6 ms·

The five filters of the mass media

93 points by ZunarJ5 3y ago

almyndz 3y ago
This is very distilled version of the propaganda model discussed in his book Manufacturing Consent, here's a good video series discussing each filter in detail: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHpn1t6h34EgO1H48uz3m8GoFpqoQvF6X https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHpn1t6h34EgO1H48uz3m...
colpabar 3y ago
[flagged]
- psychlops 3y ago
  Flak at you!
  - sdfghswe 3y ago
    You got everything right, except that he's a left-wing lunatic, not a right-wing lunatic.
mjburgess 3y ago
Chomsky's analysis of society, and the media, is common across radicals of all political persuasions. They need a theory to explain why their radicalism isnt popular, despite being "obvious" -- so you have false consciousness (marx), manufactured consent (chomsky), class envy (ayn rand), etc. 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.
- psychlops 3y ago
  So are you saying the media does not have these filters?
- js8 3y ago
  I get your point, but I think there is a lot of empirical support for 5 filters. 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.
- feedforward 3y ago
  > They need a theory to explain why their radicalism isnt popular 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.
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    I dont think we have a way to determine popularity as easily as you suggest. Brexit was popular: 52% said yes, but of those many would not pay any money at all to see it through. So, its popular if its free. Many things are. 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.
nemo44x 3y ago
Curtis Yarvin’s concept of “The Catgedral” extrapolates on this I believe. Beyond the elite media he also identifies the prestigious academic institutions, which consequently are the source of elite media and business power, as a part of the apparatus that determines what’s ok to think. 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.
- js8 3y ago
  It reminds me of AlphaGo not playing for a win by a large margin, unlike humans do. I don't think the system needs to stomp Chomsky to the ground, unlike some totalitarian systems that demand complete subordination. They only need to make sure that more people listen to Tucker Carlson than Noam Chomsky, for which not inviting Chomsky to mainstream TV was so far pretty sufficient.
  - nemo44x 3y ago
    Tucker Carlson would be closer to the "Flak" than the New York Times though. He has been pushed to the margins by his previous employer Fox, who are more or less a flak machine at least compared to elite media that are taken seriously by policy makers and the academics that shape those policies.
    - js8 3y ago
      That's a good point. The mass media and elite media really use different language, which is an additional obstacle. They don't seem to be a part of the same structure, and are presented to be at odds. 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.
- _aaed 3y ago
  Chomsky has spoken about this issue many times. His most famous work on this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Responsibility_of_Intellectuals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Responsibility_of_Intellec...
itomato 3y ago
During my Sociology studies, I read this in parallel with ‘Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy’ and ‘Arguments for the Elimination of Television’ What they point to is the false promises of “products” like 𝕏 and the effective cloche they provide in aid of these goals.
- shunyaekam 3y ago
  What do they recommend over (something like) X/Twitter in summary? I don't think microblogging would work in North Korea for example...
- mecsred 3y ago
  It would be a sociologist that would take the time to search up a fancy symbol "𝕏" for a companies' branding. 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.
  - fmajid 3y ago
    Specially when x.com itself redirects to twitter.com.
js8 3y ago
There is also good series on YT from "Carefree Wandering" (Hans-Georg Moeller) on media theory in general, which also discusses Chomsky perspective in one of the videos.
jimmytucson 3y ago
One thing I've never been able to work out is, if this model were true, how would we ever hear about it? 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. 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.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  Does he every imply that the filters are 100% airtight?
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > Why would Random House publish the book by Herman and Chomsky? It's in #1. "Their end game? Profit." Corporations don't need to manipulate people into buying things they wanted anyway.
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  Suppression is a good way to make ideas more acceptable. Chomsky is allowed to say these things because he's also considered a communist in the common enemy sense.
- bordercases 3y ago
  In this case tenure would work out in Chomsky's favor, and Al Jazeera may as a large media company benefit from signalling that other large media companies are not like itself, by way of providing a costly signal at risk to itself. YouTube wouldn't care, it prioritizes demonization based on legal fallout. Talking about flak is not a flak topic.
- kneel 3y ago
  I don't think they meant it as all encompassing. 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.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/05/19/open-letter-to-noam-chomsky-and-other-like-minded-intellectuals-on-the-russia-ukraine-war https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/05/19/open-letter-to-noam-cho...
- feedforward 3y ago
  The discourse from establishment Washington over the past month vis-a-vis the Ukraine has been the same as Chomsky's was then. No one is talking about pushing Russia out of Crimea and Donetsk any more. This letter is addressed to Chomsky back then, but he has the same position as most of Washington DC now.
- _aaed 3y ago
  Most of the "patterns" in this letter are just nonsense; it shows a poor understanding of the wider context
motohagiography 3y ago
During the time I spent as a writer, I found media was a power game for people who could afford to play it, and a mortal struggle for those who couldn't. It's a zero sum game masquerading as a positive sum art and craft. In short, avoid. 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.
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
Chomsky explaining this to a BBC journalist who claims he's not self-censoring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYxizGsrjkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYxizGsrjkc
- tarboreus 3y ago
  Thanks for the link, I also enjoyed the full interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjENnyQupow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjENnyQupow
dharmach 3y ago
Chomsky is against state and corporates but media can also be co-opted by foreign entities and ideologies.
- jampekka 3y ago
  Chomsky somehow denies that media can be co-opted by foreign entities and ideologies?

93 points by ZunarJ5 3y ago

This is very distilled version of the propaganda model discussed in his book Manufacturing Consent, here's a good video series discussing each filter in detail: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHpn1t6h34EgO1H48uz3m8GoFpqoQvF6X https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHpn1t6h34EgO1H48uz3m...

colpabar 3y ago

[flagged]

psychlops 3y ago
Flak at you!
- sdfghswe 3y ago
  You got everything right, except that he's a left-wing lunatic, not a right-wing lunatic.

mjburgess 3y ago

Chomsky's analysis of society, and the media, is common across radicals of all political persuasions. They need a theory to explain why their radicalism isnt popular, despite being "obvious" -- so you have false consciousness (marx), manufactured consent (chomsky), class envy (ayn rand), etc. 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.

psychlops 3y ago
So are you saying the media does not have these filters?
js8 3y ago
I get your point, but I think there is a lot of empirical support for 5 filters. 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.
feedforward 3y ago
> They need a theory to explain why their radicalism isnt popular 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.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  I dont think we have a way to determine popularity as easily as you suggest. Brexit was popular: 52% said yes, but of those many would not pay any money at all to see it through. So, its popular if its free. Many things are. 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.

nemo44x 3y ago

Curtis Yarvin’s concept of “The Catgedral” extrapolates on this I believe. Beyond the elite media he also identifies the prestigious academic institutions, which consequently are the source of elite media and business power, as a part of the apparatus that determines what’s ok to think. 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.

js8 3y ago
It reminds me of AlphaGo not playing for a win by a large margin, unlike humans do. I don't think the system needs to stomp Chomsky to the ground, unlike some totalitarian systems that demand complete subordination. They only need to make sure that more people listen to Tucker Carlson than Noam Chomsky, for which not inviting Chomsky to mainstream TV was so far pretty sufficient.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  Tucker Carlson would be closer to the "Flak" than the New York Times though. He has been pushed to the margins by his previous employer Fox, who are more or less a flak machine at least compared to elite media that are taken seriously by policy makers and the academics that shape those policies.
  - js8 3y ago
    That's a good point. The mass media and elite media really use different language, which is an additional obstacle. They don't seem to be a part of the same structure, and are presented to be at odds. 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.
_aaed 3y ago
Chomsky has spoken about this issue many times. His most famous work on this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Responsibility_of_Intellectuals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Responsibility_of_Intellec...

itomato 3y ago

During my Sociology studies, I read this in parallel with ‘Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy’ and ‘Arguments for the Elimination of Television’ What they point to is the false promises of “products” like 𝕏 and the effective cloche they provide in aid of these goals.

shunyaekam 3y ago
What do they recommend over (something like) X/Twitter in summary? I don't think microblogging would work in North Korea for example...
mecsred 3y ago
It would be a sociologist that would take the time to search up a fancy symbol "𝕏" for a companies' branding. 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.
- fmajid 3y ago
  Specially when x.com itself redirects to twitter.com.

js8 3y ago

There is also good series on YT from "Carefree Wandering" (Hans-Georg Moeller) on media theory in general, which also discusses Chomsky perspective in one of the videos.

jimmytucson 3y ago

One thing I've never been able to work out is, if this model were true, how would we ever hear about it? 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. 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.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
Does he every imply that the filters are 100% airtight?
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> Why would Random House publish the book by Herman and Chomsky? It's in #1. "Their end game? Profit." Corporations don't need to manipulate people into buying things they wanted anyway.
mnky9800n 3y ago
Suppression is a good way to make ideas more acceptable. Chomsky is allowed to say these things because he's also considered a communist in the common enemy sense.
bordercases 3y ago
In this case tenure would work out in Chomsky's favor, and Al Jazeera may as a large media company benefit from signalling that other large media companies are not like itself, by way of providing a costly signal at risk to itself. YouTube wouldn't care, it prioritizes demonization based on legal fallout. Talking about flak is not a flak topic.
kneel 3y ago
I don't think they meant it as all encompassing. 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.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/05/19/open-letter-to-noam-chomsky-and-other-like-minded-intellectuals-on-the-russia-ukraine-war https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/05/19/open-letter-to-noam-cho...

feedforward 3y ago
The discourse from establishment Washington over the past month vis-a-vis the Ukraine has been the same as Chomsky's was then. No one is talking about pushing Russia out of Crimea and Donetsk any more. This letter is addressed to Chomsky back then, but he has the same position as most of Washington DC now.
_aaed 3y ago
Most of the "patterns" in this letter are just nonsense; it shows a poor understanding of the wider context

motohagiography 3y ago

During the time I spent as a writer, I found media was a power game for people who could afford to play it, and a mortal struggle for those who couldn't. It's a zero sum game masquerading as a positive sum art and craft. In short, avoid. 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.

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

Chomsky explaining this to a BBC journalist who claims he's not self-censoring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYxizGsrjkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYxizGsrjkc

tarboreus 3y ago
Thanks for the link, I also enjoyed the full interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjENnyQupow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjENnyQupow

dharmach 3y ago

Chomsky is against state and corporates but media can also be co-opted by foreign entities and ideologies.

jampekka 3y ago
Chomsky somehow denies that media can be co-opted by foreign entities and ideologies?