Rebooting the Herman & Chomsky Propaganda Model in the Twenty-First Century

Writing in the 1980s, Edward J. Herman and Noam Chomsky proposed their Propaganda Model of the US (and other western) corporate media in which news production is conditioned by five constraint factors: the size, ownership, and profit orientation of the mass media; advertising as an unofficial license to do business; sourcing patterns within the regime of professional routines; push-back or "flak" from ideological enforcers; and anti-communist ideology as a control. Goss (communication, Saint Louis U., Spain) revisits this model in light of contemporary realities, such as the rise of new media, the spread of neoliberal globalization, and the decline of communism (replacing the anti-communist filter in the model with a dichotomization filter). The analysis is carried out through a focus on exceptional cases of "against-the-grain" news, both at the micro-level of particular stories and, through a case study of London's The Guardian, at the macro level. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Brian Michael Goss (PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana) is a professor in the communication faculty at Saint Louis University, Madrid, Spain. His principal research interests revolve around mass media in its many manifestations. Dr. Goss is the author of Global Auteurs: Politics in the Films of Almodovar, von Trier, and Winterbottom (Peter Lang, 2009) and co-editor (with Christopher Chavez) of Identity: Beyond Tradition and McWorld Neo-Liberalism (2013).