This item was originally posted on CEMP's Interactive Media Portal on 03 March, 2006.

This week: mainstream media’s theory of propaganda good; everyone else’s bad.

This article’s name is brought to you by the word ‘news’ and the Nerd Name Generator.

In 1988 Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman published their withering analysis of how media-content gets made: The Propaganda Model. The kinds of things that ‘can be said’ in the media are determined through 5 filters: who owns the media; which sponsors subsidise the producers; the kind of sources that can be regarded as ‘authoritative’; the ‘flak’ that content may attract; and finally, the kind of ideological winds that are blowing at any given time.

It has mostly been sidelined and criticised since then; people arguing that it’s just a ‘conspiracy theory’ (though the authors never claim a conscious effort at deceit), that it’s too deterministic (so that’s any logical theories ever proposed out of the window then), that it’s unscientific (like, yeah, mainstream media theory is the very model of scientific enquiry), or it’s just written off as the polemic of ‘activists’ (rather like how people who think the status quo is crap get conveniently labelled as anarchists, as though that somehow dispenses with their arguments).

On BBC Newsnight, 24 Feb, a package was aired in which file-sharing was described as theft, and use of Bittorrent lumped in with paedophilia and terrorism. Adam Livingstone, Producer of BBC Newsnight, in a prickly, snide little column on the BBC News website (I guess he considers it as an apology), has retracted the claim, and hinted at the idea that mainstream media are scared of the internet and so consistently attempt to demonise it. It would have been more persuasive if his column hadn’t been dripping with sarcasm and obvious irritation at the, erm, ‘torrent’ of criticism the BBC’s internet presence has exposed him to.

Meanwhile, news broadcasts covering Daniel Gonzales, the guy currently accused of murdering 4 people in his desire to become a Freddie-Krueger type serial killer, have not failed to report the prosecutions’ characterisation of Gonzales as someone who spent a lot of time playing video games – couched amongst other labels such as ‘loner’, ‘no friends’, ‘no girlfriend’, ‘isolated’.

And they wonder why ‘fewer young people are watching TV’. I guess they’re all on the internet planning ‘paedo-terror’ and contemplating their next series of murders as they gaze moronically into video games.

Whose Propaganda Model looks stupid now?