The "Common Enemy" Filter in Action

This article in Current Affairs does an excellent job of highlighting the fifth filter in Chomsky and Herman's Propaganda Model of the Media.  In it, the author, Nathan Robinson, looks at recent reporting from the New York Times about an attempt by hackers affiliated with the Russian government to obtain information about UK and US efforts to research a vaccine for COVID-19. In his analysis, Robinson highlights how the reporting there illustrates the "Common Enemy" filter. The entire article is illuinating and worth a quick read.

Tucker Carlson is not an honest journalist

There is a great deal of sloppy, fallacious, and outright deceptive language surrounding the BLM protests. A good illustration of this comes from a recent episode of Tucker Carlson's show on Fox as illustrated in the following tweet:

i didn't edit this footage at all pic.twitter.com/afEkKzQrXb

— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) June 17, 2020

This is a both nice illustration of both the Appeal to Emotion (Scare Tactics version) and  a good example of the fifth filter in Chomsky's and Herman's Propaganda Model of the Media. As a reminder, the fifth filter is the "Common Enemy" filter, and we can see quite clearly through the use of scary music that Tucker Carlson is attempting to present BLM protestors and activists as scary monsters that lack humanity.

Amazon writes the news

The third filter in Chomsky and Herman's Propaganda Model of the Media is the idea that the media relies on a limited range of sources. In most cases, the sources in question are the very subjects that we would hope the media would do independent reporting on such as the government and large corporations. The outcome of this practice is that these sources then get to shape how they are covered in the media and can control the narrative around themselves.

One major way that these companies do this is by delivering content directly to TV stations with the expectation that the TV station will use the provided video and script to create a segment for their program. A perfect example of this is described in a recent article on The Verge about Amazon using this practice.  

The article includes a screenshot of the script Amazon sent out:



As well as a video of 11 different news stations reading from that script:

Together, these demonstrate that this practice, described and criticized by Chomsky and Herman, is alive and well in the age of COVID-19.

h/t to the AV Club

What's wrong with this picture

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Georgia Department of Public Health released the following chart:



They key thing to note are the dates along the bottom.

h/t to Tom Sullivan at Digby's Hullabaloo

I knew Subway was bad for our health...

A student sent me the following infographic which is an excellent illustration of our tendency to confuse correlation with causation:

The image displays a  meme that compares 5G coverage with the hot spots for COVID-19 implying that one caused the other. It then shows a variety of other maps with similar distributions. This illustrates how we often mistake correlation for causation.

John Oliver takes on Psychics

The following video from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is an excellent discussion of tricks and techniques employed by psychics, particularly the techniques known as hot and cold reading.


Another excellent discussion can be found in Season 6, Episode 11 of South Park, "The Biggest Douche in the Universe."

Access trumps the truth

This link to an article in Vox gives a very nice illustration of how large media companies will bury or hide stories in order to gain access to subjects for interviews. In this case, ABC news buried an interview with one of Jeffrey Epstein's victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, because they were concerned that he accusations against Prince Andrew would interfere with ABC News' efforts to interview other members of the English royal family. In effect, they buried an important news story in order to maintain access and the ability to interview people who might have been implicated by that story.

This story in Salon amplifies this point and makes its relevance to Chomsky and Hermann explicit. 

https://www.salon.com/2019/12/15/abc-news-had-the-goods-on-jeffrey-epstein-years-ago-and-killed-the-story/