Graham, Herman & Chomsky

I thought that this article was interesting, because I have been studying this a lot since I became a CMC major. Previously I was under the impression that the majority of what we heard in the media was true, because there has to be some law against falseness in the media, right? Wrong. The authors discuss this, and a quote that I think sums it up fairly well is “a propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices.” This has a lot to do with what goes on in society today. In my economics class we are discussing cross-media ownership, and the way that large corporations can easily control the information that is heard and seen by the viewers. This means that oftentimes, the companies with the most money are the ones who control the media and it becomes very narrow. We also discussed this a lot in the CMC100 class that I took last year, because we discussed how corporations can hide information about the fact that their products could possibly be harmful to those who use them. I think that this story relates really well to the ideas of Jameson, and how he discusses that we do not even think twice about the things that we see in media anymore, because we see the advertisements so much that it becomes second nature. To analyze the thousands of advertisements that we view on a daily basis would take far too much time. Maybe this is why we purchase products such as fat-loss supplements based solely on the fact that the commercials say that we are guaranteed to lose weight (with diet, exercise, and the risk of heart attack and stroke) but that is not something that we choose to focus on. We just want the weight loss. The more money that these companies spend on advertisements, and the more companies that they befriend, the chances become smaller that the “truth” will be exposed about what is really going on.