Chomsky and "Red" America

The government shutdown has stilled the hallways of the Smithsonian and closed memorials and national parks across the country - and the media loves it. Big, elaborate graphics with dire overtones fly in to introduce a news segment on the shutdown, a clock ticks away the seconds in the corner of the screen, letting the viewer know with exactitude how long it has been since the government was opened (it has been a lot longer since the legislative bodies have functioned).

This article in the NY Times discusses how the people consume news in a way that resonates with their own personal beliefs, instead of gaining a big-picture understanding of current events.

This is a great observation, but it needs to go a step further: why doesn't reading or watching or listening to the news provide a comprehensive picture of the world. Why is everything either slanted to the left or the right?

This shutdown, whatever the effect on the general populace, is good business for the media. It doesn't really matter if coverage of the shutdown is accurate, because the news outlets realize that people only want to hear what reinforces their already held beliefs and not be challenged by inconvenient truths.

It's got to be true, I saw it on the news. 

 

The news media is controlled by just a few central, very wealthy, very politically influential corporations - and the news media serves the needs of the for-profit corporation, not the viewership or society in general.

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.

Excerpt from "Manufacturing Consent" by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman.

In other words, the media's job is to make the population behave, not the politicians. The media actually has, at times, a vested interest in not reporting "just the facts and nothing but the facts, ma'am."
 
Why? One of the main reasons that the media works to keep the populace in check and not the other way around is because the media system is concerned with profit.

According to Chomsky (from a compilation of his interview answers):

The major decisions over what happens in the society -- decisions over investment and production and distribution and so on -- are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations and conglomerates and investment firms...

They are also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government. They're the ones who own the media and they're the ones who have to be in a position to make the decisions. They have an overwhelmingly dominant role in the way life happens.

This is propaganda -- not to support a tyrannical autocrat, but to keep the plutocrats happy. To keep the populace tuned in, susceptible to the blandishments of advertisers- that is what the media wants.

  Socialism is the new red. 

One of the most powerful mechanisms in place that supports the propaganda of the media giants is (in dramatic echoing tones): the fear of communism.

It bears repeating that communism is the antithesis of capitalism. Communism is the antithesis of capitalism. (Repeated).

Put another way, communism is bad for profits. Our government has had some very lucrative dealings with dictators over the years. But communism is government dispersing profits, it is others reaping the fruits of your labor (theoretically, you would also be reaping the fruits of their labors, but it never seems to work out like that in our minds).

But, we haven't been worried about the Reds since the fall of the Soviet Union and McCarthy's witch hunt, right?

Except that, the media and their political mouthpieces and their ideologue talking heads don't always call it communism. They call it "entitlements" and "socialism." It doesn't matter that socialism and communism are vastly different. If it can be made to seem like social welfare programs are communist in nature, the inculcated masses will have no choice but to go back to the ideal ways of the benevolent capitalist overlords. Which is what our friend, the creepy, finger-raping Uncle Sam puppet, reminds us - don't let the socialists take our profits.

All hail to the capitalist overlords--or get puppet finger-raped.

Bonus excerpt from "Manufacturing Consent":

The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings:

(I) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms;

(2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media;

(3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power;

(4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media;

(5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another.

The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.