Reviews

Jeffery Klaehn (Ed.) (2005) Filtering the News: Essays on Herman and Chomsky's Propaganda Model

London: Black Rose Books (224 pages; Paperback ISBN: 1-55164-260-3 $24.99/£17.99)

This edited collection is a welcome addition to the sparse literature on the Propaganda Model of media operations advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (1994, 2002). Manufacturing Consent argues that, in contrast to state-controlled media in the former Soviet bloc, the media in the capitalist, liberal-democratic West is based on a guided market system. The outcome, however, is similar; in both cases, the media operates to mobilise support for the interests of the economic and political elite. As such, it represents a powerful tool for thought control, which, in the West, is in the hands of private corporations and their political representatives. Basing their model on media operations in the United States (US), Herman and Chomsky (1994: 2) explain that their model focuses upon the:

'inequality of wealth and power and its multi-level effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the route by which money and power and able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalise dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their message across to the public. The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters" fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business and "exports" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anti-communism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amounts to propaganda campaigns.'

Klaehn opens the collection with a critical assessment of the Propaganda Model, highlighting its first-order prediction - that the five filters will effectively shape the discourse of the mainstream media. Herman and Chomsky (1994, 2002) amply demonstrate that this is the case by providing copious amounts of empirical evidence. Klaehn also discusses its second-order prediction - that, if the first-order prediction is correct, the model will be excluded from intellectual debate on media behaviour and media discourse. This assertion is also borne out: the Propaganda Model is often omitted from university media courses and it has been ignored within the academic literature. Indeed, in a challenge to their critics, such as Schlesinger (1989) who dismissed the model as 'highly determinist', Herman (2000: 111) threw down the gauntlet, proclaiming 'we are still waiting for our critics to provide a better model.'

In his review of the operation of the Propaganda Model, Klaehn observes that in the post-Cold War period the dichotomy of 'otherness' has replaced the now redundant anti-communism as the fifth filter. The current 'War on Terror' is the latest, and arguably most effective, attempt to construct an ideological basis for the maintenance of thought control. Subsequent contributors then applied the Propaganda Model to a range of contemporary events, as reported in the mainstream media in Canada and the US. These include the media coverage of the 2003 Iraq war; a demolition of the claim that the media is biased against Israel; the case of the 1987-1991 civil war in El Salvador; the propaganda utility of Dan Rather's (CBS News) 'patriotic journalism'; and the systematic marginalisation of protestors' voices.

There are also two chapters devoted to empirically testing the Propaganda Model. The first investigates the Canadian media's coverage of the events in East Timor between 1975 and 1991. Using the two methodological devices of the Propaganda Model - contrasting media coverage of paired examples of concurrent historical events whilst identifying the boundaries of permissible opinion - Klaehn compares the Canadian media's coverage of the genocidal events in Cambodia and East Timor. He concludes that the mainstream media downplayed the genocide in East Timor, where Canada had important economic and geopolitical interests, while giving considerable coverage to comparable events in Cambodia, just as the Propaganda Model would predict. The second chapter looked at the discourse of Canadian newspapers on the environment, specifically global warming and the Kyoto Protocol, concluding that their coverage reflected business interests, again just as the Propaganda Model would predict. In the final chapter, Klaehn explores the criticisms that have been made of the Propaganda Model by both academics and commentators. He explodes the myth that the model is conspiratorial, that it is deterministic, that it fails to account for micro-processes of media behaviour (which the structuralist Propaganda Model never set out to do), and that it fails to theorise audience effects (which was never the intention of the Propaganda Model).

To conclude, there are two substantive criticisms that can be levelled at this collection. The first is the absence of an introduction and conclusion to draw together the salient arguments and to point the way forward. The second is that it would have benefited from an index. Nevertheless, this collection is an important contribution to the literature and it deserves to be widely read. Furthermore, is it not time that media scholars in Britain acknowledged the Propaganda Model and tested its utility in terms of explaining the operation of the British media?

Dr Andy Mullen, Politics Division, Northumbria University.

Bibliography

Herman, E. (1996) 'The Propaganda Model Revisited', Monthly Review, July.
Herman, E. (2000) 'The Propaganda Model: A Retrospective', Journalism Studies, Vol.1, No.1, pp.101-112.
Herman, E. and Chomsky, N. (1994) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, London: Vintage.
Herman, E. and Chomsky, N. (2002) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, New York: Pantheon Books.
Schlesinger, P. (1989) 'From Production to Propaganda' in Media, Culture and Society, Vol.11, pp. 283-306.