Serendipity, Herman and Chomsky

In recent classes, we have spent much time discussing ISA's. These work through cultural ideology and not by force. One of the most interesting parts in today's reading I thought, was on propaganda. The modelincludes, “(1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) ‘flak’ as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) ‘anticommunism’ as a national religion and control mechanism” (257-258). This immediately made me think of propaganda as a huge ISA during World War 2. The people were being brainwashed by these images and captions, and the images were one of the ways that the Nazi's kept the country in line. People were not likely to question huge culturally wide assumptions, they would simply remain oblivious and continue to follow the crowd. The ISA's (the propaganda images) were in my opinion, just as much at fault as Hitler himself. They perpetuated his beliefs nationwide and kept the war going much longer than it probably would have.This also made me think of Benjamin's quote "the camera lies". Even though these were widespread images, most of them were not true, but because they were so plentiful and out there, people didnt even think that what they were saying might not be true. Nowadays, we have the saying "not everything you read is true", which hints than once, people did think everything they read was absolutely the truth.