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The Propoganda Model

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The Propoganda Model First Paper / Panel presentation (see second conference paper / panel below) The PrPropoganda Model: Evaluating a Theory on the Political Economy and Performance of the MMass Media Andrew Kennis University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign PhD Program at the Institute of Communications Research <[email protected]> Paper Prepared for Presentation at the Midwest Political Science Association 64th Annual National Conference April 20-23, 2006 Chicago, IL Paper will be presented at the Media as Economic Input and Output panel of the Mass Media and Political Communication section on Friday, April 21st, 10:30am (Salon 6 – 3rd Floor). Abstract: The principal aim of this study is to test and evaluate the efficacy of the propaganda model. The propaganda model was co authored by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky and first put-forth in Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988). The model postulates predictions about how the U.S. mainstream media will generally perform in terms of its coverage of U.S. foreign policy issues of importance. Herman and Chomsky have written little about the model since its publication, save for an expanded introduction that served as the only revision of the second edition of Manufacturing Consent (2002). Despite the lack of additional study on the model, the theory still does attract scholarly debate, such as that seen in the pages of Political Communication (see January-March 2004 issue). For this study, I am selecting the paired examples of the coverage of Racak, a village where a massacre that took place in a state deemed hostile to U.S. interests, along with the coverage of Acteal, also a village where a massacre took place, but in a client state of the U.S. Exactly the same number of people died in both of these massacres – forty-five – and they occurred during time periods that were close to one another: Acteal occurring on December 22, 1997 and Racak just a little bit more than a year later, on January 15, 1999. Second Paper / Panel presentation Evaluating the Media Performance of the New YYork Times on Vieques Paper will be presented at the Political Threats, Cycles and Catastrophes panel of the New Political Science Caucus section on Saturday, April 22nd, 8:30am (Parlor B – 6th Floor). Note: Second Paper begins after First following page 40, where numeration restarts. Endnotes to both papers come at end of the document (following second section / paper); bibliographies follow conclusion of each respective paper. 1 The main aim of this study is to test and evaluate the efficacy of the propaganda model. The propaganda model was first posited in, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky.1 Some prominent scholars in communications have all but completely dismissed the model, arguing either that the political economic approach of communications analysis is of limited value (such as Dan Hallin and Michael Schudson), or that the model is no longer relevant in the current post-cold-war era (such as framing theorist Robert Entman).2 More critical scholars, such as Robert McChesney, argue that the model best explains why, “the weakest feature of U.S. professional journalism has been its coverage of the nation’s role in the world, especially when [U.S.] military action is involved…”3 Eric Herring and Piers Robinson studied the question of whether or not Herman and Chomsky’s work was marginalized from mainstream academia for being “too polemical” or “too critical” and concluded the latter as opposed to the former. In their argument, Herring and Robinson write that this marginalization is a “product of an institutional tendency to filter out anti- elite perspectives . and the function of academia in buttressing elite power.”4 The co-authors themselves, however, in the revised introduction of the most recent printing of Manufacturing Consent,5 strongly assert that the model has continued relevance due to continued corporate media concentration and the growth of more powerful media conglomerates and of the corporate dominated public relations industry, which taken together, make the model even more relevant.6 Within the context of this debate then, which is far from settled, I undertook a thorough evaluation of the model in an attempt to evaluate its continued relevancy (or lack thereof). The crux of the model is its unworthy / worthy victims thesis, which posits that because of a filtration process which results from the institutional structure of the media, 2 there will be dichotomized news media coverage of important elections, atrocities, massacres and wars along the lines of the interests of the White House.7 “What is on the agenda in treating one case will be off the agenda in discussing the other,” wrote Herman and Chomsky.8 The primary methodological tool that I used to evaluate the propaganda model is a comparative media content analysis of a “paired example.”9 The case study that will be undertaken will be the massacres of Acteal (December 22, 1997), a small village which is located in the rugged and impoverished state of Chiapas in southeastern Mexico, and of Racak (January 15, 1999), which is also a small village but located in Kosovo, a republic within the Federated Republics of Yugoslavia. Before analyzing the coverage versus the model predictions for this case study, however, I will briefly review the history of the two massacres. Acteal Acteal is a small indigenous village populated mostly by Tztozil speaking Mayans. The village is located in the Chenalhó district, which is the closest municipality to San Cristobal that is within the region known as Los Altos, a reference to the rugged and mountainous terrain that is also described as a cloud forest. San Cristobal, the second largest city in the state, and Acteal, are both located in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas. Along with Oaxaca, which is the northern neighbor of Chiapas, both states are Mexico’s poorest and most densely populated indigenous states in the country. The uprising in 1994 by the Ejercito Zapatista Liberacion National (National Zapatista Liberation Army, or EZLN) was a shock to the Mexican government, then headed by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The reaction of the Salinas administration was to 3 institute a brutal military occupation (that exists to the present, though since toned down by the Fox administration shortly after it took office in 2000) that was roundly condemned by international and Mexican human rights groups.10 It is not, as one might reasonably expect, the Mexican military who has committed the majority of the human rights violations in southeastern Mexico. Instead, it has been the paramilitaries who most often commit the crimes. The paramilitaries generally consist of impoverished indigenous people who are bought off with food, weapons, and military training. In the case of Mexico11, it was a paramilitary group called Paz y Justicia (Peace and Justice, or P&J) that committed the worst of the atrocities since the EZLN uprising and the subsequent military occupation: that was the massacre in Acteal on December 22, 1997.12 The community of Acteal consists of two separate and distinct parts. Las Abejas, one half of Acteal, is pacifist and chooses to disagree with the other half of the community – that is, the Zapatista half of Acteal – on their decision to be associated with the armed group, the EZLN. Its deep religious roots explain why nearly all of its residents who were not away working (mostly women) at the time of the massacre were praying in the middle of a weekday afternoon in the community church. What happened on December 22, 1997 is best recounted by one of Acteal’s most grief stricken residents, 13 year old Guadalupe Vázquez Luna, whose mother, father and 5 sisters were all killed in the massacre: . we were in the chapel praying for peace when about 90 men burst in and started shooting at everybody, even babies. Then they went through the village shooting. The assassins ran after me and my father. When my father was hit by a bullet, he shouted, “Run, Lupita, run,” but I couldn’t. Again he told me, “Run, run,” and I ran faster than the bullets until I couldn’t run anymore. Forty-five people died that day in our village.13 4 John Ross14, veteran correspondent and author on U.S. – Mexico relations, notes that the massacre was “slow and systematic,”15 lasting from its mid-morning start all the way until sunset, with a total fatality count of 45 (19 women, 19 children and 7 men). This begs the question on why police were not dispatched, but as it turned out, however, police were already on-the-scene. Ross explains that at 11:30 in the morning, Cornelio Pérez, a resident of the Zapatista half of Acteal, ran down from the hills to plead to the police detachment that was about 50 meters away from where the killings were taking place to stop the bloodshed, but Comandante Roberto Rivas decided instead to detain Pérez.16 A large majority of the assailants have not been convicted, as only 20 people were sentenced to 35 years in prison, prompting the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Center to term the ruling “partial justice.”17 The Center also noted how “the intellectual authors of the Acteal massacre [still] have not been processed.”18 The bottom line is that a number of officials and authorities had ample time to act and lessen the death count at Acteal, but chose not to do so both before and during the massacre. Although mainstream coverage usually reported that this was a mistake or an accident, the female survivors of the massacre took issue with this stance.
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