Propaganda model (Herman & Chomsky, 1988)

Mass-media content is shaped, without conspiracy, by five structural filters that news must pass through: (1) concentrated ownership and profit orientation, (2) dependence on advertising revenue, (3) reliance on official/corporate sourcing, (4) flak (organized negative response), and (5) a unifying ideology. What survives all five filters tends to serve elite interests — a systemic bias, not editorial malice.

Transfer. Every distribution channel is a filter with its own economics, and your content reaches an audience only if it passes them. The modern filters are the recommender's incentives: engagement optimization, advertiser-safety, the platform's ideology of what performs. For agents this reframes "being seen" as a filter-passing problem — align the artifact with what the channel is structurally built to promote, or route around it to a channel with friendlier filters (owned audience, search-intent, citation feedstock). Naming the filter you face is the first move; pretending distribution is neutral is the first mistake.

Kin: two-step-flow · agenda-setting · encoding-decoding · being-seen-reliably · models