Fighting Words: How Arab and American Journalists can Break Through to Better Coverage

Fighting Words (Click here)

THE PROPAGANDA MODEL: AN OVERVIEW

In their 1988 book ‘Manufacturing Consent – The Political Economy of the Mass Media’, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky introduced their ‘propaganda model’ of the media. The propaganda model argues that there are 5 classes of ‘filters’ in society which determine what is ‘news’; in other words, what gets printed in newspapers or broadcast by radio and television. Herman and Chomsky’s model also explains how dissent from the mainstream is given little, or zero, coverage, while governments and big business gain easy access to the public in order to convey their state-corporate messages – for example, ‘free trade is beneficial, ‘globalisation is unstoppable’ and ‘our policies are tackling poverty’.

Those Aren’t Stones, They’re Rocks

By Seth Ackerman

American journalists probably feel more pressure about their coverage of Israel and Palestine than any other subject. That is true even of Extra!; despite having a readership that is overwhelmingly sympathetic to our progressive critique of the media, our Middle East coverage invariably elicits angry letters and complaints, sometimes resulting in cancelled subscriptions.

According to Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun, his publication has felt “tremendous pressure” to alter its editorial position that Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is the “fundamental source of the problem.” Hundreds of subscribers have cancelled their subscriptions, and donors have announced publicly that they will stop giving money to the magazine (Democracy Now!, 11/15/00).