cherry blossoms

Manufacturing Indifference: Searching for a New 'Propaganda Model'

There are two other aspects to this that needs to be examined including top-down coercion as when politically motivated moguls like Rupert Murdoch or Silvio Berlusconi or Conrad Black buy a media outlet and discharge journalists with whom they disagree.

There has just been a worrisome recent development at the one media outlet in the world known for its independence, AlJazeera where a new board has been named with a gutsy independent journalist replaced as managing director by a former Ambassador to Washington. You just know what that will result in-Foxeera, was the formulation coined by one reader.

In some countries, media dissenters are jailed or even killed. That's why it was suggested at the conference that the title Manufacturing Consent today should be modified for "Manufacturing Compliance." Increasingly governments don't care what people think at all– or if they consent-just that they go along with the program by hook, crook or club. Most prefer that we don't vote at all. That's why elections are treated as sports events. The non-voters increasingly outnumber whose who cast ballots.

Even more distressing is the tend towards the depoliticalization of politics through the merger of showbiz and newsbiz to assure that much of the media agenda is noisy and negative, stripped of all meaning: superficial, often celebrity-dominated with little in-depth explanatory or investigative journalism. They would rather market American Idol as the American Ideology. To them, the only "hegemony" in Canada is its beer and hockey.

The people who run our media are, after all, in the end, promoting a culture of consumption, not of engaged citizenship. They want eyeballs for advertisers, not activists to promote change. The sound-bytes presented as substance are there for entertainment, not illumination. It's heat, not light, all the way