The propaganda of news

Welcome to part three of Meet Press‘s series on the truth. We’ve talked about the philosophical concept of “truth” and defined journalistic truth and explained how it works. Below, we talk about propaganda and its involvement in the truth and its effect on journalistic truth.

First, though, a moment to talk about the propaganda model of news.

Noam Chomsky

In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman make an argument for the propaganda model of news. Chomsky and Herman argued that news organizations are subject to market pressures because they are free-market enterprises. As such, they will make decisions about what to cover based on the market forces working upon them. The stories will inevitably maintain the status quo and not question those in power and help the news outlets maintain their sources of revenues. At its core, the model theorizes how power involves itself in the relationship between the dominant structures in society the media (Klaehn, 2005).

Why am I mentioning this? Well, within the model Chomsky and Herman touch on the idea that the sources journalists use tend to be those in power, or those who are part of organizations that produce the most flak. Journalists, then, reproduce propaganda from these sources. As Chomsky and Herman argued, in the situation of a government public relations campaign, the taxpayers are paying to be propagandized.

And this is where journalism, despite its mantra of truth-seeking, falls victim to propaganda.

As I mentioned previously, Lippmann’s idea of journalistic truth through scientific testing took hold following the First World War (St. John, 2009). At the same time that journalists were looking to distance themselves from the wartime propaganda machines, public relations theorists were trying to come up with new ways of providing information to the public. St. John wrote that Edward Bernays was one of the foremost thinkers on public relations during the 1920s and had a different view of what constituted propaganda.

How do we define propaganda? One definition is any media use designed to influence behaviour and thinking of target audience towards a subject, product or objective (Mercado & Torres 2006). Bernays (1928, in St. John, 2009) defined propaganda as “a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group.” If that’s the case, then anything can be considered propaganda, including public education campaigns or media advocacy. But wait, isn’t all propaganda by its very nature evil? Bernays believed that propaganda was not a negative — used in the right context, it could become a tool to better society. St. John noted that in 1927, Bernays asserted that effective propaganda needed to be based on the truth.

Journalists were outraged and denounced his ideas, St. John wrote. The press argued that journalism portrays the truth while propaganda delivered the illusion of truth. This argument remains today.

Journalistic truth, while being based on scientific methods of gathering and checking facts, also required journalists to put stories into context for consumers. For that, reporters continue to turn to experts to provide the context a consumer needs to understand the impact and information contained in a news piece. These experts help answer the question of “so what?” when a consumer reads about political happenings or an environmental disaster such as the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Consistently using experts to explain journalistic truth, sometimes without challenging them to verify and validate their claims, leads us to part of the definition of propaganda noted above: “influence behaviour and thinking of target audience towards a subject, product or objective.” The argument that continues to be made about the use of experts to contextualize information and maintain press objectivity is still subject to Chomsky and Herman’s critiques along with the critiques of educational philosopher John Dewey. Dewey argued that the press overemphasized the use of experts, or elites, in the newsgathering process. St. John wrote that Dewey argued that experts were “not the key to the press providing accurate renditions of the world.” Dewey argued that reality — or the best picture of the truth — was only available by being in the community. Experts were the people on the ground, not necessarily those in the ivory tower or in political office.

Yet, if you look at a news story today and analyzes the use of experts, you will find that certain people repeatedly pop up. I’m not a saint in this respect: When I was a political reporter, I knew which local university professors to turn to when I required an expert opinion. I went to them for context even though they brought their own biases to their analyses. This relationship between experts and journalists, St. John argued, has had the unintended effect of promoting journalists’ reliance on propagandists and has led to the erosion of journalists cries of being objective.

… if journalism is to more fully realize its professional drive to be an accurate provider of “daily slices of the truth,” it needs to acknowledge a key incongruity that makes incoherent its broad assertion of authenticity — the press’s objectivity stance contributes to an enduring, if unintended, preference for public relations sources and propaganda materials. Press truth claims can only erode as this dissonance persists. (St. John, 2009, p. 364)

The propaganda model of news strikes again.

And that leads us to a recent phenomenon — the era of truthiness. That’s next time on Meet Press.