Note: This essay is incomplete and a work in progress. Sections may be missing, arguments may be disjointed.

Noam Chomsky is an absolutely titanic figure on the American left. For most of the Cold War, he served as the premier public intellectual for anyone of a more radical disposition. In the modern day, the figure of the public intellectual carries less importance – which might explain why it’s difficult to really point to anyone who has definitively carried his torch. Sure, one can pick out current-day left-wing academics and media figures, but there’s none which have really struck the balance he has. This was a man whose ideas had wide-reach among the activist base while also having enough rigor to earn academic respect. His talent came in his ability to apply his thought to the cycle of current events while also still providing meaningful theoretical innovations: he could speak at a common level without blowing hot air.

Perhaps this fact helps to explain why he continues to have such an enduring legacy, even decades after their peak. Out of all the ideas he espoused, his most enduring legacy seems to be – not his theories of socialist governance or linguistics – but his propaganda model. The amount of people I have seen continue to invoke Manufacturing Consent to this day (sometimes without even reading it) is quite incredible. Chomsky gets flak for a lot of things, ranging from his libertarianism to his views on foreign policy. But, the one thing I will never hear anyone take a shot at is the propaganda model itself.

It’s interesting, because from the time I spent in these spaces, I never got the sense it was because the arguments were so airtight they didn’t warrant questioning. Instead, it seemed moreso like the questions just never got raised: does the model actually hold up to scrutiny? Has anyone actually picked it apart and judged it on its own merits, as opposed to just accepting that it aligns with their ideological priors?

Chomsky’s Propaganda Model, Restated

The purpose of a model is to explain how a system functions. A good model is able to explain how things happen and identify which components are most essential to understanding the system and its mechanics. For example, the atomic model helps us to understand how matter works. By recognizing the importance of protons and electrons, you can piece together why certain interactions lead to specific chemical reactions.

Chomsky’s task in Manufacturing Consent is to develop a model of propaganda in capitalist democracies: highlighting the most essential parts and providing an explanation of why mass media works the way it does. When judging his model, these are the metrics we have to consider it by.

The first section of the book is dedicated to laying out the model itself. Right from the beginning, he sums up the core of his argument quite succinctly: if you want to understand how propaganda works, you have to look at who is producing and funding it.

A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. (Herman and Chomsky 1988, 1)

The book argues that because of these controlling interests, even in a “free market” the information has to pass through various “filters” prior to publication (Herman and Chomsky 1988, 2):

1. The size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms.
2. Advertising as the primary income source of the mass media.
3. The reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and “experts” funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power.
4. “Flak” as a means of disciplining the media.
5. “Anticommunism” as a national religion and control mechanism.

Or, in other words, he’s saying media always reflects the interests of its owners. Whether the owners are Stalinist bureaucrats or corporate shareholders is besides the point. By owning the platform, they get control over the editorial direction and that allows them to frame political discourse in a myriad of ways.

… the “societal purpose” of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state. The media serve this purpose in many ways: through selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and by keeping debate within the bounds of acceptable premises. (Herman and Chomsky 1988, 298)

Because of how highly verticalized mass media is, smaller outlets routinely get outcompeted, displaced, and eliminated from the “marketplace of ideas”. The marketplace here is not metaphorical, but literal as the economics of mass reach take precedence over quality of ideas in determining who does or doesn’t survive. Just as capital has a tendency to concentrate over time, so the media landscape (which is a business in the end) gradually finds itself in the hands of a select few (Herman and Chomsky, 4).

Corporate mergers, government relationships (which incur lobbying expenses), advertising models (which prefer high-income audiences), and the outsourcing of fact-finding to “official sources” (cheaper than investigative reporting) all work together to create an environment in which the media landscape is disproportionately dominated by the interests of the wealthy and for-profit enterprises. This isn’t a conspiracy, but systemic; the effects are subtle enough that the propagandists are able to convince themselves they actually are being objective.

The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news “objectively” and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable. (Herman and Chomsky 1988, 2)

The working class has neither the wealth to fund their own operations, the disposable income to be worthy consumers, or the elite status to schmooze with politicians. High-quality, investigative reporting is expensive to produce and incurs the risk of legal and political liability. While speech may be legally “free” in America under the First Amendment, not all voices are equal: those with the most money can afford the largest megaphones.

Chomsky takes it a step further to argue that this class interest will always result in a specific ideological bias: anticommunism (Herman and Chomsky 1988, 29).

“Flak” refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. It may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and bills before Congress, and other modes of complaint, threat, and punitive action. It may be organized centrally or locally, or it may consist of the entirely independent actions of individuals… During the McCarthy years, many advertisers and radio and television stations were effectively coerced into quiescence and blacklisting of employees by the threats of determined Red hunters to boycott products. (Herman and Chomsky 1988, 26)

Because of “flak”, he expects right-wing audiences (who are supposed to be aligned with the interests of the wealthy) to have the main sway in dictating what positions outlets are allowed to take. Whatever liberal voices in media that exist are constantly on the defensive, having to routinely distance themselves from and condemn communism in order to survive McCarthyist witch-hunts (Herman and Chomsky 1988, 29).

‘Manufacturing Consent’ in the Modern Day (unfinished)

That’s Chomsky’s propaganda model in summary, and – as you can tell – it makes a lot of very bold claims. But, to his credit, he does back it up with the proper reciepts:

• It is empirically true that (at the time), over half of the country’s newspapers were owned by only a handful of companies (Herman and Chomsky 1988, 4).
• It is true that the Pentagon poured an unparalleled amount of money per year on its own PR, creating a flood of newspapers, radio broadcasts, and press conferences that drove the public discourse (Chomsky and Herman 1988, 19-20).
• The press’ reaction to Watergate versus the FBI’s illegal activities against socialist parties did highlight a double-standard as to what is or isn’t considered a “real scandal” (Herman and Chomsky 1988, 299).

And even today, there are many incidents people will point to as vindication of Chomsky’s theory:

• Nearly half of our country’s news stations (as of 2018) have steadily been bought out by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, placing all these seemingly separate, local stations in the hands of a single owner with a common agenda.
• During the pandemic-era, a retail lobbying group grossly misrepresented the prevalence of shoplifting, and the press unquestioningly ran with this story, manufacturing a narrative out of thin air. Politicians found themselves under immense pressure to dedicate even more resources to hunting down shoplifters and funneling tax dollars as “investments” into these very same companies. All of this, only for the lobbyists to eventually retract the claims as entirely false years after the dust had already settled.
• One might even see echoes of “flak” in the fallout FOX News faced following their call of the 2020 election: facing backlash from their right-wing viewers, hosts turned course and started boosting election fraud conspiracies they did not believe in in order to appease the mob.
• Reporting by Semafor has shown that various political, media, and business elites have been known to congregate in groupchats to workshop narratives that they all boost simultaneously to try and steer news cycles.
• Executives who own various newspapers have been known to interfere with the papers’ topics of coverage and endorsements, which has raised concerns regarding personal conflicts of interest.
• Facing a wave of scandals and public backlash for their shady dealings, Facebook began pushing the “metaverse” as a PR stunt. Tech media, uncritically parroting “offical” company sources, helped manufacture a hype cycle for the company out of thin air.

But what’s conspicuously missing from both this list and Chomsky’s book is a real investigation into the impact propaganda has on people. There’s all sorts of evidence pointed to in order to demonstrate that, yes, systemic filters do in fact exist which generate an unconscious (or in some cases, conscious) bias in a supposedly free media ecosystem. But, how well is it actually working? It’s the claims surrounding the response of audiences where Chomsky leaves a lot presumed.

Luckily, Chomsky leaves enough latitude in his theory that it is actually relatively falsifiable. In his theory, it’s not just outright communist positions that are continually under attack but also broadly progressive ones. Higher taxes, regulation, relaxed criminal justice policies, foreign policy positions, all of these (according to him) can pose threats to elite interests. We can use current events as a quick barometer

Chomsky claims flak is an inherently right-wing phenomenon: yet when the Washington Post was bought out by billionaire Jeff Bezos and had its editorial policy altered in a fashion suspected to suit his personal interests, the outlet faced an unprecedented financial backlash from critics on the left¹.

Similarly, in the recent NYC mayoral race, heavyweight papers such as the New York Times attempted to pull out every stop to influence coverage towards their preferred outcome. But ultimately, it didn’t matter: the candidate whose platform (by Chomsky’s metrics) would run counter to the interests of the local elites won by a landslide.

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This leads to what is one of the big ironies of Manufacturing Consent. The “propaganda model” in the book isn’t actually a propaganda model: it’s a media model at best. And, I don’t mean this as some kind of semantic gotcha. This fact completely reframes how the book is supposed to be taken and applied.

What Chomsky expertly does with the book is nail down a very specific form of media organization that peaked in the mid-late 20th century and how it produced information. But in order for such a model to succeed, a certain set of environmental conditions had to be met. Chomsky presents this as the natural evolution of media under capitalism, but this just raises the question about whether or not he’s taking too much for granted.

Less than forty years after the publication of his book, capitalism is as strong as ever, but a lot of those preconditions have started to erode:

• A strong national consensus. Without consensus, any pretense to objectivity is impossible. The rise of siloed media environments with the internet², increased political polarization, erosion of demographic homogeneity over the past decades, and decreased religious/civic involvement all create both a fracturing of narratives and information streams.
• Technology which enables fact verification. Photo, audio, and video technologies defined journalism in the 20th century. The silver bullet in the Watergate case was a tape recording of Nixon admitting to everything. Photojournalists and documentarians framed the images that came to define the century’s most pivotal moments. These technologies acted as a social anchor for “truth” and helped bestow an air of legitimacy among those broadcasting it. The increasing reliance of newsrooms on 24/7 on-site punditry and the rise of technologies which can falsify information has eroded this foundation.

What journalists often bemoan as the “post-truth era” is more precisely is the era in which their specific models of producing and understanding “truths” is becoming outmoded.

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The Myth of ‘Counter-Propaganda’ (to-do)

Another basic truth about models is that they typically tend to be attached to some sort of practical purpose: black boxes help engineers focus on datastreams and weather forecasts help us decide whether or not we’re carrying an umbrella. The purpose of a propaganda model – one would assume then – would be to help us identify whether or not we’re being manipulated. Just as how someone who studies the weather should come out with a dry head, ideally someone who understands propaganda should have a better grasp on the truth.

Is this the case for Chomsky? Well, we can’t look at his track record without consulting the elephant in the room. To this day, Chomsky’s comments on Cambodia remain one of the largest black marks on his legacy.

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An Alternative: Ellul’s Propaganda Model (to-do)

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Bibliography

Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2002 (1988).