Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media – Feature, Documentary

[Music] three two one take two good morning welcome to Erin Mills town center the home of the world's largest permanent point-of-purchase video wall installation my name is Calvin [ __ ] and I'm your video host all day here at am TV I want to take this opportunity to extend a very special and warm welcome to the film crew from necessary illusions we've got an excellent lineup of television programming for you today so let's get on with it they're working on this documentary [Music] however every country I show up they're always there [Music] Daisy when they're done hunters gonna want to hear somebody talk for an hour I guess they know what to do [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] good afternoon and welcome to Wyoming talks my guest today is well-known intellectual Norm Chow escaped thank you for being on our program today glad to be here well I know probably the main purpose for your trip to Wyoming is to discuss thought control in a democratic society now I'd say I'm just Jane USA and I say well gee this is a Democratic Society and what do you mean thought-control I make up my own mind I create my own destiny what would you say to her well I would suggest that Jane take a close look at the way the media operate the way the public relations industry operates the extensive thinking that's been going on for a long long period about the necessity for finding ways to marginalize and control the public in democratic society but particularly to look at the evidence that's been accumulated about the way the major media the sort of agenda-setting media the international press the television is on the way that they shape and control the kinds of opinions that appear the kinds of information that comes through the sources to which they go and so on and I think that Jane will find some very surprising things about the democratic system I'd like to welcome all of you to this lecture today several years ago for Chomsky was described in the New York Times Book Review as follows judges in terms of the power range novelty and influence of his thought Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive professor Noam Chomsky together there are some people out behind that blackness there but if I don't look you in the eye it's because I don't see you all I see is the blackness perhaps I ought to begin by reporting something that's never read the line about the arguably the most important intellectual in the world and so on comes from a publisher's blurb and you always got to watch those things because if you go back to the original you'll find that that sentence is actually there this is in the New York Times but the next sentence is since that's the case how can you write such terrible things about American foreign policy I may never quote that point but in fact if it wasn't for that second sentence I would begin to think that I'm doing something wrong and I'm not joking about that it's true that the Emperor doesn't have any clothes but the Emperor doesn't like to be told it and the Emperor's lapdogs like the New York Times they're not gonna enjoy the experience if you do good evening I'm Bill Moyers what's more dangerous the big stick are the big lie governments have used both against their own people tonight I'll be talking with a man who has been thinking about how we can see the developing lie he says that propaganda is to democracy what violence is to a dictatorship but he hasn't lost faith in the power of common people to speak up for the truth you have said that we live in tangled in webs of in this deceit that we live in a highly indoctrinated society where elementary truths are easily buried elementary truths such as such as the fact that we invaded South Vietnam or the fact that we're standing in the way of significant and had four years of significant moves towards arms negotiation or the fact that the military system is to an abstention extent not totally but to it substantial extent a mechanism by which the general population is compelled to provide a subsidy to high technology industry since they're not gonna do it if you ask them to you have to deceive them into doing it I think there are many truths like that and we don't face them do you believe in common sense I mean yours and Cartesian and common sense I think people have the capacities to see through the deceit in which there and sneered but they gotta make the effort seems a little in Congress to hear a man from the ivory tower of Massachusetts Institute of Technology a scholar a distinguished linguistics scholar talk about common people with such appreciation I think that scholarship at least the field that I work in has the opposite consequences by my own studies in language and human cognition demonstrate to me at least what remarkable creativity ordinary people have the very fact that people talk to one another is a reflection just in a normal way I don't mean anything particularly fancy reflects deep-seated features of human creativity which in fact separate human beings from any other biological system we know tonight scientists talk to the animals but are they talking back the journal with father from and Mary Lou Finley communicating with animals is a serious scientific pursuit this is nim chimpsky NIM jokingly named after the great linguist noam chomsky was the great hope of animal communication in the 1970s for four years potato and others coached him in sign language but in the end they decided it was a lost cause NIM could ask for things but not much more I would have loved to have a conversation with him and understand how he looked at the universe he failed to communicate that information to me no week and we gave him every opportunity no I'm Chomsky theorist of language and political activists has had an extraordinary career I can think of none like it in recent American history and few anywhere at any time he has literally transformed the subject of linguistics at the same time he's become one of the most consistent critics of power politics in all its protein guises scholar and propagandist his two careers apparently reinforce each other in 1957 he published his sink tactic structures which began what has frequently been called the Chomsky and revolution in linguistics like a latter-day Copernicus Chomsky proposed a radically new way of looking at the theory of grammar Chomsky worked out the formal rules of the universal grammar which generated the specific rules of actual or natural languages the general approach I'm taking seems to me rather simple-minded and unsophisticated but nevertheless correct later he came to argue that such systems are innate features of human beings they belong to the characteristics of the species and have been in effect programmed into the genetic equipment of the mind like the machine language in a computer and the interesting question from this point of view would be what is the nature of the initial state that is what is human nature in this respect astonishing facility that in turn explains the astonishing facility the children have been learning the rules of natural language no matter how complicated incredibly quickly from what our imperfect and often degenerate samples santé located confiscated near Geneva complicated ins which means it's complicated [Music] if in fact our minds were a blank slate and experience wrote on them we would be very impoverished creatures indeed so the obvious hypothesis is that our language is the result of the unfolding of a genetically determined program well plainly there are different languages in fact the apparent variation of languages is quite superficial it's certain as it that's at certain veining Hill is that humans are not genetically programmed to learn one or another language so you bring up a Japanese baby and Boston that will speak Boston English if you bring up my child in Japan it'll speak Japanese and that means that the base that from that it fought from from that it simply follows by logic that the basic structure of the languages must be essentially the same our task as scientists is to try to determine exactly what those fundamental principles are that cause the knowledge of language to unfold in the manner in which it does under particular circumstances and incidentally I think there is no doubt the same must be true of other aspects of human intelligence and systems of understanding and interpretation and moral and aesthetic judgment and so on the implications of these views have washed over the fields of psychology education sociology philosophy literary criticism and logic in the fifties and sixties the bridge between your theoretical work and your political work seems to have been the attack on behaviorism but now behaviorism is no longer an issue or so it seems so how does this leave the link between your linguistics and your politics well I've always regarded the link I've never really perceived much of a link to tell you the truth again I would be very pleased to be able to discover intellectually convincing connections between my own anarchist convictions on the one hand and what I think I can demonstrate or at least begin to see about the nature of human intelligence on the other but I simply can't find intellectually satisfying connections between those two domains I can discover some tenuous points of contact we puppeted to the physical allocation schemes a law school plus C regular et à l'intérieur uncle cross off the list spree with a lot natural women from the Mount Seir systems regularity the current kihon Pacific eons under that little V are you other mental experiment not deform social don't the Hubble the projects you don't class it's at there if it is correct as I believe it is that a fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work for a creative inquiry for for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effects of course of institutions then of course it will follow that a decent society should maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realized now a federated decentralized system of free associations incorporating economic as well as social institutions would be what I refer to as anarcho-syndicalism and it seems to me that it is the appropriate form of social organization for an advanced technological society in which human beings do not have to be forced into position of tools of cogs in the machine since the 1960's Noam Chomsky has been the voice of a very characteristic brand of rationalist libertarian socialism he's attacked the abuses of power wherever he saw them he's made himself deeply unpopular by his criticism of American policy the subservience of the intelligentsia the degradation of Zionism the distortions of media and self-delusions and prevailing ideologies [Music] under the liberal administration of the 1960s the cloth of academic intellectuals designed and implemented the Vietnam War and other similar though smaller actions this particular community is a very relevant one to consider it a place like MIT because of course you're all free to enter enter this community in fact you're invited and encouraged to enter the community of technical intelligentsia and weapons designers and counterinsurgency experts and mathematic planners of an American Empire is one that you have a great deal of inducement become associated with and are very real Jamie this came with the meal be with you in a second okay and they still get their cameras okay let's start in your essay language and freedom you write social action must be animated by a vision of a future society I was wondering what vision of a future society and animates you oh well I have my own ideas as to what a future society should look like I've written about them I mean I think that we should the most general level we should be seeking out forms of authority and domination and challenging their legitimacy sometimes they are legitimate that is let's say than needed for survival so for example I wouldn't suggest that during the Second World War the forms of authority we had a totalitarian society basically and I thought there was some justification for that under the wartime conditions and there other forms of so so for relations between parents and children for example involved forms of coercion which are sometimes justifiable but any such in any form of coercion and the control requires justification and most of them are completely unjustifiable now at various stages of human civilization it's been possible to challenge some of them but not others others are too deep-seated or you don't see them or whatever and so at any particular point you try to detect those forms of authority and domination which which are subject to change and which do not have any legitimacy in fact which often strike at fundamental human rights and your underst ending of fundamental human nature and right well what are the major things say today there are some that are being addressed in a way the feminist movement is addressing some the civil rights movement as addressing others the one major one that's not being seriously addressed is the one that's really the core of the system of domination that's private control over over resources and that means an attack on the fundamental structure of state capitalism I think that's an order that's not something far off in the future you're lying the alphabet has only 26 letters with these 26 magic symbols however millions of words are written every day nowhere else are people so addicted to information and entertainment via the printed word everyday the world comes thumping on the American doorstep and nothing that happens anywhere remains long a secret from the American newspaper region it comes to us pretty casually the daily paper but behind its arrival on your doorstep is one of journalism's major stories how it got there there is a standard view about democratic societies and the role of the media within them it's expressed for example by Supreme Court justice Howell when he spoke of the crucial role of the media in affecting the societal purpose of the First Amendment namely enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process that kind of formulation expresses the understanding that democracy requires free access to information and ideas an opinion and the same conceptions hold not only with regard to media but with regard to educational institutions publishing the intellectual community generally it is basic to the health of a democracy that no phase of government activity escaped the scrutiny of the press ear reporters are assigned to stories faithful not only to our nation but to all nations Congress says the First Amendment shall pass no law abridging the freedom of the press and the chief executive himself throws open the doors of the White House to journalists representing papers of all shades of political opinion [Music] but it is worth bearing in mind that there is a contrary view and in fact the contrary view is very widely held and deeply rooted in our own civilization it goes back to the origins of modern democracy to the 17th century English Revolution which was a complicated affair like most popular revolutions there was a struggle between Parliament representing largely elements of the gentry and the merchants and the Royalists representing other elite groups and they fought it out but like many popular revolutions there was also a lot of popular ferment going that was opposed to all of them there were popular movements that were questioning everything the relation between master and servant the right of authority all together all kinds of things were being questioned there was a lot of radical publishing the printing presses had just come into existence and this disturbed all the elites on both sides of the Civil War so as one historian pointed out at the time in 1660 he criticized the Radical Democrats the ones we're calling for what we would call democracy because they are making the people so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule now underlying these doctrines which were very widely held is a certain conception of democracy it's a game for elites it's not for the ignorant masses who have to be marginalized diverted and controlled of course for their own good the same principles were upheld in the American colonies the dictum of the founding fathers of American democracy that unquoted the people who own the country ought to govern it John J [Music] now in modern times for elites this contrary view about the intellectual life and the media and so on this country review in fact is the standard one I think apart from rhetorical flourishes from Washington DC he's intellectual author and linguist professor and Noam Chomsky manufacturing consent what does that title meant to describe well the title is actually borrowed from a book by walter Lippmann written back around 1921 in which he described what he called the manufacture of consent as a revolution in the practice of democracy what it amounts to is a technique of control and he said this was useful and necessary because the common interests the general concerns of all people elude the public public just isn't up to dealing with them and they have to be the domain of what he called a specialized class notice that that's the opposite of the standard view about democracy there's a version of this expressed by the highly respected moralist and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr who was very influential on contemporary policy makers his view was that rationality belongs to the cool observer but because of the stupidity of the average man he follows not reason but faith and this naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth maker to keep the ordinary person on course [Music] it's not the cases the naive might think that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy rather as this whole line of thinkers observes it's the essence of democracy the point is that in a military state or a feudal state or what you give nowadays both totalitarian state it doesn't much matter what people think because you've got a bludgeon over their head then you can control what they do but when the state loses the bludgeon when you can't control people that force and when the voice of the people can be heard you have this problem it may make people so curious and so arrogant that they don't have the humility to submit to a civil rule and therefore you have to control what people think and the standard way to do this is the resort through what in more honest days used to be called propaganda manufacture of consent creation of necessary illusions various ways of either marginalizing the general public or reducing them to apathy in some fashion [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] normal to muskie Kojima Thank You Japanese yo Hatchin the oldest of two boys Algrim noam chomsky was born in Philadelphia Pennsylvania in 1928 as a Jewish child the anti-semitism of the time affected him both parents taught Hebrew and he became fascinated by literature reading translations of French and Russian classics he also took an interest in a grammar book written by his father on Hebrew of the Middle Ages he recalls a childhood absorbed in reading Crudup in a sofa often boring up to 12 books at once from the library he is married to Carol and they have three children I don't like to impose on my wife and children a form of life that they certainly haven't selected for themselves namely one of public exposure or exposure to the public media that's their choice and I don't believe that they attack them from and frankly a second dose or perhaps principle point is that I'm rather against the idea the whole notion of developing public personalities who were treated as stars of one kind or another were aspects of their personal life as opposed have some significance and so on take one reception you said that you're just like us he went to school got good grades and what made you start being critical you know and see them different let's start up a change personal factors in anybody's life first of all don't forget I grew up in the depression [Applause] [Music] my parents actually happen to have jobs which was kind of unusual they were Hebrew school teachers as a lower middle class for them everything revolved around being Jewish Hebrew Palestine in those days so on and I grew up in that Midea so you know I learned Hebrew in Hebrew school being a Kiwi school teacher like College led youth groups summer camp Hebrew camps all business the branch of the Zionist movement that I was part of was all involved in socialist by nationalism and arab-jewish cooperation nice stuff [Music] hopping on a train and going up to New York and hanging out at Atticus bookstores on 4th Avenue and talking to good in mind because relatives there I mean I don't totally trust my childhood memories without viously but the family was split up like a lot of Jewish families it went in all sorts of directions there were sectors that were super Orthodox there were other sectors that were very radical and very assimilated and working-class intellectuals and that's the secretary that I naturally gravitated toward it was a very lively intellectual culture for anything it was a working class culture had working-class values values of solidarity socialist values and so on there was a sense somehow things were gonna get better kind of institutional structure was around the method of fighting you know of organizing of doing things which had some hope and I also had the advantage of having gone through a experimental progressive school to a do a school which was quite good run by a university there and you know there was no such thing as competition or there's no such thing as being a good student I mean literally the concept of being a good student didn't even realize until I got to high school I went to the academic high school and suddenly discovered I'm a good student you know I hated high school because I had to do all the things you have to to get into college but until they know it's kind of a free pretty open I don't know maybe I was just can't Angliss as a historian I have read with interest in amazement your long review articles Gabriel Jackson Spanish Civil War and that's a very respectable piece of history and I can appreciate how much work goes into that we know when I did work when did you then I did that work in the early 1940s when I was about 12 years old the first article I wrote was right after the fall of Barcelona in the school newspaper it was a lament about the rise of fascism 1939 actually I guess one of the people whose biggest influence in my life was an uncle who had never gone past fourth grade he was you know I had a background in crime then left-wing politics and all sorts of things but he was a hunchback and as a result he could get a newsstand in New York through they had some program for people with physical disabilities and some of you from New York yeah well you know the 72nd Street yes at 72nd Street there's a place where you come out of the subway and there's everybody goes towards 72nd Street and there were two newsstands on that side which we're doing fine and there's the two noted stands on the back and nobody comes out the back and that's where his news but it was a very lively place he was a very bright guy it was the thirties there were a lot of Emma graves no so a lot of people hanging around there the evening especially it was sort of a literary political salon you know every kind of guys hanging around arguing and talking and as a kid like 11 12 years old the biggest excitement was to work the newsstand you write in manufacturing consent that it's the primary function of the mass media in the United States to mobilize public support for the special interests that dominate the government and the private sector what are those interests well if you want to understand the way any society works ours or any other the first place to look is who makes who is in a position to make the decisions that determine the way the society functions societies differ but in ours the major decisions over what happens in the society decisions over investment and production and distribution and so on are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations and conglomerates and investment firms and so on they are also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government and they're the ones who own the media and they're the ones who have to be in a position to make the decisions they have an overwhelmingly dominant the way life happens you know what's been done in the society within the economic system by law and in principle they dominated the control of our resources and the need to satisfy their interests imposes very sharp constraints on the political system and the ideological system talk about manufacturing of consent whose consent is being manufactured when we can start with their two different groups we can get more into more detail but at the first level of approximation there's two targets for propaganda one is what's sometimes called the political class there's maybe 20% of the population which is relatively educated more or less articulate that plays some kind of role in decision-making they're supposed to sort of participate in social life either as managers or cultural managers like say teachers writers and so on they're supposed to vote they're supposed to play some role in the way economic and political and cultural life goes on now their consent is crucial one group that has to be deeply indoctrinated then there's maybe 80% of the population whose main function is to follow orders and not to think you know and not to pay attention to anything and they're the ones that usually pay the cost all right professor Chomsky dome you outlined a model with filters propaganda is sent through that's way to the public you have briefly outlined those it's basically an institutional analysis of the major media what we call a propaganda model and we're talking primarily about the national media those media that sort of set a general agenda that others more or less adhere to to the extent that they even pay much attention to national or international affairs now the elite media are the sort of the agenda-setting media that means the New York Times The Washington Post the major television channels and so on they set the general framework local media more or less adapt to their structure in sound like that says that there's a beachhead I think I think I think by the ages architectonic this was the offered of soundbyte dollars got a minute all the time so that's I love this so much repair wood and they do this in all sorts of ways by selection topics by distribution of concerns by emphasis and framing of issues by filtering of information by bounding of debate within certain limits [Music] 45 second they determine they select they shade they control the restraint in order to serve the interests of dominant elite groups in the society focus today on the five nations of Central America this is democracy's diary here for our instruction our triumphs and disasters the pattern of life's changing fabric here is great journalism a revelation of the past a guide to the present and a clue to the future New York Times is certainly the most important newspaper in the United States and one could argue the most important newspaper in the world the New York Times plays an enormous role in shaping the perception of the current world on the part of the politically active educated classes also the New York Times has a special role and I believe its editors probably feel that they bear a heavy burden in the sense that the New York Times creates history what happened years ago may have a bearing on what happens tomorrow millions of clippings are preserved in The Times library all indexed for instant use a priceless archive of events and the men who make them but his history is what appears in the New York Times archives a place where people will go to find out what happened is the New York Times therefore it's extremely important if history is going to be in an appropriate way that certain things appear certain things not appear certain questions be asked other questions be ignored and that issues be framed in a particular fashion now in whose interests is that history being so shaped well I think that's not very difficult to answer the process by which people make up their minds on this is a much more mysterious process than you would ever guess from reading manufacturing consent there is a saying about legislation that legislation is like making sausage the less you know about how it's done the better for your appetite the same is true of this business if you're in a conference in which decisions are being made on what to put on page one or what not you would get I think impression that important decisions were being made in a flipped and and frivolous way but in fact given the pressures of time to trying to get things out you resort to a kind of a shorthand and you have to fill that paper up every day it's curious in a kind of a mirror-image way that professor Chomsky is in total accord with Reed Irvine who at the right-wing end of the spectrum says exactly what Chomsky does about the insinuating influence of the press of the big media as quote agenda setters to use one of the great buzz words of the time and of course reader Irvine sees this as a left-wing conspiracy of foisting liberal ideas in both domestic and foreign affairs on the American people but in both cases I think that the premise really is an insult to the intelligence of the people consume news now to eliminate confusion all of this has nothing to do with liberal or conservative bias according to the propaganda model both liberal and conservative wings of the media whatever those terms are supposed to mean fall within the same framework of assumptions in fact if the system functions well it ought to have a or bias or at least they appear to because if it appears to have our liberal bias that will serve to bound thought even more effectively in other words if the press is indeed adversarial and liberal all these bad things then how can I go beyond it they're already so extreme in their opposition to power that the go beyond that would be to take off from the planet so therefore it must be that the presuppositions that are accepted in the liberal media are sacrosanct can't go beyond them and a well-functioning system would in fact have a bias of that kind the media would then serve to say in effect thus far and no further we ask what would you expect of those media on just relatively uncontroversial guided free market assumptions and when you look at them you find a number of major factors entering into determining what their products are these are what we call the filters so one of them for example is ownership who owns them the major agenda-setting media after or what are they as institutions in the society what are they well in the first place they are major corporations in fact huge corporations furthermore they're integrated with and sometimes owned by even larger corporations conglomerates so for example by Westinghouse GE and so on [Music] what I wanted to know was how specifically needs control the media what I mean is I can ask me how do they elites control General Motors what why isn't that a question I mean General Motors is an institution of the elites they don't have to control it they own it except I guess at a certain level I think like I I guess I work with student crass and I and I so I know it's like reporters inside that they don't control the student press but I'll tell you something you try and the student press to do anything that breaks out of conventions and you're gonna have the whole business community around here down at your neck and the into the university is gonna get threatened and you know I mean maybe no bill paying attention to you that's possible but if you get to the point where they can't don't stop paying attention to you the pressures will start coming back because there are people with power there are people who own the country and they're not gonna let the country get out of control what do you think about that this is the the the old cabal theory that that somewhere there's a there's a room with the bays covered desk and they're a bunch of capitalists sitting around and they're pulling a string these rooms don't exist I mean I hate to tell Noam Chomsky this you don't you don't build it'll share that I think it is the most absolute rubbish I've ever heard this is the current fashion in the universities you know it's patent nonsense and I think it's it's nothing but a fashion it's a way that intellectuals have of a feeling like a clergy I mean there has to be something wrong [Music] [Music] [Music] so what we have in first place is major corporations which are parts of even bigger conglomerate now like any other corporation they they have a product which they sell to a market the market is advertisers that is other businesses what keeps the media functioning is not the audience they make money from their advertisers and remember we're talking about the elite media so they're trying to sell a good product a product which raises advertising rates and ask your friends in the advertising industry that means that they want to adjust their audience to the more elite and affluent audience that raises advertising rates so what you have is institutions corporations big corporations that are selling relatively privileged audiences to other businesses well what point of view would you expect to come out of this and we had any further assumptions what you'd predict is that what comes out is a picture of the world a perception of the world that satisfies the needs and the interests and the perceptions of the sellers the buyers and the product now there many other factors that press in the same direction if people try to enter the system who don't have that point of view they're likely to be excluded somewhere along the way after all no institution is going to happily design a mechanism to self-destruct it's not the way institutions function so they all work to exclude or marginalize or eliminate dissenting voices or alternative perspectives and so on because they're dysfunctional the dysfunctional of the institution itself do you think you've escaped the ideological indoctrination of the media and society that you grew up in often not I mean I when I look back and think of the things that I haven't done that I should have done it's it's very it's not a pleasant experience so what's the story of young know than the schoolyard yeah mother I mean that was a personal thing for me I don't know why it's an interesting one else but I do remember each was certain well yeah I mean I did had a big influence on me I mean I remember when I spent six I guess first grade there was there was the standard fat kid who everybody made fun of and I remember in this schoolyard he was on a you know I'm standing on a right outside the school classroom and a bunch of kids outside so taunting him you know so on and one of the kids actually brought over his older brother so like from third grade instead of first grade big kid he was gonna you know beat him up or something and I remember going up to stand next to him feeling somebody would help them and I did for a while and then I got scared and I went away and I was very much ashamed of it afterwards and sort of felt you know not gonna do that again that's a feeling that's stuck with me you should stick with the underdog and the shame remain should have stayed we're already established you a professor at MIT you'd made a reputation you had a terrific career ahead of you you decided to become a political activist now here is a classic case of somebody whom the institution does not seem to have filtered out I mean you were a good boy up until then were you or you'd always been it's like some of them you're a rebel yeah pretty much I had been pretty much outside you felt isolated you felt out of sympathy with the prevailing currents of American life but a lot of people do that suddenly in 1964 you decide I have to do something about this what made you do that well that was a very conscious decision and a very uncomfortable decision because I knew what the consequences would be I was in a very favorable position I had the kind of work I like we had a lively exciting department field was going well personal life was fine I was living in a nice place children growing up everything looked perfect and I knew I was giving it up and at that time remember it was not just giving talks I began involved right away in resistance and expected to spend years in jail I came very close to it in fact my wife went back to graduate school in part because we assumed she's gonna have to support the children these were the expectations [Music] and I recognize that if I returned to these interests which were the dominant interests of my own youth life would become very uncomfortable because I know that the United States you don't expect us I catch a prison and they don't send a death squad after you and so on but there are there are definite penalties for breaking rules so these were real decisions and it simply seemed at that point that it was just hopelessly amaro not food Noam Chomsky I'm a on the faculty at MIT and I've been getting more and more heavily involved in anti-war activities for the last few years [Music] [Music] beginning with writing articles and making speeches and speaking to congressmen and that sort of thing and gradually getting involved more and more directly and resistance activities of various sorts I've come to the feeling myself that the most effective form of political action that is open to a responsible and concerned citizen at the moment is action that really involves direct resistance refusal to take part in what I think are were crimes to raise the domestic cost of American aggression overseas through non participation and a support for those who are refusing to take part and particular draft resistance throughout the country I think that we can see quite clearly some very very serious defects and flaws in our society our level of culture our institutions which are going to have to be corrected by operating outside of the framework that is commonly accepted I think we're going to have to find new ways of political action [Music] [Music] I rejoice in your disposition to argue the Vietnam question especially when I recognize what an act of self-control this must involve it does sure it really does I mean I think sometimes I lose my temper maybe not because you would have smashing the goddamn thing you say you say any reason for not losing you say the war is simply an obscenity a depraved act by weak and miserable men including all of us including myself putting every that's the next sentence seems so short because you count everybody in the company of the guilty I think that's true in this job but this is one of the points ever since the theological observation isn't that day no I don't think because if somebody points out if everybody's guilty of everything that nobody is guilty of anything no no I don't I don't believe that see I think that I think the point that I'm trying to make and I think thought to be made is that the real at least to me I say this elsewhere in the book the what seems to me a very innocent terrifying aspect of our society and other societies is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane reasonable sensible people can observe such events I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up these people would not be able to operate we're it not for the this apathy and equanimity and therefore I think that it's in some sense the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who should who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and revolt twelve million pounds of confetti dropped into New York City's so-called Canyon of Heroes Americans were officially welcoming the troops home from the Persian Gulf War just goes to show that we're a mighty nation and we'll be there or no matter what comes along I mean it's the strongest country in the world and you got to be glad to live in [Music] I guess what it's good I got to be a month bit much after a while but I guess it was good to know everything you know it's guessing Vietnam you didn't really know a lot was going on but here you pretty much up to the moment on everything so this was good to be informed for the first time because of technology we have the ability to be live from many locations around the globe and because of the format in all news network we can spend whatever time is necessary to bring the viewer the complete context of that day's portion of a story and by context I mean the institutional memory that is critical to understand why and how and that's those who are analysts and do commentary and those who can explain david brinkley once said that you step in front of the camera and you get out of news business and in show business but nonetheless that should not in any way subtract or obscure the need for the basic standards of good journalism President Bush and Prime Minister major closed almost rejected the Soviet peace talk peace efforts okay in Saudi Arabia the door is being left open Rick Sallinger is standing by live in Riyadh with arrays' accuracy speed a fair approach on honesty and integrity within the reporter to try and bring the truth whatever the truth may be by going to war is a serious business and a totalitarian society The Dictator just says we're going to war everybody marches and with this weapon of human Brotherhood on our hands we are seeing the war for men's minds not as a battle of truth against lies but as a lasting Alliance pledge and faith with all those millions driving forward to create the true new order the world order of the people first the people before of all the necrotic Society the theory is that if the political leadership has committed to the war they present reasons and they got a very heavy burden of proof to me because the war is a very catastrophic affair as this month proved to be the role of the media at that point is to allow us to present the relevant background for example the possibilities of peaceful settlement such as what they may be have to be presented and then to present to offer a forum in fact encourage a forum of debate over this very dread decision to go to war and then this case kill hundreds of thousands of people and leave two countries wrecked and so on that never happened the there was never well you know when I say never I mean 99.9% of the discussion excluded the option of the peaceful settlement Falls one of the most vital and constructive tasks of this war this is a People's War and to win it the people ought to know as much about it as they can this office will do its best to tell the truth and nothing but the truth in the boys first weapon in this worldwide strategy of proof is the great machine of information represented by the three threads with its powers of molding public thought and leading public action with all its lifelines for the exchange of new ideas it's lean piping nation spread across the earth every time George Bush would appear and say there will be no negotiations there would be in a hundred editorials the next day lauding him for going the last mile for diplomacy if he said you can't reward an aggressor instead of cracking up and ridicule the way people did in civilized sectors of the world like the whole third world the media is so fantastic principle you know the invader of Panama the only head of state stands condemned for aggression in the world the guy who was head of the CIA during the Timor aggression you know he says aggressors can't be rewarded the media just applauded the motion picture industry with its worldwide organization of newsreel camera crews invaluable for bringing into vivid focus the background drama and perspective of the world mobilized who in this all-out struggle for men's minds are the radio networks with all their experience in the Swift reporting of great occasion and event from every strategic center and frontline stronghold their reporters are sending back the lessons of new tactics new ways of war the result was it's a media war on this tremendous fakery all along the line the UN is finally living up to its mission you know wondrous sea change the New York Times told us the only one Juris sea change was that for once the united states didn't veto a Security Council resolution against aggression people don't want to war unless you have to have one and they would have known that you don't have to have for it well the media kept people from knowing that and that means we went to war very much in the manner of the healthcare and state thanks to the media subservience that's the big story now remember I'm not talking about a small radio station in Laramie I'm talking about the national agenda setting media if you're on a radio news show and Laramie chances are very strong but you pick up what was in The Times that morning and you decide that's the news in fact if you follow the AP wires you find it in the afternoon they send across tomorrow's front page of the New York Times that's what everybody knows what the news is and the perceptions and the perspectives and so on are sort of transmitted down and not to the precise detail but the general picture is free not transmitted elsewhere the foreign news comes here to the foreign news desk the editor is Bob Henley Bob I suppose you get far more foreign news than you can possibly use in the paper yes we do we get a great deal more than we can accommodate in a day your job is to weed it out I suppose this is the selection center as it were and when I have selected it I pass it across the desk to one or the other of these sub editors it comes back to me and on this chart I design the page that is age 1 and page 2 fine Bob thank you very much what do you feel about media well such a nice white town it's a beautiful town well we're making a film about the mass media so we thought what a good place we probably got the name so maybe you could start by introducing yourself yes I'm Boden senko I'm the main street manager and the executive director of the media business authority and we are in media Delaware County in the southeastern part of Pennsylvania media is called everybody's hometown the motto was developed as a way to promote the community we're a very high promotion conscious community when you walk through media you'll be treated very well and you find that people have taken the idea of being everybody's hometown to heart the local paper the talk of the town the town talk yes I read the town what do you think the difference is between the Wall Street Journal it's fun it's nice to read it's interesting and we bet your neighbors and see what's going on in the school district that we're in business tonight bucks just like the big daily newspapers and just like the big radio stations and we do quite well and rightfully so close we work very hard at it I just want to show you a copy of the paper here the way it is this week it's a plastic wrapped on all four sides weatherproof and hung on everybody's front door and many many times you'll find that this paper runs well over a hundred pages a week this particular edition you have to remember there are five editions this happens to be the central Delaware County Edition which is the Edition that covers media Pennsylvania what you see here now is the advertising and Composition Department say hello guys and what we're doing now as we're putting red dots green dots and yellow dots up on the map wherever there is a store now the red dots are the stores that don't advertise with us at all the green dots are the ones that advertise with us every week and the yellow dots are the ones that would run sporadically if you have any we have computer printouts of every one of these stores and what we do is we take the printouts of all the red dots which are the bad lies and what are our ideas is to turn these red dots into yellow dots and turn the yellow dots into green dots and eventually make them all green dots so 100% of the stores and a hundred percent of the merchants and the service people advertising our newspaper every week that way we won't have any more red dots I guess will always be a few red dots but I have high hopes that there'll be a lot more green ones of red ones when we're finished hi I'm Jim Morgan I'm with the corporate relations department of the New York Times and I'm here to take you on a tour of the New York Times so let's begin so they just taken audio in they're taking audio in here audio no cameras no still open we went over this play thoroughly they don't even take a still camera in there but we're in the composing room this is where the pages are composed this is the type of graphical area news to advertising 60% is this might seem big but it is average in fact below average are 60% might include on some days maybe 20 pages of classified advertising or off to itself where the rest of the newspaper is weighted much heavier news to advertising but the paper in its entirety every day large or small is 60 and 40 news well that completes our tour The New York Times and I hope you found it informative and I hope that you read the New York Times of every day of your life from now on now there are other media to whose basic social wall is quite different that's divergent there's the the real mass media the kinds that are aimed at you know the guys who Joe Sixpack that time the purpose of those media is just to dull people's brains this is an oversimplification but for the 80% or whatever they are the main thing for them is to divert them to get them to watch National Football League and to worry about you know another child with six heads pick up in the you know and the thing that you pick up on the supermarket stands and so on or you know look at astrology or get involved in you know fundamentalist stuff or something real just get them away you know get them away from things that matter and for that it's important to were reduce their capacity to sink the sports section is handled in another special department the sports reporter must be a specialist in his knowledge of sports he gets his story right at the sporting event and often sends it into his paper play-by-play takes a sports that's another crucial example of the indoctrination system in my view for one thing because it you know it offers people something to pay attention to that's of no importance that keeps them from worrying about them keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea about doing something of them and in fact it's striking to see the intelligence that's that's used by ordinary people in sports I mean you listen to radio stations where people call in they have the most exotic information understanding and the press undoubtedly does a lot with this I remember in high school already I was pretty old I suddenly asked myself at one point why do I care if my high school team wins the football game I mean I don't know anybody on the team have nothing to do with me I mean why am i cheering for my team it doesn't mean it make any sense you know and but the point is it does make sense it's a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to Authority and you know group cohesion behind you know leadership elements in fact it's training and irrational jingoism that's also a feature of competitive sports I think if you look closely at these things I think they have typically they do have function and that's why energy is devoted to supporting them creating a basis for them and advertisers are willing to pay for them I'd like to ask you a question essentially about the methodology and studying the propaganda model and how would one go about doing that well there are number of ways to proceed one obvious way is to try to find more or less parrot examples history doesn't offer true controlled experiments but it often comes pretty close so one can find atrocities or abuses of one sort that on the one hand are committed by official enemies on the other hand are committed by friends and allies or by the favorite state itself by the United States in the US case and the question is whether the media except the government framework or whether they use the same agenda the same set of questions the same criteria for dealing with the two cases as any honest outside observer would do if you think America's involvement in the war in Southeast Asia is over think again genocide of people on the face of the earth Peter Jennings reporting from The Killing Fields Thursday I mean the great act of genocide in the modern period is Pol Pot the 1975 - through 1978 that atrocity I think it would be hard to find any example of a comparable outrage and how pouring of the fury and so on and so forth so that's one atrocity well it just happens but in that case history did set up a controlled experiment well it happens that right at that time is another atrocity very similar in character but differing in one respect we were expensable for it not all pot hello I'm Louise penny and this is radio noon if you've been listening to the program fairly regularly over the last few months you'll know East Timor has come into the conversation more than once particularly when we were talking about foreign aid and also the war and a new world order people wondered why if the UN was serious about a new world order no one was doing anything to help East Timor the area was invaded by Indonesia in 1975 there are reports of atrocities against the timur ease people and yet canada and other nations have consistently voted against UN resolutions to end the occupation today we're going to take a closer look at East Timor what's happened to it and why the international community is doing nothing to help one of the people who have been most active is alain pierre a photojournalist from british columbia she's the founder of the east timor alert network and she joins me in studio now hello hi one tragedy compounding a tragedy is that a lot of people don't know much about east timor where is it East Timor is just north of Australia about 420 kilometers and it's right between the Indian and Pacific Oceans just south of these Timor is a deep water sea lane perfect for us submarines to pass through there's also huge oil reserves there one of the unique things about East Timor said it's truly one of the last surviving ancient civilizations in that part of the world the timrie spokes 30 different languages and dialects amongst a group of 700,000 people today less than 5% of the world's people live like the East Timor is basically self-reliant they live really outside of the global economic system small societies like the East to Marie's are much more democratic and much more egalitarian and there's much more sharing of power and well before the Indonesia is invaded most people lived in small rural villages the old people in the village were like the university they passed on tribal wisdom from generation to generation children grew up in a safe stimulating nurturing environment a year after I left his tumour I was a pod when I heard that Indonesia had invaded they didn't want a small independent country setting an example for the region East Timor was a Portuguese colony Indonesia had no claim to it and in fact stated that they had no claim to it during the period of colonization there was a good deal of politicization the different groups developed a civil war broke out in all this 75 [Music] it ended up in a victory for Fretilin which was one of the groupings described as populous Catholic and the character with some typical of leftist rhetoric Indonesia at once started intervening what's the situation whether those ships come in they start arriving scenes to Monday Sikhs have been bought together very close to our border no they're not they're just for fun you know and they're preparing a massive operation something happened here last night that moved us very deeply it was so far outside our experience as Australians that will find it very difficult to convey to you but we'll try sitting on woven mats under a thatched roof in a hut with no walls we were the target of a barrage of questioning from men who know they may die tomorrow and cannot understand why the rest of the world is not care that's all they want for the United Nations to care about what is happening here the emotion here last night was so strong that we all three of us so we should be able to reach out into the wall night here and touch it Greg Shackleton is an unnamed village which we'll remember forever in Portuguese Timor Fortin Kissinger visited Jakarta it was December 5th we know that they had requested that Indonesia delay the invasion until after they left because it would be too embarrassing within hours I think after they left the invasion took place in his number seven what happened on December 7th in 1975 it's just one of the great gray evil deeds of history early in the morning bombs began dropping on Dilli the number of troops that invaded daily that day almost outnumbered the entire population of the town and for two or three weeks there was just they just killed people you can always afford the same low pollution pollution here so Cynthia - Scott was a caring person Ramiz presión foreigner I didn't push him at me he accompanied you greeted great so just more Impala - disposing terrible this comes to must consider internet regression against T mode as the main issue of the discussion when the Indonesians evaded the UN reacted as it always does calling for sanctions and condemnation and so on various watered-down resolutions were passed but the US was very clearly not anything to work [Music] so the timreis were fleeing into the jungles by the thousands by late 1977-78 indonesia set up receiving centers for those timorous who came out of the jungle waving white flags those the Indonesians thought were more educated or who were suspected of belonging to Fred lien or other opposition parties were immediately killed they took women aside and flew them off to Delhi in helicopters for use by the Indonesian soldiers they killed children and babies but in those days their main strategy and their main weapon was starvation by 1978 it was approaching really genocide all levels the church and other sources estimated about 200,000 people killed the US backed it all the way the u.s. provided 90 percent of the arms right after the invasion arms shipments were stepped up when the Indonesians actually began to run out of arms in 1978 the Carter Administration moved in and increased arms sales and other Western countries did the same Canada England Holland and everybody who can make a buck was in there trying to make sure they gets no more tea more read there is no Western concern for issues of aggression atrocities human rights abuses and so on if there's a profit to be made from them nothing could show more it more clearly than this case [Music] it wasn't that nobody ever heard of a steamer crucial to remember that there was plenty of coverage in the New York Times and elsewhere before the invasion the reason was that there was concern at the time over the breakup of the Portuguese Empire and what that would mean it was fear that do believe in dependency Russian influence or whatever after the Indonesians invaded the coverage dropped there was some but it was strictly from the point of view of the State Department and Indonesian generals never a teamers refugee as the atrocities reached their maximum peak in 1978 when it really was becoming genocidal coverage dropped the zero in the United States and Canada the two countries have looked at closely literally drop to zero all this was going on at exactly the same time as the great protests of outrage over Cambodia the level of atrocities was comparable in relative terms it was probably considerably higher and Timor it turns out right in Cambodia and the preceding years 1970 through 1975 there was also a comparable atrocity for which we were responsible the major US attack against Cambodia I started with the bombings of the early 1970s they reached a peak in 1973 and they continued up till 1975 they were directed against inner Cambodia very little is known about because the media wanted it to be secret they knew it was going on they just didn't want to know what was happening the CIA estimates about 600,000 killed during that five-year period which is mostly either u.s. bombing or a u.s. sponsored war so that's pretty significant killing but also the conditions in which it left Cambodia were such that high US officials predicted that about a million people would die in the aftermath just from hunger and moseys because of the wreckage of the country pretty good evidence from US government sources and scholarly sources that the intense bombardment was a significant force maybe a critical force in building up a peasant support for the Khmer Rouge would be four that were pretty marginal element well that's just the wrong story after 1975 atrocities continued and that became the right story because now they're being carried out by the bad guys well it was bad enough in fact current estimates are that well you know they were very I'm in the CIA claim fifty to a hundred thousand people killed and maybe another million or so died one way or another Michael Vickery is the one person who's given a really close detailed analysis his figure is maybe 750,000 deaths above the normal others like Ben Kiernan suggests higher figures but so far without a detailed analysis anyway it was terrible no doubt about it although the atrocities the real atrocities were bad enough they weren't quite good enough for the purposes needed within a few weeks after the Khmer Rouge takeover the New York Times was already accusing in the genocide at that point maybe a couple hundred or maybe a few thousand people have been killed and from then on it was a drumbeat a chorus of genocide [Music] the big bestseller on Cambodia Pol Pot is called murder in a gentle land up until April 17th 1975 was a gentle and peaceful smiling people and after that some horrible the Holocaust took place very quickly a figure of two million killed was hit upon in fact what was claimed was that the Khmer Rouge boast of having murdered two million people facts are very dramatic in the case of atrocities committed by the official enemy extraordinary show of outrage exaggeration no evidence required faked photographs are fine anything goes also vast amount of line I mean an amount of lying that would have made Stalin friend it was fraudulent we know that it was fraudulent by looking at the response to comparable atrocities for which the United States was responsible early seventies Cambodia Timor two very closely paired examples well the media response was quite dramatic [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] back in 1980 I taught a course at Tufts University well Chomsky came around to this class he made a very powerful case that the press underplayed the fact that the Indonesian government annexed this former Portuguese colony in 1975 and that if you compare it for example with Cambodia where there was a courage of things that this was a communist atrocity whereas the other was not a communist atrocity well I got quite interested in this and I went to talk to the then Deputy Foreign editor at The Times and I said you know we've had very poor coverage on this and he said you're absolutely right there are a dozen atrocities around the world that we don't cover this is one for various reasons so I took it up I was working as a reporter and writer for a small alternative radio program in upstate New York and we received audio tapes of interviews with temari's leaders and we were quite surprised that given level of American involvement that there was not more coverage indeed practically any coverage of the large-scale Indonesian killing in the mainstream American media we formed a small group of people to try to monitor the situation and see what we could do over time to alert public opinion to what was actually happening in East Timor there were literally about half a dozen people who simply dedicated themselves with great commitment to getting the story to break through and I reached a couple of people in Congress they got to me for example I was able to testify at the UN and write some things they kept at it kept at it kept at it whatever is known about the subject is mainly comes from essentially comes from their work there's not much else I wrote first an editorial called an unjust war in East Timor it had a map and its head exactly what had happened we then ran a dozen other editorials on it they were read they were entered in the congressional record and several congressmen then took up the cause and then something was done in Congress as a result of it fact that the editorial page in the New York Times on Christmas Eve published that editorial put our work on a very different level and it gave a great deal of legitimacy to something that we were trying to advance for a long time and that was the idea and the reality that a major tragedy was unfolding in East Timor if one takes literally various theories that Professor Chomsky puts out one would feel that there is a tacit conspiracy between the establishment press and the government in Washington to focus on certain things and ignore certain things so that if we broke the rules that we would instantly get a reaction a sharp reaction from the overlords in Washington would say hey what are you doing speaking up on East Timor we're trying to keep that clean here a thing what we did here this was quite interesting is that there was a guy named Arnold Cohn and he became a one-person Lobby I appreciate the nice things that call Meyer said about me in his interview but I object to the notion that a one-man Lobby was formed or anything like that I think that if there weren't a large network composed of the American Catholic Bishops Conference composed of other church group composed of human rights groups composed of simply concerned citizens and others and a network of concern within the news media I think that would have been impossible to do anything at all at any time and it certainly would have been impossible to sustain things for as long as they've been sustained professor Chomsky and a lot of people who engage in this kind of press analysis have one thing in common most of them have never worked for a newspaper many of them know very little about how newspapers work when Chomsky came around he had with him a file of all the coverage in New York Times The Washington Post and other papers of East Timor and he would go to the meticulous degree that if for example the London Times had a piece on East Timor and then it appeared in the New York Times that if a paragraph was cut out he compared and he said look this key paragraph right near the end which is really what tells the whole story was left out of the New York Times version of the London Times thing there was a story in the London Times which is pretty accurate the New York Times revised it radically and as we've retired they revised it and give it totally different cast [Music] it was then picked up by Newsweek giving it the New York Times cast it ended up being a whitewash whereas the original was an atrocity story so I said to to to Chomsky at the time I said well it may be that you're misinterpreting ignorance haste deadlines pressure etc for some kind of determined effort to suppress an element of the story he said well if it happened once or twice or three times I might agree with you but if it happens at a dozen times mr. Meyer I think there's something else at work and it's not a matter of happening one time two times five times a hundred times it happened all the time I said professor Chomsky having been in this business it happens at testing times that these are very imperfect institutions when they did give coverage it was from the point of view of it was it was a whitewash of the United States now you know that's not an error that's systematic consistent behavior in this case without even any exception this is a much more subtle process then then you get in the in the kind of the sledgehammer rhetoric of the people that make a a to B equation between what the government does what people think and what newspapers say that that sometimes what The Times does can make an enormous difference at other times it has no influence whatsoever so when one of the greatest tragedies of our age is still happening in East Timor the Indonesians have killed up to 1/3 of the population they're in concentration camps they conduct large-scale military campaigns against the people who are resisting campaigns with names like operation eradicate Operation Clean Sweep temari's women are subjected to a forced birth control program in addition they're bringing in a constant stream of Indonesian settlers to take over the land whenever people are brave enough to take to the streets and demonstrations or show the least sign of resistance they just Massacre them it's sort of like Indonesia if we allow them to continue to stay in East Timor the international community they were simply digests East Timor and turned it into the attorney trying to turn it into cash crop I mean this is way beyond just demonstrating the subservience of immediate of power I mean they are actual there they have real complicity in genocide in this case the reason that the atrocities can go on is because nobody knows about them if anyone knew about them there'd be protests and pressure to it and stop them so therefore by suppressing the facts the media are making a major contribution to some with some of the probably the worst act of genocide since the Holocaust you say that what the media do is to ignore certain kinds of atrocities that are committed by us and our friends and to play off enormously atrocities that are committed by them and and our enemies and U+ that there's a test of integrity and moral honesty which is to have a kind of equality of treatment of corpses I mean that every dead person should be in principle equals F with every other dead what I say is that we should be responsible for our own actions primarily because your method is not only to ignore a court the corpse is created by them but also to ignore the corpses that are created by neither side but which are irrelevant here ideological but let me give you an example that that one of you are one of your own causes that you take very seriously is the cause of the Palestinians and and a Palestinian corpse where is weighs very heavily on your conscience and yet a Kurdish corpse does not and involved in Kurdish support groups for years a that's actually true let me just ask the curve ask the people who are involved in I mean you know they come to me I sign their petitions and so on and so forth and in fact if you look at the stuff that the things we've written it takes a listen take a look I mean I'm not Amnesty International I can't do everything I'm a single universe person but if you read say take take a look say at the book that Edward Herman and I wrote on this topic in it we discuss three kinds of atrocities what we called benign blood baths which nobody cares about constructive blood baths which are the ones we like and the Farias blood baths which are the ones that the bad guys do the principle that I think we ought to follow is not the one that you stated you know it's a very simple ethical point you're responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions you're not responsible for the predictable consequences of somebody else's actions the most important thing for me and for you is to think about the consequences of your actions what can you effect these are the things to keep in mind these are not just academic exercises we're not analyzing the media on Mars or in the 18th century or something like that we're dealing with real human beings who are suffering and dying and being tortured and starving because of policies that we are involved in we as citizens of democratic societies are directly involved in and are responsible for and what the media are doing is ensuring that we do not act on our responsibilities and that the interests of power are served not the needs of the suffering people and not even the needs of the American people who would be horrified if they realize the blood that's dripping from their hands because of the way they're allowing themselves to be deluded and manipulated by the system [Music] what about the third world well despite everything and it's pretty ugly and awful these struggles are not over the struggle for freedom and independence never is completely over their courage in fact is really remarkable amazing I've personally had the privilege and it is a privilege of witnessing it a few times in villages in Southeast Asia and Central America and recently in the occupied West Bank and it is astonishing to see [Music] and it's always amazing which to me it's amazing I can't understand it it's also very moving and very inspiring in fact it's kind of all inspiring now they rely very crucially on a very slim margin for survival that's provided by dissidents and turbulence within the imperial societies and how large that margin is is for us to determine [Music] today's on-the-spot assignment we're going to see just what's behind the making of movies the director and the crew are shooting a documentary film let's take a closer look Bob this word documentary what would you say is the difference between a documentary film and a feature movie well they're good many differences one would be length generally speaking documentaries a good deal shorter than feature films also documentaries have something to say in the way of a message they are informational films also another term that used interchangeably with documentary is the word actuality actuality film Bob is this the thing you hold up in front of the camera before each scene this is a clapper board yes this identifies on the visual camera the scene number in the take number and also as you heard on the soundtrack the editor back at the studio puts the two pieces of film together matches where they lips at the clapper come together and there you are anything before the break you were mentioning the media putting forth the information that they currently want I'm not sure if I understand how it does the power leap do this and why don't why do we stand for why does it work so well I think here we have it I mean they're really two questions here one is this picture of the media true and there you have to look at the evidence I mean I've given one example and that shouldn't convince anybody one has to look at a lot of evidence to see whether this is true I think anyone who investigates it will find out that the evidence to support it is simply overwhelming in fact it's probably one of the best supporting conclusions in the social sciences but the other question is how does it work I'm the media guy what would you like I got you an international language get the one now where they've been my baby back before this Narsee huncles blood ton of blood [Music] well this evenings program is scheduled as a debate which puzzled me all the way through there are some problems one problem is that no proposition has been set forth as I understand debate people are supposed to advocate something and oppose something rather more sensibly a topic has been proposed for discussion the topic is manufacturers consent it's somewhat unusual for a number of the government to debate with professor in public it hasn't happened in Holland before I don't think it's often often happens elsewhere [Music] [Applause] mr. bogus time the floor is yours now we all know that the theory can never be established merely by examples it can only be established by some by showing some internal inherent logic professor Chomsky has not done so professor Chomsky he's quite right when he says you can't just pick examples you have to do them in a rational way that's why we compared examples the truth is that things are not as simple as professor Chomsky maintains another of professor Chomsky's case studies concerns the treatments that cambodia has received in a Western press here he goes badly off the rails we didn't discuss Cambodia we compared Cambodia with East Timor to very closely paired examples and we gave approximately 300 pages of detail covering this in political economy of human rights including a reference to every article we could discover about Cambodia many Western intellectuals do not like to face the facts and balk at the conclusions that any untutored person would draw many people are very irritated by the fact that we exposed the extraordinary deceit over Cambodia and paired it with the simultaneous suppression of the us-supported ongoing atrocities and teamwork that people don't like that if one thing we were challenging the right to lie in defense of the state for another thing we were exposing the actually apologetics and support for actual ongoing atrocities that doesn't make it popular where did he learn about the atrocities in East Timor or in Central America if not in the same Free Press which he Saudi Rides you can find out where I learned about them by looking at my footnotes I learned about them from Human Rights reports from church reports from refugee studies and extensively from the Australian press there was nothing from the American press because it was silence German this is an attempt at intellectual intimidation these are the ways of the bullying professor Chomsky uses the oldest debating trick on record he erect a man of straw and proceeds to hack away at him professor Chomsky calls this the manufacture of consents I call it the creation of consensus in Holland we call a draft flock which means foundation professor Chomsky things it is deceitful but it is not in a representative democracy it means winning people for one's point of view but I do not think that professor Chomsky believes in representative democracy I think he believes in direct democracy with Rosa Luxemburg he longs for the creative spontaneous self-correcting force of mass action that is the vision of the anarchists it is also a boy's dream those who believe in democracy and freedom have a serious task ahead of them what they should be doing in my view is dedicating their efforts to helping the despised common people to struggle for their rights and to realize the democratic goals that constantly surface throughout history they should be serving not power and privilege but rather their victims freedom and democracy are by now not merely values to be treasured there are quite possibly the prerequisite to survival it's a conspiracy theory pure and simple it's not borne out by the facts mr. Chairman I have to get a system if you'll excuse me I'm leaving [Applause] one thing is sure the consent has not been manufactured tonight there is nothing more remote from what I'm discussing or what we have been discussing than a conspiracy theory if I give an analysis of say the economic system and I point out that General Motors tries to maximize the profit and market share that's not a conspiracy theory that's an institutional analysis nothing to do with conspiracies and that's precisely the sense in which we're talking about the media the phrase conspiracy theory is one of those that's constantly brought up too and I think its effect simply is to discourage institutional analysis do you think there's a connection somehow about what the government wants us to know and what the media tell us it's not communism but I think to a certain point it is sensitize you don't always tell how it gets down they don't always tell the truth to make getting something I think by and large it's a well done you get both sides of the stories we get the liberal and which side and the conservative side so to speak but I don't think you get a very balanced picture because they only have 20 seconds 30 seconds for a news item whatever they're gonna pick out a highlight and every network is gonna cover the same highlight and that's all you're gonna say you get that which they want you to hear goodbye is it possible to get a little brighter see somebody out there yeah for the last hour and 41 minutes you've been whining about how the elite and how the government have been using thought control to keep radicals like yourself out of the public limelight now you're here I don't see any CIA men waiting to drag you off you were in the paper they that's where everyone here heard you were coming from in the paper and I'm sure they're gonna publish your comments in the paper now a lot of countries you would have been shot for what you have done today so what do you whine about this is we are allowing you to speak and I don't see any thought control first of all I haven't been saying I have said one word about my keep my being kept out of the limelight the way it works here is quite different I don't think you heard what I was saying but the way it works here is that there is a system of shaping control and so on which gives a certain perception of the world I gave one example I'll give you sources where you can find thousands of others that and it has nothing to do with me it has to do with marginalizing the public and ensuring that they don't get in the way of elites who are supposed to run things without interference in a review of the Chomsky meter it was written that as he's been forced to the margins he's become strident and rigid do you feel this categorization of your later writings is accurate and that you've been a victim of this sort of process you've been describing well the business being forced to the other people will have to judge about the stridency I won't talk about I don't believe it but anyway that's for other people to judge however the matter of being forced to the margins as a matter of fact and the fact is the opposite of what is claimed the fact is it's much easier to gain access to even the major media now than it was 20 years ago you've dealt in such unpopular truths and have been such a lonely figure as a consequence of that do you ever regret either that you took the stand you took it I have written the things you have written or that they we had listened to you earlier I don't I mean there are particular things which I would do differently because do you think about things you feeling differently but in general I would say I do not regret it I mean I've been declawed reversal No nuisance because this mass medium pays little attention to the views of dissenters not just Noam Chomsky but but but most dissenters do not get much of a hearing in this meeting no in fact that's again completely understandable they wouldn't be performing their societal function if they allowed favored truths to be challenged now notice that that's not true when I cross the border anywhere so that I've easy access to the median just about every other country in the world there's a number of reasons for that and one reason is I'm primarily talking about the United States and it's much less threatening your view there is that the military militarization of the American economy essentially has come about because there are not other means of controlling their variable in a Democratic Society I mean it may be paradoxical but the freer the society is the words necessary to resort to devices like induced fears okay I'll go along with that arguably heat is the most important intellectual delight today and if my program can give him 500,000 people listening or 3/4 million people listening I'll be delighted wartime planners understood that actual war aims should not be revealed they are part of the reason why the media in Canada and in Belgium and so on are more open is that it just doesn't matter that much what people think it matters very much with the politically articulate sectors of the population those narrow minorities think and do in the United States because of its overwhelming dominance on the world scene but of course that's also a reason for wanting to work here we might call the fifth freedom the freedom to rob exploit and dominate and to curb mischief by any feasible means conclude not include the United States is ideologically narrower in general than other countries furthermore the structure of the American media is such as to pretty much eliminate critical discussion our guests are as far apart on the Contra question as American intellectuals can be now if we had the slightest concern with democracy which we do not in our foreign affairs and never have we would turn to countries where we have influence like El Salvador now in El Salvador they don't call the archbishop bad names what they do is murder him they do not repent they do not censor the press they wipe the press out they sent the army and to blow up the church radio station the editor of the independent newspaper was found in a ditch mutilated and cut the pieces with machete may I continue Matic liar did these things happen or didn't they these things did not happen in the context in which you said generally you are a phony mister and it's time that have people who out read you great it's clear that's clear why you want to divert me from the discussion then I get tired of rubbish but let's get you with except we can't I'm afraid we're out of time yet we thank you both John Silver and Noam Chomsky okay [Music] last time you were here you spoke about how when you go overseas you are given access to the mass media but here that doesn't seem to be the case has that changed at all have you ever been invited to appear on Nightline or Brinkley yes I have a couple times been invited to speak on Nightline I couldn't do it I had another talking something or other and to tell you the honest truth I don't really care very much fair the media monitoring group published a very interesting study of Nightline it shows their conception of a spectrum of opinion is ridiculously narrow at least by European at world standards let me tell you a personal experience I happened to be in Madison Wisconsin on a listener-supported radio station community radio station a very good one I was having interview with news director I've been on that program dozens of times usually by telephone and he's very good he gets to all sorts of people and he started the interview by playing for me a tape of an interview that he had just had and had broadcast with the guy who's some mucky muck and Nightline I think his name is Jeff Greenfield or some such name said name [Music] just in the selection of guests to analyze things why is Noam Chomsky never on Nightline I couldn't begin to tell you it's one of the leading intellectuals in the entire world I have no idea I mean I can make some guesses he may be one of the leading intellectuals who can't talk on television you know that's a standard that's very important to us if you got a twenty two minutes show and a guy takes five minutes to warm up now I don't know whether Chomsky doesn't know he's out one of the reasons why Nightline has the usual suspects is one of the things you have to do in your book a show is know that the person can make the point within the framework of television and if people don't like that they should understand it is about as sensible to book somebody who will take eight minutes to give an answer as it is to book somebody who doesn't speak English but in the normal given flow that's another culture bad thing we gotta have anyone speaking people we also need concision so Greenfield or whatever his name is hit the nail on the head the US media are alone in that that it is you must meet the condition of concision you got to say things between two commercials or in 600 words and that's a very important fact because of the beauty of concision you know saying a couple of sentences between two commercials the beauty of that is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts I was reading Chomsky 20 years ago I think his notion he doesn't he have a give me cold engine earring consent or the manufacturing consent I mean some of that stuff to me looks like it's from Neptune this is the first time the Neptune system has been seen clearly by human eyes these pictures taken only hours ago by Voyager two are its latest contribution you know he's firmly entitled said if I I'm seeing it through a prism - but my view that of his notions about the limits of debate in this country is absolutely wacko whatever it is two minutes and I say Qaddafi is a terrorist Khomeini as a murderer you know etc etc the Russians you know I don't need any evidence everybody just nods on the other hand suppose you say something that just isn't regurgitating conventional piety suppose you say something that's the least bit unexpected or controversial suppose you say I mean the biggest international terror operations that are known are the ones that have run out of Washington or suppose you say what happened in the 1980s is the US government was driven underground suppose I say the United States is invading South Vietnam as it was the best political leaders are the ones who are lazy and corrupt if the nuremberg laws were applied than every post-war American president would have been hanged the Bible is one of probably the most genocide 'el book and Eric total canon education is a system of imposed ignorance no more morality in world affairs fundamentally than there wasn't a ton of Genghis Khan they're just different you know they're just different factors to be concerned with no chop see thank you well you know people will reasonable quite reasonably expect to know what you mean why did you say that I never heard that before if you said that you better have a reason you know better have some evidence and in fact you better have a lot of evidence because that's pretty startling common you can't give evidence if you're stuck with concision you know that's the genius of these of this structural constraint and in my view if people like say Nightline and Neil Lehrer and so on were smarter if they were better propagandists they would let dissidents on let them on more in fact the reason is that they would sound like they're from Neptune then comes our special conversation on the Middle East crisis tonight's is with the activist writer and professor Noam Chomsky again there is has been an offer on the table which we rejected an Iraqi offer last April okay eliminate their chemical and other unconventional Arsenal's if Israel were to simultaneously do the same have to inject their but I think that should be pursued as well sorry to interrupt you I have to end it there that's the end of our time professor Chomsky thank you very much for joining us AT&T has supported the macneil/lehrer Newshour since 1983 because quality information and quality communications is our idea of a good connection AT&T the right choice that's all we can do everything else right the idea of this one is that's just a shot where I'm seen talking to you and you're seeing listening to me I'll ask you though if you don't speak to me or move your lips so that I can be seen to be asking you a question the reason for the shot simply this user okay just don't talk to me and I'll keep yelling that's the thing the reason for the shell don't explain it through so you find that's the easiest way to do it the reason for this shot is I need a shot where you're sitting and seen listening to me while I'm asking you a question we can use the shot to introduce you explain who you are we fit into the piece I'm doing but if you don't speak to me I can also use good okay thanks a good time right if there is a narrow range of opinion in the United States and it is harder to express a variety of different opinions why do you live in the u.s. well first of all it's my country and secondly it's in many ways as I said before it's the freest country in the world I'm not think there's more possibilities for change here than in any other country I know but again comparatively speaking it's the country where the state is probably most restricted but isn't that what you should be looking at comparatively rose that's absolute terms but you don't you beat that impression country well maybe I don't give the impression I certainly say it often enough what I've said over and over again and I've been saying it all tonight I've written it a million times is that the United States at a very free society it's also a very rich Society of course the United States is a scandal you of its wealth I mean given the natural advantages that the United States has in terms of resources and lack of enemies and so on the United States should have a level of Health and Welfare and so on that's you know Porter Wagner to be on anybody else in the world we don't the United States is last among 20 industrialized societies and infant mortality that's a scandal of American capitalism and it ends up being a very free society which does a lot of rotten things in the world okay there's no contradiction there I mean you know Greece was a free society by the standards of that of Athens you know it's also a vicious Society from the planet moves Imperial behavior there's virtually no correlation between the int maybe none between the internal freedom of a society and its external behavior you you you start your line of discussion at a moment that is terribly useful for you at the beginning of the world is that the communist communist imperialist by the use of terrorism by the use of deprivation of freedom have contributed to the continuing bloodshed and the sad thing about it is not only the bloodshed with the fact that this seemed to dis possess you of the power of rational I say something I think that's about five percent true and then about or maybe ten percent true it certainly is why do you give that may I complete a sentence it's it's perfectly true that there were areas of the world in particular Eastern Europe where us where Stalinist imperialism very brutally took control and still maintains control but there are also very vast areas of the world where we were doing the same thing and there's quite an interplay in the Cold War you see the what you just described is a I believe in mythology about the Cold War which might have been tenable ten years ago but which is quite inconsistent with contemporary scholars go check ask asked Aguada Mahlon ask a Dominican Republic ask you know ask a person from South Vietnam you know ask you obviously if you can't distinguish between the nature of our venture in Guatemala to the Soviet Union's in Prague watch them we have real plans now what about making the media more responsive and democratic well they're very narrow limits for that it's kind of like asking how do we make corporations more democratic well the only way to do that is get rid of them you know I mean if you have concentrated power you can I mean I don't want to say you can do nothing like you can you know like the church can show up at the stockholders meeting and start screaming about not investing in South Africa and sometimes that has marginal effects I don't wanna say there's no effect but you can't really affect the structure of power because of the I mean to do that would be a social revolution and unless you're ready for a social revolution that is power is going to be somewhere else the media are going to have their present structure and they're gonna represent their present interests now that's not to say that one shouldn't try to do things I mean it makes sense to try to push the limits of a system oh it takes one or two people that think they have integrity as journalists to getting some good press see that's important then that goes back to somebody came up before I mean there's a lot you know people are country you know things are country are complex it's not monolithic I mean the mass media themselves are complicated institutions with internal contradictions so on the one hand there's the commitment to indoctrination and control but on the other hand there's the sense of professional integrity she works alone as her own boss writing newspaper columns and producing radio commentaries for a hodgepodge of small clients across the country this so-called leather lung Texan has been firing questions at our chief executives for almost 40 years this is a question which you very properly bring to the attention of the nation it's not that we haven't been holding press conferences I was just waiting for Sarah to come back say I want to call your attention a real problem we've got in this country today those unique and often terrifying McLendon questions reflect her desire to dig out information with enough know-how and persistence she usually gets her man what would you do if you in a situation where you were trying to be an honest reporter and you were worried sick about your country and you saw how sick it was and you facing this week White House in the week Congress as a reporter what would you do I think there are a lot of reporters who do a very good job in fact I have a lot of friends in the press who I think do a terrific job what you well you've got you have the first person I mean first way you have to understand what the system is and smart reporters do understand what it is you have to understand what the pressures are what the commitments are what the barriers are and what the openings are like right after the iran-contra hearings a lot of good reporters understood well things will be a little more open for a couple of months they get rammed through stories that they knew they couldn't even talk about before we have to water and and the same after Watergate and then you know it closes up again and so on most people I imagine simply internalize the values that's the easiest way and the most successful you just internalize the values and then you regard yourself in a way correctly as acting perfectly freely tell us a little bit about self-censorship that that that inertial guidance systems always going on isn't it is there any formal censorship there well there's no self-censorship farid if somebody tells me something I'm going to pass it on unless there's a particular and compelling reason not to I can't deny that I wouldn't like to have access to the Oval Office and all the same maps and charts and graphs that the president's looking at but that's not possible it's not realistic and it's probably not even desirable girl sit down there please welcome to Holland it I'll introduce you first in a few lines professor Chomsky Noam Chomsky its new gesture and it's all fear the most controversial intellectual from America it's over here and platitude of myself what you a multitude Chomsky has been called the Einstein of modern linguistics the New York Times has said he's arguably the most important intellectual alive today but his presence here has sparked a protest poisoned the world and in Vietnam that's no violation of human rights and knows crime in Cambodia is wrong Chomsky is using his a professor he using that to poison the world every day we come here to protest that I don't mind the denunciations frankly I mind the lies well I mean intellectuals are very good at lying they're professionals at it you know vilification is a wonderful technique there's no way of responding though if somebody calls you a you know an anti-semite what can you say I'm not an anti-semite are you somebody says you're a racist you're a Nazi or something this you always lose I mean the person throws mud always wins because there's no way of responding to such charges professor Chomsky seems to believe that the people he criticizes fall into one of two classes liars or dupes consider what happens when I discuss the case of Oh bear fully song let me recall the facts let's not go into details please because they also happen to be important yes but I have only one question for his focus do the facts matter or don't they matter of course is let me tell you what the facts are first off says that the that the massacre of the Jews in the Holocaust is a historic lie now this is an important one has a lot to do with the topic your views are extremely controversial and perhaps one of the one of the things that has been most controversial and you've been most strongly criticized for it was your defensive a a French intellectual who was suspended from his university post for a contending that there were no Nazi death camps in World War two my name is Robert Faurisson I am 60 I am university professor in lyon france behind me you may see the courthouse of paris the Palais de justice in this place I was convicted many times at the beginning of the 80s I was charged by nine associations mostly Jewish Association for inciting hatred racial hatred for racial defamation for damage by falsifying a story professor Chomsky and a number of other intellectual signed a petition in which for a song is called a respected professor of literature who merely tried to make his findings public perhaps we can start with just the story of Robert for a saw and your involvement more than 500 people's sign maybe 600 mostly université other 499 of them how come we only hear about Chomsky signature well I think it's because Chomsky is in himself a kind of political power I signed the petition calling on the tribunal to defend his civil rights at that point the French press which apparently has no conception of freedom of speech concluded that since I had called for his civil rights I was therefore defending his theses for Isolde then published a book in which he tried to prove that the nause gas chambers never existed what we deny is that there was an extermination program and an extermination actually especially in gas chambers or gas vents the book contains a precious written by professor Chomsky in which he calls for his own a relatively apolitical sort of liberal a communist is a man a Jew is a man energy is a man I am a man are you a Nazi I am NOT energy how would you describe yourself politically nothing that's not the pressive preface that I wrote because I never wrote a preface and you know that I never he's referring to a statement of mine on civil liberties which was added to a book in which excuse me yes you can continue with the facts for hours but but but there are perfect that okay let's get gonna be so-called preface I was then asked by the person who organized the petition there to write a statement on freedom of speech they have just banal comments about freedom of speech pointing out the difference between defending a person's right to express his views and defending the views expressed so I did that I wrote a rather banal statement called some elementary remarks on freedom of expression and I told him do what you like with it so yeah produced a book which all the arguments of Khorasan were to be put in front of the court and we thought wise to use the taste of norm Chomsky as a kind of warning a foreword to say that it was a matter of freedom of expression the freedom of thought freedom of research why did you try at the last moment to get it back from that's the one thing I'm sorry about but there's one real that's no it's not a thing it's noisy much as I tried to read across it in with that you said it was wrong of no I didn't see in fact take a look at what I wrote a letter which we can publicize in which I said look things have reached a point where the French intellectual community simply is incapable of understanding the issues but at this point it's just going to confuse matters even more if my comments on freedom of speech happen to be attached to this book which I don't didn't know existed so just to clarify things better separate them now in retrospect I think I probably should have done that well I should have just said fine then let it appear because it ought to appear but that's apart from that I regard this is not only trivial but as compared with other positions I've taken on freedom of speech invisible I do not think that the state ought to have the right to determine historical truth and to punish people ZD I'm not willing to give the state that right even if they happen to hold nine gas chambers every person's day but I'm saying if you believe in freedom speech you believe in freedom speech for Guzzi all right I mean gurbles was in favor of freedom speech for busy like right so is Stalin if you're in favor of freedom speech that means you're in favor of freedom speech precisely for views you despise otherwise you're not in favor of freedom speech it's two positions we can have on freedom of speech now you can decide which position you want with regard to my defense of the utterly offensive the people who express utterly offensive views I haven't the slightest doubt that every commissar says you're defending that person's views no I'm not I'm defending his right to express them the difference is crucial and the difference has been understood outside of fascist circles since the 18th century reality as a scientist but I'm not saying I defend the views I look if somebody publishes a scientific article which I disagree with I do not say the state ought to put him in jail suppose this guy is taken to Porky and charged with falsification then I'm gonna defend in fact the only support that I gave him is to say he has a right of freedom of speech Puri that is no doubt in my mind that the example that I gave about the story is they're all okay they did not exist he's very very typical how much is the American press believes the glory saw has anything to say or any press how much of the press in France seriously follow what percentage would you say I'll tell you this is it higher than zero have you ever seen anything in any newspaper or any journal saying that this man has anything other I'll try to answer I try to answer I think that I just followed a simple question I followed the case five or six years ago and I happened to say that the North Shore ski was in for strong criticism even from some of his supporters for doing something which could be interpreted only in terms of a campaign against Israel going back years I am absolutely certain that I've taken far more extreme positions on people who deny the Holocaust that you have for example you go back to my earliest articles and you will find that I say that even to enter into the arena of debate on the question of whether the Nazis carry out such atrocities is all ready to lose one's humanity so I don't think you discuss the issue if you want to know my opinion but if anybody wants to refute for a sauna there's certainly no difficulty in doing so [Music] and I'm not interested in a freedom of speech and all that I have to win and that's the question and I shall win [Music] I'm just an ordinary mum who's just thinks in terms of I don't want to someday be holding my grandchildren and watching something horrible happen and feel like I didn't do anything and I mean it's obvious what what you're doing and my question is on a practical level where do you see the most practical place to put your energy I mean tonight I feel an overwhelming I feel like it's too big it's too much to even make a dent in the way things change is because lots of people are working all the time and you know they're working in their communities in their workplace or wherever they happen to be and they're building up the basis for popular movements which are going to make changes that's the way everything has ever happened in history you know whether it was the end of slavery or whether it was the Democratic revolutions or anything you want you name it that's the way it worked you get a very false picture of this from the history books in the history books there's a couple of leaders you know George Washington or Martin Luther King or whatever and I don't want to say that those people are unimportant like Martin Luther King was certainly important but he was not the civil rights movement Martin Luther King can appear in the history books cost lots of people whose names you will never know and his names are all forgotten than who may have been killed and so on we're working down in the south when you have active activists and people concerned and people devoting themselves and dedicating themselves to social change or issues or whatever then people like me can appear and we can appear to be prominent but that's not really cuz somebody else is doing the work my work whether it's giving hundreds of talks a year or spending 20 hours a week writing letters or writing books is not directed to intellectuals and politicians it's directed to what are called ordinary people yeah and what I expect from them in fact exactly what they are that they should try to understand the world and act in accordance with their decent impulses and that they should try to improve the world and many people are willing to do that but they have to understand that in fact as far as I can see in these things well I feel that I'm simply helping people develop the courses of intellectual self-defense what did you mean by that such a course I don't mean go to school because you're not gonna get it there it means you have to develop an independent mind and work on it now that's extremely hard to do alone know the beauty of their system is it isolates everybody each person is sitting along the front of the - that's very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances you can't fight the world alone some people canvass prayer the way to do it is through organization so courses of intellectual self defence will have to be in the context of political and other organization and it makes sense I think to look at what the institutions are trying to do and to take that almost as a key what they're trying to do is what we're trying to combat if they're trying to keep people isolated and separate and you know and so on well we're trying to do the opposite we're trying to bring them together so in your local community you want to have sources of alternative action people with parallel concerns maybe differently focused but at the core sort of similar values and a similar interest in helping people or not defend themselves against external power and taking control of their lives and you know reaching out your hand the people who need it that's a common array of concerns you can learn about your own values and you can figure out how to defend yourself and so on in conjunction with others are there one or two publications that I as an average person a biologist can read to bypass this filter of our part of our press now if you ask what media can I turn to first of all I wouldn't tell you because I don't think there's an answer the right answers are what you decide are the right answers maybe everything I'm telling is wrong but that's nothing for you to figure out when I can tell you what I think happens to be more or less right but there isn't any reason why you should pay any attention to it what impact do you feel alternative media is currently having or could potentially have I'm actually a little more interested in its potential and just to define my terms by alternative media I'm referring to media that are or could be citizen controlled as opposed to state or corporate control you know that's what's kept people together to the extent that people are able to do something constructive it's because they have some way of interacting I'm I've always felt it would be a very positive thing and it should be pushed as far as it can go I think it's gonna have a very hard time there's just such a concentration of resources and power that alternative media while extremely important are I have quite a battle it's true there are things which are small successes but it's because people have just been willing to put an incredible effort I'd say take Z Magazine I mean that's a national magazine which literally has a staff of two and no resources tell us a little bit Z magazine what it is and what makes it different go ahead we just wanted to do a magazine that would address all the sides of political life economics race gender Authority political relations then we wanted to do it in a way that would incorporate an attention to how to not only understand what's going on but how to make things better what to aim toward and to provide at the same time humor culture a kind of a magazine that people could relate to and could get a lot out of and could participate in and what we wanted to do which we didn't think was provided by the existing magazines was to give it a real activist slant so that it could be very useful to the variety of movements in the country and we just felt there wasn't a magazine that reflected that that inspired people and that gave people sort of a strategy and perhaps even a vision of how things could be better South End press has sort of made it how that is they're surviving it's a small collective again with no resources and they put out a lot of books including quite a lot of good books but for a South End book to get reviewed it's almost impossible editorially and business-wise we make decisions based on politics that no corporate publisher can really advocate because of their ties to corporate America we can solicit manuscripts based on what we feel is the relevance for the movement and we can make our business decisions based on whether we feel people can afford our books whether we feel that a book might not make that much money but it needs to be out there and maybe there is a thousand people who would buy it and those are criteria that we feel are very precious in this day of corporate mergers likewise our structure about sharing work and continuing our training process as long as we're at the press there are losses there in terms of productivity but in terms of empowerment all of us are then able to say my perspective is different from yours then all of our intelligence gets used in making those decisions and not just whoever happens to have done it the longest who ever happens to have graduated from the best schools in order to be the best editor making all the decisions and only using his or her intelligence what's the suppori radio in the United States has undergone a remarkable growth in the last decade it's perhaps the fastest growing alternative media there are many reasons for this first and foremost is that its enormous ly economical and it reaches communities that have not been served by community radio before and in bold in particular we see with someone like Noam Chomsky who's been there I believe three times in the last six years he has a tremendous audience and kju is partly responsible for that because we play his tapes on a regular basis we play his lectures and his interviews so when he does come to Boulder and people hear what he has to say they're able to tune in it's not something exotic or esoteric that he's talking about it's material that they're very familiar with and he's noted this incidentally if there's a listener-supported radio station you're that means that people can get daily every day a different way of looking at the world not just what the corporate media want you to see but a different picture a different understanding not only can you hear it but you can participate in it you can add your own thoughts you know and you can learn something and so on well that's the way people become human you know that's the way you become human participants in a in a social and political system what is non corporate news and why is it necessary I didn't want to just show another film at a library or something I wanted to make my own statement I thought it'd be more fun to do and perhaps I get other people involved in a project besides showing a film we couldn't we could make a film or video the local cable stations hooked up to three communities Lin Swampscott and Salem so that's 30,000 people it or 30,000 homes I'm not sure but I'm sure a lot of people see it it'll be a kind of people who don't go out to to see a film it'll go right into their houses so if they're flipping through the channels they might be able to get a completely new idea of the world so there's kind of networks of cooperation development which I mean like here for example is a collection of stuff from a friend of mine on Los Angeles who does careful monitoring of the whole press in Los Angeles and a lot of the British press which you read and select us selection so I don't have to read them you know the movie reviews in the local gossip and all this kind of stuff but I get the occasional nugget that sneaks through and that you find if you're carefully and intelligently and critically reviewing a wide range of Criswell their fair number of people who do this and we exchange information we wrote this a two-volume work which we saw one another for a couple weeks gentleman that we were getting started but then we wrote two volumes essentially without seeing one another just by phone by by now and exchanging manuscripts and but this takes a lot of a lot of communication right now Chomsky file is a couple of feet thick the end result is that you do have access to resources in a way which I doubt that any National Intelligence Agency can duplicate a little own scholarship so there are ways of compensating for the absence of resources people can do things what for example I found out about the arms float I ran by reading transcripts of the BBC and by reading an interview somewhere with an Israeli ambassador in one city and reading something else in the Israeli press No okay the information is there but it's there to fanatic you know somebody who wants to spend a substantial part of their time and energy exploring it and comparing today's lies with yesterday's leaks and so on that's a research engine and it's you know it just simply does make any sense to ask the general population to dedicate themselves to this task on every issue I'm not given the false modesty there are things that I can do and know that I can do them reasonably well including analysis and study research I mean I know how to do that sort of thing and I think I have a reasonable understanding of the way the world works as much as in when you can't go and that turns out to be a very useful resource there were people who were who are doing active organizing trying to engage themselves in a way which will make it a little bit of a better world and if you can help in those things or participate in them well that's you know that's rewarding I wonder if you can envision a time when people like myself again in naive people of this world can again take pride in the United States and is that even a healthy just wish now because it may be this hunger for pride in our country that makes us more easily manipulated by the powers that you talk about I think you first of all have to ask what you mean by your country now if you mean by the country the government I don't think you can be proud of it and I don't think you could ever be proud of it or it couldn't be proud of any government it's not our go and you shouldn't be States or violent institutions the the government of any country including ours represents some sort of domestic power structure and it's usually violent the states are violent to the extent that they're powerful that's roughly accurate you look at American history it's nothing to write home about you know why are we here we're here because say some 10 million Native Americans were wiped out that's not very pretty until the 1960s it was still cowboys and Indians in the 1970s for the first time really it became possible even for scholarship to try to deal with the facts as they were for example to deal with the fact that the Native American population was far higher and then had been claimed millions higher maybe as many as 10 million higher than had been claimed and that they had an advanced civilization and that there was something akin to genocide that took place now we went through 200 years of our history without facing that fact one of the effects of the 1960's as it's possible to at least begin that comes in to think about the fact well that's an advance do you think that this activism 20 years ago has made it a difference in how our society operates now it has not changed the institutions and the way they function but it has led to very significant cultural changes I remember these movements of the sixties expanded in the 70s and expanded further in the 80s and they reached into other parts of the society and different issues these a lot of things that seemed outrageous in the 60s are taken for granted today so for example take the feminist movement for example which barely began to exist in the 60s now it's part of general consciousness and awareness the ecological movements began in the 70s the solidarity mood world solidarity movements were very limited in the 60s it was really Vietnam and in the 60s also it was a student movement as you say no it's not no it's mainstream America if there is more dissidents now than you can remember why do you go on to write that the people feel isolated because I think much of the general population recognizes that the organized institutions do not reflect their concerns and interests and needs they do not feel that they participate meaningfully in the political system they do not feel that the media are telling them the truth or even reflect their concerns they go outside of the organized institutions to act we see more and more of our elected leaders and no less and less of what they're doing that's this medium does that very striking in fact the presidential elections have been almost removed from the point where the public even takes them seriously is involving a matter of choice it's kept in private I think I know well it means that the political system increasingly increasingly functions without public input it means to an increasing extent not only do people not ratify decisions presented together but they don't even take the trouble of ratifying them they assume that the decisions are going on independently of what they may do in the polling booth ratification would it would be what well ratification would mean a system in which there are two positions presented to me the voter I go into the polling booth and I push one or another button depending over to those positions I want that's a very limited form of democracy really meaningful democracy would mean that I play a role in forming those decisions and make them creating those positions and that would be real democracy is not very far from that but we're even departing from the point where there is ratification when you have stage-managed elections with the public relations industry determining what words come out of people's mouths candidates decide what to say on the basis of tests that determine what the effect will be across the population somehow people don't see how profoundly contemptuous that is of democracy [Music] let's move to your seats for the first time in this century the first time in perhaps all history man does not have to invent a system by which to live form of government is better we don't have to rest justice the king we only have to summon it from within ourselves this is a time when the future seems at door you can walk right through into a room called harm great nations of the world are moving toward democracy through the door to freedom the people of the world had to take their free expression and free thought through the door to tomorrow an intellectual satisfaction laughs we noticed more just and prosperous life for man on earth free markets free free free speech free elections and the exercise of free will on effort by the state I've spoken a thousand points of light all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the nation doing good to the world - we offer new engagement and a renewed vow we will stay strong to protect the peace the offer can endure a lot this holy herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle we as the people have such a purpose today it is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world referring back to your earlier comment about escaping from or doing away with capitalism I was wondering what scheme workable scheme you would put in its place me you know just to others who might be in a position to set it up and get it going well I mean I I think that what used to be called centuries ago wage slavery is intolerable I mean I don't think people ought to be forced to rent themselves in order to survive I think that the economic institutions ought to be run democratically by their participants by the communities in which they exist and so on and I think basically through various kinds of free association distort they have there being any sustained examples on any substantial scale of societies which approximates into the anarchist ideal there are small societies a smaller number that have I think done so quite well and there are a few examples of large-scale libertarian revolutions which were largely anarchist in their structure as to the first small societies extending over long period I myself think the most dramatic example is the perhaps the Israeli kibbutz in which for a long period may or may not be true they really were constructed on anarchist principles that is of direct worker control integration of agriculture industry service personal life on an egalitarian basis with direct and in fact quite active participation in self-management and work I should it's primarily successful a good example of a really large-scale anarchist revolution or largely anarchist revolution in fact the best example to my knowledge is the Spanish revolution in 1936 and in fact you can't tell what would happen that anarchist revolution was simply destroyed the force but during the period of in which was alive I think it was inspiring testimonies of the ability of poor working people to organize manage their affairs extremely successfully without coercion control how far does the success of libertarian socialism or anarchism is whoever really depend on a fundamental change in the nature of man both in his motivation his altruism and also in his knowledge and sophistication I think it not only depends on it but in fact the whole purpose of libertarian socialism is that it will contribute to it it will contribute to a spiritual transformation precisely that kind of great transformation in in the way humans conceive of themselves and their ability to act to decide to create to produce to inquire precisely that spiritual transformation that social thinkers from the left Marxist tradition from lexington luxembourg say on overthrew anarcho-syndicalist have always emphasized so on the one hand it requires that spiritual transformation on the other hand the its purpose is to create institutions which will contribute to that transformation you've written that in looking at contributions of gifted thinkers one must make sure to understand the contributions but also to eliminate the errors in them and of your ideas what would you guess would be discarded and what would be assimilated by future thinkers well I mean I would assume virtually everything would be discarded for example and here we have to distinguish I mean the work that I do in my professional area I mean if I still believed what I believe ten years ago I'd assume the field is dead so I assume that when next time you read a student's paper you're gonna see something that has to be changed and you continue to make progress in dealing with social and political issues in my view what is at all understood is pretty straightforward I don't think there there may be deep and complicated things but if so they're not understood the the basic ways to the extent that we understand society at all it's pretty straightforward and I don't think that those simple understandings are likely to undergo much change the point is that you have to work and that's why that's why the propaganda system is so successful very few people are gonna have the time or the energy or the commitment to carry out the constant battle that's required to get outside of the McNiel they are dan Rather or somebody like that the easy thing to do you know you come home from work you're tired just a busy day I'm gonna spend the evening carrying out a research project so you turn on the to say it's probably right so you look at the headlines in the paper and then you watch the sports or something cuz just and that's that's basically the way the system the document works sure the other stuff is they're just gonna have to work to find modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths the driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain which is accepted as legitimate even praiseworthy on the grounds that private vices new public benefits in the classic formulation now it's long been understood very well that a society is that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time it can only persist with whatever our suffering and injustice it entails as long as it's possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited that the world is an infinite resource and that the world is an infinite garbage can at this stage of history either one of two things as possible either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others or alternatively there will be no destiny for anyone to control as long as some specialized class is in a position of authority it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves but the conditions of survival let alone justice require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole and by now that means the global the question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must namely to impose necessary illusions to manipulate and deceive the stupid majority and remove them from the public arena the question in brief is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided in this possibly terminal phase of human existence democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured they may well be essential to survival [Music] leaves up there thinking for himself and he's deciphering this tremendously over weighted body of information which he puts into an order and gives you the feeling that you can do the same thing that the whole thing is decipherable and he also gives you the sense that there is a source there's a center to the to a dissenting population although we feel that there's no center and i think that is what i reactivated in me a desire to get back it get reacquainted with the political scene after 30 years of alienation from it you do hundreds of interviews and lectures and i mean you're dealing with massacres in East Timor and and invasions of Panama at sets are pretty horrific stuff death squads what keeps you going I mean don't you get burned out on this material well you know it's mainly a matter of whether you can look yourself in the mirror I think gotta go [Music] [Music] [Music] the microphone past our that you agree to did we well we we did pretty well actually that means less sports and that's fun on that optimistic note professor Chomsky thank you very much indeed did you ever think of running for president president first thing I do is tell people not to vote for me the Celtics bastion of our channels thanks [Music] [Music]

Channel: Encore +

Views: 2,045,021

Rating: 4.8024979 out of 5

Keywords: CMF, Canada Media Fund, Encore, Documentary, Award-winning, Critically-acclaimed, Best documentary, Biography, Intellectual, Media, Activist, Politics, Social, Noam Chomsky, Bill Moyers, Peter Jennings, William F. Buckley Jr., Tom Wolfe, Michel Foucault, Robert Faurisson, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, Manufacturing Consent, Canadian Television, Movie, Canadian documentary, Corporate greed

Id: EuwmWnphqII

Length: 167min 8sec (10028 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 06 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

16th century Etienne de La Boétie And look for Discourse on Voluntary Servitude The translation should be faithful (didn't read it in English) A few pages, not that long. He was 18 when he wrote it, 1548.

[u/[deleted]]

I find it disturbing that my older family members ALWAYS have the news on. They're just being hypnotized by a bunch of talking heads. Every political discussion is a main stream talking point. Like ostriches in sand.

[u/Fuck-yu-2]

After reading the book manufacturing consent my views were changed

[u/srsly_its_so_ez]

Personally I think that there is an especially important way that the media is attempting to manipulate the public right now: the 2020 election. They're propping up establishment candidates by not covering huge scandals. It's very clear that the major news companies choose whether they want to portray someone negatively or not. They ignore serious issues that could bring down major candidates campaigns if the news reported on it fairly, but they also use baseless smears against candidates that they don't like.

How they choose to present their coverage can have a significant effect on their viewers. Running non-stop stories saying "this candidate is surging in the polls and looking very strong" will give a positive boost to the candidate even if they're not really surging. It's called the bandwagon effect and the media will gladly exploit it.

It's very clear that the coverage is not fair, just look at this count of how many times each candidate is mentioned on the news. They prop up their favorites and ignore the candidates that they don't like.

Many times they will straight up lie about the numbers, "accidentally" mixing up poll numbers. Coincidentally they always mix up the numbers in the same way: making establishment candidates look better and outsiders look worse, never the other way around. Or they'll "forget" to mention them in headlines and include them in graphics. There's actually a whole subreddit about it called r/BernieBlindness, and there are tons of great examples there.

If you would like some more info on the canidates that the media props up, I'd highly recommend this article and this one.

And if anyone's interested, I have a subreddit called r/MobilizedMinds where I post all kinds of information that I find interesting, and I'd be glad if you'd join me there :)

[u/PMme_slave_leia_pics]

TL;DW: here

I like Chomsky and his ideas, but lord can he be a chore to read and or listen to.

[u/TheMonksAndThePunks]

His book of the same name is highly recommended.

[u/Guanhumara]

Shout-out to r/bernieblindness.

[u/ButWhyIWantToKnow]

I would like to see an updated version of this which talks about more recent phenomenon like social media.

[u/ManShutUp]

Media fucked up in 2016 though, building up Trump and giving him free air time all throughout the beginning of his campaign. There was no reason why the dude should have had such a large lead right out of the gate during the primaries. Thinking that Clinton would easily crush him, sitting on the Access Hollywood tape until after the Republican primaries were over. Then they realized that they had created a monster and it ends up getting elected. Now they are realizing how good their ratings are with Trump in office, so no one really learned anything after all.