Elmo, Herman & Chomsky

Reading about what Herman and Chomsky said about media made me realize how huge the media industry actually is. Their one and only job is to communicate “messages and symbols to the general populace…to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society” (257). But, this job is a huge one; there is so much to make known to the public and so much we as consumers of media expect to be told. In 1986 there were “over 25,000 media entities in all” (259) but I’m sure now there are even more. There are so many places for us to gain information and all these places where we do get the information are competing for our attention. The media needs to catch our attention so that their corporation is the one we turn to when looking for the latest, up-to-date, information. It was shocking for me to read that “for a television network, an audience gain or loss of one percent point in the Nielsen ratings translates into a change in advertising revenue of from $80 to $100 million a year” (268). It is crazy that even one percentage point can yield that much of a financial difference. I had never really thought about how the advertising industry really worked I guess, or how much money actually went into even making one advertisement. Another point that I found interesting in the essay was when Herman and Chomsky said, “the mass media themselves also provide “experts” who regularly echo the official view” (274). This made me think back the Marx and his ideas of ideology, who says that these people reporting the news to us are even “experts” and is this “official view” just what they think people should believe, an ideology perhaps? Overall I think the Herman and Chomsky provide a lot more in depth look at the media than we have been getting with the other theorists; they take more of a numerical and mathematical approach to media which was a nice change.