What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream?
What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream?
By Noam Chomsky
April 23, 2014
Part of the reason why I write about the media is because I am interested in the whole intellectual culture and the part of it that is easiest to study is the media. It comes out every day. You can do a systematic investigation. You can compare yesterdays version to todays version. There is a lot of evidence about whats played up and what isnt and the way things are structured.
My impression is the media arent very different from scholarship or from, say, journals of intellectual opinionthere are some extra constraintsbut its not radically different. They interact, which is why people go up and back quite easily among them.
You look at the media, or at any institution you want to understand. You ask questions about its internal institutional structure. You want to know something about their setting in the broader society. How do they relate to other systems of power and authority? If youre lucky, there is an internal record from leading people in the information system which tells you what they are up to (it is sort of a doctrinal system). That doesnt mean the public relations handouts, but what they say to each other about what they are up to. There is quite a lot of interesting documentation.
Those are three major sources of information about the nature of the media. You want to study them the way, say, a scientist would study some complex molecule or something. You take a look at the structure and then make some hypothesis based on the structure as to what the media product is likely to look like. Then you investigate the media product and see how well it conforms to the hypotheses. Virtually all work in media analysis is this last parttrying to study carefully just what the media product is and whether it conforms to obvious assumptions about the nature and structure of the media.
More:
http://zcomm.org/zmagazine/what-makes-mainstream-media-mainstream/
hedda_foil
(16,375 posts)Members of the the mainstream media are preconditioned to sincerely believe that the rabble must be steered to believe in whatever the elites want them to believe. And that's the objective. There's so much more to this piece. I hope many other DUers will take the time to read the entire article.
Doctor_J
(36,392 posts)See "Dirty Truths". What is now seen as "mainstream" is actually a corporate propaganda factory. It's become so refined in the Limpballs Era that the big shots no longer have to do any censoring. The rank and file propagandists censor themselves or, in the case of Fox, are believers in the far right BS.