In mid-May of this year, scholars and activists from around Canada and the US, converged at the University of Windsor to attend the “20 Years of Propaganda?” conference.  The gathering was the brainchild of Paul Boin, Assistant professor of Communications Studies at the University of Windsor, to mark the 20^th anniversary of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Communication (Pantheon, 1988) by Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman.

 

The Propaganda Model Revisited

 

Manufacturing Consent gave us the now infamous ‘propaganda model’ which examined the media filters that regulate what makes it into mainstream news and what doesn’t. According to Chomsky and Herman, mainstream news content is regulated by a series of five ‘filters,’ including: ownership of the medium (i.e. corporate ownership); the medium’s funding sources (i.e. advertising revenues); sourcing (which includes government and private sector content production); flak (readers of the NECEF Report should already be familiar with this filter); and ‘anti-communism’ (updated to include a number of newer ‘anti-ideologies’ that serve as foils to corporate capitalism).

 

 The conference included a veritable “who’s who” on the North American left, including Amy Goodman, Judy Rebick, John Downing, Robert Jensen, Antonia Zerbisias, Robert Hackett, Sheldon Rampton, Peter Phillips, Danny Schechter, Linda McQuaig, and K'naan (all offering their own unique takes on the ‘propaganda model’). However, it was Sut Jhally who placed a novel spin on the proceedings by challenging conference participants to break the silence on Palestine (it should be noted that indigenous sovereignty struggle in North America/Turtle Island also weren’t addressed by any of the panelists – although the issue came up in a Q&A with Linda McQuaig, challenging her vision of a ‘progressive Canadian nationalism’).

 

 The Palestine Challenge: Combating Old Filters on the Left…

 

 Jhally is Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts and founder and Executive Director of the Media Education Foundation. Readers of the NECEF Report might be more familiar with Jhally’s film Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land. During his talk, Jhally not only challenged the audience to confront Israeli apartheid, but also asked that the

racism that kept the Palestine issue on the backburner and that prevented some organizations, let alone governments, from taking a principled stand to be directly confronted.

 

Interestingly, Jhally noted that his film also fell victim in some ways to the internalized racism that occurs in the Palestine solidarity movement and which privileges critical Jewish voices over those of Palestinians (a trap that oddly replicates the Zionist movement’s contention that Jewish people have more of a claim to speak for and about Palestine than any other people, including the indigenous Palestinians).

 

Jhally argued that if he were to remake Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land now he would actively seek out Palestinian voices and spokespeople to describe the situation in Palestine. In fact, it was his acquaintance with the late Edward Said that motivated Jhally to undertake his Palestine solidarity work in the first place. Recalling this relationship, Jhally asked why pro-Israel organizations have been so effective in muting the voices of the Palestinian people who are most directly affected by 40 years of Israeli military occupation and 60 years of the Nakba.

 

 Chomsky’s own positions on Palestine were not touched on, although in recent years his silences have replicated some of the dynamics Jhally critiqued. Chomsky, as is well known, continues to be a staunch advocate of the increasingly discredited ‘two-state solution’ and the 2003 ‘Geneva Proposal’ which still hold currency among an older generation of Israeli and Palestinian leftists (particularly grouped around Zionist left organizations like Gush Shalom and small Palestinian factions like FIDA and the People’s Party).

 

 Chomsky’s position seems strangely anachronistic, given the vitality of new movements within both Israeli and Palestinian societies which are challenging the feasibility of the ‘two-state solution.’ The new movements base their arguments on a sober analysis of the failures of the Oslo Process. If the ‘two-state’ solution is simply a euphemism for the legitimation of Palestine’s Bantustanization along the South African model, then real and sustainable alternatives must be found (Ali Abunimah’s new book One Country offers one possibility).

 

 Palestinian solidarity activists are increasingly being forced to consider whether or not their solidarity extends to a

portion of the Palestinian people (i.e. those living under direct Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip), or to the whole Palestinian people (i.e. including those living under Israel’s own internal system of legislated racism that discriminates against its Palestinian citizens as well as the roughly 5-million Palestinian refugees exiled from their homeland).

 

 Fortunately, with the publication of Jimmy Carter’s Peace Not Apartheid, and the growing success of the global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement rooted in the call of over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations to isolate Israel until apartheid in Palestine is dismantled, the cracks in the traditional silences around Palestine are beginning to show.

 

 Still a lot more work to do…

 Of course, the overall portrayal of the conflict within mainstream North American media accounts continues to be dismal – privileging either discourses that demonize the oppressed, or seek to construct a moral equivalency between oppressor and oppressed. During the conference I had a chance to present the findings of NECEF’s comparative study into the reporting of Israeli/Palestinian conflict related deaths in Canadian print media outlets (see NECEF REPORT - Fall, 2006).

 

 The presentation was made in an eclectically assembled workshop entitled “Canadian Propaganda, Canadian Media, and the Propaganda Model.” Predictably, the Frasier Institute’s contribution to the panel was lambasted by conference attendees, who challenged the claim that Canadian media wasn’t giving enough space to skeptics of global warming. Lacking the empirical foundations of the other two studies there was little to support the right-wing think-tanks claims.

 However, the symmetries between the NECEF report and another study relating to the coverage of the pharmaceutical industry in Canadian print-media, proved particularly interesting. Despite separate starting points, both the Israel/Palestine and the pharmaceutical  industry study showed a considerable right-wing bias in the coverage of such issues, including the complete absence of critical voices in the pages of the National Post.

The Propaganda Model at Twenty – Raising Questions for the Palestine Solidarity Movement

By Kole Kilibarda

“If the ‘two-state’ solution is simply a euphemism for the legitimation of Palestine’s Bantustanization along the South African model, then real and sustainable alternatives must be found”

Kole Kilibarda is an organizer with the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA). He spent 10 months working and living in Nablus, Palestine in 2004. He is currently a PhD candidate at York University.

Kole Kilibarda

Photograph by Aya Abou-Taha