If you are strapped for time, I recommend that you scroll down to a section entitled "The Performance Pyramid - Conformity Without Design" which provides a very good explanation of how corporate news services necessarily frames their coverage of events by the profit and power interests of capitalists. Edwards specifically describes four frames in which news coverage is shaped.
1) Corporate nature, elite/parent company ownership and profit-maximising orientationHowever, numbers 3 and 4 require much more elaboration which Edwards provides only indirectly by quotes mostly from Michael Parenti. The quotes suggest that corporate coverage of events that undermine the legitimacy or credibility of the US-led Empire's actions abroad is heavily biased to prevent any major criticism. And Edwards completely misses one major frame that prevents any discussion, much less criticism of the basic system of capitalism: the capitalist bias regarding the private ownership and control of economic property and money.
2) Dependence on allied corporate advertisers for 50% or more of revenues
3) Dependence on cheap, subsidised news supplied by state-corporate allies
4) Political, economic, legal carrots and sticks rewarding corporate media conformity and punishing dissent
Although criticism is permitted about the way the system currently functions to cause problems, this is always framed as a distortion of the basic system which suggests that only reforms are needed to solve the problems. Thus you might find comments that reflect adversely on "crony capitalism" , "corporate capitalism", "neoliberal capitalism", and "the excesses of capitalism", but the soundness and legitimacy of the basic system is simply taken for granted. Likewise corporate media always promotes the idea of "sustainable capitalism" in the face of overwhelming evidence that capitalism is driving climate destabilization.
