All-out warfare

Reading what Herman and Chomsky wrote in 1988, yet again, I see extreme relevance with what’s happening in our system now.

After reading the first sentence of this piece, the first thing I thought of was the film Wag the Dog, a fictional story about the US government colluding with Hollywood producers to fabricate a war in Bosnia. Herman and Chomsky’s “propaganda model” is at the heart of this film – the message that the government, corporations and others with power are controlling what we see, and subsequently, the way we think about things.

But media has been rebuked time and time again since Chomsky and Herman wrote this controversial theory in 1988. The Internet and social media have changed the way media is consumed and produced. Nowadays, people can publish their own news stories, opinions and experiences, and consume those of others – directly from others. Herman and Chomsky’s idea as media equating to integration is now a theory widely acknowledged by all kinds of Americans.

As mentioned in my therapeutic blog reflection for last week’s classes, Donald Trump’s election is the epitome of America’s media rejection. Trump and his supporters continually bashed the media for inaccuracy and bias. So, on election day, while most networks gave 90-99.9% chances of winning the White House to Hillary Clinton, the base of people known for media-loathing proved them wrong by electing Donald Trump.

It’s the latest evolution of another communication barrier in our country: between the elite and the rest. They are seemingly at war with one another – not the ‘divorced parent’ kind of war I discussed yesterday – but all-out warfare.

Chomsky and Herman discuss in their theory a media trend that’s been present since before 1988: consolidation. Today, most major media organizations are part of a conglomerate of many companies – all tied into one – seemingly with the express purpose of consolidating power between outlets and firming up their side of the battleground. Totally non-media-oriented companies also desire to quite literally own the media – like General Electric, which owned NBC until a few years ago. Companies also have the goal of becoming classified as media. Google, for example, considers itself a media and technology company. By doing so, they desire to declare their technology has power.

The final of the five “filters” cited by Chomsky and Herman is “anticommunism” in the media. I think this term being located in communism is simply a remnant of the time period in which this theory was written. The significance I see in this phrase, however, is that the media consistently seems to take the moral “high-ground” outwardly. As I discussed in my blog post yesterday, this superiority only adds fuel to the flames of media hatred and division in our country.

I see this as the most unfortunate thing in our media landscape - that warfare with the media clouds trusting them when it comes to the journalistic checks and balances they were meant have on our society. As a result, we're left with "reality" shows as our pulse on society and their stars as our leaders.

Peace,

-UA191