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despite apparent widespread public support and the effectiveness of the system in Canada, served well the interests of the insurance and medical service complex.142 The uncritical media reporting and commentary on the alleged urgency of fiscal restraint and a balanced budget in the years 1992–96 fit well the business community’s desire to reduce the social budget and weaken regulation.143 The media’s gullibility in accepting the claim of a Social Security system “crisis,” which would require policy action some thirty-seven years ahead if certain conservative guesses were true and a number of easy corrections were ruled out, served the interests of conservative ideologues anxious to weaken a highly successful government program and a security industry eager to benefit from the partial or full privatization of Social Security.144 The applicability of the propaganda model in these and other cases, including the media’s handling of the “drug wars,” seems clear.145

CONCLUDING NOTE

The propaganda model remains a useful framework for analyzing and understanding the workings of the mainstream media—perhaps even more so than in 1988. As we noted above, the changes in structural conditions that underlie the model, and that we believe strongly and often decisively influence media behavior and performance, have tended to increase the model’s salience. We noted in the Preface to the first edition and in chapters 2 and 3, in reference to the media’s coverage of the wars and elections in Central America in the 1980s, that the media’s performance often surpassed expectations of media subservience to government propaganda demands. This was at least equally true of their performance in covering the 1991 war against Iraq and NATO’s war against Yugoslavia in 1999, as we have described earlier and briefly in regard to Yugoslavia and in detail elsewhere.146

In our conclusion to the first edition, we emphasized that, as the negative performance effects of the media result primarily from their structure and objectives, real change in performance calls for substantial changes in underlying media organization and goals. In the years since 1988, structural changes have not been favorable to improved performance, but it remains a central truth that democratic politics requires a democratization of information sources and a more democratic media. Along with trying to contain and reverse the growing centralization of the mainstream media, grassroots movements and intermediate groups that represent large numbers of ordinary citizens should put much more energy and money into creating and supporting their own media—as they did with the Independent Media Centers brought into existence during the Seattle and Washington, D.C., protests of 1999 and 2000. These, and other nonprofit community-based broadcasting stations and networks, and a better use of public-access channels, the Internet, and independent print media, will be essential for the achievement of major democratic social and political successes.

Preface

In this book, we sketch out a “Propaganda model” and apply it to the performance of the mass media of the United States. This effort reflects our belief, based on many years of study of the workings of the media, that they serve to mobilize support for the special interests that dominate the state and private activity,1 and that their choices, emphases, and omissions can often be understood best, and sometimes with striking clarity and insight, by analyzing them in such terms.

Perhaps this is an obvious point, but the democratic postulate is that the media are independent and committed to discovering and reporting the truth, and that they do not merely reflect the world as powerful groups wish it to be perceived. Leaders of the media claim that their news choices rest on unbiased professional and objective criteria, and they have support for this contention in the intellectual community.2 If, however, the powerful are able to fix the premises of discourse, to decide what the general populace is allowed to see, hear, and think about,