Media

QUESTION: When we talk about manufacturing of consent, whose consent is being manufactured? CHOMSKY: To start with, there are two different groups, we can get into more detail, but at the first level of approximation, there's two targets for propaganda. One is what's sometimes called the political class. There's maybe twenty percent of the population which is relatively educated, more or less articulate, plays some kind of role in decision-making. They're supposed to sort of participate in social life -- either as managers, or cultural managers like teachers and writers and so on. They're supposed to vote, they're supposed to play some role in the way economic and political and cultural life goes on. Now their consent is crucial. So that's one group that has to be deeply indoctrinated. Then there's maybe eighty percent of the population whose main function is to follow orders and not think, and not to pay attention to anything -- and they're the ones who usually pay the costs. []

Editorial bias: five filters
The propaganda model describes five editorially-distorting filters applied to news reportage in mass media: []
 * 1) **Size, Ownership, and Profit Orientation:** the business connections among the owning corporations, the identity of the controlling investors, and the personal, political, and financial affiliations of external directors.
 * 2) **The Advertising License to Do Business:** the advertising-income-based news media must cater to the political prejudices and economic desires of advertisers.
 * 3) **Sourcing Mass Media News:** reporters consider governmental sources as more factually reliable than private sources. “In effect, the large bureaucracies of the powerful //subsidize// the mass media, and gain special access, by their contribution to reducing the media’s costs of acquiring . . . and producing, news”.
 * 4) **Flak and the Enforcers:** powerful, private influence groups (e.g. conservative or liberal think tanks) organize systematic replies to reporters deviating from the official corporate interpretation of facts and events.
 * 5) **Anti-Communism:**since the Russo–American Cold War’s (1945–91) ending, anticommunism was transubstantiated into the contemporary "War on Terror", as the current national religion and social control mechanism. See “Media Control, the Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda”[|[1]].