Log24

Understanding Media

BBC News, March 2, 2002:

"The Reverend Billy Graham has apologised for a taped conversation with former President Nixon in which he said the Jewish 'stranglehold' of the media was ruining the United States and must be broken."

"The ‘propaganda model’ of media operations laid out and applied by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media postulates that elite media interlock with other institutional sectors in ownership, management and social circles, effectively circumscribing their ability to remain analytically detached from other dominant institutional sectors. The model argues that the net result of this is self-censorship without any significant coercion." 

— A Critical Review and Assessment of
   Herman and Chomsky’s ‘Propaganda Model'
   by Jeffery Klaehn,
   European Journal of Communication,
   2002, Vol 17(2): 147–182. 

"We are in a war of ideas."

— Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
   Oct. 24, 2003

Toby Ziegler
of West Wing

THE WEST WING
"NIGHT FIVE"

WRITTEN BY: AARON SORKIN

Transcription from http://communicationsoffice.tripod.com
/3-13.txt

Episode 3.13 — "Night Five"
Original Airdate: February 6, 2002

**************************

PORTION OF THE TRANSCRIPT
DEALING WITH A
UN FOREIGN POLICY SPEECH

**************************

TOBY
Our goal is to proclaim American values.

ANDY
This speech isn't supposed to be about ideology. It's supposed to be about reality.

TOBY
I think the President will decide what the speech is suppose to be about, but the reality is, the United States of America no longer sucks up to reactionaries, and our staunch allies will know what we mean.

ANDY
We don't have any staunch allies in the Arab world; just reluctant ones.  We've a coalition held together with duct tape! A coalition without which we cannot fight!

TOBY
Nobody's blowing off the coalition, and that coalition will be plenty strong….

ANDY
What's Egypt going to think? Or Pakistan?

TOBY
That freedom and democracy are coming soon to a theatre near them, so get dressed.

He sits on the edge of his desk.

ANDY
…. this one moment in time, you have to
get off your horse and just… simply put – be nice to the Arab world.

TOBY
Be nice?

ANDY
Yes.

TOBY
Well… How about when we, instead of
blowing Iraq back to the seventh century for harbouring terrorists and trying to develop nuclear weapons,
we just imposed economic sanctions and were reviled by the Arab world….

Supplemental reading:

Who Rules America?

Review of Abraham Foxman's
Never Again? The Threat of
The New Anti-Semitism,
NY Times Book Review,
November 30, 2003