Large numbers of Palestinians and Ukrainians were killed in missile strikes days apart, writes Jonathan Cook. The differing coverage of these comparable events is the clue to the media’s true function.
When all we have to rely on in understanding our relationship to the news media is the media’s self-proclaimed assessment of its own role, maybe it is no surprise that most of us assume the West’s “free press” is a force for good: the bedrock of democracy, the touchstone of a superior western civilisation.
The more idealistic among us think of the news media as something akin to a public service. The more cynical of us think of it as a competitive marketplace in information and commentary, one in which ugly agendas are often in evidence but truth ultimately prevails.
Both views are fanciful. The reality is far, far darker – and I speak as someone who worked for many years in The Guardian and Observer newsrooms, widely seen as the West’s most progressive newspapers.
As readers, we don’t, as we imagine, “consume” news. Rather, the news consumes us. Or put another way, the media uses the news to groom us, its audience. Properly understood, the relationship is one of abuser and abused.
Sounds like a paranoid conspiracy theory?
In fact, just such an argument was set out many years ago — in more academic fashion — in Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman’s book Manufacturing Consent.
If you have never heard of the book, there may be a reason. The media don’t want you reading it.
When I worked at The Guardian, there was no figure more reviled in the newsroom by senior editors than Noam Chomsky. As young journalists, we were warned off reading him. How might we react were we to start thinking more deeply about the role of the media, or begin testing the limits of what we were allowed to report and say?
Chomsky and Herman’s Propaganda Model explains in detail how Western publics are “brainwashed under freedom” by a media driven by hidden corporate and state interests. Those interests can be concealed only because the media decides what counts as news and frames how we understand events.
Its chief tools are misdirection and omission — and, in extremis, outright deception. (more...)
The Corporate News Media at Work
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