Darrell G. Moen, Ph.D.

ZNet Commentary (November 26, 2006)

By Gary Olson

The late political philosopher Isaiah Berlin coined the term ‘’secular priesthood'’ to describe Russian commissars who were apologists for Stalin’s crimes. Later, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky adapted the term to characterize their counterpart in contemporary societies, namely the higher level media, commentators and academic types who learn which side of their crusty French bread has the foie gras.

Just whom do they serve in our own society? Although we avoid the subject, we live in a class society. Roughly 2 percent of the population owns virtually everything that matters. Below them reside about 18 percent, those whom political analyst Michael Albert calls the ‘’coordinator class,'’ most of whom administer the daily operations of the economy. They are the agents that workers encounter on a day-to-day basis. The government, including both parties, serves this group. Finally, at the bottom, 80 percent of the population consists of working people with little or no power or influence.

The secular priesthood belongs in the second group and the target for their actions are the minds of newspapers readers like yourselves, educated people with some discretionary time and resources. The fear is that if this vast middle class knew the truth, they would demand changes that would threaten the top 20 percent. Therefore, obedience to the system must be engineered by those whose stated opinions habitually echo what Orwell once called the official truth.
(more…)

The following is an extract from David Cromwell’s “Spotlight on the Media: Chapter 3 of A Private Planet” (Jon Carpenter Publishing).

In their 1988 book ‘Manufacturing Consent - The Political Economy of the Mass Media’, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky introduced their ‘propaganda model’ of the media. The propaganda model argues that there are 5 classes of ‘filters’ in society which determine what is ‘news’; in other words, what gets printed in newspapers or broadcast by radio and television. Herman and Chomsky’s model also explains how dissent from the mainstream is given little, or zero, coverage, while governments and big business gain easy access to the public in order to convey their state-corporate messages - for example, ‘free trade is beneficial, ‘globalisation is unstoppable’ and ‘our policies are tackling poverty’.

We have already touched upon the fact that corporate ownership of the media can - and does - shape editorial content. The sheer size, concentrated ownership, immense owner wealth, and profit-seeking imperative of the dominant media corporations could hardly yield any other result. It was not always thus. In the early nineteenth century, a radical British press had emerged which addressed the concerns of workers. But excessive stamp duties, designed to restrict newspaper ownership to the ‘respectable’ wealthy, began to change the face of the press. Nevertheless there remained a degree of diversity. In postwar Britain, radical or worker-friendly newspapers such as the Daily Herald, News Chronicle, Sunday Citizen (all since failed or absorbed into other publications) and the Daily Mirror (at least until the late 1970s) regularly published articles questioning the capitalist system.

The well-known journalist John Pilger joined the Mirror in 1963, and worked there for over 20 years. Pilger later claimed that ‘The Mirror was the first popular paper to encourage working-class people to express themselves, for whatever reason, to their newspaper’. Luckily for him, ‘Irreverence and a certain anarchy were encouraged’. Later, when Robert Maxwell took over ownership of the newspaper, Pilger was personally assured that his job was secure: ‘Eighteen months later, after relentless interference from Maxwell, I was sacked.’ (more…)