When you sit right behind the 10 yard line, pretty much every play seems like it's on the other side of the field. Hence, when Noam Chomsky, who is far-left of even the farthest left Democrats (he calls himself an anarcho-syndicalist), says the Mainstream Media (MSM) is 'right-wing', he is really using the term to describe any one in favor of capitalism. To Noam Chomsky, Ted Kennedy is a raving right-wing lunatic. Ok, maybe not raving, but right-wing nonetheless.
It is therefore surprisig to most people that I am a big fan of Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman's General Propaganda Model as put forth their book Manufacturing Consent. While Chomsky and Herman's theory was developed to show how corporations control the media for their own anti-democratic purposes, the same theory can also be used to explain all sorts of media biases.
Cassandra (via Emperor Misha) has an interesting post on the subject, and does a great job in classifying media bias once it has hapened, but it lacks a theoretical causal underpinning.
Posted by Dr. Rusty Shackleford at April 6, 2005 02:31 PM | TrackBack