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Update on propaganda and advertising

John Quiggin13 Comments

A year or so ago, I was surprised to find out that a fair bit of the news on US TV is actually advertising produced by corporations and fed into news broadcasts with spurious “reporters”. The NYT has an update, with a report by the Center for Media and Democracy on the extent of the practice.

13 thoughts on “Update on propaganda and advertising”

  1. Corporate propaganda is nothing new at all. It has a very long history, having adopted and refined many of the techniques of propaganda used in WWI.

    Of more concern is the ease with which ‘news’ organisations make use of this material. The structure of much modern media makes this all but inevitable. News divisions are often nothing but an element of a corporation, whose only interest is the bottom line. If you accept this, then ready made ‘news’ items, requiring no time, money, or thought, to produce are likely to be used much more readily than the ideal of the ‘free press’ in pursuit of the truth, would suggest.

    Does this indicate that the increasing corporate influence over news gathering is becoming a terminal condition?

    Though I wonder at the need for Govt agencies to indulge in this kind of deception. Another feature of the current media system is that official statements are themselves news, by definition. This offers great scope for Govts to get their message out with, too often, far less critical scrutiny than they deserve. The deceptions over WMD in Iraq is just the most blatant example. Various spokespersons pronouncments were endlessly reported as ‘news’ with only minimal scepticism over the contents of the statements.

  2. I’m surprised you were suprised. This is consistent with the logic of a profit driven press. Keep costs down, recirculate pre-prepared material, go for mass entertainment.

    I think the press should refuse to cover ‘doorstops’ and say ‘if you won’t answer our questions we won’t broadcast your soundbites’. Alternatively they could make ‘the story’ the particular person’s refusal to answer detailed questions.

    But of course they are too feckless to do that. And it would be ‘biased’. And so we get ‘he said – she said’ journalism. It would ultimately be more costly too.

    So it seems to me that the day will come when the PM’s office (of whatever political party) says to the press “The PM was unable to find the time to do a doorstop, but we do have a tape of ‘grabs’ you can use for the news.

    Etc Etc.

  3. Prof Q, you haven’t been reading some Chomsky? He has been banging on about this for years. I recall reading about this in great detail in one of his books about 4 years ago…hardly a new phenomenon.

  4. It’s always good to be cautious and skeptical of anything one hears or sees on the news. You cannot just swallow anything that happens to be presented as news. I don’t think there was ever a time when you COULD reasonably accept anything seen or heard on the news as the pure unadulterated truth. Perhaps the very low ratings given the news media by the public are a reflection of a growing awareness of the phenomenon.

  5. In my local newspaper (the St Louis Post-Dispatch) a great many of the articles simply promote a company or product. This once great newspaper is now mostly a waste of newsprint. There was a time when I could reasonably accept the daily news as mostly true.

    The low ratings for news programs reflects the fact that most of the people really don’t care about the news.

  6. “The low ratings for news programs reflects the fact that most of the people really don’t care about the news. ”

    If that were true, people wouldn’t be turning to other sources for news, such as the internet.

  7. Worst I’ve seen was about a decade ago travelling through south america when the lead item in the news program was about the rising excitement throughtout the capital and other major cities about the beginning of another soap opera to be screened on that channel. And this was the serious channel. It didn’t take long to develop a filter to ignore the non-news items.

  8. You can expect the Howard government to do this too – just keep a very sceptical eye on the Australian media. No one is too far above the Washington standard.

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