Anarchists have developed detailed and sophisticated analyses of how the wealthy and powerful use the media to propagandise in their own interests. Perhaps the best of these analyses is the "Propaganda Model" expounded in Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, whose main theses we will summarise in this section (See also Chomsky's Necessary Illusions for a further discussion of this model of the media).
Chomsky and Herman's "propaganda model" of the media postulates a set of five "filters" that act to screen the news and other material disseminated by the media. These "filters" result in a media that reflects elite viewpoints and interests and mobilises "support for the special interests that dominate the state and private activity." [Manufacturing Consent, p. xi] These "filters" are: (1) 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" (negative responses to a media report) as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism.
"The raw material of news must pass through successive filters leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print," Chomsky and Herman maintain. The filters "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." [Manufacturing Consent, p. 2] We will briefly consider the nature of these five filters below (examples are mostly from the US media).
We stress again, before continuing, that this is a summary of Herman's and Chomsky's thesis and we cannot hope to present the wealth of evidence and argument available in either Manufacturing Consent or _Necessary Illusions. We recommend either of these books for more information on and evidence to support the "propaganda model" of the media.