I strongly recommend that anyone who has not read "Manufacturing Consent" by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky buy or borrow a copy.

An excerpt from the book is available at:

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Manufac_Consent_Prop_Model.html

In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite. It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance.

A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (I) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (~) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.

The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable. In assessing the newsworthiness of the U.S. government's urgent claims of a shipment of MIGs to Nicaragua on November 5, I984, the media do not stop to ponder the bias that is inherent in the priority assigned to government-supplied raw material, or the possibility that the government might be manipulating the news, imposing its own agenda, and deliberately diverting attention from other material. It requires a macro, alongside a micro- (story-by-story), view of media operations, to see the pattern of manipulation and systematic bias.

The book was originally published in 1988. By substituting the word "antiterrorism" for "anticommunism" it is made current. The model as it is practiced by the beltway and the MSM works better today than it ever has. As other commenters on this forum have said it is a case of "old wine in new bottles."

Media consolidation in America when combined with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine has contributed greatly to our current state of news media as propaganda.

In every era there are those who write alternative histories that seem to directly contradict the dominant narratives of the day. By alternative histories, I mean histories that introduce events, people and facts that are either excluded or are re-interpreted by those who dominate the narrative discourse at a point in time.

I learned one American History in high school. In college I learned another. My college experience led me to the conclusion that my high school education was intended to serve primarily as a form of mass socialization. Knowledge and independent thinking were secondary in importance if they were that. Even college didn't tell me everything I should have been told. It wasn't until after college when I read "Don't Know Much About History," by Kenneth Davis, Howard Zinn's "Peoples History of the United States," and "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" by Dee Brown, that I really began to understand the role that history plays in society.

That being said, I learned more about American society and culture from sci-fi authors, poets, comic book artists and other social thinkers working on the margins of society than I ever did from history.

Main stream history, like main stream media, is the dominant narrative of the ruling class. It always has been. It probably always will be. That does not mean that alternative narratives are not available for those who really and truly want to know what is going on. But you have to look in the right places. Places like this.