Original Article THE PROPAGANDA MODEL: A RETROSPECTIVE

Chomsky and I put forward a "propaganda model " as a framework for analysing and understanding how the mainstream U.S. media work and why they perform as they do (Herman and Chomsky 1988). We had long been impressed with the regularity with which the media operate on the basis of a set of ideological prem-ises, depend heavily and uncritically on elite information sources, and participate in propaganda campaigns helpful to elite interests. In trying to explain why they do this we looked to structural factors as the only possible root of the systematic patterns of behavior and performance. Because the propaganda model challenges basic premises and suggests that the media serve antidemocratic ends, it is commonly excluded from mainstream de-bates on media bias. Such debates typically include conservatives, who criticize the media for excessive liberalism and an adversarial stance toward government and business, and centrists and liberals, who deny the charge of adversarialism and contend that the media behave fairly and responsibly. The exclusion of the propaganda model perspective is noteworthy, for one reason, because that per-spective is consistent with long standing and widely held elite views that 'the masses are notoriously short-sighted ' (Bailey 1948: 13) and are 'often poor judges of their own interests ' (Lasswell 1933: 527), so that 'our statesmen must deceive them ' (Bailey 1948: 13); and they 'can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality ' (Walter Lippmann 1921: 310). In Lippmann's view, the 'manufacture of consent ' by an elite class had already be-come 'a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government ' by th