WHY
THE MEDIA LIE
THE
CORPORATE STRUCTURE OF THE MASS MEDIA
(part one)
www.newdawnmagazine.com
© By Nafeez
Mosaddeq Ahmed
On
11th September, in the space of an hour and a half, the
It was
not long before the perpetrators of the attack had supposedly been discovered. Osama Bin Laden and his international terror network, Al-Qaeda, was blamed, and the Taliban
was pinpointed as a “government” harbouring Al-Qaeda. A war on Afghanistan was justified, along with an
unlimited militarisation of US foreign policy, which
has gone on to focus on key strategic regions of the world as potential targets
of US intervention, and thus the expansion of US hegemony.
The
official story around 11th September espoused by the
The Independent Media: A Myth
For
those who have inspected the facts, it is clear that the mass media has failed
to generate genuine public awareness of the nature of Western policy. Majid Tehranian, Professor of
International Communication at the
In
their scholarship, William Appleton Williams, Noam
Chomsky, Richard Falk, Ramsey Clark, Ali Mazrui, and
other critics of US foreign policies have provided an abundance of evidence to
support the charges on the counter-democratic role of the
In an
extensive study of the US-UK special relationship, British historian Mark
Curtis, former Research Fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs
in
Mutual
Anglo-American support in ordering the affairs of key nations and regions,
often with violence, to their design has been a consistent feature of the era
that followed the Second World War... Policy in, for example, Malaya, Kenya,
British Guiana and Iran was geared towards organising
Third World economies along guidelines in which British, and Western, interests
would be paramount, and those of the often malnourished populations would be
ignored or further undermined. Similarly, US interventions overseas – in
Development
specialist Dr. J. W. Smith, who is Director of Research for the
California-based Institute for Economic Democracy, is even more explicit:
No society will tolerate it if they knew
that they (as a country) were responsible for violently killing 12 to 15
million people since WW II and causing the death of hundreds of millions more
their economies were destroyed or those countries were denied the right to
restructure to care for their people. Unknown as it
is, and recognising that this has been standard
practice throughout colonialism, that is the record of the Western imperial centres of capital from 1945 to 1990... While mouthing
peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule, all over the world
state-sponsored terrorists were overthrowing democratic governments, installing
and protecting dictators, and preventing peace, freedom, justice, rights, and
majority rule. Twelve to fifteen million
mostly innocent people were slaughtered in that successful 45 year effort to
suppress those breaks for economic freedom which were bursting out all over the
world... All intelligence
agencies have been, and are still in, the business of destabilising
undeveloped countries to maintain their dependency and the flow of the world’s
natural wealth to powerful nations’ industries at a low price and to provide
markets for those industries at a high price.3
It is
obvious that the media has failed to accurately portray the real nature of
Western foreign policy to the public. The question is, why does
the media conform to the dubious agenda of the government and corporate
elite?
The
answer lies in an analysis of how the media works. Probably the most thorough
analysis is Manufacturing Consent, written by two leading US academics,
Edward Herman (Professor Emeritus of Finance at Wharton School in the
University of Pennsylvania) and Noam Chomsky
(Institute Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT).4
The
principal reason to begin with this study is that it contains arguably the most
thoroughly researched and empirically verified model of the media available.
Herman and Chomsky’s landmark book is recommended by
Herman of Wharton and Chomsky of MIT
lucidly document their argument that America’s government and its corporate
giants exercise control over what we read, see and hear. The
authors identify the forces that they contend make the national media
propagandistic – the major three being
the motivation for profit through ad revenue, the media’s close links to and
often ownership by corporations, and their acceptance of information from
biased sources. In five case studies, the writers show how TV, newspapers
and radio distort world events… Extensive evidence is calmly presented, and in
the end an indictment against the guardians of our freedom is substantiated. A disturbing picture emerges of a news
system that panders to the interest of
Indeed,
according to the leading
This
book promises to be a seminal work in critical media analysis and to open a
door through which future media analysis will follow… Manufacturing Consent is
a work of tremendous importance for scholars and activists alike… Each chapter
is meticulously researched and most draw heavily on the authors’ earlier works
in these areas.8
All
this provides ample reason to understand Herman and Chomsky’s model of the
media.
A propaganda model does not entail a
grandiose conspiracy theory. Rather, it is based on analysing
the politico-economic influences on the mass media, and the extent to which
those influences condition the media’s reporting tendencies in accord with the
interests of power. The model can be described as a ‘guided free market’ model,
arguing that the media’s reporting is dominated by the same factors that guide
corporate activity: the maximisation of profit. A
propaganda model of the media asserts that the media is fundamentally conditioned
by the profit-orientated activities of corporate elites. As
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 behaviour;
rather, they argue, media bias arises
from ‘the preselection of right-thinking people, internalised 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 of the
Filter 1: Elite Ownership
Herman
and Chomsky’s model describes five ‘filters’ that limit what the media reports
in accord with governmental and corporate interests. Professor McChesney observes that:
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 of
the evidence would indicate the preposterous nature of many of the stories that
receive ample publicity in the press and on the network news broadcasts.10
The first filter consists of the size,
concentrated ownership, owner wealth and profit-orientation of the most
dominant mass media firms. Media ownership involves enormous costs,
which imposes rigid limits on who is able to run a media entity, even a small
one. To cater to a mass audience, a media organisation
must be a fairly sizeable corporation. Consequently, it will be owned either
directly by the state, or by wealthy individuals. In 1986, out of 25,000 US media entities, a mere 29 largest media
systems accounted for over half the output of newspapers and for the majority
of sales and audiences in magazines, broadcasting, books and films. These
massive media firms are profit-orientated corporations, owned and controlled by
wealthy profit-orientated people, which are also “closely interlocked, and have
common interests, with other major corporations, banks, and government”.11 Because
they are often fully integrated into the stock market, they become subject to
powerful pressures from stockholders, directors and bankers to focus on
profitability. This means that they are united by a basic framework of special
interests, even though they remain in competition:
These
control groups obviously have a special stake in the status quo by virtue of
their wealth and their strategic position in one of the great institutions of
society [the stock market]. And they exercise the power of this strategic
position, if only by establishing the general aims of the company and choosing
its top management.12
Major media corporations thus tend to
avoid news that questions the status quo in terms of the actions of the wealthy: If
media entities are owned by profit-orientated corporations that have a vested
interest in maintaining the status quo, those corporations are clearly not
going to employ individuals who question the status quo to run their media
entities. McChesney observes:
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.13
A large amount of the information the
public receives is controlled by a very small number of media sources.
Freedom House records that within states, out of 187 governments, 92 have
complete ownership of the television broadcasting structure, while 67 have part
ownership.14 Ownership of the world’s media sources is
growing increasingly concentrated. Thousands of other sources do exist, but in
comparison, their influence is negligible. The leading US media analyst Ben Bagdikan – former Dean at the Graduate School of Journalism
at the University of California, and a winner of almost every top prize in
American journalism including the Pulitzer – noting that despite more than 25,000 media entities in the US only “23 corporations
control most of the business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books,
and motion pictures”, concludes that this endows corporations with the
extensive power to exercise influence over “news, information, public ideas,
popular culture, and political attitudes”.15
The result is that a total of 12
corporations dominate the world’s mass media. US media and
communications expert Dr. Dean Alger – former Fellow in the Joan Shorenstein
Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F.
Kennedy School of Government – lists this ‘dominant dozen’ as follows in order
of power: Disney – Capital Cities – ABC; Time Warner – Turner; News
Corporation; Bertelsmann; Tele-Communications (TCI) – AT&T; General
Electric – NBC; CBS Inc.; Newshouse/Advance
Publications; Viacom; Microsoft; Matra – Hachette –
Filipacchi; Gannet.
Leading
journalists have commented on the implications. Journalist and former top
editor of the Chicago Tribunal, James Squires, describes the
concentration of media-ownership in profit-orientated corporations:
In its
struggle for relevance and financial security in the modern information age,
the press as an institution appears ready to trade its tradition and its public
responsibility for whatever will make a buck. In the starkest terms, the news media of the 1990s are a
celebrity-oriented, Wall-Street dominated, profit-driven entertainment
enterprise dedicated foremost to delivering advertising images to targeted
groups of consumers.
Richard
Clurman, who was for years a leading figure in Time
magazine, observes:
As the
news media became bigger and bigger business, the innovative traditions led by
creative editorial dominance began to erode... The media had grown from a
nicely profitable, creative business into a gigantic investment opportunity. It
was becoming harder to think of them as different from any other business in
free enterprise
Doug
Underwood – former reporter for The Seattle Times and the Gannett News
Service, now Professor of Communications at the
It’s
probably no surprise that in an era of mass media conglomerates, big chain
expansion, and multimillion dollar newspaper buy-outs, the editors of daily
newspapers have begun to behave more and more like the managers of any
corporate entity.16
The elites who dominate the various
institutions of society share a common set of values and associations linked
with their generally wealthy position as members of a highly privileged class.
These elites include the decision makers over politics, investment, production,
distribution; members of ideological institutions involving editorial positions,
control of journals and so on; those in managerial positions, who manage
corporations and have similar roles. These different elite groups all
interpenetrate one another in accord with their shared values and associations.
Furthermore, due to their common social position, they are largely socialised into the
traditional values that characterise their wealthy
class. This has a significant impact on their outlook on the world, and
consequently their attitude towards political affairs.17
In
Of the
eighty-five governors who have served in the first fifty years of the BBC’s
history, fifty-six had a university education (forty at Oxford or Cambridge)
and twenty were products of Eton, Harrow or Winchester. The political
experience of Board members has come mainly from the House of Lords although
there have been nineteen former MPs.18
Bob
Franklin, Reader in Media and Communication Studies at the University of
Sheffield, observes that abundant documentation proves that the elite “uses its privileged access to
media institutions to produce programming which is partial and supportive of a
particular class interest.”
Former
Editor-in-Chief David Bowman of the Sydney Morning Herald thus confirms
that “having thrown off one yoke, the press should now be falling under
another, in the form of a tiny and ever-contracting band of businessmen-proprietors.
Instead of developing as a diverse social institution, serving the needs of
democratic society, the press, and now the media, have become or are becoming
the property of a few, governed by whatever social, political and cultural
values the few think tolerable”.21 “The danger”, he
elsewhere observes, “is that the media of the future, the channels of mass
communication, will be dominated locally and world-wide by the values – social,
cultural and political – of a few individuals and their huge corporations.”22
The
mass media also broadly restricts the ideological orientation of its staff, the
result being that the media becomes largely ideologically subservient to the
assumptions and interests of the elite. Bob Franklin notes that this is because, editors are simply workers – albeit at a high grade
– and, as such, remain subject to the discipline of proprietors...
It
would certainly be difficult to persuade an editor that proprietors are no
longer in control of their newspapers. A succession of
editors from Harold Evans to Andrew Neil acknowledge the power of
proprietors in autobiographies which invariably detail their prompt removal
from the editorial chair following a disagreement with the owner... Proprietors’
power to ‘hire and fire’ makes them formidable figures, but they also control
all aspects of a newspaper’s financial and staffing resources.23
Media
expert Ben Bagdikan acknowledges the dictatorial
control over public life entailed by the increasing concentration in corporate
ownership:
In an authoritarian society there is a
ministry, or a commissar, or a directorate that controls what everybody will
see and hear. We call that a dictatorship. Here we have a handful of very
powerful corporations led by a handful of very powerful men and women who
control everything we see and hear beyond the natural environment and our own
families. That’s something which surrounds us every day and night. If it
were one person we’d call that a dictatorship, a ministry of information.24
The
extent of the power that elites have over the media can be grasped when we
recall that even Western intelligence agencies control the press. For example,
an internal committee of the CIA reported in 1992 that:
We
[i.e. the CIA] have relationships with reporters [that] have helped us turn
some intelligence failure stories into intelligence success stories. Some
responses to the media can be handled in a one-shot phone call.25
Former CIA Director William Colby went
further, admitting: “The Central Intelligence Agency owns anyone of any
significance in the major media.”26
Consequently,
the legitimacy of elite interests are presupposed by
the mass media in terms of a general all-pervading set of assumptions. Since these assumptions are rooted in the
elite ideology, the mass media, owned by a corporate
elite, is generally unable to fundamentally question that ideology. Bob
Franklin thus concludes that “while it is possible to cite cases where the
media have toppled the powerful, there is a greater body of evidence to suggest
that their role is more typically to serve as a source of support.”27
It is therefore not surprising that debate
within the media is largely restricted to the assumption of Western
governmental and corporate benevolence, the belief in the viability and
legitimacy of the status quo. Dissent that stretches beyond
these limits by choosing to question the very assumptions adopted at the outset
by the media, will be neglected. Certainly, due to the sheer mass of news it is
also predictable that the odd dissenting report may filter through – but the
substantial majority of reports will “serve as a source of support” for elite
interests.
As the
American political scientist Michael Parenti writes,
the result of corporate ownership of the media where staffing will be
especially restricted to those who conform to the ideological requirements of
corporate power, is that journalists
“rarely doubt their own objectivity even as they faithfully echo the
established political vocabularies and the prevailing politico-economic
orthodoxy. Since they do not cross any forbidden
lines, they are not reined in. So they
are likely to have no awareness they are on an ideological leash.”28 A
propaganda model clarifies the institutional structure of the media that
prevents criticism of elite policy from receiving little in-depth critical
analysis by the mainstream media. Permissible dissent then becomes powerless,
unable to question the ideological framework upon which the elite dominated
social structures are based. The result has been noted by media analyst W.
Lance Bennett:
The public is
exposed to powerful persuasive messages from above and is unable to communicate
meaningfully through the media in response to these messages... Leaders
have usurped enormous amounts of political power and reduced popular control
over the political system by using the media to generate support, compliance,
and just plain confusion among the public.29
Filter 2: Elite Funding
The second filter noted by Herman and
Chomsky, related to the first filter, is advertising.
Professor McChesney notes that advertising “has colonised the
Advertisers,
of course, constitute corporate sponsors. This means that newspapers that fail
to attract such corporate sponsors, are more likely to
be either marginal or non-existent. Additionally, a newspaper will be more favourable to advertisers if it is biased towards the
assumptions and values of a wealthy readership. With newspapers having become
so dependent on advertising to exist and flourish, corporate sponsors effectively
retain a significant control over which newspapers survive, what they choose to
report, and how they do so. Consequently, newspapers unattractive to
advertisers can be undercut – without a good source of funds from advertising,
their prices tend to be higher, reducing sales and reducing profit by which to
invest in improving saleability (via quality, format,
promotions, etc.). Such newspapers can therefore be effectively marginalised – in some cases, driven completely out of
existence.
In
their authoritative history of the British press, James Curran and Jean Seaton
conclude that the growth in both advertising and capital costs were critical in
eliminating the popular radical press that had emerged in the first half of the
nineteenth century. They record that “advertisers thus acquired a de facto
licensing authority since, without their support, newspapers ceased to be
economically viable”.31
These two filters mean that the mass media
is institutionally structured to be subservient to the corporate elite. It is
thereby at once directly owned and structurally controlled by that elite, and indirectly influenced by financial pressures
from corporate sponsors related to advertising. The mass media as an institution
is intrinsically subservient to corporate ideology. As Professor Edward Herman
states, “capitalists control the media and they do so to maximise
profits”. What does this entail? Herman explains:
The
main element in corporate ideology is the belief in the sublimity of the market
and its unique capacity to serve as the efficient allocator
of resources. So important is the market
in this ideology that ‘freedom’ has come to mean the absence of constraints on
market participants, with political and social democracy pushed into the
background as supposed derivatives of market freedom. This may help explain the
tolerance by market-freedom lovers of market-friendly totalitarians – Pinochet
or Marcos. A second and closely related constituent of corporate ideology is
the danger of government intervention and regulation, which allegedly tends to
proliferate, imposes unreasonable burdens on business, and therefore hampers
growth. A third element in the ideology is that growth is the proper national
objective, as opposed to equity, participation, social justice, or cultural
advance and integrity. Growth should be sustainable, which means that the
inflation threat should be a high priority and unemployment kept at the level
to assure the inflation threat is kept at bay. The resultant increasingly
unequal income distribution is also an acceptable price to pay. Privatisation is also viewed as highly desirable in
corporate ideology, following naturally from the first two elements – market
sublimity and the threat of government. It also tends to weaken government by
depriving it of its direct control over assets, and therefore has the further
merit of reducing the ability of government to serve the general population
through democratic processes... [P]rivatisation
yields enormous payoffs to the bankers and purchasers participating in the sale
of public assets.32
These
ideological positions become implicit assumptions pervading permissible
political discourse within the media. It is therefore extremely rare to find
these principles being subjected to fundamental critical examination by the
corporate-owned media.
Filter 3: Elite Information Sources
The third filter constitutes the sources
that the mass media routinely relies on for news. Because the
media needs a steady and reliable source of news, resources are focused where
news can be most easily acquired. Unfortunately, central news terminals of this
type happen to be the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department, as
well as business corporations and trade groups. The importance of such organisations as news sources is because they possess the
greatest resources for public relations and promotional material. Consequently,
“the mass media are drawn into a
symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic
necessity and reciprocity of interest”.33 Alternative media entities established by human
rights organisations and other groups are thus marginalised. The public then receives news and analysis
that fundamentally conforms to the elite ideology, and facts largely cannot be scrutinised free from the assumptions of that ideology. News is thus filtered in accordance with
what is suitable to the requirements of elite power and its interests. McChesney explains:
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 subsidise the media and the media must
be careful not to antagonise 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.34
For
example, the
To
consolidate their pre-eminent position as sources, government and business-news
promoters go to great pains to make things easy for news organisations...
In effect, the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidise
the mass media, and gain special access by their contribution to reducing the
media’s costs of acquiring the raw materials of, 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.35
The impact
of this, as Mark Fishman affirms, is that:
News workers are predisposed to treat
bureaucratic accounts as factual because news personnel participate
in upholding a normative order of authorised knowers in the society. Reporters operate with the attitude that officials ought to know what
it is their job to know... In particular, a newsworker
will recognise an official’s claim to knowledge not
merely as a claim, but as a credible, competent piece of knowledge.
“This
amounts to a moral division of labour: officials have
and give the facts”, which are therefore beyond question, however tenuous or
absurd, while “reporters merely get them” from the bureaucratic elite.36
Filter 4: Elite Flak
The fourth filter Chomsky and Herman refer
to is ‘flak’: the negative responses to a media report in the form
of letters, phone calls, petitions, speeches, legal
and parliamentary action, among other methods of complaint. One of the most significant forms of flak
already discussed is the withdrawal of advertising revenue, which in itself
can be sufficient for editors to review their product. This form of flak can
lead to the entire elimination of a media source that is unfavourable
to corporate sponsors and their interests. Flak can also serve as a deterrent
to producing certain kinds of programme or story, and
can even prevent reporters from investigating particular issues because of how
unlikely it is that such stories would be published. Business organisations often come together to form organisations devoted solely to the mass dissemination of
flak, by which to impose immense pressure on the media to follow the corporate
lead.
In the
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… While ostensibly antagonistic
to the media, these flak machines provide the media with legitimacy and are
treated quite well by the media.37
One of
the most potent disseminators of flak is the government itself due to its
enormous resources. Compared with such corporate power, the ability of other organisations representing the poor, the oppressed or the
environment to pressurise the media is dwarfed.38
Filter 5: Elite Ideology
Since
the corporate ideology dominates the media by way of being almost
institutionally assumed, all ideologies
that are in fundamental opposition to the corporate ideology must similarly be
institutionally assumed incorrect: the fifth filter. Nationalist social
movements around the world that threatened the international capitalist system
under
We can
recall evidence for this when we compare the orthodox interpretation of the
Cold War espoused by most academic and media commentators with the fact that
there was no global Communist threat. Major covert operations, such as the
installation of the Shah in
Conversely,
when journalists or editors challenge the prevailing anticommunist orthodoxy,
they “must meet far higher standards; in fact standards are often imposed that
can barely be met in the natural sciences”.41 This filter is, however, not limited to anticommunism –
rather it is related to the prevailing pretext for Western policy at the time.
After the collapse of the
The
fifth filter is essentially synonymous with the elite ideology, since it is in
the context of this ideology that social movements and ideas in opposition to
the dominant ideology are interpreted within the media. Other elements of the
final filter will therefore include the benevolence of one’s government, the
universal merits of private enterprise, the benign character of corporations
and their activities, and so on. All of
these inherently imply the demonisation of the
perceived threat to
In the
second part of this paper, we will discuss in further detail the new alleged
threat that has come to the fore, particularly in the aftermath of
11th September: the threat of Islamic terrorism in the form of Osama Bin Laden’s “Al-Qaeda”.
Notes:
1. Tehranian, Majid, ‘A Requiem for
Realism?’, Peace & Policy, 3:1, Spring
1998.
2. Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power: British
Foreign Policy Since 1945, Zed,
3. Smith, J. W., ‘Simultaneously Suppressing the World’s Break for Freedom’, Economic
Democracy: The Political Struggle of the Twenty-First
Century, M. E. Sharpe,
4. Herman, Edward S. and Chomsky, Noam, Manufacturing
Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Vintage,
5. FAIR, www.fair.org; GRIID,
affiliated with CMC, www.grmc.org, www.grcmc.org/griid.
6. ‘The Media’, Corporate Watch magazine, Issue 5 & 6.
7. McChesney, Robert W., ‘Introduction’ in Chomsky, Noam, Profit Over People, op. cit.
8. McChesney, Robert, W., ‘Edward S. Herman on the propaganda model’, Monthly
Review, January 1989
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, op. cit., p. 14.
12. Ibid., p. 8
13. McChesney, Monthly Review, January 1989.
14.
15. Bagdikan, Ben H., The
Media Monopoly, Beacon Press,
16. Alger, Dean, Megamedia: How Giant
Corporations Dominate Mass Media, Distort Competition, and Endanger Democracy,
Rowman & Littlefield,
17. All this is well understood. For studies of elite power in relation to
Britain see for instance John Scott, Who Rules Britain?, Polity Press,
Cambridge, 1991; Mark Curtis’s study in The Ambiguities of Power of the
mainstream British media is also very illuminating, disclosing the subservience
of the media in relation to Nicaragua and the Gulf War in particular. A fairly
competent analysis of the British media is Curran, James and Seaton, Jean, Power
without responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, Methuen,
London, 1985; and especially Franklin, Bob, Newszak
& News Media, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1997. Also see Pilger, John, Distant Voices, Vintage,
18. Dearlove, J. and Saunders, P. An Introduction
to British Politics; cited in Franklin, Bob, Newszak
& News Media, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1997, p. 41.
19. Franklin, Bob, ibid.
20. Cited in Ibid.
21. Cited in 24 Hours,
22.
23. Franklin, Bob, Newszak & News Media,
op. cit. p. 40.
24. Ben Bagdikian interviewed by David Barsamian in ‘Navigating the Media’, Z Magazine,
September 1998.
25. Memorandum to Director of CIA, Task Force on Greater CIA Openness,
26. Cited in McGowan, David, Derailing Democracy, Common Courage Press,
27.
28. Parenti cited in Pilger,
John, Hidden Agendas, op. cit., p. 4.
29. Bennet, W. Lance, News: The Politics of
Illusion,
30. McChesney, Monthly Review, January 1989.
31. Alger, Dan, Megamedia: How Giant
Corporations Dominate Mass Media, Distort Competition, and Endanger Democracy,
Rowan & Littlefield, Oxford, 1998, p. 154, 158; Curran, James and Seaton,
Jean, Power without responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain,
Methuen, London, 1985, p.31. Also see Barnouw, Erik, The
Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate, Oxford University Press, 1978.
32. Interview with Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney
by David Peterson, ‘The Global Media’, Z Magazine, June 1997.
33. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, op. cit., p. 14.
34. McChesney, Monthly Review, January 1989.
35. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, op. cit., p. 21-22.
36. Fishman, Mark, Manufacturing News,
37. McChesney, Monthly Review, January 1989.
38. For an introductory discussion of how the propaganda model can be extended
to explain and reveal the corporate conditioning of Western culture and
academia, see Edwards, David, Free To Be Human: Intellectual Self-Defence in an Age of Illusions, A Resurgence Book,
Green Books, Devon, 1995.
39. McChesney, Monthly Review, January 1989.
40. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, op. cit., p. 25.
41. Ibid., p. 291.
42. See for example, Masud, Enver, The War On Islam, The Wisdom Fund, Madrasah
Books Division,
______________________________________________________________________________
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
is a political analyst and human rights activist, specialising in Western foreign
policy and its impact on human rights. He is Executive Director of the
Institute for Policy Research & Development (IPRD), an independent,
interdisciplinary, non-profit think tank based in