Pre-Class "A Propaganda Model"

Although this article was tricky to read during some parts, I found "A Propaganda Model" by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky to be quite interesting. What I took away from this piece was that the propaganda model is a conceptual model within the political economy sphere that attempts to explain how propaganda works and functions within mass media outlets in our society. I think that the model tries to explain how populations are easily manipulated and how consent for economic, social and political policies is in a sense manufactured in the public mind due to this thing we call propaganda. I thought a lot about the way in which our news is structured and framed. I took away from this piece that this "propaganda model" views the private media as businesses interested in the sale of a product. They also outlined the idea of power and wealth and how those two outside forces directly impact media interests and choices. Describing the media's purpose in society,"... the study of institutions and how they function must be scrupulously ignored, apart from fringe elements or a relatively obscure scholarly literature"(207). The theory outlines five general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media: (1) Size, Ownership, and Profit Orientation of the Mass Media (2)The Advertising License to Do Business (3)Sourcing Mass-Media (4) Flak and the Enforcers (5) Anticommunism as a Control Mechanism. I will end with a quote that I found to be very interesting: “We do not use any kind of ‘conspiracy’ hypothesis to explain mass media performance. Our treatment is much closer to a ‘free market’ analysis, with the results largely an outcome of the workings of market forces"(222).