Seminar slides for MAC201 Week 4

1. Hidden Agendas / Propaganda
#mac201
robert.jewitt@sunderland.ac.uk
YouTube playlist
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2. Propaganda
 Propaganda is mainly perceived in the
West as an aspect of Communist, Fascist
or totalitarian regimes where the media is
controlled by the state. It is assumed that
in the West, where much of the media is
in the hands of private enterprise, that
formal propaganda is absent.
 Saeed and Laverty (2006)
 On Sunspace
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3. Gaza Flotilla, 2010
The War You Don’t See (2010)
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4. Consequences?
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5. Tony Benn fights back
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6. Social media
 Israel government recruited 1,000 volunteers with the
objective of flooding news websites and blogs that the
ministry term as anti-Israeli with pro-Israeli opinions.
 Israel government held a World Citizens Press Conference
via Twitter only 4 days after the initial onslaught
(Chomsky, 2009).
 Silverstein suggests that there has been a concerted
effort on Israel’s part to flood the web and news media
with crafted materials in an attempt to turn public
opinion toward Israel (Silverstein, 2009: 1).
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7. How to make sense of this?
 Factual media, despite claims to truth, are a
battleground for ideological warfare
 Documentary film-makers and news outlets are implicitly
involved in shaping and re-shaping public understanding
of events
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8. 3 paradigms
1. Manufacturing consent
• (Herman & Chomsky, 1988)
2. Media of contest
• (Wolfsfeld, 1997)
3. Media culture
• (Kellner, 2003)
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9. 9
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10. 1 - Manufacturing Consent
Five news “filters”:
 1. Ownership and profit orientation
 2. Funding via advertising
 3. Over-reliance on „official‟ sources
 4. “Flak” targeting the media
 5. The need to engage a „common enemy‟ (via anti-ideologies)
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11. 2 - Media of contest
1. Political protest more influential than media but there is give-
and-take
2. Political voices do not always maintain dominance
3. The power of the media/politics fluctuates
4. News is framed in cultural contexts and „read‟ differently
5. Dissidents can combat unequal resources and use news
media as a tool for political influence
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12. 3 - Media culture
 Media permeates all aspects of popular culture and
impacts upon identity formation
 Local engagement/reception of media spectacles
 „Social and political conflicts are increasingly played out
upon the screens of media cultures‟ (Kellner, 2003:1)
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13. Media as cultural industries Media as multi-purpose arenas
manufacturing consent in support in which strategic and symbolic
of dominant interests conflicts are waged
Mainstream media
Public sphere(s)
Minority and Alt. media
‘public spheracules’
New media
‘counter public spheres’
Public Screens
Media culture as pervasive, meaningful and
contested, and constitutive of identities 13
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14. Questions to consider:
 Does documentary have a special claim to truth and to what
extent can it capture the 'truth' of a situation?
 What kind of documentary forms or genres exist?
 How might the different genres within the umbrella term of
documentary inform the kind of content that is presented to the
public?
 What limitations do documentary film-makers face in attempting to
convey complex material to the public?
 To what extent are documentaries able (or unable) to go beyond
the limitations of mainstream news?
 (consider the pressures of: funding; time; scale; risk; scheduling)
 How might documentary be described as ideological? Are all
formats as culpable as each other in offering specific versions of
'reality'?
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15. Panorama
Primark: On The Rack (2008, BBC)
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19. Oh Dearism (2009, Adam Curtis)
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