Readings

• Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books. (Chapter 1, ‘A propaganda model,’ pp 1-35).
• Sara Fischer and Christine Wang. 2025. Journalism under pressure amid fear of retribution. May 27, Axios. (pdf)
• Cara Buckley. 2024. The weatherman who tried to bring climate science to a red state. June 20, New York Times. (pdf)
• Eli Pariser. 2011. The Filter Bubble. NY: Penguin (chapter 2, ‘the race for relevance‘). (MS Word)

Lecture pages

• ‘Filters’ on the news 
• Other filtering pressures
• Some examples of filtering 
• A new filtering paradigm

Video Clips

(related to filtering pressures … Watch the first under each heading, others as you’re interested)

• 1. Ownership–
  • • Chomsky on ownership
    • And now a word from Sinclair Broadcasting
  2. Advertising
  • • Toyota’s problems , Glenn Beck
    • Ever heard of rBST?
  3. Source
  • • ‘Message force multipliers’ (David Barstow’s NY Times story)
      • subsequent media coverage
      • PBS has unusual guest
      • White House response
    • Fake (hearing aid) news (credit score) videos (chocolate, and allergy tests), sometimes with attribution (and increasing sophistication)
    • Not just the US–feeding confirmation bias from TV news
    • Astroturf (more examples)
  4. Flak–negative feedback
  • • Media Matters, PR firms (after release of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’)
    • Trump and CNN’s Jim Acosta
    • Fox’s Greg Gutfeld on the ‘legacy media’ (and January 6)
    • CNN’s Brian Stelter on Fox
    • Social media (trolling, doxxing . . . generates much heat, little light or, as Farhad Manjoo puts it, reflexive egotism, righteous activism, and the ‘easy dunk‘)
  5. Anti-communist/terrorism
  • • Bill Maher after 9/11 (anti-terrorism)
    • Chomsky et al. on East Timor (anti-communism)