Today in my "Blogging the Globe" class we were discussing Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's classic work on the "propaganda model" for understanding how the news media work to legitimate and naturalize elite perspectives and marginalize dissent in a supposedly "democratic" society. As I told the students, the model isn't perfect - like all models, it can and should be subject to critique - but it has proven to be remarkably accurate, in many ways, over the years. Today we got another illustration.
Many people have been wondering why the Occupy Wall Street movement isn't getting more play in the mainstream (corporate) media. But it's no mystery at all if you understand Chomsky and Herman. They point out, quite correctly, that the major news media have so thoroughly internalized the worldview of the country's business elites that they can't possibly be counted on to provide anything remotely resembling decent coverage of labor activism or any other form of popular mobilization that seeks to replace corporate control with popular control.
What does this mean in practice? Well, let's ask NPR (National Public Radio), which supposedly exists to be a more "public" alternative to the fully-corporate media. Today NPR responded to listener complaints that the network was failing to give Occupy Wall Street the coverage it deserves. Here is the money quote from NPR executive editor Dick Meyer:
"The recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective."
Yet NPR provides regular (one might say religious) coverage of what "business" is up to - despite the fact that corporate elites represent a tiny fragment of the population. The fact that Meyer could so blithely dismiss the Wall Street protests reveals a great deal about NPR's role in the process of "manufacturing consent" (to use Chomsky and Herman's famous phrase, originally coined by Walter Lippman) for the kinds of policies that benefit the corporate elites.
Interestingly, the NPR ombudsman who reported on the listener complaints and Meyer's response admitted that the complaints "have validity" - but simultaneously argued that NPR's decision to give minimal coverage to Occupy Wall Street was not "part of a long term trend." Perhaps he needs to read Chomsky and Herman. The systematic favoring of business/corporate perspectives is one of the most basic "long term trends" that makes our mainstream news media system so unsatisfying.