In an interview between BBC journalist Andrew Marr and social critic Noam Chomsky, Marr posed the question, “How can you know that I’m self-censoring?” to which Chomsky replied, “I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting (BBC, 1996)”.
These words encapsulate the central theory of Manufacturing Consent, a 1988 book written by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky which argues that mass media in the U.S are “effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion (Herman and Chomsky, 2002, p. 306)”. Essentially, the book describes the way media skews the news narrative to best serve the interests of the powerful. This can be explained by means of a propaganda model of communication developed by Herman and Chomsky. The model consists of five filters of editorial bias that apply to news reporting. These are as follows: Media ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak and ideology and will be analysed through examining the US presential election in 2016, particularly the campaign of Donald Trump and how it relates to Herman and Chomsky’s concept of manufactured consent. The five filters of the propaganda model will form the basis of this essay’s thesis which is that the coverage of the 2016 US presidential election confirms to Herman and Chomsky’s concept of a propaganda model and helped to secure Trump’s presidency.
Media Ownership
In 1988, when Manufacturing Consent was first published, 50 companies controlled the mass media in America. Fast forward to today and just 6 corporations control 90% of media in America. It Is these dominant power structures which shape and control what is considered newsworthy and therefore have a firm stranglehold on what is reported, heard, read and watched. Media ownership is the first filter of the propaganda model. The way the media is structured today allows for a cultural hegemony to infiltrate society, where the values and beliefs of those in power become accepted as normal even if they go against the interests of the average person. According to the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, entertainment is presented in a way which de-politicises the public sphere in ways that people rarely notice: “Reporting facts as human-interest stories, mixing information with entertainment, arranging material episodically, and breaking down complex relationships into smaller fragments – all of this comes together to form a syndrome that works to depoliticize public communication (Fuchs, 2018, p. 72)”. This is a subtle form of propaganda that results in many accepting the world as it is presented to them, unaware that the society we live in is a social construct and that their perception of it is a false consciousness influenced primarily through the ideological state apparatuses that are filtered to us through the media. This is when institutions allegedly outside of state control, such as the media, transmit the values of the state onto the individual and therefore perpetuate order in society and maintain the capitalist relations of production (Althusser, 2014).
The capitalist system that is in place in the USA allows massive media conglomerates to value profit above all else. This value system is visible when it comes to how the media dealt with and reported on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Trump’s campaign was beneficial to media organisations as Trump’s controversial nature drove up ratings and multiplied paid subscriptions to online news sites (Bloom, 2018). Trump was a candidate whose values closely aligned with that of those in power, he supported corporate tax cuts and while much of his rhetoric may have been divisive, such as calls to build a wall on the US border with Mexico in order to stop illegal immigrants from entering the country, it did not threaten the dominant power structures and as such Trump was given ample coverage by the media (BBC News, 2016).
This is in stark contrast to other candidates on the campaign who did threaten the dominant power structures. Bernie Sanders was a major presidential candidate for the Democratic Party in 2016. A democratic socialist, Sanders ran on a platform that criticised economic inequality and neoliberalism, supporting universal health care and demanding higher taxes for corporations and the wealthy. These views do not align with those in power and as such it was much more difficult for Sanders to get media coverage. He had to rely primarily on a grassroots campaign funded by small individual donors as opposed to super PAC’s which funded much of the Trump campaign, which bound him even closer to the dominant power structures and the elite (Open Secrets, 2016). An apt symbol of the media’s bias toward reporting on Trump came on 1 March 2016 when all 3 of the major cable news stations ignored a speech by Sanders and instead decided to broadcast a live feed of Trump’s empty podium for a speech he was delivering later that evening. “Fox News, CNN and MSNBC all declined to carry Sanders’ speech, instead offering punditry about the evening, with the chyrons promising, ‘AWAITING TRUMP’ and ‘STANDING BY FOR TRUMP’ (Grim, 2016)”. This demonstrates that when it comes to media reporting oftentimes organisations will prop up the voices that maintain the status quo and silence that ones that disrupt it.
Advertising
According to Herman and Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent the media is not only selling consumers their content, but they are also selling the viewer as a product for advertisers. This is the second filter of the propaganda model. Before advertising became commonplace, the price of a newspaper was merely to cover the expenses involved in making it. As advertising began to take hold it was no longer economically viable to run a newspaper without it and that meant an advertiser’s choice could make or break a papers survival. As outlined in Manufacturing Consent the media needs to adjust its content to favour output that aligns with advertisers’ values and avoid content that may be controversial or show them in a bad light:
Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the ‘buying mood.’ They seek programs that will lightly entertain and thus fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose of program purchases the dissemination of a selling message (Herman and Chomsky, 2002, pp. 17–18).
While the goal of traditional advertisers is usually to sell you a product, the goal of advertising during election season is to sell you on a candidate. Political advertising is big business in US presidential elections with an estimated $2.38 billion spent on television advertisements in 2015-2016 cycle, representing 4.29 million advertisements airing. This oversaturated landscape of television advertisements demonstrates how ingrained advertising money is into the US election process. Those without the means or who refuse to take large contributions from the ruling elite, such as Bernie Sanders, will be unable to keep up with the amount of money needed to run a successful campaign. “To put the over 4 million airings in context, if every one of these ads aired back-to-back, they would be broadcast for nearly 1500 straight days without stop (Fowler, Ridout and Franz, 2016)”.
Trump was an unusual political candidate, he had no background as a politician prior to his decision to run, but also because he already had a successful world-famous brand. The Trump brand represents hotels, resorts, and golf courses amongst other things. Trump himself was already known as the host of the reality television series The Apprentice and was well versed and already established in the television landscape before his campaign began. Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” was used effectively to resonate with the voters he wanted to reach, creating nostalgia for an era that never really existed. Tactics such giving his competitors unflattering nicknames such as “Crooked Hillary”, for democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, also demonstrated how political advertising could be used to influence voters’ perceptions. The Washington Post outlined the ways in which Trump’s strategy to advertise himself and discredit opponents had a positive effect on his campaign and ultimate election:
Trump used social media, and Twitter in particular, to build relationships with voters and create a word-of-mouth buzz for his brand. Clinton’s use of social media did not generate as much communication buzz. This strategy helped Trump build attitudinal loyalty, the degree to which a customer prefers or likes a brand, rather than behavioural loyalty, when a customer buys a product out of habit (Rivero, 2016).
Sourcing
The third filter of the propaganda model relates to how the establishment manages the media. It is difficult for journalism to hold power to account as the system itself encourages complicity. With government lobbies, special access given to favoured news organisations, interview opportunities, and leaks to the media, governments make themselves pivotal to the process of reporting and can shape the news narrative to their liking (Al Jazeera English, 2017). Those in power and those who report on it have a mutually beneficial relationship and this distorts accurate reporting. According to Herman and Chomsky, “the mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest. The media need a steady, reliable flow of the raw material of news (Herman and Chomsky, 2002, p. 18)”. As outlined in Manufacturing Consent, news reporters cannot be in all places at once and they must concentrate their resources to where they are most likely to get interesting attestable stories.
Economics dictates that they concentrate their resources where significant news often occurs, where important rumours and leaks abound, and where regular press conferences are held. The White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department, in Washington, D.C., are central nodes of such news activity (Herman and Chomsky, 2002, pp. 18–19).
This symbiotic relationship between Trump and media can clearly be seen in the 2016 election as well as during his presidency. From the beginning of the Trump campaign, mass media focused on what an unusual candidate he was as he had no previous political experience. The press would report on the fact that the press was reporting on him, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where the coverage itself was the story.
Research from Harvard’s Shorenstein Centre showed the media’s initial coverage of Trump largely focused on his campaign’s momentum, and the amount of coverage he received was abnormal for a candidate who had such a low standing in the polls. The press coverage, the centre concluded, was a factor in Trump’s improvement in the polls (Jablow, 2016).
Alluding to the title of a play by Henrik Ibsen, Trump referred to the media as “the enemy of the people” (Jablow, 2016) showing the relationship as one fraught with division as Trump dismissed those who criticised him as “fake news” while propping up those who supported him such as the far-right news organisation Breitbart News. After his election Trump would appoint former Breitbart executive chairmen Steve Bannon as the White House’s chief strategist in his administration, demonstrating a clear favour for this type of one-sided reporting.
The special access given to favoured news organisations became even more apparent after Trump’s election when he started to handpick certain reporters to attend off-camera press briefings, given by White House press secretary Sean Spicer, and banning other major news sources such as The Guardian, CNN, and BBC. “When asked why some were excluded, Mr Spicer said it was his decision to ‘expand the pool’ of reporters. He also warned the White House was going to ‘aggressively push back’ at ‘false narratives’ in the news (BBC News, 2017)”. This exclusion and silencing of dissenting voices wholly encapsulates the third filter of the propaganda model, sourcing the mass media news, as outlined by Herman and Chomsky.
Flak
The fourth filter in the propaganda model is “flak”, described by Herman and Chomsky as “negative responses to a media statement or program. It may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and bills before Congress, and other modes of complaint, threat, and punitive action (Herman and Chomsky, 2002, p. 26)”. For Chomsky and Herman flak means negative responses to content which can be used to discredit those who disagree with the accepted hegemonic views of those in power.
In today’s world of rampant social media use the internet is an effective place to generate flak, particularly on Twitter where the vast majority of those in politics are active. During the 2016 election significant flak was generated by the alt-right movement that supported Trump and opposed the democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. According to Christian Fuchs, Director of the Communication and Media Research Institute, in his piece examining the propaganda model today, “the Guardian has reported that Trump supporters spread fake news stories and conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton on social media. Empirical research confirms such tendencies (Fuchs, 2018, p. 82)”.
In the age of the internet, flak can spread like wildfire and today contentious views that would usually not make it onto traditional media platforms can flourish online. “Even if we do not like it, fascism and right-wing extremism on social media are to a significant degree public forms of communication. They constitute a reactionary public sphere that is mediated by the internet, social media, mobile communication etc (Fuchs, 2018, p. 83)”. Flak can often be an organised attack and consumers continue to read controversial content and often fall into a self-perpetuating cycle, as internet algorithms give them more of the same, leading to a belief in false narratives. Herman and Chomsky have discussed the effect of the alt-right on perceptions in today’s world arguing that “right-wing media, including Fox News, right-wing talk radio and blogs, form ‘a right-wing attack machine and echo-chamber’. In the current political climate of nationalism, racism, xenophobia and elements of fascism, social media is certainly a right-wing attack machine (Fuchs, 2018, p. 83)”.
These right-wing attack machines function partly due to prevalence of so-called Russian bots on Twitter who generated content to influence the 2016 election. These Twitter bots would spread information online, posing a real people, to start anti-democratic dialogues online. “An investigation by The New York Times, and new research from the cybersecurity firm FireEye, reveals some of the mechanisms by which suspected Russian operators used Twitter and Facebook to spread anti-Clinton messages and promote the hacked material they had leaked (Shane, 2017)”. These are just some of the ways that flak has influenced the election and helped secure Donald Trump’s presidency.
Ideology
The fifth filer of the propaganda model in the original publication of Manufacturing Consent was anti-communism. At the time, this was closely linked to tensions between the US and Russia. Chomsky later argued that since the end of the Cold War this filter could be replaced with the “War on Terror” as threats in the USA shifted toward conflicts with the Middle East and Islamic terrorist organisations following the attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. In essence, this last filter could be described as the way that Western ideology is presented in the media as what a good society looks like, and how foreign ideologies or different patterns of thinking are shown as ‘other’ or something which should be avoided. The cultural critic Edward Said described this concept of “othering” in his 1978 book Orientalism which detailed the Western world’s prevailing narrative that positions “the East” as somehow inferior. “Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort (Said, 2003 p. XVI)”.
In the case of the 2016 US presidential election this could most closely be seen in the anti-immigration rhetoric espoused by Donald Trump. Although Trump has no definitive ideology, his calls to build a wall on the border with Mexico and his description of Haiti as a “shithole country” shows the US-centric view of his campaign and it resonated with white supremacists. This became evident through some of those who gave their endorsement to Trump’s campaign.
Before the 2016 US election Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance and one of the countries most prominent white supremacists, had never given his support to any presidential candidate. However, in 2016 he urged voters to support Trump stating: “We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, educated, white people who will assimilate to our culture (Mahler, 2016)”. The American Freedom Party, a white supremacist group, also devoted a daily hour-long podcast to Trump during his campaign. A piece in the Seattle Times outlining Trump’s popularity with white power groups said: “It is difficult to quantify the reach of the various white-supremacist websites that are championing Trump’s cause. Taylor says American Renaissance attracts about 300,000 unique visitors a month. Another white-power site, Stormfront.org, claims to have the same number of registered users (Mahler, 2016)”. These statistics show how Trump tapped into the views of extreme far-right groups and gained support from groups usually outside of the mainstream political sphere, securing his election through a platform based on populism and divisiveness. All of this played very well to mass media coverage and online content creation, driving up clicks and generating controversy.
This essay analysed Herman and Chomsky’s theoretical approach to “manufacturing consent” as it related to the US presidential election in 2016, focusing primarily on Donald Trump and the coverage surrounding his campaign and how this led to his ultimate election. This was achieved through examining the campaign through the five filters of the propaganda model as outlined by Herman and Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent. The first filter is media ownership and how Trump’s campaign was beneficial to mass media from a financial perceptive as it generated views and bolstered profits for news organisations. The second filter is advertising and examined how Trump’s previously recognisable brand was an asset in his campaign. The third filter is sourcing, this demonstrates how Trump played into the symbiotic relationship between government and media using this to his advantage. The fourth filter is flak and shows how Trump supporters and organisations used social media to discredit his opponents such as Hilary Clinton. The fifth and final filter is ideology and the way that Trump used anti-immigration rhetoric to tap into public discontent and gain supporters usually outside of the political spectrum. All these filters when viewed together demonstrate the underlying forces at play in news reporting and how individuals can be coerced or influenced into supporting systems which go against their best interest. In essence, have their consent manufactured and sold back to them as dominant power structures continue to prevail.
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