Rajpal's Column

4th Apirl 1999

About Chandrika, Chomsky and the media mafia

By Rajpal Abeynayake

One of the most important facets of the Wayamba election was the media connection. Now, the state media, particularly TV, is spending an awful lot of time on the "media's importance in the electoral process."

Meanwhile, its well known now that the President has been complaining about a "media mafia." The Editor's Guild for instance has not taken too kindly to this, and has lodged a formal protest against the President's attempts to paint a picture of an "emerging organised media mafia that is against the government."

Does the President think that there is a threat to the democratic process from the media? Or does the President simply think that there is a threat to her party and her government from the media?

Either way, it seems, the President perceives that the function of the media is to "manufacture consent" of the masses in favour of her agenda. The phrase "manufacturing consent" is something that is (suitably I think) borrowed from Noam Chomsky, America's leading dissident intellectual. His recent attacks on President Clinton's behaviour towards Iraq, for instance have been scathing…and snide…

Chomsky has some very interesting things to say about the media in democracies, and in an article titled "What makes the Mainstream media Mainstream" Chomsky says that the role of the media is to "manufacture consent."

The real mass media he says "are basically trying to divert the people." The real mass media run by the power elite is basically saying to the people "let them do something, but don't bother us (us being the people who run the show.) Let them (the people) get interested in professional sports for example . Let everybody be interested in professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. Anything as long as it is not serious. Of course the serious stuff is for the big guys. We take care of that."

But, he says, when it gets harder to run a country like running a private club, the elite's have to "begin to control what people think." So, he says, quoting Walter Lippman who coined the phrase, that there is a new method of democracy called "manufacturing consent." Chomsky says, with resounding relevance to the Lankan situation here, that the elite can make "the people's vote irrelevant." This is done by " making sure that the people's choices and attitudes will be structured in such a way, that the people will always do what we tell them, so we'll have a real democracy…" So, he says, the major newspapers are there to see that the "meddlesome people" are kept out of the public arena, because "if they get involved they will just make trouble."

Chomsky then proceeds to analyse how "consent" is manufactured by the media, which is owned by a society's elite. One is by weeding out certain trouble making journalists from the system, for instance. The news he says is "manufactured" by leading newspapers such as the New York Times so that other lesser organisations are compelled to follow suit. "Take the New York times," he says. "It's a corporation, and it sells a product. The product is audiences. They don't make money when you buy the newspaper. They are happy to put it on the world wide web for free. They actually lose money when you buy the newspaper. But the audience is the product. The product is privileged people, just like the people who are writing the newspapers, you know, top level decision making people in society." Eventually, he concludes, politics has to become political warfare. "Politics has to become political warfare, applying the mechanisms of propaganda that worked so brilliantly during the first World War towards controlling people's thoughts."

Now, its a little ironic than a nostalgic Fanonite such as Chandrika Kumaranatunga is using the same tactics of "political warfare", the tactics and stratagems of using the media to control people's thoughts.

But, to manufacture consent through the media in Sri Lanka , as the President may have learnt, at least judging from the aggrieved tone of her complaints, is difficult. Anyone who has been in America would know that most Americans are fairly inured to politics. They think alike; for most of them communism was the red plague; Saddam Hussein was the personification of evil. But, things being different in Sri Lanka, where a communist party actually existed and exists to this day, the spirit of political dissent is more robust. Being a politician with left leaning origins as well, none should know better about this than Kumaratunga herself. She has found to her surprise (feigned or otherwise) that it is difficult to mould the press in the image of the leader; even a press which shared her own platform once a upon a time , and was instrumental in making her President. On a broader analysis too, its difficult to do with the press here, what the American elite has done with theirs, which is to make the press control people's thoughts the way the elites' want. Successive leaders have learnt that lesson here, Kuma-ratunga being only the latest. Since the press doesn't "manufacture consent" here, at the bidding of the power elite, the power elite has sought to stop, alternately, the media from manufacturing discontent. This has been attempted of course not by subtle means that the Americans employ; such as weeding out dissenting journalists and getting the big corporate media moguls to dictate the news. On the contrary, as mediamen know, here, the press has often been successfully bludgeoned into submission. (Most of the time, that is.) Alternate methods are often used. If you cannot bludgeon them, the other way is to send them on a guilt trip. This may be why the President says there is a "media mafia." As Chomsky says, in other democracies power elites have succeeded in "controlling the minds of people" getting the elite media to set a framework within which others operate. "People who don't adjust to the structure and internalize it are likely to be weeded out, along the way, starting from the kindergarten all the way up," he says. The Americans, for instance, are very successful in employing filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. For example, media-men who don't sanction US international policy even in our (Lankan) local papers or those who are critical of American policy, do not benefit from or receive any of the media junkets, fellowships or training programs to the US. Neither do they receive any American sponsored scholarships/grants or awards. Of course, those who toe the line and/or are malleable fly to America all the time! Result: in the eyes of employers, objective local journalists can look relatively underqualified. There are no foreign fellowship credentials against their names. Talk about filtering devices, by remote control at that.

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