mass-communication-theory

92 Section 2 The Era of Mass Society and Mass Culture
Close your eyes and think welfare. Did you envision large corporations accepting
government handouts, special tax breaks for businesses, companies building
ships and planes that the military does not want? Or did you picture a single
mother, a woman of color, cheating the taxpayers so she can stay home and watch
Jerry Springer? This narrowing of public discourse and debate is examined in
works such as historian Herb Schiller’s Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of
Public Expression (1989); communication theorist Robert McChesney’s Corporate
Media and the Threat to Democracy (1997) and The Problem of the Media (2004);
mass communication researchers Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman’s The
Press Effect (2003); and linguist Noam Chomsky’s American Power and the New
Mandarins (1969), Deterring Democracy (1991), and with Edward S. Herman,
Manufacturing Consent (Herman and Chomsky, 1988). All offer a common perspective.
In Jamieson and Waldman’s words, it is, “‘Facts’ can be difficult to discern
and relate to the public, particularly in a context in which the news is driven
by politicians and other interested parties who selectively offer some pieces of information
while suppressing others” (xiii).
Take one such “interested party,” advertisers and their advertising, as an example.
Different ads may tout one product over another, but all presume the logic
and rightness of consumption and capitalism. Our need for “more stuff” is rarely
questioned: the connection between wealth/consumption and success/acceptance is
never challenged; and concern about damage to the environment caused by, first,
the manufacture of products and second, their disposal, is excluded from the debate.
The point is not that consumption and capitalism are innately bad, but that
as in all successful propaganda efforts, the alternatives are rarely considered.
When alternatives are considered, those who raise them are viewed as out of the
mainstream or peculiar. By extension, this failure to consider alternatives benefits
those same economic elites most responsible for limiting that consideration and reflection.
Sproule has written thoughtfully and persuasively on advertising as propaganda
in Channels of Propaganda (1994) and Propaganda and Democracy: The
American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion (1997).
This current reconsideration of propaganda theory comes primarily from critical
theorists and, as a result, its orientation tends to be from the political Left
(Chapter 2). For example, economist and media analyst Edward S. Herman identified
five filters that ensure the “multi-leveled capability of powerful business and
government entities and collectives (for example, the Business Roundtable; U.S.
Chamber of Commerce; industry lobbies and front groups) to exert power over
the flow of information” (1996, p. 117). These filters enable powerful business
and government elites “to mobilize an elite consensus, to give the appearance of
democratic consent, and to create enough confusion, misunderstanding, and apathy
in the general population to allow elite programs to go forward” (p. 118). The first
two of Herman’s elite-supporting filters are ownership and advertising, which
“have made bottom line considerations more controlling. . . . The professional autonomy
of journalists has been reduced” (p. 124). The next two are sourcing and
flack, increasingly effective because “a reduction in the resources devoted to journalism
means that those who subsidize the media by providing sources for copy
gain greater leverage” (p. 125). Here he is specifically speaking of the power of
corporate and government public relations. Finally, the fifth filter motivating media
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