Mass media play an especially important role in democratic societies. They are
presupposed to act as intermediary vehicles that reflect public opinion, respond to
public concerns and make the electorate cognizant of state policies, important
events and viewpoints. The fundamental principles of democracy depend upon the
notion of a reasonably informed electorate. The `propaganda model' of media
operations laid out and applied by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
postulates that elite media interlock with other institutional sectors in ownership,
management and social circles, effectively circumscribing their ability to remain
analytically detached from other dominant institutional sectors. The model argues
that the net result of this is self-censorship without any significant coercion.
Media, according to this framework, do not have to be controlled nor does their
behaviour have to be patterned, as it is assumed that they are integral actors in
class warfare, fully integrated into the institutional framework of society, and act
in unison with other ideological sectors, i.e. the academy, to establish, enforce,
reinforce and `police' corporate hegemony. It is not a surprise, then, given the
interrelations of the state and corporate capitalism and the `ideological network',
that the propaganda model has been dismissed as a `conspiracy theory' and condemned
for its `overly deterministic' view of media behaviour. It is generally excluded
from scholarly debates on patterns of media behaviour. This article provides a
critical assessment and review of Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model and seeks to
encourage scholarly debate regarding the relationship between corporate power and
ideology. Highly descriptive in nature, the article is concerned with the question
of whether media can be seen to play a hegemonic role in society oriented towards
legitimization, political accommodation and ideological management.
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