Not Free, Just Different: How Socialist and Capitalist Media Both Manufacture Consent

 

Propaganda, ownership, and why “private media” isn’t the antidote to state control.

When the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed, one of the promises loudly celebrated in the West was the end of authoritarian, state-controlled media (see Václav Havel’s classic dissident essay, “The Power of the Powerless”).

No more propaganda. No more party line. A “free press” would arrive with capitalism, and truth would finally circulate — a claim challenged by foundational media-critique frameworks like Herman & Chomsky’s propaganda model (and the broader argument in Manufacturing Consent).

We know now that this is a fantasy.

As someone who lived in the Czech Republic in the early post-socialist years, and later campaigned in movements like Occupy Wall Street, I have watched two different media systems up close. Both are propaganda systems. They just propagandize in different directions, built on different motivations and different visions of what a human life is for (see also Habermas on the transformation of the public sphere: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere).

The West critiqued socialist media as propaganda — correctly. What it rarely admits is that capitalist media is also propaganda, just for a different regime (Herman & Chomsky: media “filters” and the bounds of acceptable debate; McChesney: Rich Media, Poor Democracy).

Socialist media: the propaganda of community

Let’s start by being honest about socialist media.

State media under socialism was not some benign public service. It was a tool for power. Its job was to:

• promote the party line
• present the socialist state as the natural horizon of history
• celebrate workers, collectives, and the heroism of building socialism
• suppress stories that undermined that project

People in socialist states knew much of their news was propaganda. They understood the performances of May Day, the obligatory coverage of party congresses, the ridiculous “achievements” of five-year plans. They developed strategies of reading between the lines, jokes, cynicism (see also Alexei Yurchak’s ethnography of “late socialism”: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More).

But there is something important here: the propaganda was organized around values of collectivity.

The message of socialist media emphasized:

• community and solidarity
• the dignity of work
• the idea that individuals were part of a collective project
• suspicion of unregulated private profit

Over years and decades, this produces certain habits of mind. Certain motivations (Verdery’s classic post-socialist analysis is useful here: What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?).

When I arrived in Prague after 1989, you could still feel this. People had grown up inside a media ecosystem that, however hypocritically, kept talking about society, community, fairness, and shared responsibility.

You could feel how different that was from the motivational ecosystem I grew up with in New York.

Capitalist media: the propaganda of profit

In capitalism, the media is not formally run by the state. That does not make it neutral or free. It simply shifts the center of gravity.

The key motivations are different:

• maximize profit
• grow market share
• deliver audiences (eyeballs, clicks, data) to advertisers
• keep shareholders and owners happy

The media’s job in this system is not to “inform the public.” It is to turn attention into money (Herman & Chomsky: the media’s institutional role; McChesney: commercial media as anti-democratic force).

So the propaganda looks different:

• It celebrates individual success, not collective achievement.
• It glorifies wealth and consumption as signs of merit.
• It frames competition as natural and good.
• It quietly erases or ridicules alternatives to capitalism.

The people who own the largest media platforms are the winners of capitalism. In J. K. Gibson-Graham’s terms, they are deeply capitalocentric.

When those people own the microphones, their worldview becomes the water everyone swims in. For classic work on corporate media concentration and ownership power, see Ben Bagdikian’s The New Media Monopoly.

A concrete example: Occupy Wall Street and editorial power

During Occupy Wall Street, I spent time with a journalist from The New York Times who was following our work.

After a couple of pieces, I asked if there would be a third. I was told:

“No. We’ve been told from the highest editorial levels that we’re not going to cover Occupy Wall Street anymore.”

That wasn’t an accident. It was an explicit political decision by a privately owned media institution — precisely the kind of boundary-setting described in the propaganda model (Herman & Chomsky).

This is how capitalist media manufactures consent:

• not through overt censorship,
• but through editorial decisions about what matters.

Research on Occupy framing confirms this pattern (Xu 2013).

Consumer logic, not news logic

Capitalist media is organized around a simple rule:

“It’s not enough to make money. You have to make the maximum amount of money possible.”

That requires maximum attention, engagement, and emotional reaction.

Outrage cycles and culture wars are profitable not because they inform, but because they keep people watching.

The system is consumer-driven, not truth-driven (again: McChesney).

Two propaganda systems, one missing option

Yes:

• Socialist media was propaganda.
• Capitalist media is propaganda.

The difference is not truth versus lies, but which interests are served (Herman & Chomsky’s framing: Manufacturing Consent).

We moved from the party line to the bottom line.

What we have not yet built is a genuinely democratic media ecology:

• community-owned media
• non-profit infrastructures
• public storytelling not driven by markets or states

Until we confront who shapes the shared reality we live inside, we will keep mistaking propaganda for freedom.

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Further reading (critical sources)

• Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky: “A Propaganda Model” (excerpt) and Manufacturing Consent
• Robert W. McChesney: Rich Media, Poor Democracy
• Jürgen Habermas: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
• Václav Havel: “The Power of the Powerless” (also available as a PDF: download)
• Ben H. Bagdikian: The New Media Monopoly
• Alexei Yurchak: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More
• Katherine Verdery: What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?