Readings

• Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books. (Chapter 1, ‘A propaganda model,’ pp 1-35). In Canvas.
• Cara Buckley. 2024. The weatherman who tried to bring climate science to a red state. June 20, New York Times (example of flak filter).
• Gideon Lewis-Kraus. 2022. How harmful is social media? June 3, New Yorker Magazine. In Canvas.
• Eli Pariser. 2012. The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web is changing what we read and what we think. NY: Penguin (‘The race for relevance’). In Canvas.

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)