So how does this process of ‘manipulation’ or ‘persuasion’ work?

1.Structures of ownership

• Maybe there is only a few select amount of companies
• “The first has to do with ownership. Mass media firms are big corporations. Often, they are part of even bigger conglomerates. Their end game? Profit. And so it’s in their interests to push for whatever guarantees that profit. Naturally, critical journalism must take second place to the needs and interests of the corporation.”

2.The role of advertising

• The propaganda model is a conceptual model in political economy advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky to explain how propaganda and systemic biases function in corporate mass media.

3.Links with ‘The Establishment’

• Links with higher power
• (THE MEDIA ELITE)
• The establishment manages the media through the third filter. Journalism cannot be a check on power because the very system encourages complicity. 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’. They make themselves crucial to the process of journalism. So, those in power and those who report on them are in bed with each other.

4.Diversionary tactics – ‘flak’

• Diverse someone’s attention to something else
• “If you want to challenge power, you’ll be pushed to the margins. 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.”

5.Uniting against a ‘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.

Noam Chomsky describes himself as an anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian socialist, and is considered to be a key intellectual figure within the left wing of politics of the United States.

Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals“. Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard Nixon‘s Enemies List

What is the manufacturing consent theory?

It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion”, by means of the propaganda model of communication …

The 5 Filters of Mass Media Machine

The five filters are:

(1) ownership; (2) advertising; (3) official sources; (4) flak; and (5) marginalizing dissent.

The author discusses the applicability of Herman’s and Chomsky’s propaganda model today.

1. Ownership: Mass media companies and firms as parts of even bigger conglomerates, as a sole function for profit. In their interest to push what ever increases that profit.
2. Advertising money: Advertisers are paying for audiences. So their role is to be at the use of mass media conglomerates as a tool to increase profits.
3. The media Elite: Make themselves crucial to the process of advertising. They are used as a tool to help the processes of media consumption. You cannot challenge power.
4. Flak machine: discrediting, distorting, challenging and undermining stories.
5. The common enemy: Helps crowd public opinion, points the finger at the common enemy as a tactic to control the masses.

AGENDA SETTING

FRAMING

MYTH MAKING

CONDITIONS OF CONSUMPTION