Noam Chomsky: The five filters of the mass media machine | The Listening Post

Dropsite news is good, but are you familiar with manufacturing consent’s propaganda model of the mass media? A simplified explanation: ▶ this video

Most people that have knowledge of a news story are often incredulous reading one due to incorrect framing or outright mistakes. More insidiously, the news is also molded by a set of institutional incentives that often results in a highly distorted picture of the world. ▶ this video

If Chomsky [1] is to be believed, the media is designed to keep the masses outraged and fighting amongst themselves while keeping those in power out of the spotlight. If the news gets to inconvenient for those in power it gets "corrected" by the media complex. [1] ▶ this video

Five filters. One big media theory. Consent is being manufactured around you all the time. Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine ▶ this video

Manufacturing Consent (there's a documentary form of it too) changed my entire outlook on media. Highly recommend. Short vid based on it: ▶ this video

link For those that don't like to read there's a brief animated YouTube introduction voiced by Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now!": ▶ this video This theory, backed by enormous volumes of evidence and case studies, is very much worth a read. It explains how propaganda is instituted in the US without overt censorship.

I gave this some more thought, and I think you're wrong. Wrong in the sense that Chomsky and Herman did focus on these things. One of the five filters is "Flack". In this filter "wrong" opinions are given flack from institutions with power. The focus on government comes from them being, arguably, the most powerful institution. The propaganda model does account for other non-governmental and non-media influences. This is talked about in the animation Al-Jazeera made. ▶ this video

I agree with your description of populism, but it does not argue against decentralisation. I guess you think of the single leader as the "centralised" focal point of a populist movement. I agree, but it's not what the word centralised refer sto. Instead, it refers to the media being centralised or not. Any leader needs a platform to broadcast their message from. Centralised media have (some) selective power over the narrative, and therefore the role of gatekeepers or enablers (like when controversial figures get disproportionate attention because it causes more clicks - see also [0][1]). The decentralisation aspect of the internet undermines that, which in itself is value-neutral. This is not something that never happened before; the printing press allowed Luther to bypass the gatekeeping powers of the Catholic Church[2]. As I mentioned elsewhere, this lead to massive social upheaval ending in the Thirty Year's War, so it's not all positive (worth noting is that Luther's biggest issue was with the so-called "indulgences", which allowed people to buy off their sins[3][4]. How is that for unfair wealth inequality?) The point is that the printing press meant that a lot more voices could be heard by a lot more people. The Internet takes that to the next level. A lot more of those "single charismatic leaders" suddenly have a potential audience (this might explain why I feel disdain for most YouTubers: a lot of them want an audience for the sake of having an audience, without havin