Name: Noam Chomsky on Propaganda - The Big Idea - Interview with Andrew Marr
Uploaded: 2017-01-17T14:20:06.000Z
Duration: 30 min 18 s
Description: gooodLearn the English Usage: press,chomsky,watergate,vietnam,propaganda,war,nafta,labour,people,liberal,power,vietnam war,fact,england,centre,mainstream,wing,corruption,britain,american,read,happened,washington,anti,state,orwell,corrupt,conservative,find,neo,matter,august,state...

Do you believe what you read in the media? I'm not talking about Di and Fergie

but about the important stuff, politics and economics.

Has it ever occurred to you it could be  a system of propaganda designed to limit

Well, that's the view of Noam Chomsky,   who's been teaching here in Boston

Described as America's leading dissident, he's   based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

where, although it's very cold, it  isn't exactly the Gulag Archipelago.

As a working journalist myself, I've come to talk to professor Chomsky about bias in the media.

Orwell's nightmare: a place where propaganda rules, where thought is controlled.

It's now a familiar, if chilling, cold war fable. Most of us would say it's old hat. But is it?

For decades the freedoms of thought and expression have been central to Western democracy.

The media sees itself as free, fearless, stroppy.

And for many in power, the press are too strong.

So the idea that Orwell's warning is still relevant, may seem bizarre.

But not to Noam Chomsky, who thinks the image of a truth seeking media is a sham.

Chomsky's devoted his life to questioning Western state power.

Having virtually invented modern linguistics by the age of 30, Chomsky joined the gathering swirl of protests in the '60s.

I'm Noam Chomsky and I'm faculty at MIT. And I've been getting more and more heavily involved in anti-war activities for the last few years.

Since then, Chomsky has championed a brand of anarchism, becoming deeply hostile to established power and privilege.

And in recent years, he's refined what he calls the propaganda model of the media.

He claims that the mass media brainwash under freedom.

Not only do the media systematically suppress and distort, when they do present facts, the context obscures their real meaning.

The invasion of East Timor by the Indonesian army caused indescribable slaughter. Hundreds of thousands died.

But it was more or less ignored by the mainstream Western media, because, Chomsky argues, we were selling arms to the aggressors.

But wars were the West's interests are directly involved, get a different treatment.

For Chomsky, coverage of the Gulf war was servile.

Trivial criticisms were aired, fundamental ones were ignored.

Have dissident views really been excluded in an age of relative media diversity?

What about Chomsky's own access? What about this very programme?

Professor Chomsky, could we start by listening to you explain what the "Propaganda Model",

as you call it, is. For many people, the idea that propaganda is used by democratic, rather

than merely authoritarian governments, will be a strange one.

Well... the term "propaganda" fell into disfavour around the Second World War, but in the 1920’s

and the 1930’s, it was commonly used, and in fact advocated, by leading intellectuals,

by the founders of modern political science, by Wilsonian progressives and of course, by

the public relations industry, as a necessary technique to overcome the danger of democracy.

The institutional structure of the media is quite straightforward - we’re talking about

the United States, it’s not very different elsewhere - there are sectors, but the agenda-setting

media, the ones that set the framework for everyone else (like the New York Times and

the Washington Post, and so on), these are major corporations, parts of even bigger

conglomerates. Like other corporate institutions, they have a product and a market: Their market

is advertisers, that is, other businesses; their product is relatively privileged audiences,

They’re selling privileged audiences - these are big corporations selling privileged audiences

to other corporations. Now the question is, what picture of the world would a rational

person expect to come out of this structure? Then we draw some conclusions about what you

would expect, and then we check, and yes - that’s the picture of the world that comes out.

And is this anything more than the idea that, basically, the press is relatively right wing,

with some exceptions, because it’s owned by big business - which is a truism, it’s well known?

Well, I would call the press relatively liberal. Here I agree with the right wing critics.

So, especially the New York Times and the Washington Post, which are called, without

a trace of irony - the New York Times is called the "establishment left" in say, major foreign

policy journals - and that’s correct, but what’s not recognised is that the role of

the liberal intellectual establishment is to set very sharp bounds on how far you can go -

Well, let’s take say, the Vietnam War - probably the leading critic, and in fact one of the

leading dissident intellectuals in the mainstream, is Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, who

did finally come around to opposing the Vietnam War about 1969 - about a year and a half after

Corporate America had more or less ordered Washington to call it off, and his picture

from then on is that the war (as he put it) began with blundering efforts to do good,

but it ended up by 1969 being a disaster and costing us too much - and that’s the criticism...

So, what would the "non-propaganda model" have told Americans about the Vietnam War

Same thing that the mainstream press was telling them about Afghanistan. The United States

invaded South [Vietnam]... had first of all in the 1950s set up a standard Latin American-style

terror state, which had massacred tens of thousands of people, but was unable to control

local uprising (and everyone knows - at least every specialist knows - that’s what it was)

and when Kennedy came in, in 1961, they had to make a decision

because the government was collapsing under local attack, so the U.S. just invaded the

country. In 1961 the U.S. airforce started bombing South Vietnamese civilians, authorised

Napalm crop destruction... then in 1965 - January, February 1965 - the next major escalation

took place against South Vietnam, not against North Vietnam - that was a sideshow - that’s

what an honest press would be saying, but you can’t find a trace of it.

Now, if the press is a censoring organisation, tell me how that works - you’re not suggesting

that proprietors phone one another up, or that many journalists get their copy "spiked",

It’s actually... Orwell, you may recall, has an essay called "Literary Censorship in

England" which was supposed to be the introduction to Animal Farm, except that it never appeared,

in which he points out "look, I’m writing about a totalitarian society, but in free,

democratic England, it’s not all that different", and then he says unpopular ideas can be silenced

without any force, and then he gives a two sentence response which is not very profound,

but captures it: He says, two reasons - first, the press is owned by wealthy men who have

every interest in not having certain things appear but second, the whole educational system

from the beginning on through gets you to understand that there are certain things you

just don’t say. Well, spelling these things out, that’s perfectly correct - I mean,

the first sentence is what we expanded...

This is what I don’t get, because it suggests - I mean, I’m a journalist - people like

No - not self-censoring. There’s a filtering system that starts in kindergarten and goes

all the way through and - it doesn’t work a hundred percent, but it’s pretty effective

- it selects for obedience and subordination, and especially...

So, stroppy people won’t make it to positions of influence...

There’ll be "behaviour problems" or... if you read applications to a graduate school,

you see that people will tell you "he doesn’t get along too well with his colleagues" - you

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