I’m skeptical that the mainstream media has our best interests at heart or is making any real effort to inform the populace in an honestly open manner. Big media is itself big business and so they tend to report in such as way that serves those same interests. I think the model of how this works, as described in the book Manufacturing Consent, by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, is largely correct. But Glen Greenwald, writing on Salon, brought to light another very interesting way of looking at how the media functions. It originally came from a book examining how the media covered the Vietnam War. That book, by Daniel C. Hallin, was titled Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam. In it, at Page 117, is the Holy Grail, or in this case the Holy Doughnut. Using a very simple diagram, Hallin neatly describes a continuum with three spheres of public opinion and how they affect public debate, especially by the media. Jay Rosen, a professor at NYU’s Journalism School, has written a wonderful analysis of Hallin’s model at his blog PressThink. Entitled Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press. I highly recommend it. It’s slightly different than, but entirely compatible with, Manufacturing Consent. In a nutshell, here’s Rosen’s description.

It’s easily the most useful diagram I’ve found for understanding the practice of journalism in the United States, and the hidden politics of that practice. You can draw it by hand right now. Take a sheet of paper and make a big circle in the middle. In the center of that circle draw a smaller one to create a doughnut shape. Label the doughnut hole “sphere of consensus.” Call the middle region “sphere of legitimate debate,” and the outer region “sphere of deviance.”

(from Brookston Beer Bulletin)