The 5 Filters of the Media Industrial Complex

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.

A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings:

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.
   

These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.