CUS 310 Media, Culture and Society

Manufacturing Consent

Your post reminded me a lot about a chapter out ‘Manufacturing Consent” by Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky. One of the ‘filters’, according to their propaganda model of news, is that of corporate ownership. Since papers derive their profits from advertisers, its important to remember that market forces are somewhat counterintuitive with respect to media products. Papers are not trying to sell content to audiences, rather they sell audiences to advertisers. Thus papers can never publish anything too anti-consumerist, or anything too far outside dominant mainstream discourse, otherwise they risk losing their advertising revenue and becoming unprofitable. Papers have to publish what advertisers, not readers, want.

In regards to your discussion point – I do think that publicly owned media can partially solve the problem, but only if it is sufficiently funded and independently administered. There is ongoing controversy in Australia over our public broadcaster the ABC – the government claims they biased towards the opposition and continually cut their funding, however when the opposition party was in power they did exactly the same thing. I think that the governments annoyance at how critical the ABC can be is a sign that the ABC is actually doing their job well.