What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream
Noam Chomsky
From a talk at Z Media Institute, June 1997.
Part of the reason I write about the media
is that I am interested in the whole intellectual culture, and
the part of it that is easiest to study is the media.
It comes out every day. You can do a systematic
investigation. You can compare yesterday’s version to today’s
version. There is a lot of evidence about what’s played up and
what isn’t and the way things are structured.
My impression is that the media aren’t very
different from scholarship or from, say, journals of intellectual
opinion. There are some extra constraints, but it’s not radically
different. They interact, which is why people go up and back quite
easily among them. If you want to understand the media, or any
other institution, you begin by asking questions about the internal
institutional structure. And you ask about their setting in the
broader society. How do they relate to other systems of power
and authority? If you’re lucky, there is an internal record from
leading people that tells you what they are up to. That doesn’t
mean the public relations handouts, but what they say to each
other about what they are up to. There is quite a lot of interesting
documentation.
Those are major sources of information about
the nature of the media. You want to study them the way, say,
a scientist would study some complex molecule. You take a look
at the structure and then make some hypothesis based on the structure
as to what the media product is likely to look like. Then you
investigate the media product and see how well it conforms to
the hypotheses.
Virtually all work in media analysis is
this last part-trying to study carefully just what the media product
is and whether it conforms to obvious assumptions about the nature
and structure of the media.
Well, what do you find? First of all, you
find that there are different media which do different things.
For example, entertainment/Hollywood, soap operas, and so on,
or even most of the newspapers in the country (the overwhelming
majority of them) are directed to a mass audience, not to inform
them but to divert them.
There is another sector of the media, the
elite media, sometimes called the agenda-setting media because
they are the ones with the big resources; they set the framework
in which everyone else operates. The New York Times, the Washington
Post, and a few others. Their audience is mostly privileged people.
The people who read the New York Times are
mostly wealthy or part of what is sometimes called the political
class. Many are actually involved in the systems of decision-making
and control in an ongoing fashion, basically as managers of one
sort or another. They can be political managers, business managers
(like corporate executives and the like), doctrinal managers (like
many people in the schools and universities), or other journalists
who are involved in organizing the way people think and look at
things.
The elite media set a framework within which
others operate. For some years I used to monitor the Associated
Press. It grinds out a constant flow of news. In the mid-afternoon
there was a break every day with a "Notice to Editors: Tomorrow’s
New York Times is going to have the following stories on the front
page." The point of that is, if you’re an editor of a newspaper
in Dayton, Ohio, and you don’t have the resources to figure out
what the news is, or you don’t want to think about it anyway,
this tells you what the news is. These are the stories for the
quarter-page that you are going to devote to something other than
local affairs or diverting your audience. These are the stories
that you put there because that’s what the New York Times tells
us is what you’re supposed to care about tomorrow. If you are
an editor of a local newspaper you pretty much have to do that,
because you don’t have much else in the way of resources. If you
get out of line and produce stories that the elite press doesn’t
like, you're likely to hear about it pretty soon. What happened
recently at San Jose Mercury News (i.e. Gary Webb’s “Dark Alliance”
series about CIA complicity in the drug trade) is a dramatic example
of this. So there are a lot of ways in which power plays can drive
you right back into line if you move out. If you try to break
the mold, you’re not going to last long. That framework works
pretty well, and it is understandable that it is a reflection
of obvious power structures.
The real mass media are basically trying
to divert people. “Let them do something else, but don’t bother
us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested
in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about
professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their
problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn’t
serious. Of course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. ‘We’
take care of that.”
this article copyright 1997 Noam Chomsky
You Are Being Lied To copyright 2001
The Disinformation Company, Ltd.
