- Ownership: The first has to do with ownership. The endgame of mass media firms is profit. Critical journalism must take second place to the needs and interests of the corporation.
- Advertising: The second filter exposes the real role of advertising. Media costs a lot more than consumers will ever pay. So who fills the gap? Advertisers. And what are the advertisers paying for? Audiences. And so it isn’t so much that the media are selling you a product — their output. They are also selling advertisers a product — YOU.
- The media elite: Governments, corporations, big institutions know how to play the media game. They know how to influence the news narrative. They feed media scoops, official accounts, interviews with the ‘experts’. Journalism cannot be a check on power because the very system encourages complicity, and it is said that those in power and those who report on them are in bed with each other.
- Flak: When the media – journalists, whistleblowers, sources – stray away from the consensus, they get ‘flak’. This is the fourth filter. When the story is inconvenient for the powers that be, you’ll see the flak machine in action discrediting sources, trashing stories and diverting the conversation.
- The common enemy: To manufacture consent, you need an enemy — a target. That common enemy is the fifth filter. Communism. Terrorists. Immigrants. A common enemy, a bogeyman to fear, helps corral public opinion.
Agenda setting: Noam Chomsky defined agenda-setting as the “the tacit alliance between the government of a country (usually Western and especially U.S.) and the media to communicate to viewers, listeners or readers of a medium only what matters, and hide the most of what can be dangerous or detrimental to the stability they think right for their country.”
Framing: Framing involves social construction of a social phenomenon – by mass media sources, political or social movements, political leaders, or other actors and organizations.