A compelling indictment of the news media's role in covering up errors
and deceptions (The New York Times Book Review) due to the
underlying economics of publishing--from famed scholars Edward S.
Herman and Noam Chomsky. With a new introduction.
In this pathbreaking work, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky show that,
contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous,
obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of
justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and
political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic
society, the state, and the global order.
Based on a series of case studies--including the media's dichotomous
treatment of "worthy" versus "unworthy" victims, "legitimizing" and
"meaningless" Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media
coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina--Herman and Chomsky draw on
decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to
explain the media's behavior and performance.
Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case
studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the
manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free
Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995,
the media's handling of the protests against the World Trade
Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and
2000, and the media's treatment of the chemical industry and its
regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how
propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to
live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that
people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their
function in a radically new way.
