Daisy, Herman and Chomsky

As CMC majors we have been dwelling on the fact that the dominant class has the power in our society, they are the ones that create the ideologies we follow. Herman and Chomsky’s article, “A Propaganda Model,” expands on the fact that “the media serve the ends of a dominant elite” (257). The article goes into detail, talking about the “filters” that the media goes through before it is released into the public. Once the news passes through the filters, it is cleansed of anything that may not fit the description of what the elite want presented. I found this idea of filters to be related to Horkheimer and Adorno when they said, “the whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry” (45). Everything we see in the media has been modified in some form or another.
Reading the article, you realize how difficult it really is to achieve something in the media unless you have a product that a larger company is interested in. Looking at the charts in the Herman and Chomsky article, you realize that major media conglomerates not only have enough money to control the media, but are also made up of powerful directors, specifically individuals who have a background in banking. No wonder the companies like GE are so powerful, they are made up of some of the most powerful people. Even if powerful individuals do not have much knowledge in the company they are directing, their status ups the status of the company.
I found the discussion on client profiling extremely interesting. I always wondered how companies decide about where to put their commercials. Herman and Chomsky said, “the mass media are interested in attracting audiences with buying power, not audiences per se” (268). Not only do the dominant media companies keep smaller and lower groups out, but they also avoid targeting lower class with commercials. This goes along with the idea of sameness, the media is created by the powerful class for the powerful class, because they are the ones who are able to afford to buy the products, this just seems to create a larger aspirational gap. There is no variation in our culture, and this is the hegemonic power; our culture does not run on difference. As Hebdige talked about in his article, “otherness is reduced to sameness” (157). Being different is being the same.