{"title":"Journalism Studies’ Systematic Pursuit of Irrelevance : How Research Emphases Sabotage Critiques of Corporate-Run News Media","authors":"Yigal Godler","doi":"10.16997/BOOK27.D","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/BOOK27.D","url":null,"abstract":"Journalism studies, a subfield within communication research, has for a long time concerned itself with journalists’ beliefs, perceptions and practices, allegedly in order to deepen scholarly understanding of journalism and its societal role. Meanwhile, other scholars have adduced strong evidence in support of the proposition that when business and state interests are at stake, corporate-run news organizations perform a propaganda function, thereby undermining democratic debate and participation. In principle, both research orientations could complement each other, as it is undeniable that some journalists’ beliefs and some journalists’ practices may at times shed light on journalism’s institutional constraints and corporate bent. This chapter argues that the field of Journalism Studies has systematically refrained from subjecting journalism to the kind of analysis that highlights structural power inequalities. This condition has been achieved not so much by outright censorship, but by means of squandering energies and resources on large-scale, data-intensive research projects that painstakingly document journalists’ platitudes, institutionally de-contextualized micro-practices and, on occasion, meaningless new content features. While such projects have produced a steady stream of publications, they have arguably diverted critical attention away from major institutional factors that constrain existing journalism.","PeriodicalId":117074,"journal":{"name":"The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123290380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Propaganda 2.0: Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model in the Age of the Internet, Big Data and Social Media in the Age of the Internet, Big Data and Social Media","authors":"C. Fuchs","doi":"10.16997/book27.f","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/book27.f","url":null,"abstract":"Thirty years ago, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman published their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (1988). The World Wide Web had not yet been invented and internet use was neither common nor widespread. Today, notions of propaganda are not widely shard and tend to sound strange to our ears. Also the notion of the mass media has been replaced by speaking of the media in general, which is due to the fact that digital media, such as the internet, have integrated interpersonal communication, group communication, organisational communication and public communication at the level of society in one communication technology. In this contemporary age of digital and social media, it is time to revisit and reassess Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model (PM). This chapter begins with reflections on concepts of propaganda and its relation to ideology. It then focuses on aspects of the Model and relates them to the realm of the internet: size/ownership/profit-orientation, advertising, powerful information sources, flak, and anti-communism. The PM reminds us of the importance of thinking critically about capitalism’s dominant political economy and ideologies when we analyse the internet today. Given the power of companies such as Google and Facebook, we must consider the role of new monopolies, digital labour, targeted advertising, asymmetric attention and visibility, and online ideologies when critically analysing digital capitalism.","PeriodicalId":117074,"journal":{"name":"The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121702086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Screen Entertainment Propaganda Model","authors":"M. Alford","doi":"10.16997/book27.j","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/book27.j","url":null,"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-","PeriodicalId":117074,"journal":{"name":"The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127682084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
J. Klaehn, Joan Pedro-Carañana, M. Alford, Yigal Godler
{"title":"Interview with Edward S. Herman: Ideological Hegemony in Contemporary Societies","authors":"J. Klaehn, Joan Pedro-Carañana, M. Alford, Yigal Godler","doi":"10.16997/BOOK27.B","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/BOOK27.B","url":null,"abstract":"Before his passing in November 2017, Edward Herman graciously gave a final interview to various media scholars in the preceding month of October. As the main architect of the Propaganda Model (PM), Herman offers in this exchange some comments on a range of topics and issues presented to him on the PM and its applicability and utility in the 21st Century. The questions and answers cover topics such as social control and inequality, how they are normalized and maintained; the usefulness of the PM in understanding patterns of media behavior in non-US countries; and how the PM positions television and the internet in relation to social and political change. Also addressed are notions of fear as an ideological control mechanism; ways in which media foster indifference, use of the PM to understand media coverage of Donald Trump’s election campaign and first months as President; and academia’s relationship to power structures.","PeriodicalId":117074,"journal":{"name":"The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115895311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Does the Propaganda Model Actually Theorise Propaganda?","authors":"Piers Robinson","doi":"10.16997/BOOK27.E","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/BOOK27.E","url":null,"abstract":"The propaganda model devised by Herman and Chomsky has provided a major service for scholarship in media and communication studies and political science/international relations. The model has explained and demonstrated how mainstream media perform a propaganda role for powerful economic and political interests. Today, there have been no serious challenges, so far as this author is aware, to its empirical accuracy. Nevertheless, the model only tells half the story because it remains focused on analysis of media performance at the expense of critical exploration of the actual propaganda apparatus that shapes the information environment even before mainstream media enter the equation. This chapter extends the propaganda model by attempting an initial mapping of the organisational and bureaucratic entities which work to shape the information environment, and which determine what is understood to be true and what is understood to be untrue. It is argued that a combination of ‘PR professionals’, intelligence services, academics, think tanks, and co-opted elite journalists play a pivotal role within an extended apparatus seen deep in the bureaucracy of the state and which overlaps with commercial interests. The author argues that by widening the focus to include the propaganda apparatus itself we will be able to critically engage with and reveal the processes that play a major role in determining our perception of political reality.","PeriodicalId":117074,"journal":{"name":"The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122045950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"System Security: A Missing Filter for the Propaganda Model?","authors":"D. Broudy, Miyume Tanji","doi":"10.16997/BOOK27.G","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/BOOK27.G","url":null,"abstract":"Within the context of American counter-intelligence breaches in recent years, the authors examine discourse practices in corporate media that illustrate how the prevailing social and political order is maintained despite occasional shocks to the System. Upon this understanding, this chapter seeks to clarify what the System is, how it is managed and insulated from threats, and what role corporate media play within the System that serves to shape the public’s understanding of key issues. Critical discussions focus on power relations, propaganda, and elite concepts of democracy, how these are negotiated in mass media and understood by those with the power to define keywords and concepts. The authors elucidate Herman and Chomsky’s (1988, 2002) ‘Propaganda Model’ by proposing that a System Security news filter has emerged as a necessary safeguard for the present post-9/11 era of global capitalism interconnected by complex networks of digital media and interlocking corporate interests that span national boundaries.","PeriodicalId":117074,"journal":{"name":"The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126023429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Dynamic’ Obama Lectures ‘Bumbling’ Castro on Race Relations in Cuba , While Wilfully Blind to Black Lives Matter Movement in the US","authors":"J. Winter","doi":"10.16997/BOOK27.P","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/BOOK27.P","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter studies press coverage of Barack Obama’s visit to Cuba in March, 2016. The study compares the cliches of Cuba in press coverage to academic studies of Cuban realities, from pre-revolutionary days in the 1950s, to the present day. The coverage may be readily seen as part of Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman’s Propaganda Model of news media, relating to a number of the five filters, such as media ownership and profit orientation, the reliance on advertising and pursuant promotion of capitalism, and the anti-communism or ideology filter, which opposes nationalism anywhere other than the U.S. The press coverage of Obama’s visit provided no indication of what Noam Chomsky has identified as the real reason for the embargo against Cuba: the pro-capitalist ‘rotten apple’ or virus theory. That is, if Cuba is allowed to flourish on its own, unimpeded, then the ‘virus’ of socialism could spread to other Central American countries, as indeed it has done in the past decade. One can see here explicitly that this concern and the Cuban example are central to a Chomskyan analysis of international affairs and specifically US foreign policy. Similarly, these results comply with the findings of other contemporary writers such as Chris Hedges, Stephen Kinzer and William Blum.","PeriodicalId":117074,"journal":{"name":"The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114820929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conclusion","authors":"Joan Pedro-Carañana, D. Broudy, J. Klaehn","doi":"10.16997/book27.r","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/book27.r","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":117074,"journal":{"name":"The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness","volume":"353 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125637495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Corporate-Market Power and Ideological Domination: The Propaganda Model after 30 Years – Relevance and Further Application","authors":"Florian Zollmann","doi":"10.16997/BOOK27.N","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/BOOK27.N","url":null,"abstract":"This two-part-essay postulates the continued relevance of the Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model in the Internet age. Part one of the essay investigates the institutional composition of the digital media environment. It is demonstrated that corporate-market constraints still constitute major ‘filters’ of information: the online realm is highly commercialised and dominated by giant companies as well as advertising sponsors. Part two of the essay addresses the issue of ideology, arguing that humanitarianism and selective atrocity shaming have become major reference points to legitimise Western militarism. The concluding section of the essay outlines a set of broad research areas for scholars concerned about applying the Propaganda Model.","PeriodicalId":117074,"journal":{"name":"The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132265541","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From #15M to Podemos: Updating the Propaganda Model for Explaining Political Change in Spain and the Role of Digital Media","authors":"Miguel Álvarez-Peralta","doi":"10.16997/BOOK27.H","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/BOOK27.H","url":null,"abstract":"The internationalization of the Propaganda Model, together with its applicability for the digital sphere, are two of the liveliest debates regarding the updating of the model for the 21st century. As a contribution to them, this chapter focuses on the model’s boundaries, those situations where it faces difficulties for apprehending some communication dynamics, like social media, countries with a particular political culture (like Spain) and contexts of crisis and instability (2008-2015). In such cases, an actual propaganda system’s limitations create an open way for grassroots digital activism in connection with increased personal agency of individuals who belong to the new transmedia star system, creating strategic potentialities for political change. Such flaws of the propaganda system are needed to explain not only the enormous cultural impact of the 15-M movement in Spain, but also the unprecedented electoral success of the party Podemos in its first national elections.","PeriodicalId":117074,"journal":{"name":"The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness","volume":"67 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133162372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}