What is the propaganda model and how does it work? The crucial structural factors derive from the fact that the dominant media are firmly imbedded in… - Edward S. Herman
" "What is the propaganda model and how does it work? The crucial structural factors derive from the fact that the dominant media are firmly imbedded in the market system. They are profit-seeking businesses, owned by very wealthy people (or other companies); they are funded largely by advertisers who are also profit-seeking entities, and who want their ads to appear in a supportive selling environment. The media are also dependent on government and major business firms as information sources, and both efficiency and political considerations, and frequently overlapping interests, cause a certain degree of solidarity to prevail among the government, major media, and other corporate businesses. Government and large non-media business firms are also best positioned (and sufficiently wealthy) to be able to pressure the media with threats of withdrawal of advertising or TV licenses, libel suits, and other direct and indirect modes of attack. The media are also constrained by the dominant ideology, which heavily featured anticommunism before and during the Cold War era, and was mobilized often to prevent the media from criticizing attacks on small states labelled communist.
About Edward S. Herman
Edward Samuel Herman (April 7, 1925 – November 11, 2017) was professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania and a media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy. He also taught at Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He developed, with Noam Chomsky, the propaganda model of media criticism which seeks to explain how populations are manipulated and how consent for economic, social, and political policies is "manufactured" in the public mind due to this alleged propaganda.
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Additional quotes by Edward S. Herman
An important body of evidence that suggests the irrelevance of enemy atrocities to U.S. intervention in Vietnam may be found in official Washington responses to a broader spectrum of foreign atrocities. Official estimates of deliberate NLF killings in South Vietnam for the nine-year period 1958-1966 are on the order of 12,000, and the Defense Department estimates 19,578 enemy killings of civilians in South Vietnam from 1964 through September 1969. Yet in 1966 between 500,000 and 1,000,000 men, women, and children were slaughtered in Indonesia without even provoking any official U.S. protest, let alone an invasion to prevent mass murder.
The common view that internal freedom makes for humane and moral international behavior is supported neither by evidence nor by reason. The United States has a long history of imposing oppressive terrorist regimes in regions of the world within the reach of its power, such as the Caribbean and Central American sugar and banana republics […]. Since World War II, with the great extension of U.S. power, it has borne a heavy responsibility for the spread of a plague of neofascism, state terrorism, torture and repression through large parts of the undeveloped world. The United States has globalized the “banana republic.” This has occurred despite some modest ideological strain because the developments serve the needs of powerful and dominant interests, state and private, within the United States itself.
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In general, far from "exonerating the Vietcong," the media bent over backwards to blame them for the casualties and destruction caused by the U.S. forces who were "protecting" and "defending" South Vietnam and its population, according to unquestioned dogma. While the reporting was generally accurate in a narrow sense, the framework and the general picture presented are outlandish, and conform closely to the demands of the state propaganda system. It is, once again, highly revealing that Freedom House regards such service to the state as unremarkable-indeed, insufficient, by its standards.