Puppeteer Masters: The Media Elite Today
Media and Politics Research
Three values have been set throughout the media since the first democratic societies: Inform, educate, and entertain. Media serves as a reminder of the set of codes and beliefs that integrate the general public into larger institutions of our society. Propaganda is a word many use in discussions of countries viewed as authoritarian through the lens of Western Media, such as North Korea, Kazakhstan, Iran, or Russia. When discussing democratic countries, such as the United States, France, or Australia for example, standard terms such as Press Freedom or Freedom of Thought are widely used. The world holds these countries on a pedestal for their commitment to journalistic integrity and freedom of speech. The United States, for example, is an example of what media everywhere should look like, or so they say.
Naom Chomsky is an American philosopher, linguist, activist, and intellectual. Chomsky has a diverse range of subject matter interests throughout his 150 books. Yet, he saw right through the American media and how propaganda deviously hid itself right in front of our eyes. In 1988, Chomsky co-authored a book with Edward Herman called ‘Manufacturing Consent,’ where they ripped apart the notion that media acts as a check on political power, that it informs or serves the public so that the citizens can better engage in the political process of the country. The argument was that democracy is staged with the help of media that work as propaganda machines to keep us all in line. Quite a pessimistic approach to the adored institutions that are the media of the world’s democracies, but within the framework of five filters, Chomsky outlines how the media manufactures our consent. These essential ingredients of this model fall under the following headlines, “(1) the size, concentrated ownership, wonder wealth and profit orientation of the dominant mass media firms; (2) advertising as the primary 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” (Chomsky, Herman). The filters interact with and reinforce one another. In today’s world, indications from all five of these filters prove that the propaganda machine is still very much running, turning, and controlling what the public thinks, feels, and how they act, behave, and live.
The third filter of this model is the focal point of this paper. The media elite is a pillar of the propaganda model. The model says that journalism cannot be a check on power because the system encourages complicity. Governments, corporations, and big institutions all know how to play the media game; they know how to influence the news narrative. “They do not challenge power; they are power, the voice of the powerful” (McLeod). Whatever the media elite’s agenda is, they mobilize the media to make us believe it is in our best interest. It could be a foreign war our taxpaying money is funding, the greater military-industrial complex we fund, or many other examples. The media elite use media to convince us it is best for everyone. “The mass media is not trying to provide the public with factual information, but rather to gaslight and propagandize them into subservience and support for elite positions, most of which are against our own interests” (McLeod). We grew up believing that media and journalism were pillars of democracy and that it was admirable. It is difficult to conceptualize the puppeteers that are the media elite because they make themselves indistinguishable from the world. “The greatest achievement of modern propaganda is in persuading us of its non-existence” (McLeod). Because our world is mediated mostly through images and words of the media, it is easy for the elite to mold our realities for us. Most Americans do not have a passport, and nearly half of all foreign trips are to Mexico from America. This shows that our understanding of foreign countries and the world at large has been molded by the media we consume or the media that has been carefully curated for us and not by our friends. “The media is not your friend. The media is a weapon of the elite in the battle for your mind” (McLeod). The media does not represent the people, giving us hope that the government or elite won’t abuse power on the media’s watch. Rather, they are the elite, the power, and the fist.
The media elite set the agenda and create our understanding of reality by making themselves crucial to journalism, “so those in power and those who report on them are in bed with each other” (Al Jazeera VIDEO). The media elite feed you the scoops, the inside experts, and facts that paint the picture they want the public to see. “By relying on official sources like politicians, think tanks and PR companies, sources that make sure their point of view is always represented, what they say becomes a story and news is written in a light that is favorable to them and their interests” (McLeod). An excellent example of the media elite working media in their interests was during COVID-19. During the 2020 pandemic, restrictive measures taken by most governments around the world included social distancing, lockdowns, contact-tracing and mask requirements, the use of certain treatments of the disease and the exclusion of others, and the implementation of “vaccine passes” in many countries. While health and government authorities argued that these restrictive lockdowns were necessary to prevent deaths and deal with a pandemic, “many scientists and medical practitioners questioned the ethics and morality of such tactics, including Nobel laureates and leading physicians and scholars. Furthermore, from early 2020, increasing numbers of scientists and doctors argued that the pandemic, as well as morbidity and mortality figures, were being inflated and exaggerated, that the extreme policies and restrictions violated fundamental rights, and that governments were using fear campaigns based on speculative assumptions and unreliable predictive models” (Shir-Raz). To narrow in on a specific example, many doctors criticized the hastiness with which mRNA vaccines were granted Emergency Use Authorization by the FDA, even for children; the quality of clinical trials that led to this authorization; lack of transparency regarding the process and data; and the minimization or ignoring of adverse events. This is where the media elite comes in. “Some government and tech corporations, such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn, have taken measures to censor contrary viewpoints, arguing that views challenging government policies are dangerous misinformation, and therefore censorship is justified to protect public health” (Shir-Raz). This is where the model comes into play because if you want to challenge power, you will be pushed to the margins and lose your story and platform. Then the Flak machine kicks in, and you are quickly discredited, flagged as misinformation, and the story is trashed. “Many instances involve social media censorship, including the removal of accounts (“de-platforming”) or blocking the visibility of a user’s content without informing them (“shadow banning”)”(Shir-Raz). An in-depth example of this happening was when three epidemiologists at Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford universities released The Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, signed by many notable scientists and doctors, including the Nobel Prize laureate Micheal Levitt. The Declaration argued against the universal lockdowns in favor of protecting vulnerable groups. To reduce exposure to this document, Google altered its search algorithm, Facebook deleted a page set up by a group of scientists involved with the declaration, and YouTube removed a recording of an official public hearing on the pandemic that featured Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. “One of them, Prof. Kulldorff, who is one of the most cited epidemiologists and infectious disease experts in the world, was himself censored by Twitter…and users have been prevented from liking or retweeting the post,” making it impossible for others to see.
Many of these doctors and researchers are leading experts working in prestigious universities or hospitals, some of whom have published dozens if not hundreds of papers and whose studies have been widely cited, some editors of scientific/medical journals. It is the media and government that work as flak machines. “In December of 2021, an e-mail from the fall of 2020 was released via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. It revealed a behind-the-scenes effort by Francis Collins, then head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to his colleague, Anthony Fauci, head of NIAID, to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration and disparage its authors. In the email, Collins told Fauci that “this proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists…seems to be getting a lot of attention..there needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet- is it underway?” (WSJ, 2021). Even this was not reported by mass media in the United States when it seemed like a scandal worth attention and consequences. Media and government used each other during this time to keep people quiet and obedient to their policies. You were not allowed to criticize how the United States and the world handled this pandemic. It is very interesting today that it is almost like those years never happened. Big Pharma raked in a whopping 90 billion US dollars in profits with COVID-19. The government saw with their own eyes that scare tactics and censorship work; that we will not hug family; we will keep children out of school, harming their emotional development; we will lock ourselves in and reap the consequences of increased depression and anxiety; we will obey.
As Noam Chomsky explained, “Consent is being manufactured all around you, all the time,” what is in your best interest is being carefully curated to convince you to follow and obey. The Propaganda Machine and Model are still very much at play. The Media Elite still very much holds the strings, and we are still the puppets. Today, the media elite are everywhere, on every social media platform. If we do not have free speech and the free exchange of ideas and cannot question policies, the government, and the media, we are not a democratic society. Chomsky was correct, and is still correct today, that democracy is staged with the help of media that work as propaganda machines to keep us all in line. Inform, educate, and entertain or distract, gaslight, and control?
Works Cited
Sarkissian, Arek. 2021. DeSantis tears into YouTube, claiming censorship. Politico, April 12. https://www.
politico.com/states/forida/story/2021/04/12/desantis-tears-into-youtube-over-claims-of-censorship1373586.
Rancourt, Denis G. 2020. COVID censorship at ResearchGate: Things scientists cannot say. Ratical.org,
June 5. https://ratical.org/PandemicParallaxView/COVID-censorship-at-ResearchGate-2.pdf.
Lukmantoro, T., & Nugroho, H. (2019). Propaganda model in the age of social media. KnE Social Sciences, 419-437.
MacLeod, A. (2019). Introduction: Propaganda in the information age. In Propaganda in the Information Age (pp. 1-11). Routledge.
Shir-Raz, Y., Elisha, E., Martin, B. et al. Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy: Tactics and Counter-Tactics. Minerva 61, 407–433 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-022-09479-4
Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (2019). A Propaganda Model (1988). In Crime and Media (pp. 30-43). Routledge.
Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. 2021. How Fauci and Collins Shut Down Covid Debate. Wall Street Journal, December 21, 2021. https://www.wsj.com/articles/fauci-collins-emails-great-barringtondeclaration-covid-pandemic-lockdown-11640129116.
