A Screen Entertainment Propaganda Model

Abstract

How useful is Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model (PM) for analysing the entertainment media? I have previously established that the PM is an essential tool for analysing cinema1 and that the objections raised to such an enterprise are insubstantial.2 Both Herman and Chomsky have indicated that they consider the model to be more widely applicable but that the entertainment media is beyond their immediate fields of interest.3 This article applies the PM to both the cinema industry and to network television, as a means by which we can assess the model’s utility more widely in contemporary America. The PM hypothesises that the US media ‘mobilise support for the special interests that dominate state and private activity’4 and that media representations of the US’ role in the world can be explained through five contributory factors or ‘filters,’ which ‘cleanse’ information from the real world to leave only the ‘residue’ which is acceptable to established power systems.5 The filters are as follows: ‘size, ownership and profit orientation’ (first filter); ‘the advertising license to do business’ (second filter); the need for the media to use power-