Rubber Soul, Herman and Chomsky

“…an advertising-based media system will gradually increase advertising time and marginalize or eliminate altogether programming that has significant public-affairs content” (269).

The reading gives an example of three working-class newspapers that went under due to the fact that they didn’t have press advertising. The Daily Herald, News Chronicle, and Sunday Citizen were highly read newspapers, in fact, the Daily Herald had almost double the readership of The Times, the Financial Times and the Guardian combined AND its readers thought more highly of the Daily Herald than any other popular newspaper. These working-class newspapers served as, “an alternative framework of analysis and understanding that contested the dominant systems of representation in both broadcasting and the mainstream press” (267). Therefore, even a newspaper that is widely read by a massive audience and also provides multiple ideological perspectives loses out to a newspaper that supports the standard hegemonic ideals that limit and create a biased perspective merely because advertisers pay for pictures of their consumer goods to be printed on the pages. Advertisers don’t want to buy space on programs that deal with controversial issues because that might “interfere with the ‘buying mood” (269). They’d rather invest in safe lightly entertaining programs that don’t require too much critical thinking in hopes that their advertisements will seem more appealing to the viewer. Throughout the reading, political economy plays the leading role as to what we see and hear. What the major corporations deem newsworthy corresponds with how these stories send messages similar to the big business ideals. Media that chooses to focus on stories that don’t run with the mainstream ideologies have to “go to extra expense to find and check out information sources; they would elicit flak from government, business, and organized rightwing flak machines, and they might be looked upon with disfavor by the corporate community” (280).