The Media ‘Propaganda Model’: Zimbabwe Mugabe Struggles

18 November 2009

By Reason Wafawarova

THE people who preach Press freedom are very articulate in expressing a view of how the media ought to function, but this model hardly shows how the media do function.

The model of how the media ought to function is what the American journalistic schools refer to as "the Jeffersonian role" of the media where the media is a counterweight to government.

This in reality is meant to be that "cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous Press, which must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the right of the people to know, and to help the population assert meaningful control over the political process", (Noam Chomsky, 2002; Understanding Power).

This is the standard conception of the media today the world over and clearly most people in the media do take this conception for granted.

There is the alternative conception; that media will present a picture of the world which defends and inculcates the economic, social and political agendas of society’s privileged groups — groups that dominate the domestic economy of nation states and which, therefore, also largely control government.

This is the "Propaganda Model" that Chomsky described as leading to the media serving their societal purpose through such things as the way they select topics, distribute their concerns, frame issues, filter information, focus their analysis, employ emphasis, tone or the timing of reports and so on.

This is the wide range of techniques employed in the media "propaganda model" where the end result is that common belief that says whatever is in the news must be true.

This model does not suggest in any way that the media always will agree with state policy at any given moment. In the Western democracies control of the government shifts back and forth largely between bi-party systems like is the case in the US, the UK and in Australia. This means that various elite groupings will take turns in controlling government and whichever group happens to be in control of government at a particular time will only reflect part of the elite political spectrum.

There are often tactical disagreements within this spectrum like is the case with Obama’s approach to the Afghan war. The wider spectrum suggests that the war is, in Obama’s own words, "a war of necessity", but there are media criticisms on how George W. Bush was executing the war. These are nothing but tactical disagreements within the confines of the accepted spectrum pushed by the media propaganda model.

Essentially nothing much goes beyond the range of elite perspectives although there are citable examples of "media scrutiny" on state policy — in reality scrutiny within the accepted limits.

The challenge is how one proves the reality of the media propaganda model. Noam Chomsky came up with four basic observations.

First is elite advocacy. This is the traditional thinking among elite democratic thinkers in the West — a tradition that claims that the media and the intellectual community in general ought to carry out a propaganda function where they control what is commonly called "the public mind" or "public opinion".

This tradition dates back up to the 1920s when it was still quite fashionable to boast publicly as a propagandist or an imperialist. Then people were a bit more honest and frank.

The view that the media have a part in playing a propaganda function in nation states is not a monopoly of totalitarian states as we are often told. In fact, it is a dominant theme in the Anglo-American democratic thought and this has been the case for over 300 years; if one traces the thinking back to the first major popular-democratic revolution in the West, the English Civil War of the 1640s. This was an armed conflict between supporters of the King and the Parliament between 1642 and 1648.

The Royalists represented the more traditional elite groupings while the landed gentry and the merchant class were aligned to Parliament. Both groups became increasingly worried as the war progressed because they realised that there were now popular movements springing up and challenging everything — the right of authority altogether, the master-servant relationship; and there was a lot of radical publishing taking place then because the printing press had just been invented.

The elites on both sides of the Civil War became very worried that the general population suddenly was beginning to get out of control. The capacity to coerce was being lost and they had to do something about it.

They first tried to re-introduce coercion by establishing an absolutist state, afterwards restoring King Charles II in 1660 after several years of military rule by Oliver Cromwell’s regime. However, the new elitist set up could not restore the old order of coercion anymore. The gains of popular rebellion began to be seen as the British political democracy began to take shape. There was the establishment of the constitutional monarchy and the introduction of the Bill of Rights during that time.

The lesson that the Western elites learnt from this period was that each time there is a popular movement that succeeds in dissolving state power, there has always been this resort that says when you start losing the power to control people by force, you have to start to control what they think.

That recognition is quite central to the Western political culture and it is the same thinking that drives Western foreign policy.

There is a mainstream rightwing clique of political scientists, journalists, public relations experts and others, not only in the West, but also in other places infected with Western thinking — a clique that believes the ruling elites need more effective propaganda to control the public mind.

Walter Lippmann, a dean of American journalists, was one such member of this clique. He referred to the population of the United States as the "bewildered herd" and advised that there was need for the state to protect itself from "the rage and trampling of the bewildered herd".

He suggested this could be done by what he called the "manufacture of consent". Essentially if you cannot do it by force and the bludgeon, you can equally achieve the goal by calculated "manufacture of consent".

This thinking says that the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is a central feature of a democratic system, and the thinking is literally like that. It is in this case, the job of the "intelligent minorities" to scheme and execute this manipulation of the attitudes and opinions of the masses.

This in essence is the leading doctrine of modern day liberal-democratic intellectual thought: that once you lose the power to control people by force you need better indoctrination.

That was the first observation; where elite advocacy plays a role in shaping the framework of what people should be allowed to think about.

The second observation raised by Chomsky is what he called "prior plausibility". The institutional structure of the media as made up of corporate ownership, an elite audience and a business market will naturally mean that corporate media would serve a propaganda function in a business-dominated society such as is the Western world today.

This writer covered this aspect of the propaganda model last week in the article title "West Using Media as a Propaganda Tool".

The third point raised by Chomsky is the public perspective. Over time the public has tended to generally agree with the basic features of the propaganda model as explained above. People actually know too well that the media are too conformist and subservient to private power. This is the public’s image of the media in general although the media’s self image is often exactly the opposite.

This writer has met a lot of people in the public domain of Australia, who curiously beg for the "real story" of what is happening in Zimbabwe. On asking what they mean by "real story" the answer is always that "you know how they often tell us what they want us to hear".

So in reality there is this observation that the people are indeed aware of the manipulations carried on them by the media for the benefit of the elites.

While one would think that these matters of the media as a propaganda model would be debated publicly in the West, the reality is that the people in the West are always told of faraway places where such chicanery is the routine manner of uncivilised dictators and tyrants.

The public debate you hear in the West is always over whether the media are too extreme in their undermining of authority, and in their criticism of power. The expectation is that they should be serving their "Jeffersonian role" as a check on power.

When you suggest there is no "Jeffersionian role" at all and that the media, together with the intellectual community in general, are basically subservient to power, then you are labelled an extremist or any such label as to alienate you from any positive image.

The propaganda model therefore will never be discussed in the media in the West because it is akin to a well-known harlot inviting people to discuss harlotry.

The fourth observation is to do with the empirical validity of the "propaganda model" as suggested by Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman. The two learned authors firstly allowed their opponents to choose their own topics for discussion so that the usual argument that "you only pick convenient examples that work for you" would fall away. The opponents were arguing that the Western media are so independent that they do not follow any guided spectrum.

Their preferred topics were the Vietnam war, Watergate and similar stories. When these stories were put to scientific testing, they clearly confirmed the propaganda model. This was through such indicators as sub-topics, concerns, frame issues, focus of analyses, emphasis, tone and a whole range of other issues.

The two authors also looked at paired examples of historical events. They covered atrocities committed by enemy states and compared such to coverage of atrocities which were roughly on the same scale, but were committed by the US.

They looked at coverage of elections in enemy states and in client states, just like what recently happened with the Zimbabwe election of March 2008 and the Afghan election of October 2009.

The Zimbabwe election was extensively covered as barbaric and grossly illegitimate, while the Afghan election was covered not so extensively, and also not in so much bad light. This was despite that the election in Zimbabwe proceeded to a run-off after no candidate garnered enough presidential votes to form a government, while the Afghan run-off was a result of a nullification of the first round of elections where the Western- backed Hamid Karzai embarked on massive rigging that was confirmed by most of the independent election observers that covered the poll.

As Chomsky jokingly concluded, it is safe to dare take a "hazard guess that the ‘Propaganda Model’ is one of the best confirmed theses in the social sciences".

In reality the media freedom we hear so much about is nothing more than this propaganda model. Unlimited media criticism of power centres is only acceptable to Western elites if it is targeted at enemy states like Zimbabwe, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and others like that.

This is where we have the West financing advocates for free Press who dutifully shout to death point that journalists must be left to do as they wish.

If the client government wanted by the West one day becomes a reality in Zimbabwe all that will be is this propaganda model, and all this noise about limitless media freedoms will just not be tolerated and will not even be discussed publicly anymore.

In fact, even now divergent opinion directed at the MDC-T is simply unacceptable to Western elites and even to the advocates of free Press themselves, which is why some journalists have been placed on sanctions. This writer is no stranger to all forms of threats, including death threats; for criticising the MDC-T or pointing out the shortcomings of Prime Minister Tsvangirai.

 

 

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