The Centrist Outlook and the Propaganda Model of the News Media

Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky's classic Manufacturing Consent was neither the first word on the way the very structure of the news media builds into it a political bias in favor of the status quo and the rich and powerful who prosper by it (Upton Sinclair covered this ground way back in the World War I period), nor the last (Matt Taibbi recently endeavoring to update Manufacturing Consent for the digital age, complete with an interview with Chomsky about the matter). Still, the book justly remains a touchstone for students of the media for its presentation of a "propaganda model" of the news--in which ownership (the fact that the news is a business, in the main a Big Business concentrated in few hands), advertising (the influence of other Big Business over the news media through its advertising dollars), "sourcing" (the media's unavoidable reliance on society's dominant institutions themselves to supply them with the information they retail), "flak" (the susceptibility of media outlets to potentially bank-breaking political counterattack that they are anxious to avoid) and Anti-Communism (providing an intellectual framework for dealing with events). Indeed, while not long ago I took up the matter of the bias of the news media on a very different basis I have since come back to it again and again. Indeed, if having argued for the mainstream media being strongly biased in a centrist direction at multiple levels (the ideological balance in the country more broadly, the backgrounds of the people who become journalists, the culture of the news profession, etc.), it seems worth considering how this interacts with a propaganda model that is above all driven by business factors--and in doing that, start with the character of political centrism.

The centrist package of "horseshoe theory" anti-extremism that on closer inspection is mainly Anti-Communism, the centrist's hostility to the mass and esteem of the elite and its experts, their pessimism in epistemology and much else, their orientation to resolving conflicts about social problems rather than dealing with the problems that are the causes, their standard of "pluralist" and "civil" discourse that delegitimizes what they recognize as "ideologues" in a way that is not politically neutral or equally enforced against all parties. All this makes centrists deferential to "Establishment" institutions and spokespersons and the privilege they represent, as respectful of the right as they are disrespectful of the left, disinclined to try explaining complex issues and instead simply pass on the pronouncements of "authority," obsessed with politics at the expense of policy, and more concerned for political consensus than finding out the facts and uncovering the truth (as seen in their propensity for both sidesism).

Those espousing such an ideology do not very easily recognize the advantages enjoyed by the well-resourced as against the less well-resourced, or regard their exercise of their power relative to other groups as at all problematic. Naturally they are not bothered by those key propaganda model factors, the concentration of the news media in a few hands, the influence advertisers exert through their dollars, and the way that those with the means can organize "flak" to intimidate media outlets taking a line they do not like. Altogether this means that the centrist would regard attentiveness to those advantages and problems as inconsistent with their conceptions of "pluralism" and "civility." Nor are they troubled by the reliance on "sourcing," because they are respectful of elites, and they are certainly approving of the fifth factor, the "national religion" status of Anti-Communism--while again having no truck with the opposite outlook. Indeed, they are critical not of those factors that turn the mainstream media into a machinery for propaganda, but of those who object to its being a machinery for propaganda in this fashion; entirely comfortable with a media working in a propaganda model way, and equally hostile to those who are not, a fact not just conducive but essential to that system's functioning as it has done down to the present.