Quick Thoughts on Media
I think that nuance is important. And I think that it's important to understand Edward Herman's model.
In this short little piece, I just want to draw attention to a couple important points about the media.
First, people should approach the media with nuance.
Suppose that you have no time to fact-check a given story and investigate whether the story holds up—in that case, it makes sense to say: “This source is unreliable, so I’m highly skeptical about this.”
But suppose that you do have time to fact-check a given story and investigate whether the story holds up—in that case, it’s irrelevant what the source is, since you can actually look into things. Take a look at this Noam Chomsky piece:
“Palestine 2012—Gaza and the UN resolution” (1 December 2012)
Do you notice anything interesting about the piece? Look at the 17th footnote, which cites this article:
“US blocks UN Security Council call for Gaza cease-fire as unbalanced against Israel” (20 November 2012)
It’s a Fox News article—that might seem like a strange source to see in a Noam Chomsky footnote, but why can’t Fox News do good reporting? Just because a network like Fox News is garbage overall doesn’t mean that everything on Fox News is bad reporting.
CNN is another “garbage overall” network that makes you laugh and cringe and pull out your hair when you look at the overall job that they do—on the other hand, isn’t the below clip an example of solid and serious and important reporting from CNN?
I’m actually interested to see what CNN does with this series on the threat to American democracy—this kind of reporting is exactly what Ornstein told me is extremely important:
“Can We Heal America?” (14 January 2022)
And to take another example, I myself consider the National Post to be a silly and dangerous newspaper overall, but I read an article in that newspaper today that raised interesting challenges to popular narratives in Canada:
“What we don't know about unmarked graves at residential schools” (17 January 2022)
Is the 17 January 2022 article serious or complete BS or what’s the deal? I have no idea, since I haven’t done any investigation yet, but it would be silly for me to assume that the article must be complete BS just because I think that the National Post is a silly and dangerous newspaper overall.
So nuance is important regarding the media—there’s a tendency to dismiss entire media outlets and close one’s mind to whatever those media outlets present, but you should keep an open mind and a nuanced mind whether it’s Fox or CNN or the National Post or whatever else.
Second, people should try to actually understand Edward Herman’s model.
Edward Herman came up with an extremely interesting model of how the corporate media operate:
Manufacturing Consent (1988)
The model isn’t rocket science, but it’s a highly useful way to look at the corporate media:
Herman’s model outlines various “filters” that cause the corporate media to have a certain slant to it, but it’s possible to read the corporate media and compensate for this bias—Noam Chomsky co-wrote Manufacturing Consent with Herman, and Chomsky makes very clear how useful and informative and valuable the corporate media are:
Ed [Herman] and I updated the book to consider the rise of the Internet, but we basically concluded that nothing much had changed. The sources of information are still the same. If you want to know what’s happening in Karachi, you can’t find reliable information on Facebook or Instagram other than what’s being filtered from mainstream media. So the first thing I do in the morning is read The New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, and so on. That’s where the information is coming from.…
You can get information from other sources—the Internet allows you to read the foreign press if you’re interested. But I think the Internet’s main effect is to narrow the range of information that most people access by driving them into social media bubbles. The propaganda model is basically the same.
Now, there have been other changes of various kinds. One change, of course, is just the decline of media. So, for example, I lived most of my life in Boston, and The Boston Globe, when I was there, was a real newspaper. It had some of the best reporting in the country on, say, Central America. Today, it’s not even worth subscribing to. Now it’s mostly wire services. Same with The San Francisco Chronicle and many other newspapers. There’s a lot of narrowing of mainstream news sources.
On the other hand, if you look at a newspaper like The New York Times, it has been affected significantly by the changes in the general level of consciousness and awareness. The civilizing effect of the activism of the 1960s and its aftermath has affected the journalists, the editors, content, and so on. A lot of what you read today in the Times would have been unimaginable a couple of decades ago. Take this morning: There’s a lead story on the destruction of Gaza.
So you should definitely read the New York Times and so on—you just have to compensate for the slant:
You know the way it’s going to be slanted, so you instantly compensate for it—it’s easy. It’s even easier in a totalitarian state when the propaganda is so grotesque that people just laugh at it, and then you dismantle it quickly. It’s a little more subtle here, but not that difficult—it’s not quantum physics.
Once you understand “where they’re coming from” and “what their assumptions are”, you can “correct for” those assumptions.
And then you can make great use of the media:
There’s plenty of information—a lot to learn.