Ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and ideology filter news without any explicit censorship.
Herman and Chomsky's 1988 model. Influential and contested, and used as a critical framework rather than as a settled finding. Yarvin's Cathedral makes a parallel claim from the opposite political direction.
In practice
- A broadcaster whose advertisers include four supermarkets runs less on supermarket supply chains than on any other industry, and no editor was instructed.
- Yarvin's Cathedral makes a structurally parallel claim about convergence without conspiracy from the opposite political direction, and both rest on the same kind of evidence.
- Possible explanations
- The proposed explanation is filtering without instruction: ownership, advertising revenue, reliance on official sources, organised complaint and shared assumptions each remove stories before any editor decides anything.
- In its favour
- Each filter is separately documented, including advertiser influence, dependence on official sources and the effect of organised campaigns on coverage.
- Against it
- It is hard to test as a whole, since almost any coverage can be read as consistent with it, and it gives little account of the adversarial reporting that these same outlets produce.
- Standing
- Influential and contested, and used as a critical framework rather than treated as a settled finding.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- Theories of what stands between an event and its audience