Yigal Godler | Ben Gurion University of the Negev (original) (raw)
Papers by Yigal Godler
Frontiers in Public Health
The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness, 2018
Before his passing in November 2017, Edward Herman graciously gave a final interview to various m... more Before his passing in November 2017, Edward Herman graciously gave a final interview to various media scholars in the preceding month of October. As the main architect of the Propaganda Model (PM), Herman offers in this exchange some comments on a range of topics and issues presented to him on the PM and its applicability and utility in the 21st Century. The questions and answers cover topics such as social control and inequality, how they are normalized and maintained; the usefulness of the PM in understanding patterns of media behavior in non-US countries; and how the PM positions television and the internet in relation to social and political change. Also addressed are notions of fear as an ideological control mechanism; ways in which media foster indifference, use of the PM to understand media coverage of Donald Trump’s election campaign and first months as President; and academia’s relationship to power structures.
Since its initial formulation in 1988, the Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model (PM) has become one of... more Since its initial formulation in 1988, the Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model (PM) has become one of the most widely tested models of media performance in the social sciences. This is largely due to the combined efforts of a loose group of international scholars as well as an increasing number of students who have produced studies in the US, UK, Canadian, Australian, Japanese, Chinese, German, and Dutch contexts, amongst others. Yet, the PM has also been marginalised in media and communication scholarship, largely due to the fact that the PM’s radical scholarly outlook challenges the liberal and conservative underpinnings of mainstream schools of thought in capitalist democracies. This paper brings together, for the first time, leading scholars to discuss important questions pertaining to the PM’s origins, public relevance, connections to other approaches within Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, applicability in the social media age, as well as impact and influence. The p...
Communication Theory, 2019
In the age of post-truth, media studies find themselves trapped between the desire to restore jou... more In the age of post-truth, media studies find themselves trapped between the desire to restore journalism’s authority as a veristic (truth-seeking) institution and the lack of a coherent, applicable and consensual theory of truth. In order to develop such a theory of truth, this study bases itself on a detailed picture of how a sample of mainstream Israeli journalists covered 20 cases of factual controversies, drawing on journalists’ own accounts of their work, an independent analysis of documents they relied on, as well as their published output. Findings show that during actual situations of coverage journalists’ operative conceptions of truth match, at a minimum, the theories of coherence, correspondence and pragmatism. I argue that a novel adaptationist theory of truth may not only provide an adequate description of journalists’ actual pursuit of truth, but also contribute to their reflexivity vis-à-vis the inevitable context-dependence of their own veristic criteria.
The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness, 2018
a. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 4 The Propaganda Model Today sant accumulation of capital in increasi... more a. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 4 The Propaganda Model Today sant accumulation of capital in increasingly oligopolistic contexts. The PM understands media structures and contents, thus, to be shaped by corporate-State powers and oriented toward the production of profits and the reproduction of class societies. Therefore, the PM would not apply to nations, societies, and communities where alternative forms of organisation and values appear. In so-called 'communist' states of the present (and past) while capital doesn't (and didn't) rise above the authority and power of the decision-making central authority, obvious social and economic inequities and inequalities appeared, and these gaps necessitated the use of various forms of consent and compliance with the system. However, these propaganda systems differ from Western systems of propaganda because the dictatorial State plays the central role in determining media contents, there is prior censorship and physical repression of dissidents, and the media opinion is much more monolithic. The PM clearly does not apply to societies where the manufacture of consent isn't necessary for the maintenance of a capitalist order that generates and maintains inequality, inequity, and oppression. The earliest kibbutz of Israel, for example, approximated most closely societies in which the manufacture of consent was subsumed by the high value its members placed upon common goals. Today, peace journalism and communication for conflict resolution provide a different perspective for journalistic practice. Alternative media outlets based on workers' cooperatives and reader-supported news provide information which differs significantly from mainstream contents. For example, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! was the only journalist who covered the first protests of indigenous people against the construction of the pipeline in their lands in North Dakota. She was disciplined through serious flak as she faced riot charges that were, ultimately, rejected by the judge. Alternative forms of communication are also being practiced by indigenous peoples throughout Latin America through community media that promote values of living in common, social justice, mutual understanding and harmony with nature. For example, communication based on the cosmovision and practice of Sumak Kawsay (Good Living) appeals to harmony between individuals, individuals with society, and both with nature as part of the same totality. 3. The (Ideal) Democratic and Egalitarian Role of the Media At a time when grassroots movements and emerging political forces are aiming to intervene in the privatized media sphere and eventually transform it, a necessary step before any meaningful change can be achieved is a better understanding of the functioning and functions of media, i.e. how and why mass media contribute to the (re)production of the existing order with its unjust class structure, its increasing inequalities and inequities, the manifest reality of perpetual war, the structural limitations to rights and freedoms, and the accelerated erosion of democratic institutions that societies are witnessing across the globe.
Journalism Studies, 2017
In order to gain an understanding of journalists' conceptions of what being factual means, the pr... more In order to gain an understanding of journalists' conceptions of what being factual means, the present work supplements the existing insights of journalism studies and the sociology of knowledge and philosophy with data about journalists' beliefs regarding the importance of detached observation and reporting things as they are, spanning 62 countries (N = 18,248). In essence, our goal is to contribute to a future theoretical account of why journalists possess the beliefs that they do vis-à-vis truth-seeking and knowledge-acquisition. Data point to a significant relationship between reporters' level of freedom and their conceptions of knowledge and reality. We discuss the implications of these findings for the debate about the possibilities of universality and contextdependence of journalistic fact-finding.
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 2017
In the age of spirited debates about the mediating role of technologies, the other side of the co... more In the age of spirited debates about the mediating role of technologies, the other side of the coin is the state of direct experience in contemporary news production, that is, cases in which news reporters still rely on traditional channels such as “legwork,” “firsthand witnessing,” or “shoe-leather reporting.” The present study is a systematic attempt to identify journalists’ reasons for engaging in legwork, by recreating item by item the work processes and reasoning behind hundreds of individual news reports produced in the digital age, across Israeli print, television, radio, and online news outlets ( N = 859). Insofar as legwork can serve as a proxy for painstaking journalism, journalists’ decisions make some difference in determining if more or less legwork will ensue. The data avail an opportunity to explore scholarly musings about journalists’ motivations behind legwork: be they knowledge related, medium related, or event related. We find support for all three possibilities a...
Journalism Studies, 2013
Journalists' ability to capture and deliver factual information is central to their sense of ... more Journalists' ability to capture and deliver factual information is central to their sense of professionalism and to their societal and democratic functions. The need to understand journalists' dealings with facts becomes especially pronounced in an age when news organizations face an economic crisis and journalism's exclusive jurisdiction over the supply of news information is challenged by new and old forces. This study—part of the “Worlds of Journalism” research project—attempts to analyze fact-related beliefs among 1800 journalists from 18 different countries, and test their associations with a wealth of individual, cultural and organizational variables. The study draws on a rich reservoir of data from diverse regimes, institutional and national backgrounds, types of news organizations, ownership and media, as well as different genders, years of journalism experience, education and seniority. Our research appears to be well placed to evaluate journalists' degree of awareness to the challenges of reality depiction, and to outline through quantitative methods the social conditions which promote epistemological naivety in the form of objectivism, and sophistication as expressed in interpretationist epistemologies. Our findings indicate that conditions of ownership, nature of the political regime, personal beliefs and social environment, produce variance in journalists' takes on reality depiction.
Journalism Studies, 2014
The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with p... more The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
Journalism Practice, 2013
The degree to which journalists realize their most basic societal role and provide fact-based acc... more The degree to which journalists realize their most basic societal role and provide fact-based accounts has been a point of contestation between several camps. While adherents to the notion of the social construction of reality have infused scholarly discourse with far-reaching doubts about journalists' ability to report facts, emphasizing the arbitrariness of their practices, pragmatic theorists of knowledge and realists, a minority among journalism scholars, have distinguished between practices more and less conducive to the goal of truth. The current paper presents findings from an exploratory study conducted in Israel, in which news-gathering practices are directly observed at controversy-laden press conferences. This arena avails a thorough observation of journalist–source exchanges, without breaching the principle of source confidentiality. The practices observed are juxtaposed against the news products, alongside reporters' own comments on their work and reasoning. We suggest that a pragmatic conception of knowledge among journalists is compatible with observable practices such as reporters' questioning tactics and choices of interrogative emphases, more so than journalistic notions of realism and the social construction of reality.
New Media & Society, 2020
Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge... more Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is provided by “social epistemology”: a young philosophical field which regards society’s participation in knowledge generation as inevitable. Social epistemology offers the best of both worlds for journalists and media scholars: a thorough familiarity with biases and failures of obtaining knowledge, and a strong orientation toward best practices in the realm of knowledge-acquisition and truth-seeking. This article articulates the lessons of social epistemology for two central nodes of knowledge-acquisition in contemporary journalism: human-mediated knowledge and technology-mediated knowledge.
Journalism, 2015
Journalists apparently maneuver between their inability to validate every single bit of informati... more Journalists apparently maneuver between their inability to validate every single bit of information and the ramifications of publishing unverified reports. This study is the first attempt to uncover and characterize the reasoning which underlies the journalistic journey from skepticism to knowledge. We draw on the philosophical field of the ‘epistemology of testimony’ and analyze a robust data set. Data consist of detailed cross-verification measures – a reification of journalistic skepticism – underlying a large sample of individual news items in Israeli print, radio, online, and television news ( N = 847), following a reconstruction of work processes. Far from being passive recipients of second-hand information, we theorize that reporters make systematic use of ‘evidence of (sources’) evidence’ – a common but previously unarticulated evidence type.
This essay brings together leading scholars to debate important questions pertaining to methodolo... more This essay brings together leading scholars to debate important questions pertaining to methodological, philosophical, and pragmatic arguments and counterarguments about the necessity to observe the Propaganda Model filters in operation.
The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness, Oct 25, 2018
While the individual elements of the propaganda system (or filters) identified by the Propaganda ... more While the individual elements of the propaganda system (or filters) identified by the Propaganda Model (PM) – ownership, advertising, sources, flak and anti-communism – have previously been the focus of much scholarly attention, their systematisation in a model, empirical corroboration and historicisation have made the PM a useful tool for media analysis across cultural and geographical boundaries. Despite the wealth of scholarly research Herman and Chomsky’s work has set into motion over the past decades, the PM has been subjected to marginalisation, poorly informed critiques and misrepresentations. Interestingly, while the PM enables researchers to form discerning predictions as regards corporate media performance, Herman and Chomsky had further predicted that the PM itself would meet with such marginalisation and contempt. In current theoretical and empirical studies of mass media performance, uses of the PM continue, nonetheless, to yield important insights into the workings of ...
Critical Sociology, 2016
The article seeks to explain why denials of reality are tolerated and go largely unchallenged in ... more The article seeks to explain why denials of reality are tolerated and go largely unchallenged in communication research. It proposes that the acceptance of anti-realist views is related to communication theorists’ general hostility toward radical political economic critiques of media institutions and coverage. Unwilling to undertake research which lucidly exposes the central power relations in society, communication scholars sympathetic to corporate ownership and elite opinion resort to a particular form of obscurantism. This form of obscurantism does not only misrepresent uncongenial work, but espouses an apparently abstruse – though rather vacuous – anti-realist philosophy, which pre-empts consideration of ideas that threaten to expose the workings of existing institutional structures and communication scholars’ role in defending them.
New Media and Society, 2019
Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge... more Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is provided by "social epistemology": a young philosophical field which regards society's participation in knowledge generation as inevitable. Social epistemology offers the best of both worlds for journalists and media scholars: a thorough familiarity with biases and failures of obtaining knowledge, and a strong orientation toward best practices in the realm of knowledge-acquisition and truth-seeking. This paper articulates the lessons of social epistemology for two central nodes of knowledge-acquisition in contemporary journalism: human-mediated knowledge and technology-mediated knowledge.
Media Theory, 2018
This essay brings together leading scholars to debate important questions pertaining to methodolo... more This essay brings together leading scholars to debate important questions pertaining to methodological, philosophical, and pragmatic arguments and counterarguments about the necessity to observe the Propaganda Model filters in operation.
Frontiers in Public Health
The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness, 2018
Before his passing in November 2017, Edward Herman graciously gave a final interview to various m... more Before his passing in November 2017, Edward Herman graciously gave a final interview to various media scholars in the preceding month of October. As the main architect of the Propaganda Model (PM), Herman offers in this exchange some comments on a range of topics and issues presented to him on the PM and its applicability and utility in the 21st Century. The questions and answers cover topics such as social control and inequality, how they are normalized and maintained; the usefulness of the PM in understanding patterns of media behavior in non-US countries; and how the PM positions television and the internet in relation to social and political change. Also addressed are notions of fear as an ideological control mechanism; ways in which media foster indifference, use of the PM to understand media coverage of Donald Trump’s election campaign and first months as President; and academia’s relationship to power structures.
Since its initial formulation in 1988, the Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model (PM) has become one of... more Since its initial formulation in 1988, the Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model (PM) has become one of the most widely tested models of media performance in the social sciences. This is largely due to the combined efforts of a loose group of international scholars as well as an increasing number of students who have produced studies in the US, UK, Canadian, Australian, Japanese, Chinese, German, and Dutch contexts, amongst others. Yet, the PM has also been marginalised in media and communication scholarship, largely due to the fact that the PM’s radical scholarly outlook challenges the liberal and conservative underpinnings of mainstream schools of thought in capitalist democracies. This paper brings together, for the first time, leading scholars to discuss important questions pertaining to the PM’s origins, public relevance, connections to other approaches within Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, applicability in the social media age, as well as impact and influence. The p...
Communication Theory, 2019
In the age of post-truth, media studies find themselves trapped between the desire to restore jou... more In the age of post-truth, media studies find themselves trapped between the desire to restore journalism’s authority as a veristic (truth-seeking) institution and the lack of a coherent, applicable and consensual theory of truth. In order to develop such a theory of truth, this study bases itself on a detailed picture of how a sample of mainstream Israeli journalists covered 20 cases of factual controversies, drawing on journalists’ own accounts of their work, an independent analysis of documents they relied on, as well as their published output. Findings show that during actual situations of coverage journalists’ operative conceptions of truth match, at a minimum, the theories of coherence, correspondence and pragmatism. I argue that a novel adaptationist theory of truth may not only provide an adequate description of journalists’ actual pursuit of truth, but also contribute to their reflexivity vis-à-vis the inevitable context-dependence of their own veristic criteria.
The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness, 2018
a. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 4 The Propaganda Model Today sant accumulation of capital in increasi... more a. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 4 The Propaganda Model Today sant accumulation of capital in increasingly oligopolistic contexts. The PM understands media structures and contents, thus, to be shaped by corporate-State powers and oriented toward the production of profits and the reproduction of class societies. Therefore, the PM would not apply to nations, societies, and communities where alternative forms of organisation and values appear. In so-called 'communist' states of the present (and past) while capital doesn't (and didn't) rise above the authority and power of the decision-making central authority, obvious social and economic inequities and inequalities appeared, and these gaps necessitated the use of various forms of consent and compliance with the system. However, these propaganda systems differ from Western systems of propaganda because the dictatorial State plays the central role in determining media contents, there is prior censorship and physical repression of dissidents, and the media opinion is much more monolithic. The PM clearly does not apply to societies where the manufacture of consent isn't necessary for the maintenance of a capitalist order that generates and maintains inequality, inequity, and oppression. The earliest kibbutz of Israel, for example, approximated most closely societies in which the manufacture of consent was subsumed by the high value its members placed upon common goals. Today, peace journalism and communication for conflict resolution provide a different perspective for journalistic practice. Alternative media outlets based on workers' cooperatives and reader-supported news provide information which differs significantly from mainstream contents. For example, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! was the only journalist who covered the first protests of indigenous people against the construction of the pipeline in their lands in North Dakota. She was disciplined through serious flak as she faced riot charges that were, ultimately, rejected by the judge. Alternative forms of communication are also being practiced by indigenous peoples throughout Latin America through community media that promote values of living in common, social justice, mutual understanding and harmony with nature. For example, communication based on the cosmovision and practice of Sumak Kawsay (Good Living) appeals to harmony between individuals, individuals with society, and both with nature as part of the same totality. 3. The (Ideal) Democratic and Egalitarian Role of the Media At a time when grassroots movements and emerging political forces are aiming to intervene in the privatized media sphere and eventually transform it, a necessary step before any meaningful change can be achieved is a better understanding of the functioning and functions of media, i.e. how and why mass media contribute to the (re)production of the existing order with its unjust class structure, its increasing inequalities and inequities, the manifest reality of perpetual war, the structural limitations to rights and freedoms, and the accelerated erosion of democratic institutions that societies are witnessing across the globe.
Journalism Studies, 2017
In order to gain an understanding of journalists' conceptions of what being factual means, the pr... more In order to gain an understanding of journalists' conceptions of what being factual means, the present work supplements the existing insights of journalism studies and the sociology of knowledge and philosophy with data about journalists' beliefs regarding the importance of detached observation and reporting things as they are, spanning 62 countries (N = 18,248). In essence, our goal is to contribute to a future theoretical account of why journalists possess the beliefs that they do vis-à-vis truth-seeking and knowledge-acquisition. Data point to a significant relationship between reporters' level of freedom and their conceptions of knowledge and reality. We discuss the implications of these findings for the debate about the possibilities of universality and contextdependence of journalistic fact-finding.
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 2017
In the age of spirited debates about the mediating role of technologies, the other side of the co... more In the age of spirited debates about the mediating role of technologies, the other side of the coin is the state of direct experience in contemporary news production, that is, cases in which news reporters still rely on traditional channels such as “legwork,” “firsthand witnessing,” or “shoe-leather reporting.” The present study is a systematic attempt to identify journalists’ reasons for engaging in legwork, by recreating item by item the work processes and reasoning behind hundreds of individual news reports produced in the digital age, across Israeli print, television, radio, and online news outlets ( N = 859). Insofar as legwork can serve as a proxy for painstaking journalism, journalists’ decisions make some difference in determining if more or less legwork will ensue. The data avail an opportunity to explore scholarly musings about journalists’ motivations behind legwork: be they knowledge related, medium related, or event related. We find support for all three possibilities a...
Journalism Studies, 2013
Journalists' ability to capture and deliver factual information is central to their sense of ... more Journalists' ability to capture and deliver factual information is central to their sense of professionalism and to their societal and democratic functions. The need to understand journalists' dealings with facts becomes especially pronounced in an age when news organizations face an economic crisis and journalism's exclusive jurisdiction over the supply of news information is challenged by new and old forces. This study—part of the “Worlds of Journalism” research project—attempts to analyze fact-related beliefs among 1800 journalists from 18 different countries, and test their associations with a wealth of individual, cultural and organizational variables. The study draws on a rich reservoir of data from diverse regimes, institutional and national backgrounds, types of news organizations, ownership and media, as well as different genders, years of journalism experience, education and seniority. Our research appears to be well placed to evaluate journalists' degree of awareness to the challenges of reality depiction, and to outline through quantitative methods the social conditions which promote epistemological naivety in the form of objectivism, and sophistication as expressed in interpretationist epistemologies. Our findings indicate that conditions of ownership, nature of the political regime, personal beliefs and social environment, produce variance in journalists' takes on reality depiction.
Journalism Studies, 2014
The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with p... more The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
Journalism Practice, 2013
The degree to which journalists realize their most basic societal role and provide fact-based acc... more The degree to which journalists realize their most basic societal role and provide fact-based accounts has been a point of contestation between several camps. While adherents to the notion of the social construction of reality have infused scholarly discourse with far-reaching doubts about journalists' ability to report facts, emphasizing the arbitrariness of their practices, pragmatic theorists of knowledge and realists, a minority among journalism scholars, have distinguished between practices more and less conducive to the goal of truth. The current paper presents findings from an exploratory study conducted in Israel, in which news-gathering practices are directly observed at controversy-laden press conferences. This arena avails a thorough observation of journalist–source exchanges, without breaching the principle of source confidentiality. The practices observed are juxtaposed against the news products, alongside reporters' own comments on their work and reasoning. We suggest that a pragmatic conception of knowledge among journalists is compatible with observable practices such as reporters' questioning tactics and choices of interrogative emphases, more so than journalistic notions of realism and the social construction of reality.
New Media & Society, 2020
Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge... more Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is provided by “social epistemology”: a young philosophical field which regards society’s participation in knowledge generation as inevitable. Social epistemology offers the best of both worlds for journalists and media scholars: a thorough familiarity with biases and failures of obtaining knowledge, and a strong orientation toward best practices in the realm of knowledge-acquisition and truth-seeking. This article articulates the lessons of social epistemology for two central nodes of knowledge-acquisition in contemporary journalism: human-mediated knowledge and technology-mediated knowledge.
Journalism, 2015
Journalists apparently maneuver between their inability to validate every single bit of informati... more Journalists apparently maneuver between their inability to validate every single bit of information and the ramifications of publishing unverified reports. This study is the first attempt to uncover and characterize the reasoning which underlies the journalistic journey from skepticism to knowledge. We draw on the philosophical field of the ‘epistemology of testimony’ and analyze a robust data set. Data consist of detailed cross-verification measures – a reification of journalistic skepticism – underlying a large sample of individual news items in Israeli print, radio, online, and television news ( N = 847), following a reconstruction of work processes. Far from being passive recipients of second-hand information, we theorize that reporters make systematic use of ‘evidence of (sources’) evidence’ – a common but previously unarticulated evidence type.
This essay brings together leading scholars to debate important questions pertaining to methodolo... more This essay brings together leading scholars to debate important questions pertaining to methodological, philosophical, and pragmatic arguments and counterarguments about the necessity to observe the Propaganda Model filters in operation.
The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness, Oct 25, 2018
While the individual elements of the propaganda system (or filters) identified by the Propaganda ... more While the individual elements of the propaganda system (or filters) identified by the Propaganda Model (PM) – ownership, advertising, sources, flak and anti-communism – have previously been the focus of much scholarly attention, their systematisation in a model, empirical corroboration and historicisation have made the PM a useful tool for media analysis across cultural and geographical boundaries. Despite the wealth of scholarly research Herman and Chomsky’s work has set into motion over the past decades, the PM has been subjected to marginalisation, poorly informed critiques and misrepresentations. Interestingly, while the PM enables researchers to form discerning predictions as regards corporate media performance, Herman and Chomsky had further predicted that the PM itself would meet with such marginalisation and contempt. In current theoretical and empirical studies of mass media performance, uses of the PM continue, nonetheless, to yield important insights into the workings of ...
Critical Sociology, 2016
The article seeks to explain why denials of reality are tolerated and go largely unchallenged in ... more The article seeks to explain why denials of reality are tolerated and go largely unchallenged in communication research. It proposes that the acceptance of anti-realist views is related to communication theorists’ general hostility toward radical political economic critiques of media institutions and coverage. Unwilling to undertake research which lucidly exposes the central power relations in society, communication scholars sympathetic to corporate ownership and elite opinion resort to a particular form of obscurantism. This form of obscurantism does not only misrepresent uncongenial work, but espouses an apparently abstruse – though rather vacuous – anti-realist philosophy, which pre-empts consideration of ideas that threaten to expose the workings of existing institutional structures and communication scholars’ role in defending them.
New Media and Society, 2019
Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge... more Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is provided by "social epistemology": a young philosophical field which regards society's participation in knowledge generation as inevitable. Social epistemology offers the best of both worlds for journalists and media scholars: a thorough familiarity with biases and failures of obtaining knowledge, and a strong orientation toward best practices in the realm of knowledge-acquisition and truth-seeking. This paper articulates the lessons of social epistemology for two central nodes of knowledge-acquisition in contemporary journalism: human-mediated knowledge and technology-mediated knowledge.
Media Theory, 2018
This essay brings together leading scholars to debate important questions pertaining to methodolo... more This essay brings together leading scholars to debate important questions pertaining to methodological, philosophical, and pragmatic arguments and counterarguments about the necessity to observe the Propaganda Model filters in operation.
Media, Dissidence and the War in Ukraine, 2024
This chapter offers a comparative analysis of mainstream Israeli news coverage of Russia’s 2022 i... more This chapter offers a comparative analysis of mainstream Israeli news coverage of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s 2014 incursion into the Gaza Strip. The comparative analysis focuses on evidential standards. The chapter finds that the studied news coverage exhibits inconsistent evidential standards across the two arenas, shifting as a function of political affinity. It also theorizes how evidential standards are shaped in society via communicative processes. Finally, it integrates its finding of inconsistent evidential standards in Israeli news coverage, with the proposed theorization. Doing so, it suggests that evidential standards in Israeli society are set primarily by social power, at least so far as questions of war and peace are concerned.
The Propaganda Model Today, 2018
Before his passing in November 2017, Edward Herman graciously gave a final interview to various m... more Before his passing in November 2017, Edward Herman graciously gave a final interview to various media scholars in the preceding month of October. As the main architect of the Propaganda Model (PM), Herman offers in this exchange some comments on a range of topics and issues presented to him on the PM and its applicability and utility in the 21st Century. The questions and answers cover topics such as social control and inequality, how they are normalized and maintained; the usefulness of the PM in understanding patterns of media behavior in non-US countries; and how the PM positions television and the internet in relation to social and political change. Also addressed are notions of fear as an ideological control mechanism; ways in which media foster indifference, use of the PM to understand media coverage of Donald Trump’s election campaign and first months as President; and academia’s relationship to power structures.