Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote a very good piece titled “A Propaganda Model.”
Propaganda has always been something that has fascinated me. Convincing a large mass of people something through lies and various forms of manipulation is something that is very intriguing to me. How do is it done? What is the process? How are more people not aware of the propaganda?
In the piece, they talk about five filters of the propaganda model, and the one that stuck out to me the most was the final filter: Anticommunism as a Control Mechanism. It is no secret that American’s are generally very anti-communist. We have been ever since World War II and were so even more after the cold war. In those times, America came together, and put aside many of our internal differences, and set out together as a country against the Fascist Nazis, and later against the communist Russians. Much of the hatred around these groups was sparked by the media. The media paints these people as monstrous, inhuman people. Making them extremely easy to grow a hatred for.
Communism is something that essentially put everyone on a level playing field, no matter who they are and how hard they work. As one can imagine, American’s are easily terrified and threatened by this approach to government. It threatens the elite’s status. And since the elites control the media and have the resources to control the propaganda that is put out, it is easy for them to rally the entirety of the American population against communism, even though economically, communism may benefit many of the people who are convinced into thinking communism is the worst, and if you’re a communist you will be marked as one and forced out of America.
The media is constantly putting out propaganda, targeting people as communist and terrorist among other things to just put them in a certain group. A group, which has been molded into a group that American’s should hate by the media.
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