Manufacturing foreign news from afar: Views from an editor’s desk

Abstract

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model, one of the major scholarly contributions to the understanding of – especially foreign – news produced by the US media, consists of trenchant analysis of media industries and volumes of media content, while mostly ignoring an important intermediate step: what happens in the newsroom. This article aims to fill in those blanks with a critical reflection informed by academic literature on the author’s time working as a global news editor with two news agencies, including the main American one, the Associated Press. Specifically, the article aims to clarify and expand on three concepts related to journalistic practices that get short shrift in the propaganda model: journalists’ individual responsibility for the product they produce, their intent and their conformity to organizational imperatives, thereby as much as possible making understandable how and why the propaganda model works on the ground.