5. Anti-communism: This filter concerns the spectre of a common enemy which can be used to marginalise dissent: "This ideology helps mobilize the populace against an enemy, and because the concept is fuzzy it can be used against anybody advocating policies that threaten [dominant] interests".[11] Anti-communism was included as a filter in the original 1988 edition of the book, but Chomsky argues that since the end of the Cold War (1945–91) anticommunism was replaced by the "war on terror" as the major social control mechanism.[12]
The Propaganda model of communication and its influence over major media organizations
The propaganda model describes the pillars of society (the public domain, business firms, media organizations, governments etc.) as first and foremost, profit-seekers.[13] To fully consider the effects of the propaganda model, a tiered diagram can be drawn. Due to the impressionable and exploitative nature of major media organizations including broadcast media, print media, and 21st century social media, media organizations are placed at the bottom. Higher up the model, it pans to the larger organizations who are financially capable of controlling advertising licenses, lawsuits, or selling environments. The first level displays the public domain in which prominent ideologies within the masses can influence the intentions of mass media. The second level pertaining to the business firms accounts for the media’s source of information[14] as business firms are wealthy enough to supply information to media organizations while maintaining control over where advertisers can sell their advertisements and stories. The final layer, the governments of the major global powers, are the wealthiest subgroup of the pillars of society. Having the most financial wealth and organizational power, media organizations are most dependent on government structures for financial stability and political direction.
Documentary adaptation
The 1992 documentary film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media directed by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick first opened at the Film Forum. This three-hour adaptation considers the propaganda model of communication and the politics of the mass-communications business, with emphasis on Chomsky's ideas and career.[20]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
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https://web.archive.org/web/20090627191223/http://www.chomsky.info//onchomsky/198901--.htm
The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Edward S. Herman interviewed by Robert W. McChesney
Monthly Review, January, 1989
Over the past generation, it has become increasingly clear to those on the left that the U.S. mass media, far from performing an autonomous and adversarial role in U.S. society, actively frame issues and promote news stories that serve the needs and concerns of the elite. Moreover, the importance of the leading corporate mass media in contemporary politics radically transcends the role of the mass media in earlier times. Hence, the Left has begun to pay considerable attention to how the media are structured and controlled and how they operate. Nevertheless, the ideology of the "free press" has proven to be a difficult adversary for left critics; as the media's operations are central to the modern polity, their legitimacy is shielded by layers and layers of ideological obfuscation.
Recently, left analysis of the media has been enriched by the publication of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, 1988), by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. This book promises to be a seminal work in critical media analysis and to open a door through which future media analysis will follow. In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky provide a systematic "propaganda model" to account for the behavior of the corporate news media in the United States. They preface their discussion of the propaganda model by noting their fundamental belief that the mass media "serve to mobilize support for the special interests that dominate the state and private support for the special interests that dominate the state and private activity." Although propaganda is not the sole function of the media, it is "a very important aspect of their overall service" (p. xi), especially "in a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest" (p.1).
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky are certainly well qualified to provide a simple yet powerful model that explains how the media function to serve the large propaganda requiremen ts ofthe elite. Together and individually, they have written numerous articles and books which have chronicled the ways in which the U.S. media have actively promoted the agenda ofthe elite, particularly in regard to U.S. activities in the Third World. Manufacturing Consent is a work of tremendous importance for scholars and activists alike.
Herman and Chomsky quickly dismiss the standard mainstream critique of radical media analysis that accuses it of offering some sort of "conspiracy" theory for media behavior; rather, they argue, media bias arises from "the preselection of right-thinking people, internalized preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the constraints" of a series of objective filters they present in their propaganda model. Hence the bias occurs largely through self-censorship, which explains the superiority ofthe U.S. mass media as a propaganda system: it is far more credible than a system which relies on official state censorship, although in performance the dominant media serve the agenda of the elite every bit as much as state organs do on behalf of the ruling bureaucracies in Eastern Europe.
The credibility and legitimacy of the media system is also preserved by the media's lack of complete agreement on all issues. Indeed, there is vigorous debate and dispute over many issues, as Herman and Chomsky readily acknowledge. They contend, however, that debate within the dominant media is limited to "responsible "opinions acceptable to some segment of the elite. On issues where the elite are in general consensus, the media will always toe the line. No dissent will then be countenanced, let alone acknowledged, except, when necessary for ridicule or derision.
In their propaganda model, Herman and Chomsky present a series of five "filters" to account for why the dominant U.S. media invariably serve as propagandists for the interests of the elite. Only stories with a strong orientation to elite interests can pass through the five filters unobstructed and receive ample media attention. The model also explains how the media can conscientiously function when even a superficial analysis ofthe evidence would indicate the preposterous nature of many of the stories that receive ample publicity in the press and on the network news broadcasts.
The first filter that influences media content is that ownership of the media is highly concentrated among a few dozen of the largest for-profit corporations in the world. Many of these corporations have extensive holdings in other industries and nations. Objectively, their needs for profit severely influence the news operations and overall content of the media. Subjectively, there is a clear conflict of interest when the media system upon which self-government rests is controlled by a handful of corporations and operated in their self-interest. The second filter is that of advertising, which has colonized the U.S. mass media and is responsible for most of the media's income. Herman and Chomsky review much of the evidence concerning the numbing impact of commercialism upon media content.
The third filter is that of sourcing, where "the mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest" (p. 14). The media rely heavily upon news provided them by corporate and government sources, which have themselves developed enormous bureaucracies to provide this material to the media. They have developed great expertise at "managing" the media. In effect, these bureaucracies subsidize the media and the media must be careful not to antagonize such an important supplier. Furthermore, these corporate and government sources are instantly credible by accepted journalistic practices. Anti-elite sources, on the other hand, are regarded with utmost suspicion and have tremendous difficulty passing successfully through this filter.
Herman and Chomsky's fourth filter is the development of right-wing corporate "flak" producers such as Accuracy in Media to harass the mass media and to put pressure upon them to follow the corporate agenda. This filter was developed extensively in the 1970s when major corporations and wealthy right-wingers became increasingly dissatisfied with political developments in the West and with media coverage. These flak producers have actively promoted the (absurd) notion that the media are bastions of liberalism and fundamentally hostile to capitalism and the "defense" of "freedom" around the world. While ostensibly antagonistic to the media, these flak machines provide the media with legitimacy and are treated quite well by the media.
The final filter is the ideology of anticommunism, which is integral to Western political culture and provides the ideological oxygen which makes the propaganda model operate so vigorously. Anticommunism has been ingrained into acceptable Journalistic practices in the United States, to the point that even in periods of "detente" it is fully appropriate and expected for journalists to frame issues in terms of "our side" versus the communist "bad guys."
Furthermore, anticommunist ideology is essential to making the double standard of the propaganda model work effectively. As the authors note, "when anticommunist fervor is aroused, the demand for serious evidence in support for claims of 'communist' abuses is suspended by the media , and charlatans can thrive as evidential sources" (p. 25). Conversely, for journalists or editors to challenge the anticommunist doctrine as well as pass through the other four filters, they "must meet far higher standards; in fact standards are often imposed that can barely be met in the natural sciences" (p. 291).
The bulk of Manufacturing Consent is made up of case studies, in which Herman and Chomsky analyze the validity of the propaganda model for explaining media coverage of five major sets of recent news stories. Herman and Chomsky present the facts in each case and then thoroughly dissect the treatment of the story by the elite media: The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and CBS News in particular. Each chapter is meticulously researched and most draw heavily on the authors' earlier works in these areas.
Chapter two compares the treatment by the media of the murder of Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko in 1984 with the treatment of hundreds of prominent victims of death squads 'in Central America in the 1980s. As Herman and Chomsky forcefully establish, the propaganda model gen"worthy victims" and "unworthy victims," depending upon their relationship to elite interests. Media coverage is extensive and of outrage for the former, while it is generally unsympathetic, if it exists at all, for the latter. Similarly, Chapter three reveals how the media covered the elections in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua earlier this decade exactly as one would anticipate from the propaganda model. Chapter four tracks the media treatment of the Bulgarian-KG"plot" to murder the Pope in the early 1980s. A right-wing concoction, this ludicrous story received extensive and generous coverage as it passed through the filters of the propaganda model with flying colors.
Almost one-half of Manufacturing Consent, chapters five and six, is dedicated to applying the propaganda model to news coverage of the Vietnam war and the developments in Laos and Cambodia since the late 1960s. These chapters are of particular importance, because they take dead aim on the current, almost universally accepted thesis that the media were opposed to the war and responsible for turning the public against it. To the contrary, the media continued to present the war in a manner consistent with elite interests until the very end, as the propaganda model would anticipate. As for Cambodia, it provides a striking example of how the propaganda model operates; the U.S. destruction of the countryside and civil society prior to 1975 was scarcely acknowledged by the media, while the later atrocities under the Khmer Rouge were the basis of extraordinary outrage with minimal concern for accuracy.
In the concluding chapter, Herman and Chomsky demonstrate that the Watergate affair -- the oft-purported highwater mark of the vigorous and feisty free press defending the constitution and bringing down a corrupt regime -- actually conformed to the propaganda model, being an example of the media responding to a crisis among the elite. The chapter discusses some of the obvious limitations of the corporate media system for the media requirements of a genuinely democratic society and suggests that progressives will have to put media restructuring on their political agendas.
In the interview that follows, Edward Herman answered a series of questions concerning some of the implications and issues arising from Manufacturing Consent. Since the interview is with Edward Herman, it is possible that Noam Chomsky may not agree with every point and nuance.
Robert McChesney: Why did you elect to use the term "elite" rather than ruling class?
Edward S. Herman: "Ruling class" has become a cliche that pegs a writer on the ideological spectrum, perhaps unfairly. We have tried to avoid language that arouses ire without serving any useful analytical purpose. And in our work, elite serves as well as ruling class.
RM: Do you perceive this elite fundamentally in class terms, i.e. is it best understood as being comprised of capitalists and the highest level managers of advanced capitalism?
ESH: Yes.
RM: You elect to term the ideological filter "anticommunist." Why is this more appropriate than terming it more broadly the "dominant ideology," which might permit the filter's extension to areas that do not lend themselves to anticommunist interpretation but, nonetheless, are critical to elite interests?
ESH: This is a reasonable suggestion and maybe we should have done this. Other elements of the dominant ideology, like the benevolence of one's own government and the merits of private enterprise, are referred to at various points in the book, but in discussing filters we wanted to focus on the ideological element that has been the most important as a control and disciplinary mechanism in the U.S. political economy.
RM: The hypothesis that the media will never legitimize ideas or positions that do not have some representation among the elite seems virtually ironclad. How do mainstream scholars and the dominant media respond to this point? How have they responded to your model and previous work on the media in general?
ESH: The mainstream hasn't noticed our model yet. This book represents our first extensive statement of a model. It will be interesting to see how it is treated, especially to see if it will be dismissed as a "conspiracy theory" despite our pointing out very carefully in the preface that our model is close to a "free market" analysis and does not rely on conspiracy at all.
RM: This hypothesis also has very serious implications for activists in the United States whose very political agenda is centered around opposition to elite interests and elite control of U.S. society. What does the propaganda model suggest regarding how anti-elite progressive political movements will be characterized in the media?
ESH: It suggests that they will be systematically denigrated and denied reasonable access. This of course was nicely illustrated by the treatment of Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition in this election.
RM: How would you characterize media treatment of the Jackson candidacy?
ESH: As he was challenging some major priorities of the elite, one would expect him to be treated badly by the mass media, and he was in many ways: nitpicking, the emphasis on non-electability, an inordinate focus on his mistakes and associations that would be seen as damaging in the U.S. political context (Castro, PLO, Hymie, etc.) and, of course, a refusal to present and debate his program.
RM: All of the case studies dealt with issues concerning U.S. foreign policy or international issues. Is the propaganda model equally applicable to domestic politics? Are there are qualifications you would make to the model before you would apply it to media coverage of domestic issues?
ESH: We think it is very much applicable to domestic issues as well, although it will be somewhat qualified by two things: the greater likelihood of elite conflict, and the fact that there are non-elite domestic interests -- the poor, social workers, victims of Love Canals, etc. -- who, though relatively weak, have more voice than murdered Vietnamese or Guatemalan peasants. We had intended a chapter on some domestic issue, like the Reagan attack on EPA, or homelessness, or the redistribution of income, and the mass media reporting of these matters, but ran out of time and space. We may address domestic and other omitted case studies in separate articles or in a supplementary volume. Incidentally, one of my favorite books -- Images of Welfare by Peter Golding and Sue Middleton -- shows that a propaganda model works well in looking at the media's handling of "welfare" in Great Britain.
RM: Considering the extensive work Chomsky and you have done on the Middle East, it was surprising that this was not included as a case study. Why was this?
ESH: Again, time and limitations on the size of the book was a factor, plus the fact that Chomsky did a fine job of analyzing the U.S. press on the Middle East in his Fateful Triangle.
RM: How would you evaluate the media coverage of the Palestinian uprising?
ESH: Overall, very bad, with some notable individual exceptions in both print and broadcasting media. Given the savagery and scope of the attacks on unarmed women and children, the large-scale imprisonments, and the terrible conditions imposed on the prisoners, the media coverage amounts to a virtual cover-up. Such assaults on workers in Poland or any minority group (especially Jews) in the Soviet Union would have produced massive coverage and frenzied indignation. Koppel's Nightline program on which he allowed Palestinians to describe their experiences was almost unique -- Palestinian victims are usually voiceless and seldom humanized. Their victimization is filtered through Israeli and official U.S. (and coopted "expert") sources.
RM: Have there been any significant developments in media coverage of Nicaragua and El Salvador in light of the peace agreement?
ESH: Since the Guatemala Peace accords were signed the U.S. mass media have outdone themselves in obfuscation. First, they have regularly refused to acknowledge that the document says that the most important condition for peace is that all forms of aid by outside parties to insurgents be terminated. As this threatens U.S. intervention, the loyal U.S. media have played dumb and contributed to the Democrats posture that in "humanitarian" aid to the contras they were keeping within the bounds of the accords. Second, they have focused incessantly on Nicaragua's actions relating to the accords, although it has clearly made the most extensive efforts to meet their requirements. Third, they have largely suppressed information on the increasing terror in El Salvador, featuring heavily CIA-sponsored "unrest" in Nicaragua, ignoring serious anti-labor violence in the client state. Until Jim Wright spoke up, the very obvious deliberate U.S.-sponsored destabilization ("Chileanization") was off the press agenda. A propaganda model works beautifully in understanding the main thrust of press coverage in Central America.
RM: In the context of the propaganda model, how would you compare of the media treatment of the U.S. downing of the Iranian jetliner in 1988 to the treatment of the Soviet downing of KAL 007 in 1983?
ESH: The propaganda model fits perfectly. A little-noted fact in the discussion of the KAL 007 shootdown is that the administration was able to claim falsely that the Soviets knew it was a civilian plane, and get away with this very deliberate act of disinformation for a very long time. The press collaboration in allowing a lie to be institutionalized and assuring that its ultimate exposure involved the administration in no costs, is high-order propaganda service.
RM: Your most recent research addresses media coverage of the U.S.withdrawal from UNESCO. Did this coverage conform to the expectations of the propaganda model?
ESH: It exceeded these expectations. An outright government propaganda agency couldn't have done better. A forthcoming book by me, Herbert Schiller, and William Preston, Jr., put out by the Institute for Media Analysis and University of Minnesota Press, analyses this in detail.
RM: How would you apply the propaganda model to the operations of PBS?
ESH: We do discuss it briefly in a footnote. PBS has done better over the years in presenting dissenting views than the commercial media, despite the government's role in its organization and financing. This shows how terrible the commercial media are. The restraints stemming from commercial and profit interests outweigh the limitations stemming from government quasi-control. This is why the right wing hates PBS and urges its liquidation, or at least keeping it on a year-to-year budget and increasing its dependence on advertising. I don't think PBS could ever become a systematic voice of serious dissent, but it can provide more than the networks, and more honest reformism.
RM: What is the range of improvement within the existing media system?
ESH: In the short run, very little. A political turnabout is needed to constrain and weaken commercial control, widen access to radio and TV, and strengthen public, educational, and community radio and TV. A reinvigorated labor movement and grassroots organization and recognition of the importance ofthe media are probably a precondition for even modest alteration of the status quo.
RM: Can a journalist survive within the dominant media without internalizing the filters?
ESH: Theoretically, yes. But most don't. It can be done if you are willing to live something of a double life, not make much progress in the organization, and suffer continuous compromises on your principles. The strain can be great.
RM: In the conclusion, you seemed to indicate that media activists should concentrate their efforts upon getting broadcast channels. Why the emphasis upon broadcast media?
ESH: Because of their ability to reach large numbers whose class interest should make them more amenable to critical messages.
RM: You conclude at the very end of Manufacturing Consent that in the long run progressives need to put media issues in their political agendas. How important is media restructuring to a general progressive agenda?
ESH: Very important. Control over definitions of reality, the agendas that people are allowed to think about, the ability to reiterate messages and manipulate symbols are basic ingredients of power. Because the media as constituted will not allow Jesse Jackson's agenda to be discussed and debated, but will push the "government on our back," burden of welfare, Soviet threat, and similar ideological messages, the Left is at a huge disadvantage in the battlefield of ideas and symbols. It is always on the defensive. This reflects its underlying position of institutional weakness, but the two interact. Media control strengthens institutional control, and vice versa. Power has to be gained on both fronts.
RM: Aside from your notion of working for more access to broadcast channels, can you think of any other tangible proposals to help construct a media system better suited to the needs of a self-governing society?
ESH: Access should include ownership, not merely an occasional program or appearance. We have to start from the bottom. Grassroots organizations have to become more media-oriented and more concerned to reach out to similar groups and beyond. We can't neglect progressive print media either.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090627191223/http://www.chomsky.info//onchomsky/198901--.htm
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https://www.westminsterpapers.org/article/id/127/
n
Andrew Mullen (AM) – Question 1: The first of the three hypotheses put forward in
the Propaganda Model is that, where there is elite consensus, the media will serve
elite interests uncompromisingly. Do you have any observations, or are there any
general rules, concerning the existence (or not) of consensus among the elite (i.e.
are particular issues prone to consensus/dissensus) or should media analysts
approach the question on an issue-by-issue basis through empirical investigation?
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (EH/NC): We have several observations, but
no rules. One observation is that elite consensus usually follows when the imperial
state projects power abroad, although it may erode if that power projection
becomes bogged down and excessively expensive. In the case of the United States
(US) and the Vietnam War, that erosion of support forced Lyndon Johnson to
step down in 1968, although even then and later there was enough elite support to
keep the mainstream media in line and cause them to exclude any fundamental
criticism of the war. This was replicated in the case of the Iraq invasionoccupation, 2003–8, when the elite was eventually splintered, but many stayed
with the official line and the media continued to support the war (oppose any
withdrawal date, etc.). In both cases the media failed to give serious space to news
and opinion reflecting the position of the majority. In neither case would the
media ever refer to the US government’s action as ‘aggression’. This suggests that
the propaganda model can do very well even without a firm elite consensus.
The war-apologetic role was well illustrated in a New York Times ‘Review of the
Week’ on 23 November 2008, which offered a collection of think-pieces on the
state of the world for the new US president. As regards Iraq and Afghanistan, on
which these experts focused, every one presupposed that the use of force by the
US was legitimate, even noble. They differed only on tactics and the usefulness
and necessity of military action – as with Barak Obama himself, if it fails to work it
is a ‘strategic blunder’, with no other objections admissible. In short, there is a
firm elite consensus on the legitimacy of state violence – in fact, it is a simple
presupposition, which is much more insidious than assertion.
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Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture © 2009 (University of Westminster, London), Vol. 6(2):
12-22. ISSN 1744-6708 (Print); 1744-6716 (Online)
Herman/Chomsky, Interview
13
This is all clearly evident in the chapters on Indochina in Manufacturing Consent.
1
A second observation is that the elite consensus is likely to be strong when
fundamental class interests are at stake. This is the case with the just mentioned
external projections of power of the imperial state, and the demands of the
military-industrial complex with which it is closely associated, and which has
grown ever stronger in the US since President Dwight Eisenhower’s January 1961
warning of its threat to US democracy. ‘Free trade’ (i.e. mainly investor rights)
issues are also important to elite interests, and this is reflected in vigorous and
close-to-unanimous mass media support of ‘free trade’ agreements and opposition
to ‘protectionism’. Labour organization and labour power are also of elite class
interest, and associated issues frequently produce elite solidarity and mainstream
media uniformity in the elite interest. Even here, however, there may be
exceptions based on place, time and specific issues. Several commentators on
Manufacturing Consent have pointed to cases where the clash of local interests was
associated with local media support of local labour’s protests and strikes.2
AM – Question 2: The second hypothesis is that, where the mass media is under
corporate rather than state control, media coverage will be shaped by what is, in
effect, a ‘guided market system’ underpinned by five filters – the operative
principles of the Propaganda Model. Can you say how each of these has fared over
the last 20 years – would you change any, expand upon any, etc.?
Ownership
Advertising
Sourcing
Flak
Anti-communism
EH/NC: What you refer to as the Propaganda Model’s ‘five filters’ requires some
clarification. (a) Ownership and (b) advertising belong to straightforward
institutional analysis – these are the kinds of institutional arrangements that
predominate among US media firms and elsewhere. (c) Sourcing and (d) flak are
two well-established processes to which any elite-serving media will adapt,
whether we are talking about the elite US or British media or the elite media under
Stalin and Hitler. On the other hand, (e) anti-communism, as a major theme of
media production during the twentieth century, was reflective of the prevailing
system of belief in the Western states, and has evolved with the collapse of the
1
See Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of
the Mass Media, New York: Pantheon, pp.169–296.
2
See Deepa Kumar (2007) Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike,
Champaign (Illinois): University of Illinois Press.
Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 6(2)
14
Soviet bloc since the first edition of Manufacturing Consent. In a crucial sense, and
extending from the most minor comic books and cartoons all the way up to the
highest academic discussions of the so-called Cold War (i.e. the system of
propaganda known as the ‘Cold War’), anti-communism was a staple that provided
content, narratives, heroes and villains. Since 1989, this staple has morphed into
an array of substitutes. But the structural role that anti-communism and its
successors have played, namely, the provision of an Enemy or the Face of Evil,
remains as relevant as ever.
To answer the question about the five filters more specifically:
(a) Ownership is more concentrated and more globalized in 2008 than it
was in 1988, in good part because of accommodating state policy. This includes
weakened anti-trust and relaxed rules on market share limits and cross-ownership
rights, most notoriously as regards radio station ownership within and between
markets.
(b) Advertising is a more important force in 2008 than in 1988, because
of greater competition among traditional media outlets and between those outlets
and the internet. Right-wing political forces have also pushed public radio and
television into greater dependence on advertising. The result of all this (including
ownership concentration) has been a more intense bottom-line focus, a greater
integration of editorial and business operations, more product placements,
cutbacks in investigative reporting and analysis, more controversy-avoidance, and
greater manageability by governments and other power centres.
(c) The above-mentioned changes have made for a greater sourcing
dependence on wire services, public relations offerings, and official and
establishment-expert claims and press releases.
(d) Flak has very likely become more important as a constraint on the
media than it was in 1988. Although aggressive government attacks on
problematic media reporting and opinion existed then and earlier,3
and media
dependence on government favours and support has long been a force
constraining the media, government has become even more aggressive in
favouring and punishing media deviations from the official line. Furthermore, flak
from within the media, including the numerous right-wing talk shows and from
blogs –constituting a right-wing attack machine and echo-chamber – has become
more important in recent decades. One of their high points of achievement was
the success of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in getting the mainstream media
to cooperate during the 2004 presidential election campaign in denigrating the
3
See Mark Hertsgaard (1989) On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency, New York:
Schocken Books.
Herman/Chomsky, Interview
15
military record of Vietnam veteran John Kerry, while downplaying the truly
dubious military record of George W. Bush.4
(e) Anti-communism has receded as an ideological factor in the Western
media, but it is not dead and is still used when needed to denigrate individuals who
can be tied to Stalin or Mao or Soviet Russia more broadly (e.g. Milosevic), and
the crimes of Stalin or Mao and the Black Book of Communism5
can be featured
periodically to warn against socialism and wrong-headed state intervention. The
‘war on terror’ has provided a useful substitute for the Soviet Menace. Also, the
antithesis of communism, the ‘free market,’ has been elevated to more prominent
ideological status, and has proven to be a strong co-replacement for anticommunism and the basis for the new world order of neoliberalism6
now in some
disarray but without an ideological rival resting on any kind of power base.
We should note that the ideology of the ‘free market’ prevails despite the fact that
‘exceptions’ crop up with great regularity, as in the case of the Agreement on
Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and periodic
bailouts, and that the entire advanced economy has long relied heavily on the
dynamic state sector to socialize costs and risks and privatize profit, as in the cases
of funding the development of computers and the internet, and the ongoing
Pentagon system. One of the most amusing cases is that of US President Ronald
Reagan, anointed as High Priest of the free market – while breaking all records for
protectionism in the post-war period, and much else.
AM – Question 3: If you were devising the Propaganda Model now, in 2008, what
would it look like?
EH/NC: It would look very much like the 1988 version, with the ‘free market’ as
a principal ideological underpinning along with ‘anti-terrorism’ and the ‘war on
terror’ that have provided the needed Enemy or Face of Evil, with anticommunism pushed into a back-up and reminder/ideological role. Within this
slightly revised framework, we would probably place more emphasis on
globalization and dependence on government for favours and service; on
aggressive government news management; on the rise or strengthening of rightwing mass media institutions (Sinclair, Clear Channel, Fox News), talk shows and
blogs; and on the real but thus far weaker growth of other alternative media
(including those based on the internet).
4
See Eric Boehlert (2006) Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush, New York: Free Press –
chaps 6-7.
5
Stéphane Courtois et al. (1999) The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard
University Press.
6
See David Harvey (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, New York: Oxford University Press.
Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 6(2)
16
AM – Question 4: Your methodological approach is based upon the use of (a)
empirical data (specifically content analysis, i.e. counting column inches), (b) the
use of official sources and (c) the use of paired examples. Can you explain why
you adopt such a framework in your analysis? Could such an approach be
augmented by others (discourse analysis for example)?
EH/NC: We don’t confine ourselves to newspapers or official sources; e.g. in our
important Table 2-1 on Worthy and Unworthy Victims7
we have a column on
CBS television news coverage, and our main focus is on the media themselves as
sources, however they derive their own information (admittedly, very heavily from
official sources). We do feature heavily the print media, partly because of ease of
access and use, but also because they are more complete, with fuller information
than television news, the latter often derivative from print media sources. Any
weaknesses in objectivity or sourcing in the leading print media would commonly
be amplified in television reporting. Where properly chosen, paired examples
highlight bias, with quite similar evils (or virtues) treated very differently in
alignment with the political interests of the state. This is a classic method of
analysis8
that fits well an analysis featuring propaganda service.
Our method IS a form of discourse analysis. We do not claim a monopoly of
routes to the establishment of truth, so other forms of discourse analysis and
other frames of analysis can complement, supplement and on occasion possibly
yield better results than our own.9
However, we believe that our broad framework
continues to be serviceable. We note that it is often admitted by critics to work
well in the important cases that we have discussed, but they rarely stop to explain
why this is so and its implications.
AM – Question 5: The third hypothesis is that the Propaganda Model, media
performance (specifically media that serve elite interests), and studies of such
media performance will be ignored and marginalized. This is where critics of the
Propaganda Model have focused their attacks. Can you deal with each of these
criticisms in turn:
(a) The Propaganda Model presents a conspiratorial view of the media.
(b) It is deterministic, functionalist and simplistic.
(c) It ignores journalist’s professionalism and the fact that they can be agents
for change within the system.
7
See Manufacturing Consent, pp.40-41.
8
See Marc Bloch (1961) The Historian’s Craft, New York: Alfred Knopf – chap.3 ‘Historical
Criticism’.
9
See W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence and Steven Livingston (2007) When the Press Fails,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Robert Entman (2004) Projections of Power, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Herman/Chomsky, Interview
17
(d) It is overly ambitious and projects a ‘total and finalizing’ view.
(e) In the post-Cold War world, anti-communism is redundant.
(f) By deploying notions such as ‘brainwashing under freedom’,
‘propaganda’ and ‘thought control’, the Propaganda Model is indeed
concerned with media effects and not just media behaviour.
(g) The Propaganda Model is not relevant in countries outside the US, which
have different media and political systems. (Given the global nature of
many media operations today, do you think that the Propaganda Model is
applicable in most places?)
EH/NC: (a) We are very clear that the Propaganda Model does not rest on any
conspiracy assumption but is rooted mainly in market-oriented processes. But
many critics have not been able to see how similar results could arise without
conspiracy, hence there must be an underlying conspiracy assumption. But in fact
what seems to be conspiratorial behaviour is easily explained by natural market
processes (e.g. use of common sources, laziness and copying others in the
mainstream, common and built-in biases, fear of departure from a party line, etc.).
We should note that some critics who claim that ours is a conspiratorial view do
this by latching on to an occasional word or phrase we made that suggests planned
action. It is true that occasionally common results arise at least in part from
knowing joint action, sometimes by government request or pressure, but these are
the exceptional cases. The market can do the job well, and we are very clear and
explicit that this is the main mechanism through which the PM does its work.
An important factor in the charge of ‘conspiracy theory’ (and general hostility to
the Propaganda Model) is that many journalists find it difficult to accept the
notion that institutions like those comprising the mainstream media can work to
produce outcomes that run contrary to the self-understanding of the social actors
who work for these institutions, and who contribute to these outcomes. Thus,
harking back to something we asserted in the first edition of our book, whereas
this type of critic appears to believe that the societal purpose of the media is to
enlighten the public, and to enable ‘the public to assert meaningful control over
the political process by providing them with the information needed for the
intelligent discharge of political responsibilities’, we believe, to the contrary, that
the evidence shows that the societal purpose of the media is ‘to inculcate and
defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that
dominate the domestic society and the state’. This difference in view of the
media’s role is hard to bridge.
(b) Every model is deterministic; the issue is whether it is useful in
understanding and forecasting. It is also simple, but our belief is that that is
appropriate for a model that deals with a very complex and changing reality and
tries to spell out basic parameters that will only provide broad guidelines and
insight into the broad sweep of news coverage and permissible opinion. On the
Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 6(2)
18
question of functionalism, by definition a propaganda model lays out a framework
that points to a propaganda function, although most of the participating
individuals may be unaware of this. We do not consider this a serious criticism,
unless it is shown that the model fails to enlighten or predict on the propaganda
service that the model is being used to describe.
(c) If those professional standards were sufficiently powerful and
relevant the Propaganda Model would soon be shown to be false – and the media
would not go along with staged elections in a terrorized El Salvador, a highly
questionable claim of the Bulgarian-KGB involvement in the 1981 shooting of the
Pope, and the Bush-era claim of the menace of Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction, among other blatant cases of propaganda service. The criticism
neglects the questions of power, ideology and the problematic standards of
journalist objectivity, which have long pushed them towards excessive if not
exclusive reliance on establishment sources and to easy manageability in
consequence.
(d) It doesn’t claim to do everything and cover every facet of newsmaking and opinion dissemination. It only shows the main thrust in many
important cases, especially where elite interests are clear and strong, elite opinion
is unified, and oppositional interests are unclear and disorganized.
(e) Redundant because its counterpart, free market ideology, and antiterrorism and the ‘war on terror,’ have moved front and centre. However, anticommunism is still a force that can be mobilized to show the lesson of excessive
government intervention and questioning of free market principles.
(f) We are certainly interested in the effects of propaganda, and believe
that it is often a powerful force. However, our model focuses on the media’s work
and performance, not the impact of the media’s propaganda efforts. We have
repeatedly pointed out that propaganda is more important for the elites in a
relatively democratic country like the US than in a totalitarian country, given the
restraints on the use of violence in the former. It follows that propaganda service
is important, but its effectiveness is variable and uncertain, and we don’t try to
measure it.
(g) Globalization and cross-border integration, and the spread and
increased importance of commercial media and advertising as a funding source,
have made the Propaganda Model ever more widely applicable, but it has to be
evaluated on a case-by-case basis given the varying degrees and forms of
penetration, and different cultural conditions and levels of government
intervention. In some cases, like Russia, we may have a slow merging of an older
form of state propaganda with an emerging market-based system.
Herman/Chomsky, Interview
19
AM – Question 6: Do you have any opinions or thoughts on the following reasons,
put forward by Mullen10, as to why the Propaganda Model, and your wider work
on the media, has been ignored within the field of media and communication
studies?
a) You are ‘outsiders’ to the discipline and, therefore, not legitimate
analysts.
b) You have been smeared as apologists for totalitarian regimes and are
considered by many to be ‘controversial’ figures, to be avoided.
c) Following the ‘cultural turn’ in the 1980s/1990s, and the rise of
postmodernism, there has been a retreat from empiricism, grand
narratives and political economy approaches to media analysis.
d) The Propaganda Model challenges the liberal-pluralist, mainstream view
of how the media operate. That liberals ignore the Propaganda Model
may be no surprise, but why, have many critical and Marxist analysts not
been overly receptive to the Propaganda Model and your wider work?
EH/NC: Each of these has an element of truth. We are outsiders to the discipline
and have brought a new and radical critique of the mainstream media into the
arena. This causes resentment from some members of the media-analysis
establishment at our turf encroachment, and even more resentment at the
implication of the media’s systematic propaganda service and non-reformability
within current institutional structures (see 5(a) above). This has been true even of
left critics, many of whom still can’t abide these radical ideas that make their
‘practical’ policy proposals seem misdirected and liberal utopianism. Many leftists
and Marxists don’t like radicalism, especially when not of their own authorship.
Of course we are out of step with postmodernism, but that trend has represented
a retreat from serious radical criticism altogether. And our controversial character
and (falsely) alleged apologetics for totalitarian regimes are largely modes of
rejection and back-handed attacks on our radical analysis rather than reasons for
that rejection. Radicalism automatically produces ‘controversy’, and criticism of an
attack on a quickly demonized enemy automatically makes the critic an ‘apologist’
for the leader(s) of the victimized state, not a defender of the victimized people or
of the rule of law – or media integrity in dealing with national enemy’s and targets.
AM – Question 7: You applied the Propaganda Model to newspaper coverage. Do
you think that it is applicable to other forms of media (television for example)?
10 Andrew Mullen, A. (forthcoming) ‘Twenty years on: the second-order prediction of the
Herman–Chomsky Propaganda Model’, Media, Culture and Society.
Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 6(2)
20
EH/NC: Yes, it should apply well to television, which is even more dependent on
adverts than the print media, often shares ownership with the latter in
conglomerates, and is even more sensitive to flak than the press.11 It will also
increasingly apply to the internet, where the ‘old media’ have a growing place and
advertising has become steadily more important in the newer internet-based media
institutions.
AM – Question 8: Does the internet age (blogging, podcasting, etc.), and the
challenge this poses to the traditional media (as the internet provides people with
alternative sources of news), mean that the Propaganda Model will become
increasingly marginal in its applicability?
EH/NC: It is possible that this might happen, but it hasn’t yet and there are
several factors protecting the hegemony of the traditional media: (1) the traditional
media themselves have occupied the internet and are dominant news providers
there; (2) they have the resources and pre-existing audiences to give them a huge
advantage over alternative media potential rivals; (3) the alternative operators on
the internet seek advertising revenue to fund their operations, compromising their
alternative character, and the biggest, like Google and Yahoo, are heavily
dependent on advertising revenue (and they are not inclined to put resources into
original news origination); (4) much of the new media on the internet is oriented
toward facilitating social connections, with politics secondary at best, and the best
of the new alternative media have limited resources and outreach and specialize in
critical analysis rather than news-making.12 What would make the Propaganda
Model more ‘marginal in its applicability’ is not the rise of blogging, podcasting
and other potential media vehicles, but rather the diminution of class and
hierarchically organized social orders, and the spread and deepening of
egalitarianism. As long as highly unequal and unfair economic and social orders
persist, their dominant elites will have to justify themselves and they will continue
to need supportive propaganda. The media structures that will help them will keep
the Propaganda Model and its filters relevant.
AM – Question 9: The Propaganda Model is concerned with media performance.
Do you have any thoughts about the impact of the operation of the Propaganda
Model on media audiences? Are there any models of media effects which you
think could complement the Propaganda Model?
EH/NC: We believe that propaganda is often effective, but not always and in
varying degrees that depend on many circumstances, such as the target audience’s
11 For illustrations, and showing the great power of advertising more than 30 years ago, see Eric
Barnouw (1978) The Sponsor, New York: Oxford University Press.
12 See Theodore Hamm (2008) The New Blue Media, New York: New Press.
Herman/Chomsky, Interview
21
interest and knowledge, the forms of appeal by the propagandists (fear, patriotism,
economic self-interest, etc.), the intensity of the propaganda campaign, the degree
of media cooperation, and perhaps other factors. Propaganda can be useful to
those who employ it even if only a substantial minority are persuaded or confused
into passivity – this persuaded or inactive minority may be enough to allow the
propagandists to ignore majority opinion.
It is true that audiences can pick and choose among media offerings, but only
within the limits of what the media will offer, and audiences may be virtually
forced to deal with messages they don’t want and even reject. The audiences are
not sovereign even if they have a (constrained) freedom of choice. It should also
be kept in mind that propagandists have the power to raise the frequency and
intensity and adjust the character of their messages in the face of audience
resistance. Active audience analysts, beware!
AM – Question 10: What hope do you see for future resistance to the corporate
domination of the mass media? Can you think of any practical examples of such
resistance? How do we get from here, a corporate controlled media, to where we
want to be, enjoying a truly democratic and plural media scene?
EH/NC: It is hard to be optimistic today as the trend has been toward
strengthening the power of the Propaganda Model, which, along with increasing
inequality, works toward a plutocratic politics that has a symbiotic and mutually
supportive relationship with a concentrating commercial media. This has,
however, stimulated a resistance movement that struggles to limit further Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) and congressional actions increasing
concentration, and which has also created pockets of local and alternative media.
We have hundreds of community radio stations, hundreds of public access
television channels, the Deep Dish television network, the multi-city news
operation and communication system, Indymedia, Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting (FAIR) – which produces a radio programme as well as the journal
EXTRA! – and numerous internet operations that transmit alternative views and
information that deserves attention, even if not much original news—among
them, Electric Politics, ZNet, Counterpunch, Information Clearing House,
Dissident Voice, Upside-Down World, Cold Type and Swan’s.
We cannot move to a truly democratic and plural media scene without a radical
change in the political economy, which is to say, some kind of economic and
political revolution. As noted, the existing media and political systems are mutually
supportive, so that media change is not on the media’s agenda, nor on the political
agenda. A strong resistance movement gathered momentum in the Bush era,
attempting to at least halt the FCC’s relaxing of ownership rules. Featuring the
2002 organization of Free Press, which focused on educating and organizing
Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 6(2)
22
against FCC-sponsored consolidation, building a membership of 400,000 by early
2008, and with an estimated 165 organizations working on media reform, this
movement has had some successes in constraining the FCC.13 These successes
involved a considerable struggle, and they were essentially stopping further
regression, not reversing past structural change or even halting the trend occurring
in the global market itself. We must continue to struggle, but reducing the
relevance of the Propaganda Model has so far proved a very difficult task.
13 See Robert W. McChesney (2008) The Political Economy of Media, New York: Monthly Rview
Press – chaps 24-25.
https://www.westminsterpapers.org/article/id/127/
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