The Political Economy of Media and Power. Jeffery Klaehn, ed. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 361 pp. $169.95 hbk. $42.95 pbk.European scholar Jeffrey Klaehn has assembled an important interdisciplinary contribution to understanding the political economy of media as vehicles of propaganda. In their introduction, David Miller and William Dinan argue that Herman and Chomsky offered a propaganda of performance that needs supplementation from theories of communication and power, that do not presume that public opinion is essential to power maintenance under neoliberalism. Blurring the line between consent and coercion, their manufacture of compliance integrates class unity, fear and resignation, manipulation and misinformation, and persuasion.In their separate essays, Andrew Mullen argues that the propaganda model's essential hypotheses have been confirmed. Robert Jensen laments its marginalization in U.S. journalism schools. David Berry implicitly locates the model within a broader tradition of radical mass media criticism, stretching back to nineteenth-century writers such as Karl Kraus, Ferdinand Tonnies, Jean Gabriel Tarde, and Soren Kierkegaard. Editor Klaehn of the University of Strathclyde coordinates an international panel of discussants (James Winter, Martha Nandorfy, Robert Jensen, Andrew Mullen, Daniel Fischlin, and David Cromwell) in an uneven conversation about media, power, and cultural politics.Sylvia Hale's chapter, Promoting War: The Power Politics of Manufacturing News, amplifies our understanding of media complicity with foreign policy goals in Yugoslavia and Iraq. With the support of both local media, over which many imposed absolute control, and intellectuals, each major political leader in the former Yugoslavia selectively interpreted history to construct discourses of ethnicity and fear. As Hale describes, powers and media fell behind only one narrative-Serbian expansionism-promoted by PR firm Ruder Finn, which, under contract with the Croatian and Bosnian-Muslim governments, reprised Hill and Knowlton's contributions to galvanizing public support for Gulf War One. The firm even secured Jewish support by disseminating stories of horrendous conditions in Serbian internment camps (yet all sides had such camps) and achieving widespread publication of the iconic thin man behind barbed wire image. Hale does not enter the controversy about the original ITN story on which this was based. media swallowed all of this uncritically, as they did the proceedings against Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia-set up, staffed, and funded by the United States.Hale competently reviews the ways in which the White House/Pentagon manipulated media and public perception in Iraq. She is weaker on issues of motive and is mistaken in her insistence that Western democratic governments . . . are not propaganda states, preferring Herman and Chomsky's systemic explanations or Herman and Peterson's willfully negligent journalism. Yet she acknowledges instances of Pentagon buyout of media and decries reporter gullibility in the face of allegations such as the Serbian rape of two hundred thousand Bosnian women in 1993, and accusations against Serbs from a discredited Kosovo Liberation Army in 1999. Three-quarters of all coverage presented the official government/Pentagon view without critical comment, feeding the blissful blindness of political leaders. She finds solace in occasional investigative reporting, such as a 2008 series of interview of the Taliban in The Globe and Mail.While Hale does not consider the role of intelligence agencies, Richard Keeble focuses on Hacks and Spooks and British intelligence media operations. He notes former Daily Mirror editor Roy Greenslade's assertion that newspapers are playthings of MI5, and quotes ex-Reuters and Telegraph journalist Eric Downton as appalled by British news media cooperation with MI5 and MI6. …