No More Learning

The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissi- dents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so natu- rally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of pro- fessional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news
choices are hardly imaginable. In assessing the newsworthiness of the U. S. government's urgent claims of a shipment of MIGs to Nicaragua on November 5, 1984, the media do not stop to ponder the bias that is inherent in the priority assigned to government-supplied raw mate- rial, or the possibility that the government might be manipulating the news,2 imposing its own agenda, and deliberately diverting attention from other materiaJ. 3 It requires a macro, alongside a micro- (story- by-story), view of media operations, to see the pattern of manipula- tion and systematic bias.
Let us turn now to a more detailed examination of the main constitu- ents of the propaganda model, which will be applied and tested in the chapters that follow.
I
I
1. 1. SIZE, OWNERSHIP, AND PROFIT ORIENTATION OF THE MASS MEDIA:
THE FIRST FILTER
In their analysis of the evolution of the media in Great Britain, James Curran and Jean Seaton describe how, in the first half of the nineteenth century, a radical press emerged that reached a national working-class audience. This alternative press was effective in reinforcing class con- sciousness: it unified the workers because it fostered an alternative value system and framework for looking at the world, and because it "promoted a greater collective confidence by repeatedly emphasizing the potential power of working people to effect social change through the force of 'combination' and organized action. "4 This was deemed a major threat by the ruling elites. One MP asserted that the working- class newspapers "inflame passions and awaken their selfishness, con- trasting their current condition with what they contend to be their future condition-a condition incompatible with human nature, and those immutable laws which Providence has established for the regula- tion of civil society. "5 The result was an attempt to squelch the work- ing-class media by libel laws and prosecutions, by requiring an expensive security bond as a condition for publication, and by imposing various taxes designed to drive out radical media by raising their costs. These coercive efforts were not effective, and by mid-century they had
been abandoned in favor of the liberal view that the market would enforce responsibility.
Curran and Seaton show that the market did successfully accomplish what state intervention failed to do. Following the repeal of the punitive taxes on newspapers between r853 and 1869, a new daily local press came into existence, but not one new local working-class daily was established through the rest of the nineteenth century. Curran and Seaton note that
Indeed, the eclipse of the national radical press was so total that when the Labour Party developed out of the working-class move- ment in the first decade of the twentieth century, it did not obtain the exclusive backing of a single national daily or Sunday paper. 6
One important reason for this was the rise in scale of newspaper enter- prise and the associated increase in capital costs from the mid- nineteenth century onward, which was based on technological
A PROPAGA~DA MODEL 3
l
4 MANUFACTURING CONSUlT
improvements along with the owners' increased stress on reaching large audiences. The expansion of the free market was accompanied by an "industrialization of the press. " The total cost of establishing a national weekly on a profitable basis in 1837 was under a thousand pounds, with a break-even circulation of 6,200 copies. By 1867) the estimated start-up cost of a new London daily was 50,000 pounds. The Sunday Express, launched in 1918, spent over two million pounds before it broke even with a circulation of ovcr 2. SQ,flQ. Q. ? '?
Similar processes were at work in the United States, where the start-up cost of a new paper in New York City in 1851 was 569,000; the public sale of the St. Louis Democrat in 1872 yielded $456,000; and city newspapers were selling at from $6 to $18 million in the 1920s. 8 The cost of machinery alone, of even very small newspapers, has for many decades run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars; in 1945 it could be said that "Even small-newspaper publishing is big business . . . [and] is no longer a trade one takes up lightly even if he has substantial cash-or takes up at all if he doesn't. "9
Thus the first filter-the limitation on ownership of media. with any substantial outreach by the requisite large size of investment-was applicable a century or more ago, and it has become increasingly effec- tive over time. lO In 1986 there were some 1,500 daily newspapers, II,OOO magazines, 9,000 radio and I,sao TV stations, 2>400 book publishers, and seven movie studios in the United States-over 25,000 media entities in all. But a large proportion of those among this set who were news dispensers were very small and local, dependent on the large national companies and wire services for all but local news. Many more were subject to common ownership, sometimes extending through vir- tually the entire set of media variants. a
Ben Bagdikian stresses the fact that despite the large media numbers, the twenty-nine largest media systems account for over half of the output of newspapers, and most of the sales and audiences in maga- zines, broadcasting, books, and movies. He contends that these "consti- tute a new Private Ministry of Information and Culture" that can set the national agenda. 12
Actually, while suggesting a media autonomy from corporate and government power that we believe to be incompatible with structural facts (as we describe below), Bagdikian also may be understating the degree of effective concentration in news manufacture. It has long been noted that the media are tiered, with the tOp tier-as measured by prestige, resources, and outreach-comprising somewhere between ten and twenty-four systems. u It is this top tier, along with the government and wire services, that defines the news agenda and supplies much of
the national and international news to the lower tiers of the media, and rhus for the general publk'4 Centralization within the top tier was substantially increased by the post-World War II rise of television and the national networking of this important medium. Pre-television news markets were local, even if heavily dependent on the higher tiers and a narrow set of sources for national and international news; the net- works provide national and international news from three national sources, and television is now the principal source of news for the public. '5 The maturing of cable, however, has resulted in a fragmenta- tion of television audiences and a slow erosion of the market share and power of the networks.
Table 1-1 provides some basic financial data for the twenty-four media giants (or their controlling parent companies) that make up the top tier of media companies in the United States. l6 This compilation includes: (I) the three television networks: ABC (through its parent, Capital Cities), CBS, and NBC (through its ultimate parent, General Electric [GEl); (2) the leading newspaper empires: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times (Times-Mirror), Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones), Knight-Ridder, Gannett, Hearst, Scripps-Howard, New- house (Advance Publications), and the Tribune Company; (3) the major news and general-interest magazines: Time, Newsweek (subsumed under Washington Post), Reader's Digest, TV Guide (Tdangle), and U. S. News & World Report; (4) a major book publisher (McGraw-Hill); and (5) other cable-TV systems of large and growing importance: those of Murdoch, Turner, Cox, General Corp. , Taft, Storer,l7 and Group W
I 01/estinghouse). Many of these systems are prominent in more than one field and are only arbitrarily placed in a particular category (Time, Inc. , is very important in cable as well as magazines; McGraw-Hill is a major publisher of magazines; the Tribune Company has become a large force in television as well as newspapers; Hearst is important in magazines
I as well as newspapers; and Murdoch has significant newspaper interests as well as television and movie holdings).
These twenty-four companies are large, profit-seeking corporations, owned and controlled by quite wealthy people. It can be seen in table I-I that all but one of the top companies for whom data are available have assets in excess of $1 billion, and the median size (middle item by size) is $2. 6 billion. It can also be seen in the table that approximately three-quaners of these media giants had after-tax profits in excess of $100 million, with the median at $183 million.
Many of the large media companies are fully integrated into the market, and for the others, too, the pressures of stockholders, directors, and bankers to focus on the bottom line are powerful. These pressures
A PROPACA~DA MODEL 5
6
MANUfACTURING CONSENT
COMP ANY
Advance Publications (Newhouse)l
Capital Cities/ABC
CBS
Cox Communi-
cations2 Dow Jones &
Co. Gannett
General Eleetric (NBC)
Hearst3
Knight-Ridder McGraw-Hill News Corp.
(Murdoch)? New York
Times Reader's
Digest~
Time, Inc. Times-Mirror TriangleS Tribune Co. Turner
Broadcasting U. S. News &
World Report9
PROFITS PROFITS
TOT AL BEFORE AFTER TOT AL
ASSETS TAXES TAXES REVENUE ($ MILLIONS) ($ MILLIONS) ($ MILLIONS) ($ MILLIONS)
TABLE 1-1
Financial Data for Twenty-four Large Media Corporations (or Their Parent Firms), December 1986
2,200
4,124
4,754 743
1,135
2,BOI
36,725
2,100 (1983) 1,911 1,517 3,822
1,565
1,400 (1985) 1,062 (-17) 537 Toft 1,257 (-II) (-53) 500
2,500
5,191
3,370 1,111
1,236
3,365 34,591
4,040
1,947 1,463 8,460
1,405
NA
4,23<> 2,929 NA 2,589 1,904
200+
. . .
448
NA NA
. 7. 370 17. 87
331 183
540 27' 3,689 2,492
NA 215 (1983) 2. 7 140 296 154 377 170
256 132
75-110 NA (1985)
Scripps-Howard6 Storer7
NA 1,242
NA NA . .
. . . . . .
NA NA 140
62l> 37. 3,762
2,948 NA NA 73<J 523 293 2,030 (-185) (-187) 570
=
A PROPAGA~DA MODEL 7
PROFITS PROFITS
TOT AL BEFORE AFTER TOT AL
ASSETS TAXES TAXES REVENUE ($ MILLIONS) ($ MILLIONS) ($ MILLIONS) ($ MILLIONS)
1,145 205 100 1,215 8,482 801 670 10,731
COMPANY
W ashington POst
W estinghouse
NA = not available
to The :l$Ct tOtal is taken from Forbes magazine's wealth total for the New- house family for 1985; the total revenue is for media sales only, as reported in Advem:sing Age, June 29, 1987.
:z. . Col: Communications was publicly owned until 1985, when it was merged into another Cox family company, Cox Enterprises. The data presented here are for year-end 1984, the last year of public ownenhip and disclosure of substantial financial information.
~ Data compiled in William Barrett, "Citizens Rich," FO'1'bes, Dec. 14, 1987. 4. These data are in Australian dollan and are for June 30, 1986; at that date
the Australian dollar was worth 6 8 /100 of a u. S. dollar.
5- Data for 1985, as presented in the NefJ) YO'1'k Time; Feb. 9, 1986.
6. Total revenue for media sales only, as reported inAdvertising Age, June 29, 1987.
7- Storer came under the control of the Wall Street firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts &. Co. in 1985; the dan here are for December 1984, the last period of Storer autonomy and publicly available information.
s. Total revenue for media sales only; from Advertising Age, June 29, 1987.
9. Total assets as of 1984-85, based on "Mort Zuckerman, Media's New Mogul," FO'1'tune, Oct. 14, 1985; total revenue from Adwrlising Age, June 29, 1987.
have intensified in recent years as media stocks have become market favorites, and actual or prospective owners of newspapers and televi- sion properties have found it possible to capitalize increased audience s. ize and adverti"iing revenues. into multiQlied values of the media fran- chises-and great wealth. 18 This has encouraged the entry of specula-
tors and increased the pressure and temptation to focus more intensively on profitability. Family owners have been increasingly di- vided between those wanting to take advantage of the new opportuni- ties and those desiring a continuation of family control, and their splits
8 MANUFACTURI~G CO~SENT
have often precipitated crises leading finally to the sale of the family interest. 19
This trend toward greater integration of the media into the market system has been accelerated by the loosening of rules limiting media
door to the unrestrained commercial use of the airwaves. 21
The greater profitability of the media in a deregulated environment has also led to an increase in takeovers and takeover threats, with even giants like CBS and Time, Inc. , directly attacked or threatened. This has forced the managements of the media giants to incur greater debt and to focus ever more aggressively and unequivocally on profitability, in order to placate owners and reduce the attractiveness of their proper- ties to outsiders,22 They have lost some of their limited autonomy to bankers, institutional investors, and large individual investors whom
they have had to solicit as potential "white knights. "23
While the stock of the great majority of large media firms is traded on the securities markets, approximately two-thirds of these companies are either closely held or still controlled by members of the originating family who retain large blocks of stock. This situation is changing as family ownership becomes diffused among larger numbers of heirs and the market opportunities for selling media properties continue to im- prove, but the persistence offamily control is evident in the data shown in table 1-2. Also evident in the table is the enormous wealth possessed by the controlling families of the top media firms. For seven of the twenty-four, the market value of the media properties owned by the controlling families in the mid-I98os exceeded a billion dollars, and the median value was close to half a billion dollars. 24 These control groups obviously have a special stake in the status quo by virtue oftheir wealth and their strategic position in one of the great institutions of society. And they exercise the power of this strategic position) if only by establishing the general aims of the company and choosing its top
management. 2S
The control groups of the media giants are also brought into close
relationships with the mainstream of the corporate community through boards of directors and social links. In the cases of NBC and the Group W television and cable systems, their respective parents, GE and West- inghouse, are themselves mainstream corporate giants, with boards of directors that are dominated by corporate and banking executives. Many of the other large media firms have boards made up predomi-
<:1;:>'OC~'I,\t"'2. t~'I,\, ~"%",--'Vw'M.
. . ,,,h\p, 'dnd 'C'i)1\t'rm by m:m-mt;dia cmnpa- nies. 20 There has also been an abandonment of restrictions-previously quite feeble anyway--on radio-TV commercials, entertainment- mayhem programming, and "fairness doctrine" threats, opening the
TABLE 1-2
Wealth of the Control Groups of Twenty-four Large Media Corporations (or Their Parent Companies), February 1986
PERCENT AGE OF VOTING STOCK
V ALUE OF CONTROLLING STOCK
CONTROLLING HELD BY
FAMILY CONTROL INTEREST
A PROP AGANDA MODEL 9
OR GROUP
Newhouse family
Cox family
Bancroft-Cox families
00,
00,
Hearst family Knight and Ridder
families McGraw family Murdoch family Sulzberger family Wallace estate
managed by trustees; no personal beneficiaries
Scripps heirs
00, 00, 00,
Chandlers Annenbergs McCormick heirs Turner
GROUP (%)
Closc:ly hc:ld
36
54
(5
MILLIONS) 2,200F
P
7l1 551P
F P
F F F
F
COMP ANY
Advance Publications
Capital Cities
CBS 00, 20. 61
Officers and directors (ODs)
20. 7 (Warren Buffett, 17. 8)
Cox Com? IOunications
Dow Jones & Co. Gannett
General Electric Hearst Knight-Ridder
McGraw-Hill News Corp.
New York Times Reader's Digest
Scripps. Howard
Storer
T. rt
Time, Inc.
Times-Mirror Triangle Tribune Co. Turner
Broadcasting
I,900 1,500
. 5' ]7] P
1. '
Under 1
33 I,SOOF 18 447'
<. 20 450 4' 300 80 450 NA NA
NA I,400
8. 4 143P 4. 8 37'
10. 7 (Luce 4. 6, Temple 3. 2)
406'
I,200P 1,600 F
35 Closely 16. 6
80
held
273 222
P P
10 MANUfACTURING CONSENT
PERCENTAGE OF VOTING STOCK
VALUE OF CONTROLLING STOCK
CONTROLLING HELD BY
FAMILY CONTROL INTEREST
COMPANY
U. S. News & World Report
Washington Post Westinghouse
OR GROUP Zuckerman
Graham family 00,
GROUP (%)
Closely held
50+ Under I
(I MILLIONS) 1762
350" 42'
Sources: P means taken from proxy statements and computed from stock values as of February 1986; F means taken from Forbes magazine's annual estimate of wealth holdings of the very rich.
I. These holdings include William Paley's 8. 1 percent and a 12. 2 percent holding of Laurence Tisch through an investment by Loews. Later in the year, Loews increased its investment to 24. 9 pen. :ent, and Laurence Tisch soon thereafter became acting chief executive officer.
2. This is the price paid by Zuckerman when he bought U. S. Nf! 'WS in 1984. See Gwen Kinkead, "Mort Zuckerman, Media's New Mogul," Forlune, Oct. 14, 1985, p. 196.
nantly of insiders, a general characteristic of relatively small and owner-dominated companies. The larger the firm and the more widely distributed the stock, the larger the number and proportion of outside directors. The composition of the outside directors of the media giants is very similar to that of large non-media corporations. Table 1-3 shows that active corporate executives and bankers together account for a little over half the total of the outside directors of ten media giants; and the lawyers and corporate-banker retirees (who account for nine of the thirteen under "Retired") push the corporate total to about two-thirds of the outside-director aggregate. These 95 outside directors had direc-
torships in an additional 36 banks and 255 other companies (aside from the media company and their own firm of primary affiliation). 26
In addition to these board linkages, the large media companies all do business with commercial and investment bankers, obtaining lines of credit and loans, and receiving advice and service in selling stock and bond issues and in dealing with acquisition opportunities and takeover threats. Banks and other institutional investors are also large owners of media stock. In the early 1980s, such institutions held 44 percent of the stock of publicly owned newspapers and 35 percent of the stock of
A PIlOPAGANDA MODEL 11
TABLE 1-3
AFFILIATIONS OF THE OUTSIDE DIRECTORS OF TEN LARGE MEDIA COMPANIES (OR THEIR PARENTS) IN 1986*
PRIMARY
AFFILIA TION
NUMBER PERCENT
39 41. 1
8 8. '
? ' . 2 15 15. 8
Corporate executive
Lawyer
Retired (former corporate eltecutive or banker) Banker
Consultant
Nonprofit organization
Other
Total
RELA TIONSHIPS
Other directorships (bank directorships) Former government officials
Member of Council on Foreign Relations
8. '
8
13 (9) 13. 7 (9. 5)
OTHER
8
95 100. 0
255 (36) 15
20
8. '
'* Dow Jones & Co. ; Washington Post; New York Times; Time, Inc. ; CBS; Times-Mirror; Capital Cities; General Electric; Gannett; and Knight~Rid- der.
publicly owned broadcasting companies,27 These investors are also frequently among the largest stockholders of individual companies. For example, in 1980-81, the Capital Group, an investment company sys- tem, held 7. 1 percent of the stock of ABC, 6. 6 percent of Knight- Ridder, 6 percent of Time, Inc. , and 2. 8 percent of Westinghouse. 28 These holdings, individually and collectively, do not convey control, but these large investors can make themselves heard, and their actions can affect the welfare of the companies and their managers. 29 If the managers fail to pursue actions that favor shareholder returns, institu- tional investorS will be inclined to sell the stock (depressing its price), or to listen sympathetically to outsiders contemplating takeovers. These
12 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
investors are a force helping press media companies toward strictly market (profitability) objectives.
So is the diversification and geographic spread of the great media companies. Many of them have diversified out of particular media fields into others that seemed like growth areas. Many older newspaper-based media companies, fearful of the power of television and its effects on advertising revenue, moved as rapidly as they could into broadcasting and cable TV. Time, Inc. , also, made a major diversification move into cable TV, which now accounts for more than half its profits. Only a small minority of the twenty-four largest media giants remain in a single media sector. 30
The large media companies have also diversified beyond the media field, and non-media companies have established a strong presence in the mass media. The most important cases of the latter are GE, owning RCA, which owns the NBC network, and Westinghouse, which owns major television-broadcasting stations, a cable network, and a radio- station network. GE and Westinghouse are both huge, diversified mul- tinational companies heavily involved in the controversial areas of weapons production and nuclear power.
It may be recalled that from 1965 to 1967, an attempt by International Telephone and Telegraph (lIT) to acquire ABC was frustrated following a huge outcry that focused on the dangers of allowing a great multinational corporation with extensive foreign investments and business activities to control a major media outlerY The fear was that ITT control "could compro-
mise the independence of ABC's news coverage of political events in countries where lIT has interests. "32 The soundness of the decision disallowing the acquisition seemed to have been vindicated by the later revelations of ITT's political bribery and involvement in attempts to overthrow the government of Chile. RCA and Westinghouse, however, had been permitted to control media companies long before the lIT case, although some of the objections applicable to ITT would seem to apply to them as well. GE is a more powerful company than ITT, with an extensive international reach, deeply involved in the nuclear power business, and far more important than lIT in the arms industry. It is a highly centralized and quite secretive organization, but one with a vast stake in "political" decisions. 33 GE has contributed to the funding of the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank that sup- ports intellectuals who will get the business message across. With the acquisition of ABC, GE should be in a far better position to assure that sound views are given proper attention. 34 The lack of outcry over its takeover of RCA and NBC resulted in part from the fact that RCA control over NBC had already breached the gate of separateness, but
J
A PR. OPAGANDA MODEL 13
it also reflected the more pro-business and laissez-faire environment of the Reagan era.
The non-media interests of most of the media giants are not large, and, excluding the GE and Westinghouse systems, they account for only a small fraction of their total revenue. Their multinational out- reach, however, is more significant. The television networks, television syndicators, major news magazines, and motion-picture studios all do extensive business abroad, and they derive a substantial fraction of their revenues from foreign sales and the operation of foreign affiliates. Reader's Digest is printed in seventeen languages and is available in over 160 countries. The Murdoch empire was originally based in Australia, and the controlling parent company is still an Australian corporation; its expansion in the United States is funded by profits from Australian and British affiliates. 35
Another structural relationship of importance is the media compa-
nies' dependence on and ties with government. The radio-TV compa-
nies and networks all require government licenses and franchises and
are thus potentially subject to government control or harassment. This
technical legal dependency has been used as a club to discipline the I media, and media policies that stray too often from an establishment
orientation could activate this threat. 36 The media protect themselves
from this contingency by lobbying and other political expenditures, the
cultivation of political relationships, and care in policy. The political
ties of the media have been impressive. Table 1-3 shows that fifteen of
ninety-five outside directors of ten of the media giants are former
government officials, and Peter Dreier gives a similar proportion in his
study of large newspapers. 37 In television, the revolving-door flow of
personnel between regulators and the regulated firms was massive dur-
ing the years when the oligopolistic structure ofthe media and networks I was being established. 38
The great media also depend on the government for more general policy support. All business firms are interested in business taxes, inter- est rates, labor policies, and enforcement and nonenforcement of the antitrust laws. GE and Westinghouse depend on the government to subsidize their nuclear power and military research and development, and to create a favorable climate for their overseas sales. The Reader's Diges4 Time, Newsweek, and movie- and television-syndication sellers also depend on diplomatic support for their rights to penetrate foreign cultures with U. S. commercial and value messages and interpretations of current affairs. The media giants, advertising agencies, and great multinational corporations have a joint and close interest in a favorable
climate of investment in the Third World, and their interconnections
14 MAN\JFACTURISG CONSENT
and relationships with the government in these policies are symbiotic. 39 In sum, the dominant media firms are quite large businesses; they are controlled by very wealthy people or by managers who are subject to sharp constraints by owners and other market-profit-oriented forces;40 and they are closely interlocked, and have important common interests, with other major corporations, banks, and government. This is the first
powerful filter that will affect news choices.
1. 2. THE ADVERTISING LICENSE TO DO BUSINESS: THE SECOND FILTER
In arguing for the benefits of the free market as a means of controlling dissident opinion in the mid-nineteenth century, the Liberal chancellor of the British exchequer, Sir George Lewis, noted that the market would promote those papers "enjoying the preference of the advertising public. "41 Advertising did, in fact, serve as a powerful mechanism weakening the working-class press. Curran and Seaton give the growth of advertising a status comparable with the increase in capital costs as a factor allowing the market to accomplish what state taxes and harass- ment failed to do, noting that these "advertisers thus acquired a de facto licensing authority since, without their support, newspapers ceased to be economically viable. "42
Before advertising became prominent, the price of a newspaper had to cover the costs of doing business. With the growth of advertising, papers that attracted ads could afford a copy price well below produc- tion costs. This put papers lacking in advertising at a serious disadvan- tage: their prices would tend to be higher, curtailing sales, and they would have less surplus to invest in improving the salability of the paper (features, attractive format, promotion, etc. ). For this reason, an adver- tising-based system will tend to drive out of existence or into marginal- ity the media companies and types that depend on revenue from sales alone. With advertising, the free market does not yield a neutral system in which final buyer choice decides. The advertisers' choices influence media prosperity and surviva1. 43 The ad-based media receive an adver- tising subsidy that gives them a price-marketing-quality edge, which allows them to encroach on and further weaken their ad-free (or ad- disadvantaged) rivals. " Even if ad-based media cater to an affluent
(<<upscale") audience, they easily pick up a large part of the "down-
I
A PROP AGANDA MODEL l j
scale" audience, and their rivals lose market share and are eventually driven out or marginalized.
In fact, advertising has played a potent role in increasing concentra- tion even among rivals that focus with equal energy on seeking advertis- ing revenue. A market share and advertising edge on the part of one paper or television station will give it additional revenue to compete more effectively-promote more aggressively, buy more salable fea- tures and programs-and the disadvantaged rival must add expenses it cannot afford to try to stem the cumulative process of dwindling market (and revenue) share. The crunch is often fatal, and it helps explain the death of many large-circulation papers and magazines and the attrition in the number of newspapers. 45
From the time of the introduction of press advertising, therefore, working-class and radical papers have been at a serious disadvantage. Their readers have tended to be of modest means, a factor that has always affected advertiser interest. One advertising executive stated in 1856 that some journals are poor vehicles because "their readers are not purchasers, and any money thrown upon them is so much thrown away. "46 The same force took a heavy toll of the post-World War II social-democratic press in Great Britain, with the Daily Herald, News Chronicle, and Sunday Citizen failing or abSorbed into establishment systems between 1960 and 1967, despite a collective average daily read- ership of 9. 3 million. As James Curran points out, with 4. 7 million readers in its last year, "the Daily Herald actually had almost double the readership of The Times, the Financial Times and the Guardian combined. " What is more, surveys showed that its readers "thought mare highly of their paper than the regular readers of any other popular newspaper," and "they also read more in their paper than the readers of other popular papers despite being overwhelmingly working class. . . . "47 The death of the Herald, as well as of the News Chronicle and Sunday Citizen, was in large measure a result of progressive stran- gulation by lack of advertising support. The Herald, with 8. 1 percent of national daily circulation, got 3. 5 percent of net advertising revenue; the Sunday Citizen got one-tenth of the net advertising revenue of the Sunday Times and one-seventh that of the Observer (on a per-thou- sand-copies basis). Curran argues persuasively that the loss of these three papers was an important contribution to the declining fortunes
of the Labor party, in the case of the Herald specifically removing a mass-circulation institution that provided "an alternative framework of analysis and understanding that contested the dominant systems of representation in both broadcasting and the mainstream press. "48 A mass movement without any major media support, and subject to a
16 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
great deal of active press hostility, suffers a serious disability, and struggles against grave odds.
The successful media today are fully attuned to the crucial impor- tance of audience "quality": CBS proudly tells its shareholders that while it "continuously seeks to maximize audience delivery," it has developed a new "sales tool" with which it approaches advertisers: "Client Audience Profile, or CAP, will help advertisers optimize the effectiveness of their network television schedules by evaluating audi- ence segments in proportion to usage levels of advertisers' products and services. "49 In short, the mass media are interested in attracting audi- ences with buying power, not audiences per se; it is affluent audiences that spark advertiser interest today, as in the nineteenth century. The idea that the drive for large audiences makes the mass media "demo- cratic" thus suffers from the initial weakness that its political analogue is a voting system weighted by income!
The power of advertisers over television programming stems from the simple fact that they buy and pay for the programs-they are the "patrons" who provide the media subsidy. As such, the media compete for their patronage, developing specialized staff to solicit advertisers and necessarily having to explain how their programs serve advertisers' needs. The choices of these patrons greatly affect the welfare of the media, and the patrons become what William Evan calls "normative reference organizations,"5o whose requirements and demands the media must accommodate if they are to succeed. 51
For a television network, an audience gain or loss of one percentage point in the Nielsen ratings translates into a change in advertising revenue of from $80 to $100 million a year, with some variation depend- ing on measures of audience "quality. " The stakes in audience size and affluence are thus extremely large, and in a market system there is a strong tendency for such considerations to affect policy profoundly.
This is partly a matter of institutional pressures to focus on the bottom line, partly a maner of the continuous interaction of the media or- ganization with patrons who supply the revenue dollars. As Grant Tinker, then head of NBC-TV , observed, television "is an advertising- supported medium, and to the extent that support falls out, program- ming will change. "52
Working-class and radical media also suffer from the political dis- crimination of advertisers. Political discrimination is structured into advertising allocations by the stress on people with money to buy. But many firms will always refuse to patronize ideological enemies and those whom they perceive as damaging their interests, and cases of
overt discrimination add to the force of the voting system weighted by income. Public-television station WNET lost its corporate funding from Gulf + Western in 1985 after the station showed the documentary "Hungry for Profit," which contains material critical of multinational corporate activities in the Third World. Even before the program was shown, in anticipation of negative corporate reaction, station officials "did all we could to get the program sanitized" (according to one station source). 53 The chief executive of Gulf + Western complained to the station that the program was "virulently anti-business if not anti- American," and that the station's carrying the program was not the behavior "of a friend" of the corporation. The London Economist says that "Most people believe that WNET would not make the same mis- take again. "54
In addition to discrimination against unfriendly media institutions, advertisers also choose selectively among programs on the basis of their own principles. With rare exceptions these are culturally and politically conservative. 55 Large corporate advertisers on television will rarely sponsor programs that engage in serious criticisms of corporate activi- ties, such as the problem of environmental degradation, the workings of the military-industrial complex, or corporate support of and benefits from Third World tyrannies. Erik Bamouw recounts the history of a proposed documentary series on environmental problems by NBC at a time of great interest in these issues. Barnouw notes that although at that time a great many large companies were spending money on com- mercials and other publicity regarding environmental problems, the documentary series failed for want of sponsors. The problem was one of excessive objectivity in the series, which included suggestions of corporate or systemic failure, whereas the corporate message "was one of reassurance. "56
Television networks learn over time that such programs will not sell and would have to be carried at a financial sacrifice, and that, in addition, they may offend powerful advertisers. 57 With the rise in the price of advertising spots, the forgone revenue increases; and with increasing market pressure for financial performance and the diminish- ing constraints from regulation, an advertising-based media system will gradually increase advertising time and marginalize or eliminate alto- gether programming that has significant public-affairs content. 58
Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the "buy- ing mood. " They seek programs that will lightly entertain and thus fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose of program purchases-the
A PROPAGANDA MODEL 17
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i .
I
dissemination of a selling message. Thus over time, instead of programs like "The Selling of the Pentagon," it is a natural evolution of a market seeking sponsor dollars to offer programs such as "A Bird's-Eye View of Scotland," "Barry Goldwater's Arizona," "An Essay on Hotels," and "Mr. Rooney Goes to Dinner"-a CBS program on "how Americans eat when they dine out, where they go and why. "5~ There are excep- tional cases of companies willing to sponsor serious programs, some- times a result of recent embarrassments that call for a public-relations offset. 6O But even in these cases the companies will usually not want to sponsor close examination of sensitive and divisive issues-they prefer programs on Greek antiquities, the ballet, and items of cultural and national history and nostalgia. Bamouw points out an interesting con- trast: commercial-television drama "deals almost wholly with the here a. nd now, a. s processed via advertising budgets," but on public televi- sion, culture "has come to mean 'other cultures. ' . . . American civiliza- tion, here and now, is excluded from consideration. "61
Television stations and networks are also concerned to maintain audience "flow" levels, i. e. , to keep people watching from program to program, in order to sustain advertising ratings and revenue. Airing program interludes of documentary-cultural matter that cause station switching is costly, and over time a "free" (i. e. , ad-based) commercial system will tend to excise it. Such documentary-cultural-critical materials will be driven out ofsecondary media vehicles as well, as these companies strive to qualify for advertiser interest, although there will always be some cultural-political programming trying to come into being or surviving on the periphery of the mainstream media.
1. 3. SOURCING MASS-MEDIA NEWS: THE THIRD FILTER
The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of inter- est. The media need a steady, reliable flow of the raw material of news. They have daily news demands and imperative news schedules that they must meet. They cannot afford to have reporters and cameras at all places where important stories may break. Economics dictates that they concentrate their resources where significant news often occurs, where important rumors and leaks abound, and where regular press
18 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
conferences are held. The White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department, in Washington, D. C. , are central nodes of such news activity. On a local basis, city hall and the police department are the subject of regular news "beats" for reporters. Business corporations and trade groups are also regular and credible purveyors of stories deemed newsworthy. These bureaucracies turn OUt a large volume of material that meets the demands of news organizations for reliable, scheduled flows. Mark Fishman calls this "the principle of bureaucratic affinity: only other bureaucracies can satisfy the input needs of a news bureauc- racy. "62
Government and corporate sources also have the great merit ofbeing recognizable and credible by their status and prestige. This is important to the mass media. As Fishman notes,
Newsworkers are predisposed to treat bureaucratic accounts as factual because news personnel participate in upholding a norma- tive order of authorized 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 recognize 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 labor: officials have and give the facts; reporters merely get them. 6 3
Another reason for the heavy weight given to official sources is that the mass media claim to be "Objective" dispensers of the news. Partly to maintain the image of objectivity, but also to protect themselves from criticisms of bias and the threat of libel suits, they need material that can be portrayed as presumptively accurate. 64 This is also partly a matter of cost: taking information from sources that may be presumed credible reduces investigative expense, whereas material from sources that are not prima facie credible, or that will elicit criticism and threats, requires careful checking and costly research.
The magnitude ofthe public-information operations oflarge govern- ment and corporate bureaucracies that constitute the primary news sources is vast and ensures special access to the media. The Pentagon, for example, has a public-information service that involves many thou- sands ofemployees, spending hundreds ofmiIIions ofdollars every year and dwarfing not only the public-information resources of any dissent- ing individual or group but the aggregate of such groups. In 1979 and 1980, during a brief interlude of relative openness (since closed down),
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20 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
the U. S. Air Force revealed that its public-information outreach in- cluded the following:
140 newspapers, 690,000 copies per week Airman magazine, monthly circulation 125,000 34 radio and 17 TV stations, primarily overseas 45,000 headquarters and unit news releases 615,000 hometown news releases
6,600 interviews with news media
3,200 news conferences
500 news media orientation flights
50 meetings with editorial boards
11,000 speeches65
This excludes vast areas of the air force's public-information effort. Writing back in 1970, Senator J. W. Fulbright had found that the air force public-relations effort in 1968 involved 1,305 full-time employees, exclusive of additional thousands that "have public functions collateral to other duties. "66 The air force at that time offered a weekly film-clip service for TV and a taped features program for use three times a week, sent to 1,139 radio stations; it also produced 148 motion pictures, of which 24 were released for public consumption. 67 There is no reason to believe that the air force public-relations effort has diminished since the 1960s. 68
Note that this is iust the air force. There are three other branches with massive programs, and there is a separate, overall public-information program under an assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in the Pentagon. In 1971, an Armed Forces Journal survey revealed that the Pentagon was publishing a total of 371 magazines at an annual cost of some $57 million, an operation sixteen times larger than the nation's biggest publisher. In an update in 1982, the Air Furee Journal lnterna- OQ7lal indicated that the Pentagon was publishing 1,203 periodicals. 69 To put this into perspective, we may note the scope of public-informa- tion operations of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the National Council of the Churches of Christ (NCC), two of the largest of the nonprofit organizations that offer a consistently challeng- ing voice to the views of the Pentagon. The AFSC's main office infor- mation-services budget in 1984-85 was under $500,000, with eleven staffpeople. 70 Its institution-wide press releases run at about two hun- dred per year, its press conferences thirty a year, and it produces about
one film and two or rhree slide shows a year. It does not offer film clips,
photos, or taped radio programs to the media. The NCC Office of Information has an annual budget of some $350,000, issues about a hundred news releases per year, and holds four press conferences annu- ally. 71 The ratio of air force news releases and press conferences to those of the AFSC and NCC taken together are 150 to I (or 2,200 to I if we count hometown news releases of the air force), and 94 to I respectively. Aggregating the other services would increase the differ- ential by a large factor.
Only the corporate sector has the resources to produce public infor- mation and propaganda on the scale of the Pentagon and other govern- ment bodies. The AFSC and NCC cannot duplicate the Mobil Oil company's multimillion-dollar purchase of newspaper space and other corporate investments to get its viewpoint across. 72 The number of individual corporations with budgets for public information and lobby- ing in excess of those of the AFSC and NCC runs into the hundreds, perhaps even the thousands. A corporate collective like the U. S. Cham- ber of Commerce had a 1983 budget for research, communications, and political activities of$65 million. 73 By 1980, the chamber was publishing a business magazine (Nation's Business) with a circulation of 1. 3 million and a weekly newspaper with 740,000 subscribers, and it was producing a weekly panel show distributed to 400 radio stations, as well as its own weekly panel-discussion programs carried by 128 commercial television stations. 7 4
Besides the U. S. Chamber, there are thousands of state and local chambers of commerce and trade associations also engaged in public- relations and lobbying activities. The corporate and trade-association lobbying network community is "a network ofwell over 150,000 profes- sionals,"75 and its resources are related to corporate income, profits, and the protective value of public-relations and lobbying outlays. Cor- porate profits before taxes in 1985 were $295. 5 billion. When the corpo- rate community gets agitated about the political environment, as it did in the 1970s, it obviously has the wherewithal to meet the perceived threat. Corporate and trade-association image and issues advertising increased from $305 million in 1975 to 5650 million in 1980. 76 So did direct-mail campaigns through dividend and other mail stuffers, the distribution of educational films, booklets and pamphlets, and outlays on initiatives and referendums, lobbying, and political and think-tank contributions. Aggregate corporate and trade-association political advertising and grass-roots outlays were estimated to have reached the billion-dollar-a- year level by 1978, and to have grown to $1. 6 billion by 1984. 77
To consolidate their preeminent position as sources, government and
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22 MASUFACTURING CONSENT
business-news promoters go to great pains to make things easy for news organizations. They provide the media organizations with facilities in which to gather; they give journalists advance copies of speeches and forthcoming reports; they schedule press conferences at hours well- geared to news deadlines;78 they write press releases in usable language; and they carefully organize their press conferences and "photo oppor- tunity" sessions. 79 It is the job ofnews officers "to meet the journalist's scheduled needs with material that their beat agency has generated at its own pace. "80
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 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. It should also be noted that in the case of the largesse of the Pentagon and the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy,Sl the subsidy is at the taxpayers' expense, so that, in effect, the citizenry pays to be propagandized in the interest of power- ful groups such as military contractors and other sponsors of state terrorism.
Because of their services, continuous contact on the beat, and mutual dependency, the powerful can use personal relationships, threats, and rewards to further influence and coerce the media. The media may feel obligated to carry extremely dubious stories and mute criticism in order not to offend their sources and disturb a close relationship. 82 It is very difficult to call authorities on whom one depends for daily news liars, even if they tell whoppers. Critical sources may be avoided not only because aftheir lesser availability and higher cost of establishing credi- bility, but also because the primary sources may be offended and may even threaten the media using them.
Powerful sources may also use their prestige and importance to the media as a lever to deny critics access to the media: the Defense Department, for example, refused to participate in National Public Radio discussions of defense issues if experts from the Center for Defense Information were on the program; Elliott Abrams refused to appear on a program on human rights in Central America at the Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University, unless the former ambassador, Robert White, was excluded as a partici- pant;S3 Claire Sterling refused to participate in television-network shows on the Bulgarian Connection where her critics would appear. 84 In the last two of these cases, the authorities and brand-name ex-
pens? were successful in monopolizing access by coercive threats. Perhaps more important, powerful sources regularly take advantage of media routines and dependency to "manage" the media, to manipu- late them into following a special agenda and framework (as we will show in detail in the chapters that follow). 85 Part of this management process consists of inundating the media with stories, which serve sometimes to foist a particular line and frame on the media (e. g. , Nicaragua as illicitly supplying arms to the Salvadoran rebels), and at other times to help chase unwanted stories off the front page or out of the media altogether (the alleged delivery of MIGs to Nicaragua during the week of the 1984 Nicaraguan election). This strategy can be traced back at least as far as the Comminee on Public Information, established to coordinate propaganda during World War I, which "discovered in 1917-18 that one of the best means of controlling news was flooding news channels with 'facts,' or what amounted to official information. "86 The relation between power and sourcing extends beyond official and corporate provision of day-to-day news to shaping the supply of "experts. " The dominance of official sources is weakened by the exis- tence of highly respectable unofficial sources that give dissident views I with great authority. This problem is alleviated by "co-opting the ex-
perts"87_i. e. , puning them on the payroll as consultants, funding their research, and organizing think tanks that will hire them directly and help disseminate their messages. In this way bias may be structured, and the supply of experts may be skewed in the direction desired by the government and "the market.