Edward S. Herman

[...] dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.

A September 2000 exposé of the Putin election campaign by the expatriate Moscow Times, based on a six-month investigative effort, uncovered compelling evidence of election fraud, including ballot stuffing, ballot destruction, and the creation of 1.3 million “dead souls” inflating the election rolls.

During the 1980s, the Reagan administration mounted a major propaganda campaign over alleged victims of “Yellow Rain” in Cambodia and Laos, claiming that chemical warfare had been employed there by the Soviet Union through its Vietnam proxy.

In his book Golden Rule, political scientist Thomas Ferguson argues that where the major investors in political parties and elections agree on an issue, the parties will not compete on that issue, no matter how strongly the public might want an alternative.

In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite.

The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print.

The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest.

During the McCarthy years, many advertisers and radio and television stations were effectively coerced into quiescence and blacklisting of employees by the threats of determined Red hunters to boycott products.

Flak from the powerful can be either direct or indirect. The direct would include letters or phone calls from the White House to Dan Rather or William Paley, or from the FCC to the television networks asking for documents used in putting together a program, or from irate officials of ad agencies or corporate sponsors to media officials asking for reply time or threatening retaliation.

In normal times as well as in periods of Red scares, issues tend to be framed in terms of a dichotomized world of Communist and anti-Communist powers, with gains and losses allocated to contesting sides, and rooting for “our side” considered an entirely legitimate news practice.