The five filters of the mass media
prruk.org
prruk.org
What they point to is the false promises of “products” like 𝕏 and the effective cloche they provide in aid of these goals.
I don't think microblogging would work in North Korea for example...
I can't wait until we achieve complete brand saturation and revert to pictographic communication using only official branding symbols. The ASCII symbols disappear from everyone's keyboards and become ancient glyphs. Only the global elite can afford to spend the time learning this ancient script, but it comes with a powerful benefit. Through the ritual magic of Prompt Engineering, the ancient script unlocks the true power of GPT-11. While us mortals can only communicate vague moods in emoji and receive a symbolic stream of consumer goods and branding in response, those who speak the ancient script have the power of millions of undergraduate essays of varying accuracy.
The observation being that it’s interesting that on subjective things, every prestigious academic institution comes to the same conclusion. And these conclusions are passed onto the elite media which then manufactures consent.
Of course an academic like Chomsky would be blind to this.
I am reminded how Chomsky described the 1930s, that working class people were often pretty well-read. The above divide seems to help in maintaining the ignorance.
But going back to the idea of ideas that generate power - that's what is useful. Ideas and concepts that can be used to justify the use of power in some form. Ideas that can be used to "change the world", or more bluntly "exercise power over others". It doesn't mean that every notion that is useful to power is wrong but rather that we should be suspicious of it.
And unfortunately, with the way universities are incentivized today a lot of bad ideas are taken as given because they produce power and are therefore more useful than the ideas that don't. Hence all the "crises", and "injustices", etc.
These theories seem to start with the assumption that all ideas are equal, and what's 'ok' is arbitrary preference. We are dealing with truth.
High quality media directly check and corroborate facts; they use journalism to systematize delivery of truth. Quality research is about revealing truths - about nature, society, etc., systematizing it via scientific method.
Yes, humans fail all the time at truth, but they succeed all the time too. These institutions do a pretty good job, IMHO, and simultaneously a very flawed job that could be improved.
> Quality research is about revealing truths - about nature, society, etc., systematizing it via scientific method
Most things can't be systematized via science because they aren't science. They aren't falsifiable. They are in essence opinions.
The idea that we are only or mostly our worst, most self-destructive instincts and not, for a equally likely example, only our best instincts, is an odd one, but people love to think it these days.
I find it quite apparent in academia too. Academics do care about the truth and such, but to survive in academia you have to "play the game" even when it means being a bit flexible with the truth or other such principles. Or conversely, being too rigorous with principles means you don't usually stay a (paid) academic for long.
edit: I hope this question doesn't come across as petty or rude. I am a fan of Chomsky and intrigued by his thoughts on society. It's an honest question that I really have a hard time getting past.
It's in #1. "Their end game? Profit."
Corporations don't need to manipulate people into buying things they wanted anyway.
YouTube wouldn't care, it prioritizes demonization based on legal fallout. Talking about flak is not a flak topic.
The major players in media need access to policymakers to publish stories, they tend to go along with whatever narrative is being pushed in exchange for this access.
You wouldn't expect Greenwald to have WH press credentials for instance.
1. Doing that would juice it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
2.Each of these institutions brands itself on providing quality information, and in the US we pride ourselves on the first amendment. So the brand hit for censoring isn't worth it.
3. Chomsky is/was tenured and couldn't be fired the same way a journalist could
If you look at manufacturing consent, they make it clear that good stuff can get through media. It is just so much harder, and therefore there is less of it overall. But that doesn't mean nothing can get through.
Arguably, the manufacturing only works if 51% or more is generally good stuff. Obviously propaganda outlets don't keep a lot of eyes, e.g. Fox News' viewership has been declining faster than demographics says it should be.
90% can be spot on, entertaining, and wholly or mostly truthful; it's the 10% makes it work.
There's a nihilistic "the media are liars and everything you read is a lie" take that bounces around the Internet a lot, but I don't think that was Chomsky's original point.
That's like saying "If there's air pollution why are we not all dead?" Nobody said this system has no holes at all - just that this defines the major vectors of news.
>Why would Random House publish the book by Herman and Chomsky? Why would Al Jazeera produce this video and why would YouTube host it? These are all large media companies.
Because this is the general propaganda mechanisms, not absolute control.
Plus it doesn't cost them much. Reading it wont give you power, nor it's directly attached to some cause they actively promote or hurts their profit margins.
If it became a movement, or it was against some of their private interests or those of their sponsors concretely, and not in the abstract, it would be a different story.
That expectation overlooks the complexity of reality - there may be reasons that Random House, etc. are exceptions, and we just can't explicitly identify and define every complexity. It also can throw away 99% of the value of things. Classical mechanics, in physics, isn't true in all situations, but it's still pretty valuable.
The value to something depends on what we can learn from it, not the flaws we can find, and how well it predicts things. If your expectation is perfection and then the theory doesn't meet it, the problem is with the expectation and not the theory.
Why wouldn't we? What are we going to do about it? Nothing. It's just like youtube platforms videos discussing how bad social media is for your mental health. Or oil companies funding 'green' tech. Or a newspaper writing about how bad news is for you.
'News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier'
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
Who cares?
> These are all large media companies.
They are all large media companies controlled by the same group of elites.
In a totalitarian system, the elites carse about what you think. In a dystopian system, the elites don't care.
So random house published herman and chomsky? And? What happened since? It's like food industry being paranoid about people finding out about how sausage is made. People find out. People keep on eating sausage. Heck it's free advertising.
Remember too that Manufacturing Consent (1988 and Chomsky's thinking in general) precede mass-internet comms and the globalized infosphere. Mass-comms really did require large capital plants (towers, satellites, cable plants, etc.), and mass-media and big-capital were inseparable. This is less true today for new media. It is more true for the incumbent radio, tv, and newspaper businesses. Those have been concentrated into a very few hands over the last 40 years.
I've not kept up with Chomsky enough to know his current thinking. I'd argue that 2 and 4 are even stronger on the internet. 5 is evergreen. And 4 is now an aspirational lifestyle - the "Influencer".
If you consider that the average person hasn't read a book since high-school, and needs someone on the nightly news to tell them what happened on twitter yesterday, then this STILL hasn't reached "mass media".
[*] really the algorithm is just another media filter that controls who gets through it, talking about "gaming" an algorithm probably has it a bit backwards.
You need to leave a relief valve, an opportunity for the malcontents to go express their need for rebellion in a wholly controllable way. They will then dig their own graves.
Learn to see the opportunity to produce things others want, make your own money, then run silent and deep until you or your kids can afford to be players, and not merely pieces.
This letter is addressed to Chomsky back then, but he has the same position as most of Washington DC now.
What Chomsky leaves out from his analysis is that he himself exists: a member of the elite, central to vast amounts of elite discourse. His ideas aren't marginal and indeed, in many ways, mainstream.
Radicals are, generally, rationalists -- starting theory-first. But in matters as complex as society, you need to be an empiricist.
If you study 'popular opinion', consent, etc. as an empiricist you do not find these categories: elite, media, etc. Rather there are shifting groups of people, each with their own interests, engaged in a competition to have their interests realised.
When fox news called Arizona their viewers left them -- so fox jumped on election denial precipitating events which led to Jan 6th. What is the analysis here, say?
Well chomsky would always 'find his enemies' in the elite: trump down to his base. Whilst this analysis is partly correct, it doesn't explain the existence of trump in the first place: his base chose him. Rather than any prior 'political elite'.
The conspiratorial analyses of radicals always ends up with 'and this is why people don't subscribe to my view of the world' -- it is itself a political project to 'manufacture ideological consent' to their own world view. A mechanism they fail to notice.
A scientist in these matters has to have basically no political project whatsoever, and not bend their empirical analysis towards their status and away from the status of others. And indeed: how many political scientists are there, by this definition? nearly none.
From a leftist perspective, there is something to your critique, I would say some of the hallucinations of the right-wing Trumpers far overtook what the mass media came up with using those filters. For example, anti-vaccines or stolen elections.
Actually what Chomsky notes is how the idea of "radical" laws such as that a person can't be kicked off their health plan if they develop cancer are not unpopular, but wildly popular with the public in polls. Nonetheless in the decades prior to Obamacare, despite its popularity, due to institutional reasons it did not become law.
> the existence of Trump in the first place: his base chose him
Chomsky said early on Trump support came mostly from the base, and the power structure did not want him.
You're knocking down a straw man - inventing things Chomsky did not say, attributing them to him, then condemning him for words you put in his mouth, when he often said the opposite.
This is often the implied context around this polling: do you want better services and lower taxes? Yes. Yes, of course.
The issue for america, in the case of universal healthcare, is that it would dramatically increase the tax burden and worsen healthcare for the middle/upper-middle. How many are so noble when it comes to this double-whammy? Few.
On paper, people will spend other people's money with glee. In practice, politics expresses something ideologues can never really tolerate: that society is often getting what it wants.
Or, more precisely, that the social ecology is both healthy and imperfect. That society may not get what it wants in some sense, but not for any malignant reason.
The ideologue always has to locate the failure to reach the ideal with some flaw in people, in the system. They cannot brook that through ordinary, indeed healthy, political process can come non-ideal outocmes.
Suppose that (democratic) minorities need a little extra weight -- then you'd need an electoral college?
Suppose the 'dripping fear-mongering' is a dislocation of a certain other emotion: discontent, pershaps? disagreement?
Suppose you make a defence that the situation is indeed a healthy one. What would you say then?
I am not saying it is -- but to get beyond this ideological analysis we need to engage with, say, 'the horror of the health of policitics' -- that the thing we most dispise may well be a symptom of what we, ourselves, prescribe
From the first filter in the article: Mass media firms are big corporations. Often, they are part of even bigger conglomerates. Their end game? Profit. And so it’s in their interests to push for whatever guarantees that profit. Naturally, critical journalism must take second place to the needs and interests of the corporation.
"it doesn't explain the existence of trump in the first place: his base chose him."
2015/2016 Trump was a ratings goldmine. See point #1 about media profits.
You see how the profit motive is in many cases, and in this case, a democratic force?
There are, in fact, many establishments that are frighteningly efficient at devoting time, money and effort into manipulating people. But those establishments are ultimately guided by people, too. And those people are fallible creatures, just as prone to vagaries of ideological fashion and lapses in rational thought as those who ushered the events of January 6. Even the juggernauts make missteps. It does not diminish the empiricism of Chomsky's ideas.
The phenomenon you describe transcends notions of class, race, and and so on: over lifetime timescales, a group of people is a chaotic and unpredictable system, replete with knock on effects, where any actor or interest, no matter how fringe, has the potential to dominate. And while one can apply basic sociological principles to anticipate some short-term behaviors, it stands to reason that no amount of cold calculation or meticulous planning (by governments, media, elites, or otherwise) is immune to the simple fact that the course of any given organization is extremely difficult to consistently predict.
The problem with chomsky's model is how it manipulates the landscape of our analysis, how it introduces paranoia into our perception of the media.
This is, I think, a serious pathology and a serious flaw -- though, for Chomsky, it's the mood he wants you to be in.. since he has a bridge to sell you.
A real political science here has to explicitly engage with this chaos -- has to model society as the irreducibly complex system that it is. Theories here arent neutral: they modify the very thing being described.
There is a difference between "people don't agree with me, it must be a conspiracy!" and "I see people reliably making choices that go against their self-interest" there are likely other factors manipulating them based on those factors own self-interest.
>Well chomsky would always 'find his enemies' in the elite: trump down to his base. Whilst this analysis is partly correct, it doesn't explain the existence of trump in the first place: his base chose him. Rather than any prior 'political elite'.
Trump's base chose him... from a sample of one. Whether by design or happenstance, Trump's political shock-jocking drew eyeballs to the media covering him and got him vastly outsized mindshare by doing so. And the same thing is happening again right now as most media outlets dwell on every single outrageous thing he says, which helps Trump by making it more difficult for any casual voter to see the underlying pattern of fraud, failure, and severe personality disorder.
That Chomsky manipulates when he points out the manipulation of others; and what we care about is that we're not successful in our manipulations.
By localising this notion of 'manipulation' to an 'elite' he creates a paranoid mood of analysis -- rather, manipulation is democratic; and as far as we're in trouble in politics, it's often because of how democratic manipulation turns out to be.
No, this is should not be conflated with teams of media&communications experts spending thousands of man-hours on individual influence campaigns that have been focus-grouped to have precise impact.
The same vapid ideology that always claims to be free of ideology and that underpinned the culture of the Obama white house that brought us Trump in the first place. Not to mention the absolute havoc it wrought in the, for the lack of a better word, global south.
If you deny the possibility of science here, so be it. I do not.
The fashion for these theories is predictive power -- but this is unscientific when applied to complex systems of this kind.
The error of marx et al. was to suppose that dialectical materialism is a possibility -- this mistakes the kind of phenomenon that history is --
we have learned, after marx, that maxism isnt even a possible theory
today, we need to show we have learned these lessons
> we have learned, after marx, that maxism isnt even a possible theory
Are you referring to Popper? Have you actually read him? It's easy to say "Popper debunked Marxism" but his line of reasoning is flimsy at best.
A swirling glass of coffee isnt subject to 'coffee-bean materialism' let alone the morass of history.
What science teaches us, of late, is the radical limits of science. Any prognostictor of society, coming along, and 'reading its temperature' is automatically a fraud.
Marx gets a pass. My view is that if marx had lived long eough, he'd be here today as a sceptical capitalist, long beyond the habit of prediction.
People just want to believe that humans are far more exceptional than we really are. These theories rest on the assumption that this 'elite' can predict the future. That there is no randomness in the world. That they are so smart and capable that they can just manipulate everyone. The truth is -- the individuals which make up the elite are just as clueless as everyone else. Furthermore, majority of them behave with good intentions. It is no surprise that no one really knows who represents the "elite". Once you dig deeper into the personality of each individual, you realise that they are just normal people. Often very selfish, but not much different from average Joe.
The problems that we see and blame the elite, god, what ever for, are due to systems we have created. Institutions, culture, feedback loops; everything that exists when large groups of individuals exist together.
E.g. on journalists: "I don't say you're self-censoring - I'm sure you believe everything you're saying; but what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."
Isn't it quite an extraordinary claim that e.g. ad-funded media would be independent from their customers (the buyers of the ads)? Ad-funded media that doesn't please the ad buyers doesn't stay in business for long. This is discussed in Manufactuing Consent at length and the discussion doesn't resort to any conspiracies.