War Made Easy and the "Propaganda Model"

In Chomsky and Herman's book Manufacturing Consent, the two authors describe a model called the "propaganda model" in which mass media filters news content. These filters are used by media corporations in order to present the news that they (or their parent companies) want to the masses to hear. This model can be applied to the documentary War Made Easy, which shows how the media skewed and filtered news from the Iraq War to Americans.
The first filter is one that shows how the semi-monopoly of the media controls our perception of the news. Since there are only a small number of companies that own a majority local and national sources of media, they can choose what Americans hear. They determine what is newsworthy because if they don't like a story, none of their stations or articles will report it. In War Made Easy, this is apparent when the show Donahue is shut down by MSNBC (owned by GE) because they didn't like what he was saying about the imminent war with Iraq. Since the higher-ups didn't want the government to grow angry with them, they shut it down.
The second filter is advertisement. Without advertising, the news corporations wouldn't have money in order to run their TV program, or print their newspapers. If these advertising companies don't like what the media is reporting, they will pull their funding and the media wouldn't be able to report anything. However, in War Made Easy, this is not shown.
Filter number three is how the media and their sources interrelate. Media, a lot of the time, takes their sources for granted. They don't necessarily do any followup research and just take what they hear for granted, especially with information from the government. In War Made Easy, media sources asked the Pentagon's recommendation and promptly used retired military generals as news experts--giving a very biased perspective. This biased perspective gave the viewers a very biased perspective and gave us a militaristic view of the upcoming war, making it seem necessary. Since the news stations used what the government gave them, the viewers only got a filtered report of the actual news.
The fourth filter is the generation of negative responses to the news, also called "flak". These negative responses can be in many forms, from petitions to Congressional Bills. Since the media likes having people listen to their reporting, they won't dissent to their constituents and will try to make the least amount of flak possible. All of the media in War Made Easy is propaganda in support of the war. In the case of this movie, the media didn't want to cause flak with the government, so their reports were very pro-war.
The fifth and final filter was, originally called the Anti-Communism filter. Nowadays, and in War Made Easy, it can be transposed onto another culture: the Muslim society. Many a media source have used the public's fear of Islamic beliefs in their favor. Anything Islamic is portrayed as bad by the media, thus justifying the Iraq War. The public is quick to jump to blame anyone Muslim for anything anti-American, so the media uses this as an advantage.