{"id":5974,"date":"2024-07-10T18:47:37","date_gmt":"2024-07-10T16:47:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=5974"},"modified":"2024-07-11T10:31:23","modified_gmt":"2024-07-11T08:31:23","slug":"news-media-groom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2024-07-10\/news-media-groom\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the news media’s job is to groom us"},"content":{"rendered":"

Large numbers of Palestinians and Ukrainians were killed in missile strikes days apart. The media’s differing treatment of these comparable events is the clue to what the media’s really there to do<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

When all we have to rely on in understanding our relationship to the news media is the media\u2019s self-proclaimed assessment of its own role, maybe it is no surprise that most of us assume the West\u2019s \u201cfree press\u201d is a force for good: the bedrock of democracy, the touchstone of a superior western civilisation.<\/p>\n

The more idealistic among us think of the news media as something akin to a public service. The more cynical of us think of it as a competitive marketplace in information and commentary, one in which ugly agendas are often in evidence but truth ultimately prevails.<\/p>\n

Both views are fanciful. The reality is far, far darker \u2013 and I speak as someone who worked for many years in the Guardian and Observer newsrooms, widely seen as the West\u2019s most progressive newspapers.<\/p>\n

As readers, we don\u2019t, as we imagine, \u201cconsume\u201d news. Rather, the news consumes us. Or put another way, the media uses the news to groom us, its audience. Properly understood, the relationship is one of abuser and abused.<\/p>\n

Sounds like a paranoid conspiracy theory?<\/p>\n

In fact, just such an argument was set out many years ago \u2013 in more academic fashion \u2013 in Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman\u2019s book Manufacturing Consent.<\/p>\n

If you have never heard of the book, there may be a reason. The media don\u2019t want you reading it.<\/p>\n

When I worked at the Guardian, there was no figure more reviled in the newsroom by senior editors than Noam Chomsky. As young journalists, we were warned off reading him. How might we react were we to start thinking more deeply about the role of the media, or begin testing the limits of what we were allowed to report and say?<\/p>\n

Chomsky and Herman\u2019s Propaganda Model explains in detail how western publics are \u201cbrainwashed under freedom\u201d by a media driven by hidden corporate and state interests. Those interests can be concealed only because the media decides what counts as news and frames how we understand events.<\/p>\n

Its chief tools are misdirection and omission \u2013 and, in extremis, outright deception.<\/p>\n