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out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the governmentand dominant interests to get their messages across to the public' (Chomsky and
Herman, 1988, p. 2). For Chomsky and Herman, this has been the result of five'filters' that impact upon the flow of ideas through the mass media:
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- -34 Understanding Global Media
(1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth and profit orientation of thedominant media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the massmedia; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business,
and 'experts' funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of
power; (4) 'flak' as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) 'anti-communism' asa national religion and control mechanism. (Chomsky and Herman, 1988, p. 2)
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In a post-Cold War and post-9/11 world, the model would still be seen as
valid, with the War on Terror' replacing 'anti-communism' as the driver of US
government-corporate priorities (see Chomsky, 2001).
The 'ruling class = ruling ideology' or propaganda model sits alongside a
second approach, developed in Marx's Introduction to A Coiztriblrtioir to t l ~ e I
Critiqrrc of Political Ecoizoiizy, where culture and ideology esist as a level in
a social formation where economic relations are in a dominant, but not necessarily
determinant, relationship to the political and ideological 'levels' through
which social relations are largely understood and contested:
In the social production of their lives, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable
and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to
a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of
these relations of production constitutes the econon~ic structure of society, the real
foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond
definite form of social consciousness. Tl~lel ~odcof prodirctior~o f rlznterial life
co1rditiolzs t11e S O C ~po~/it,ic al a t ~ di~ ite//cct~llaifle process in ger~eral.( quoted in
Larrain, 1983, p. 42; emphasis added)
This approach to the relationship between media and power, that sees
economic power relations under capitalism as dominant but not determinant,
has been the most influential one in critical political economy. Two of its key
proponents have been the British political economists Peter Golding and
Graham Murdock. Golding and Murdock have stressed how analyses of the
relationship between media texts and their audiences need to be framed by
both 'an analysis of the way the cultural industries work ... as industries', and
an examination of 'the ways in which people% consumption choices are structured
by their position in a wider econon~ic formation' (Golding and
Murdock, 2000, p. 72). In their overview of the political economy of media,
communication and culture, Golding and Murdock propose that there are
three factors that set structural limits to the diversity of media forms and
representations. In doing so, however, they stress that these are sites of contradiction
and contestation, in a world where, in explicit contrast to Chomsky
and Herman, 'Owners, advertisers and key political personnel cannot always
do as they wish ... [but] operate within structures that constrain as well