A Critical Review and Assessment of Herman and Chomsky's`PropagandaModel'

Abstract

Mass media play an especially important role in democratic societies. They are presupposed to act as intermediary vehicles that reflect public opinion, respond to public concerns and make the electorate cognizant of state policies, important events and viewpoints. The fundamental principles of democracy depend upon the notion of a reasonably informed electorate. The `propaganda model' of media operations laid out and applied by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media postulates that elite media interlock with other institutional sectors in ownership, management and social circles, effectively circumscribing their ability to remain analytically detached from other dominant institutional sectors. The model argues that the net result of this is self-censorship without any significant coercion. Media, according to this framework, do not have to be controlled nor does their behaviour have to be patterned, as it is assumed that they are integral actors in class warfare, fully integrated into the institutional framework of society, and act in unison with other ideological sectors, i.e. the academy, to establish, enforce, reinforce and `police' corporate hegemony. It is not a surprise, then, given the interrelations of the state and corporate capitalism and the `ideological network', that the propaganda model has been dismissed as a `conspiracy theory' and condemned for its `overly deterministic' view of media behaviour. It is generally excluded from scholarly debates on patterns of media behaviour. This article provides a critical assessment and review of Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model and seeks to encourage scholarly debate regarding the relationship between corporate power and ideology. Highly descriptive in nature, the article is concerned with the question of whether media can be seen to play a hegemonic role in society oriented towards legitimization, political accommodation and ideological management.