Noam Chomsky on Propaganda - The Big Idea - Interview with Andrew Marr

do you believe what you read in the media I'm not talking about die and Fergie but about the important stuff that politics and economics has it ever occurred to you it could be a system of propaganda designed to limit how you imagine the world well that's the view of Noam Chomsky who's been teaching here in Boston the past 30 years described as America's leading dissident he's based for Massachusetts Institute of Technology where although it's very cold it isn't exactly the Gulag Archipelago as a working journalist myself I've come to talk to Professor Chomsky about bias in the media all Wells nightmare a place where propaganda rules we're thought is controlled comrades attention here is a special bulletin from the Ministry of peace it's now a familiar if chilling Cold War fable most of us would say it's old hat but is it not police are joining you the chief job of a newspaper is to inform to tell people decades the freedoms of thought and expression have been central to Western democracy the media sees itself as free fearless stroppy and for many in power the press are too strong so the idea that all wels warning is still relevant may seem bizarre but no to gnome Chomsky we fix the image of a truth seeking media is a sham Chomsky has devoted his life to questioning Western state powers isn't power having virtually invented modern linguistics by the age of thirty Chomsky joined the gathering swell of protest in the 60s what it is Chomsky MA on a faculty at MIT and I've been getting more more heavily involved in anti-war activities for the last few years since then Chomsky has championed a brand of anarchism becoming deeply hostile to establish power and privilege and in recent years he's refined what he calls the propaganda model of the media on a brighter note commercial break the government he claims that the mass media brainwash under freedom not only to the media systematically suppress and distort when they do present facts the context obscures their real meaning too much you might wish to be honest the invasion of East Timor by the Indonesian army caused indescribable slaughter hundreds of thousands died but it was more or less ignored by the mainstream Western media because Chomsky argues we were selling arms to the aggressors but Wars where the West's interests directly involved get a different treatment for Chomsky coverage of the Gulf War was servile trivial criticisms were aired fundamental ones were ignored hello I drew mark how are you hi Matt Chomsky has numerous critics which chairs being allotted yes the media so influential ok have dissident views we really been excluded in an age of relative media diversity in the age of the internet right this is one of what about Chomsky's own access what about this very program professor Chomsky could we start by listening to explain what the propaganda model as you call it is for many people the idea that propaganda is used by democratic rather than nearly authoritarian governments will be a strange one well the term propaganda fell into disfavor at the around the Second World War but in the 1920s in the 1930s it was commonly used and in fact advocated by leading intellectuals by the founders of modern political science by wilsonian progressives and of course by the public relations industry as a necessary technique to overcome the danger of democracy the institutional structure of the media is quite straightforward we're talking about the United States but it's not very different elsewhere the the major there there are sectors but the agenda-setting media the ones that sort of set the framework for everyone else like the New York Times and The Washington Post and so on these are major corporations parts of even bigger conglomerates like other corporate institutions they have a product with an ax market their market is advertisers that is other businesses their product is privileged relatively privileged audiences more or less that selling audiences they're selling privileged audience these are big business big corporations selling privileged audiences to other corporations now the question is what would a rat what picture of the world would a rational person expect to come out of this structure then we draw conclusions about what you'd expect and then we check and yes that's the picture of the world that comes out and is this anything more than the idea that basically the press is relatively right-wing with some exceptions because it's owned by big business which is a truism is well known well I would call the press relatively liberal here I agree with the right-wing critics so especially the New York Times in the Washington Post and which are called without a trace of irony the New York Times is called the establishment left in say major foreign policy journals and that's correct but what's not recognized is that the role of the liberal intellectual establishment is to set very sharp bounds on how far you can go this far and no further give me some examples of that well let's take say the Vietnam War the probably the leading critic and in fact one of the leading dissident intellectuals in the mainstream is Anthony Lewis of the New York Times who did finally come around to opposing the Vietnam War about 1969 about a year and a half after corporate America had more or less ordered Washington to call it off and his picture from then on is that the war as he put it began with blundering efforts to do good but it ended up by 1969 being a disaster and costing us too much so what was that on the criticism what was the non propaganda model have told Americans about Vietnam war at the same time same thing that the mainstream press was telling them about Afghanistan United States invaded said first of all in the 1950s had set up a standard Latin American style terror state which had massacred tens of thousands of people but was unable to mean to control local a local uprising and everyone those at least every specialist knows that's what it was and when Kennedy came in in 1961 they had to make a decision because the government was collapsing under local attack so the u.s. just invaded the country in 1961 the US Air Force started bombing South Vietnamese civilians authorized napalm crop destruction then in 1965 January February 1965 the next major escalation took place against South Vietnam not against North Vietnam that was a sideshow that's what the honest press would be saying but you find a trace of it now if the press is a censoring organization tell me how that works is that you're not suggesting that proprietors phone one another up or that many journalists get their copy spiked as we say it's actually or well you may recall has an essay called literary censorship in England which was supposed to be the introduction to Animal Farm except that it never appeared in which he points out look I'm writing about it the tellurian society but in free democratic England that's not all that different and then he says unpopular ideas can be silenced without any force and then it gives to sledded he gives it to sentence response which is not very profound but captures it he says two reasons first the press is owned by wealthy men who have every interest in not having certain things appear but second the whole educational system from the beginning on through just X gets you to understand that there are certain things you just don't say well spelling these things out that's perfectly correct I mean they're it's the first sentence is what we expand this is what I don't get it suggests that I mean I'm a judge could like me are self censoring no not self centering your there's a filtering system that starts in kindergarten it goes all the way through and it's not the work 100% but it pretty effective it selects for obedience and subordination and especially I think that says stroppy people won't make it don't be influenced behavior problems or if you read applications to a graduate school you see that people will tell you he's not he doesn't get along too well with his colleague you know how to interpret those nice I'm just interesting this because I was brought up like a lot of people probably post-watergate film and so on to believe that journalism was a crusading craft and that there were a lot of disputatious stroppy difficult people in journalism and i have to say i think i know some of them well i know some of the best and best-known investigative reporters in the united state I won't mention names but whose attitudes or the media is much more cynical than mine in fact they regard the media as a sham and they know and they consciously talk about how they try to play it like a violin if they see a little opening they'll try to squeeze something in that ordinarily wouldn't make it through and it's perfectly true that the mature you're speaking for the majority of journalists who are trained have it driven into their heads that this is a crusading a prep a profession adversarial we stand up against power very self-serving you on the other hand in my opinion I hate to make a value judgment but the better journalists and in fact the ones who are often regarded as the best journalists of quite a different picture and I think a very realistic way how can you how can you know that I'm self censoring how can you know they just answering I'm sure you believe everything you're saying but what I'm saying is if you believe something different you wouldn't be sitting there sitting we have a press which has seems to meet a relatively wide range of you there is a pretty small sea conservative majority but there are left-wing papers there are liberal papers and there is a pretty large offering of views running from the far right to the far left for those who want them I don't see how a propaganda model can that's not quite true I mean there have been lot of studies of the British press and you can look at them by James Curran as the major one which points out that up until the 1960s there was indeed a kind of a social democratic press which sort of represented much of the interests of working people and ordinary people and so on and it was very successful I mean The Daily Herald for example had not only more it had far higher circulation than other newspapers but also a dedicated circulation furthermore the tabloids at that time when they were in the Sun we're kind of labor based that by the 60s that was all gone and it disappeared under the pressure of capital resources what was left was overwhelmingly the sort of Center to write press with some dissidents it's true I mean we've got our object a couple of large set layer newspapers which are left to centre right which are which are but you know putting in neo-keynesian views which the you call the elites are strongly hostile - it's interesting that you call me okay and left-of-centre I just call it straight Center the net left the center that value terms of meaning sure you could but there's there's a and your life very they're extremely good journalists in England a number of them they write very honestly and very good material a lot of what they write could interfere here on the other hand if you look at the question overall I don't think you're going to find a big difference and the fuse that there are many studies of the British press but the few that there are have found pretty much the same results and I think the better journals will tell you that in fact we can get what you have to do is check it out in cases so let's take say what I just mentioned the Vietnam War the British press did not have the kind of stake in the Vietnam War that the American press did because they weren't fighting just check some time and find out how many times you can find the American war in Vietnam described as a US attack against South Vietnam beginning clearly with outright aggression in 1961 and escalating to massive aggression in 65 if you can find 0.001 percent of the coverage saying that you'll surprise me and in a free press a hundred percent of it would have been saying that that's just a matter of fact it has nothing that was left and right let me come up to a more modern war which was the the Gulf War which again you know looking at press in Britain and watching television critiques of American television I was very very well aware of the anti Gulf War dissidents William that they did the the no blood for oil campaign that's nothing I that's not the dissidents nobody in fact isn't that the remote note the setup Saints attack and quake took place on August 2nd from August within a few days the great fear in Washington was that Saddam Hussein was going to withdraw and leave a puppet government which would be pretty much with us had just done in Panama the US and Britain therefore moved very quickly to try to undercut the danger of withdrawal by late August negotiation offers were coming from Iraq calling for a negotiated Iraqi withdraw the press wouldn't publish here they never published them in it the it did leak however good it was a great tonight about whether the judges vina negotiate sorry no that was not a debate there was debate about whether he should continue with sanctions which is a different question because the fact of the matter is we have good evidence but by late by mid or late August the sanctions are very worked because these stories were going to high American officials in the State Department former American officials like Richard helm they couldn't get the mainstream press to cover them but they did manage to get one journal to cover them Newsday that's a suburban journal and Long Island the purpose obviously being to smoke out the New York Times because it's the only thing that matters it came out of Newsday and this continued I won't go through the details but this continued until January 2nd at that time the offers that were coming were apparently so meaningful to the State Department that State Department officials were saying that look this is negotiable meaningful maybe we don't accept everything but it's certainly a basis for negotiated withdrawal the press would not cover it Newsday did a few other people did I have a couple of our beds on it and to my knowledge you can check this the first reference to any of this in England is actually in an article I wrote in The Guardian which was in early January you can check and see if there's an earlier reference okay let's look at one of the other key examples which you've looked at too which would appear to go against your idea which is the Watergate water that is a perfect example I have discussed it at length in our book in fact it'll be where it's a perfect example of the way the press was subordinated to power but this in fact this brought down investment let me give you any for just a minute let's take a look what happened there here it's kind of interesting because you know you can't do experiments in history but here history was kind enough to set when I set up set one up for us the Watergate exposures happen to take place at exactly the same time as another set of explosion namely the exposures of COINTELPRO of sorry objects ablaze interestingly I have to explain it because it's vastly more significant than Watergate that already makes my point COINTELPRO was a program of subversion carried out not by a couple of petty crooks but by the national political police the FBI under four administration's it began in the late Eisenhower administration ran up till this is the payment of the socialist work as much that my Social Work is quoting one tiny fragment of it it began by the time it got through I won't went through the whole story it was aimed at the entire new left at the woman women's movement at the whole black movement it was extremely broad its actions went as far as political assassination now what's the difference between the two very clear in Watergate Richard Nixon went after half of US private power namely the Democratic Party and and power can defend itself so therefore that's a scandal he didn't do any nothing happened like I was on Nixon's enemies list I didn't know nothing ever happened no but but nonetheless you wouldn't say it was an insignificant event no it was a president it was a case where half of us power defended itself against a person who had obviously stepped out of line that's so and the fact that the press thought that was important shows they think powerful people it'll be able to defend themselves now whether there was a question of principle involved happens to be easily checked in this case one tiny part of the COINTELPRO program was itself far more significant in terms of principle than all of Watergate and if you look at the whole program I mean it's not even a discussion but you have to ask me what COINTELPRO is you know what Watergate is there couldn't be a more dramatic example of the subordination of the educated opinion to power here in England as well as the United States I know you've concentrated on foreign affairs and that some of these key areas are being too hot about domestic law but well I'd like to come on to that because it still seems to me that on a range of pretty important issues for the establishment there is serious dissent Gingrich and his neo conservative agenda in America has been pretty savagely Lampoon the apparently fixed succession for the Republican candidates he at the presidential election has come apart at Clinton who is a powerful figure is having great difficulty with whitewater everywhere one looks one sees dis junctures openings within a spectrum so narrow that you really have to look hard to find well let me let me can I just stop you there because because you say that the spectrum is narrow but on the one hand let me know us very we've got the Ayala straight flat tax Republicans right the way through to relatively big state Democrats finally won it find a big state Democrat the position now is exactly what Clinton said Europe big government is over the government's failed the war on poverty has failed we have to get rid of this entitlement business that was Clinton's campaign message in 1992 that's the Democrats the the different what what you have now is a difference between sort of moderate Republicans and extreme Republicans actually it's well known that there's been a long-standing sort of split in the American business community it's not precise but it's sort of general between high tech capital intensive internationally oriented business which tends to be what's called liberal and lower tech more nationally oriented little more labor intensive industry which is what's called conservative now between those sectors there have been differences and in fact if you take a look at American politics it oscillates pretty much between those limits there's good work on this incidentally the person has done the most extensive work is Thomas Ferguson's political scientist you want one more example which will have some resonance in in Britain and Europe is the great argument over the north american free trade association the nafta argument we're given interesting if there is something which one could describe as a global opposition movement that is trade union environmental community based then it was certainly present in the anti-nafta shall I tell you what happened what site ever have what I'm going to say is the that well those are words were well you know we were well aware of that is exactly force they were not permitted into the press and I've documented this I'll give you references if you like we could we read all the pages and Brittany's all out as I did not for example OLMS did you read the report of the king of the office of Technology Association of Congress what are you sorry did you read the report of the labor advisory committee well I did I don't get these articles but I read I read many articles but I'll tell you after argument I'll tell you what you very I'm sorry if it's tough well if you're interested in the facts I'll tell you what they are and I'll even give you sources the the NAFTA agreement was signed more or less in secret by the three presidents in mid-august of the that's time of congrat right in the middle of the presidential campaign in mid-august now there's a law in the United States 1974 Trade Act which requires that any trade related issue be submitted to the labor Advisory Committee which is Union base for assessment and analysis it was never submitted to them a day before they were supposed to give their final report in mid-september it was finally submitted to them they were in fear the union's are very right pretty right wing but they were infuriated they had never been shown this they had strong that even at the time that they had the right they're giving 24 hours to write the report they never found look at the text nevertheless they wrote a very vigorous analysis of it with alternatives presented saying look we're not against math but we're against this version of it they get a good analysis happen to be very similar to one that had been given by the Congressional Research Service the office of Technology Assessment none of this ever entered the press the only thing that entered the press was the kind of critique that they were willing to deal with Mexico bashing right-wing nationalists and you know and so on that entered the press but not the critical analysis of the labor movement now it means somehow by process of osmosis was something I've taken up quite a lot in nineteen after argument analysis of worker protection environmental degradation may I continue this goes on in the press right until the end by the end there were there were big popular movements opposing it was extremely hard to suppress all of this to suppress everything coming out of the labor movement out of the popular movements and so on but they did at the very end it had reached such a point that there was concern that they might not be able to round this through now take a look at the New York Times in the Washington Post say the liberal media MO and the National ones in the last couple of weeks I don't say I've written about and pay what you find what you find is a hundred percent support for NAFTA refusal to allow any of the popular arguments now tremendous labor bash can I come back to make sure that I own this and the point about the liberal press as against the conservative press because in Britain over the last two years politicians I come across are deeply irritated ranging on furious about attacks on them in the press day after day on issues which have come to be known as sleaze they feel that they are harassed that they are misunderstood and that the press has got above itself is uppity and is destructive that's the message that they are giving good now are you saying that that old process same doesn't matter sure because it's all part maher zain I mean when the press the same thing is true here when the press focuses on the sex lives of politicians reach for your pocket see who's pulling out your wallet I mean because those are not the issues that matter to people I mean they're very marginal interest the issues that matter to people are somewhere else so as soon as you hear you know the press and presidential candidates and so on talking about values as I say put your hand on your wallet and you know that something else has happened but it but it's been much more than with us be much more than bed hopping it's also been about taking money from the corporation is paying for corruption corrupt judges fine topic from but yet corrupt party big business is not in favor of corruption you know and if the press focuses on corruption Fortune magazine will be quite happy they don't care about that they they don't want the society to be corrupt they want it to be run in their interest that's a different thing corruption interferes with that so for example when I was with a just haven't come back from India the Bank of India released an estimate economist there tell me it's low that a third of the economy is black meaning mostly rich businessmen not paying their taxes well that makes the press because in fact certainly transnationals don't like it they want the system to be run without corruption robbery bribes and so on just pouring money into their pockets so yes that's a fine topic for the press on the other hand the topics I've talked about are not fun topics is it much to significant what would a press be like do you think without propaganda model what would be rereading in the is that we don't read about it just given a dozen examples on every example that incidentally you've picked I haven't picked I mean I could pick my own I'm happy let you pick them on every one of those examples I think you can demonstrate but there's been a severe distortion of what the facts of the matter are this has nothing to do with left and right as I've been stressing and it has left the population pre confused and marginalized a free press we just tell you the truth this has nothing to do with life I've given the power of big business part of the press what can people do about this they can do exactly what people do in Haitian slums and Hills organize in Haiti which is the most we take that must most the poorest country in the hemisphere they created a very vibrant lively civil society in the slums and the hills and conditions they most of us can't even imagine vaguely we can do the same much more easily you've got community activists in America you've got not I'm not talking about the community so-called communitarian movement but I'm talking about the local community and writers all over the place all over the place take say a city like Boston and the way all sorts of people they don't even know of each other's existence it's there's a very large number of them one of the things I do constantly is run around the country giving talks one of my main purposes and the purpose of people invite me is to bring two people together people in that area who are working on the same things and don't know of each other exists because the resources are so scattered and the means of communication are so marginal there isn't just much they can do about it now there are there are things that plane things that are happening so it takes a community based radio which is sort of outside I was going to ask you about that and about the internet which has certainly got pretty other access at the moment well the internet has had like most technology as a very double-edged sword it had like any technology including printing it has a Liberatore potential but it also has a took a repressive potential and there's a battle going on about which way it's going to go as there was for radio television and so on but ownership an appetizer right and about just what's going to be in it and who's going to have access to it remember incidentally that the internet is a nail each operation most of the population the world has never made a phone call you know so that's certainly not on the internet I nevertheless it's it does have democratizing potential and there's a struggle going on right now as to whether that's going to be realized or whether it will turn into something like a home marketing service and a way of marginalizing people even further that discussion went on in the 1920s over radio that's interesting how it turned out it's when it went on over television it's not going on over the Internet and that's a matter of popular struggle look the company don't live the way we did 200 years ago or even 30 years ago there's been a lot of progress it hasn't been gifts from above it's been the result of people getting together and refusing to accept the dictates of authoritarian institution and there's no reason to think that that's over you've been portrayed and some would say Katy portrayed yourself as a little lonely dissident voice you clearly don't do lonely if I say nothing like guys I certainly do not portray myself that way I can't begin to accept a fraction of the invitations from around the country I'm scheduled two years in advance and at that I'm only selecting a fraction are you speaking to be huge overflow huge audiences and these are not a leading intellectuals either these are mostly popular audiences i I probably spend 20 or 30 hours a week just answering letters from people all over the country in the world I wish I felt a little more lonely I don't of course I'm not on NPR you know one wouldn't be in the mainstream media but I wouldn't expect that why should they why should they offer space to somebody who's trying to undermine that power and to expose what they do but that's not the moment professor jokes key thank you very much

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Views: 270,157

Keywords: Noam Chomsky, Chomsky, Andrew Marr, Marr, propaganda, model, propaganda model, five filters, news, politics, interview, Iraq, media, bias

Id: GjENnyQupow

Length: 30min 18sec (1818 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 12 2012