Noam Chomsky - The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Part 1 HD

you [Music] [Applause] [Applause] hi well let me begin with two recent events both of them widely publicized the first has to do with the famous Salman Rushdie case a couple of days ago you may have noticed the prime minister of Iran suggested a very simple way to resolve the crisis concerning Rushdie he said he suggested that what should happen is that all the copies of his book Satanic Verses should simply be burned and I guess the implication is that if that happened then they could cancel the death sentence that's one case lots of coverage the second case had to do with an interesting thing that happened here there was a what some people are calling a mega merger of two media giants time incorporated and Warner communications incorporated each of them huge conglomerates and putting coming together they form apparently the biggest world the world's biggest media empire now that also had a lot of publicity even outside the business pages and there was concern over the effects of the merger by increasing me concentration so effectively the effects on freedom of expression well these two events are they seem rather remote from one another and in a sense they are but we can draw them together by recalling an event which was not considered important enough to be reported but which I happened to know about because I was personally involved the title for this talk is you may have noticed manufacturing consent political economy the mass media that's actually the title of a recent book that I was co-author of with my co-authors Edward Herman and the two of us have been working together for many years we the first our first book was published in 1974 book on American foreign policy in the media and thing it was published by a publisher a textbook publisher flourishing textbook publisher which happened to be a subsidiary of Warner Communications incorporated well that's a very rare person you never saw that book and the reason was that when the advertising for the book appeared after 20,000 copies were published one of the executives of Warner Communications saw the advertising and didn't like the feel of it and asked to see the book and liked it even less in fact was appalled and then followed a an interaction which I won't bother describing but the end result of it was that the parent company Werner communication simply decided to put the publisher out of business and to end the whole story that way now they didn't burn the books they helped them and which is more civilized also books don't burn very well actually untold other kind of bricks and but pulping works and it wasn't just our book that was eliminated it was all the books published by that publisher well there are a couple of differences between this in the case of the prime minister of Iran one difference is that this was actually done not just suggested the second difference is it wasn't just one book it was all books which happened to be tainted by being published by the publisher who had the done this bad thing a third difference is the reaction the reaction in the case of the Warner Communications putting a publisher out of business to prevent them from publishing our book the reaction to that was zero not because it wasn't known it just was not considered of any significance whereas the Rushdie affair of course has had a huge furor as it should and the Prime Minister's proposal was greeted with ridicule and contempt as a demonstration of what you can expect from these barbarous people so there are some differences well let's go back to the question about the mega merger would the will this new media empire restrict freedom of expression by excessive media concentration possibly but the marginal difference is slight given what already exists as is perhaps illustrated by this case this is instantly not the only case far from the only case which illustrates how hypocritical and the cynical the reaction to the Rushdie affair is the reaction is legitimate but we can ask the question whether it's principled or not and if we look I think we find that it's not well actually this whole story that I've just told is kind of misleading it's accurate in identifying the locus of decision-making power not only in publishing and in the media but in political life and in social life generally in that respect it's accurate but it's very misleading with regard to how that power is typically exercised this is a very unusual case I wouldn't want to suggest that this is what happens typically it's usually much more subtle than this but no less effective and now I'm going to come back to some of the more subtle ways and the reasons for them and in fact if there's time or maybe back in discussion I'll talk about the aftermath of this particular incident which is also kind of illuminating in this respect though more complex well with that much as background let me turn to the main topic manufacturing consent strange a topic and thought control and indoctrination and so on now there's a and I'm going to discuss how this relates to thee to the media now there is a standard view about the media and the way they function the standard view is expressed for example by Supreme Court justice Powell when he describes what he calls the crucial role of the media in affecting the societal purpose of the First Amendment that is enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process so the idea is this kind of an instrumental defense of the First Amendment the value to be achieved is the democratic process and for the democratic process to function it's necessary for the public to have free access open access to relevant information and opinion a wide range of opinion and it's the job of the media to ensure that and the First Amendment has the instrumental function of guaranteeing that this is served and the media then do it that's the standard view and notice it has a kind of a descriptive component and also a normative component it says is what the media ought to be like and this is what they are like now that they ought to be this way seems sort of obvious in fact kind of almost tautological if democracy means has something to do with the public having a capacity to shape their own affairs it obviously presupposes information and that means the information system and free society would have to serve this function since it seems so obvious it's worth bearing in mind that there is a contrary view and in fact the country review is very widely held in fact I wouldn't be surprised if the contrary view is the dominant view among people over the last couple of centuries who have thought about liberal democracy and freedom and how to function in any event it's certainly a major position this contrary view can be traced back to the origins of modern democracy in the 17th century English revolution when for the first time the there was a challenge to the right of authority whether it was the gentry or the king or whatever and there was actually the beginnings of a real radical Democratic movement with a commitment on the part of the people involved were very widespread in England - public involvement and control over affairs they didn't want to be ruled by the king they didn't want to be ruled by Parliament they wanted to run their own affairs they were defeated the Radical Democrats were defeated but not before doing some important things which had a lasting effect well what I'm interested now is the reaction to this the reaction to the first efforts at popular democracy radical democracy might call it were a good deal of fear and concern one historian of the time Clement Walker a warned that these guys who were running putting out pamphlets on their little printing presses and distributing them and agitating in the army and you know telling people how the system really worked we're having an extremely dangerous effect they were revealing the mysteries of government and he said that's dangerous because it will I'm quoting him it will make people so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule and that's a problem John Locke a couple of years later explained what the problem was he said day laborers and tradesmen the spinsters and the dairymaids must be told what to believe the greater part cannot know and therefore they must believe and of course someone must tell them what to believe now there's a modern version of the end-of-course didn't just mean those categories he meant the general public there's a modern version of that this goes all the way up to the modern times it's discussing the American Revolution and all the way through to the modern period let's just come up to the contemporary period now in last in the modern period you get a much more sophisticated development of these ideas so for example Reinhold Niebuhr is a much respected Marla stand commentator on world affairs he wrote that rationality belongs to the cool observers but because of the stupidity the average man he follows not reason but faith and this naive faith requires that necessary illusions be developed emotionally potent oversimplifications have to be provided by the mythmakers to keep the ordinary person on course because of the stupidity of the average man that's the same view basically walter Lippmann who was the Dean of American journalists is the man who invented the phrase manufacture of consent he described the manufacture of consent as a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government this he said is quite important this is a revolution in the practice of democracy and he thought it was a worthwhile revolution the reason is again the stupidity the average man the common interest said a very largely elude public opinion entirely and they can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality that's Nibiru school observers you can guess who's part of them this is the person who pronounces these views is always part of that group it's the others who want this this is in walter Lippmann book public opinion which appeared shortly after World War one and the timing is important World War one was a period in which the liberal intellectuals John Dewey circle primarily were quite impressed with themselves for their success as they described in their own words for their success in having imposed their will upon a reluctant or indifferent majority there was a problem in World War one the problem was that the population was as usual pacifistic and didn't see any particular reason going out and killing Germans and getting killed the Europeans want to do that that's their business and in fact Woodrow Wilson won the 1916 election on a mandate which was peace without victory that's how he got elected and not surprisingly he interpreted that as meaning victory without peace and the problem was to get this reluctant and indifferent majority and get them to be to create emotionally potent oversimplifications and necessary illusions so that they would then be properly jingoistic and support this great cause and the liberal intellectuals were convinced that they were the ones who had primarily succeeded in doing this and they thought it was a very good task for obvious reasons and in fact they probably had some role whether that as much role as they think he could question but some role they used all sorts of necessary illusions for example fabrications about hun atrocities Belgian babies with their arms torn off and all sorts of things that were concocted by the British Foreign Service and fed to the educated classes in the United States who picked them up and were quite enthusiastic about them and distributed them they used such devices as what they called historical engineering it was a phrase proposed by Frederick Paxson an American historian who was the founder of a group called the National Board for historical service that was a group of historians who got together to serve the state by explaining the issues of the war that we might better win it that's historical engineering the Wilson administration established the countries I think first official propaganda agency it's called the creel Commission which was dedicated to convincing this reluctant or indifferent majority that they better be properly enthusiastic about the war that they were opposed to the that that had some institutional consequences in fact there were a number of institutional consequences to this whole period one was the institution of the National political police FBI which has been dedicated to thought control and repression of freedom ever since that's its primary activity and another development institutional development was the enormous growth of the public relations industry a lot of people learned lessons from the capacity to control to control the public mind as they put it a slogan of the public relations industry one of the people who came out of the creel Commission was a man named Edward Bernays who became the patron saint of the public relations industry that's a big substantial industry which is actually an American creation though it's since spread throughout other parts of the world it's dedicated to controlling the public mind again quoting its publications to educate the American people about the economic facts of life to ensure a favorable climate for business and of course a proper understanding of the common interests Bernays developed the concept of engineering of consent which he said is the of democracy that's and of course didn't bother saying that there are only some groups who were in a position to carry out the engineering of consent those who have the power and the resources he himself showed how this was done often by for example demonizing the government of Guatemala the capitalist democratic government that we were planning overthrow with a successful CIA coup he was then working for the United Fruit Company which was opposed to the government because it was planning to take over unused lands of the United Fruit Company and hand them over to landless peasants paying the rates that the United Fruit Company had given as their value for tax purposes which of course they regarded as very unfair because they had naturally been lying and cheating about the value so that was his achievement and that in fact the public relations industry in general has been dedicated to this project ever since the creel Commission incidentally is a predecessor of a contemporary phenomenon that the Reagan administration constructed it's their office of Latin American public diplomacy that's by far the largest propaganda agency in American history maybe one of the largest of any Western government and it was also dedicated to controlling the public mind it was dedicated primarily to controlling the debate and discussion over Central America to demonizing the Sandinistas as one of its officials put it and mobilizing support for the u.s. terror States in the region and it did it by framing the debate by intimidating critics by producing fabrications which were then happily repeated by the media so for example one famous one just illustrates some of its achievements when Ronald Reagan in 1986 read a spectacular and effective speech which convinced Congress to vote 100 million dollars of aid for the Contras right after the World Court had denounced the United had condemned the United States for the unlawful use of force and called upon at the end this aggression this speech was extremely effective it described all the whole litany of Nicaraguan crimes and it ended up by saying that these communists actually concede that they're planning to conquer the hemisphere and undermine us all they themselves say that they are carrying out a revolution Without Borders that was the peroration that's why ended up you know big excitement Congress voted the aid of the Reagan administration declared that this this meant war this was a real war and everybody was excited and happy now that phrase revolution Without Borders Axew had already been used it had been used by a State Department pamphlet that was called revolution Without Borders describing sandanista crimes and there's actually a version of that phrase that exists the phrase is a appears or something like it appears in a speech by sandanista commandant a thomas barfi he had given speech in which he said that the Nicaraguan the Sandinistas hoped to construct a kind of a model society a society which will be which will work so well and will serve the needs of the poor so well that others will be inclined to try to do the same thing for themselves and he went on to say there that every country has to every country has to carry out its own revolution there's no way for one country to make a revolution somewhere else but the model that Sandinistas are constructing he hoped was be so successful that others would want to do it and he said in this sense our revolution transcends borders well that phrase was immediately picked up by the office of public diplomacy and turned into a threat to conquer the hemisphere that fraud was at once exposed by the Council on hemispheric affairs which sends out a weekly news analysis in Washington that journalists read it was even expose it was even mentioned in the Washington Post somewhere in the back pages they noted that the phrase revolution Without Borders was not exactly what he had said by nothing to do is the opposite of what he had said but that didn't make any difference the phrase was useful the construction was useful and since then the media and and when the State Department document came out there was no criticism of it when Reagan made the speech nobody pointed out this was a fabrication even the Washington Post which it exposed it referred to the Sandinista revolution without borders the media have repeatedly have repeated this over and over again look they say themselves that they're going to have a revolution without borders and so on well that's the kind of thing that's done by an effective propaganda agency of course if the media are willing to go along because it wasn't very hard to figure out that this was a incredible fraud well that's the kind of thing that was done all of these operations were completely illegal there was a congressional report done on them general Gao report which pointed out that of course they were illegal they were run out of the national security council and not allowed the propaganda as Americans but it was very successful when this was exposed during the iran-contra hearings one cop an administration official described the activities of the office of public diplomacy is one of the really great achievements it was a he said a spectacular success he described it as the kind of operation that you carry out in enemy territory and that's quite an appropriate phrase I think the phrase expresses exactly the way in which the public is viewed by people with power it's an enemy it's a domestic enemy and you got to keep it under control and you have to make sure that the mysteries are not revealed so that the people don't become so curious and arrogant that they refuse to submit to a civil rule to put it in seventeenth-century terms and to control that domestic enemy propaganda and fabrications and so on are important and that's with the public relations industry is for for corporate purposes and what what the meteor for if they properly serve the state well that's notice again we have a view that says the media should not function the way the standard rhetoric claims there's also an academic to this it's come closer to home if you go back to the international encyclopedia of Social Sciences published in 1930 three days when people were a little more open and honest what they said there's an article on propaganda and it's well worth reading there's an entry under propaganda the entry is written by a leading one maybe the leading American political scientist the Harold Lasswell was very influential particularly in this area communications and so on and in this entry in the international encyclopedia on propaganda he says we should not succumb to democratic dogmatism about men being the best judges of their own interests they are not he said even with the rise of mass education doesn't mean that people can judge their own interests they can't the best judges of their interests are elites the specialized class the cool observers the people who have rationality and therefore they must be granted the means to impose their will notice for the common good because again because well he says because of the ignorance and superstition of the masses he said it's necessary to have a whole new technique of control largely through propaganda propaganda he says we shouldn't have a negative connotation about it's neutral propaganda he says is as neutral as a pump handle you can use it for good you can use it for bad since we're good people obviously that's sort of true by definition we'll use it for good purposes and there should be no negative connotations about that in fact it's moral to use it because that's the only way that you can save the ignorant and stupid masses of the population from their own errors you don't let a three-year-old run across the street and you don't let ordinary people make their own decisions you have to control them and why do you need propaganda well he explains that he says in military run or feudal societies what we would these days call totalitarian societies you don't really need propaganda that much and the reason is you got a you've got a club in your hand you can control the way people behave and ever it doesn't matter much what they think because if they get out of line you can control them for the wrong of course but once you lose the club you know once the state loses its capacity to coerce by force then you have some problems the voice of the people is heard you got all these formal mechanisms around that permit people to express themselves and even participate and vote and that sort of thing and you can't control them by force because you lost that capacity but the voice of the people is heard and ever you got to make sure it says the right thing in order to make sure it says the right thing you got to have effective and sophisticated propaganda again for their own good so in as a society becomes more free that is there's less capacity to coerce it simply needs more sophisticated indoctrination and propaganda for the public good the similarity between this and Leninist ideology is very striking according to Leninist ideology the cool observers the radical intelligentsia will be the vanguard who will lead the stupid and ignorant masses onto you know communist utopia because they're too stupid to work it out by themselves and in fact there's been a very easy transition over these years between one and the other position and it's very striking that continually people move from one position to the other very easily and I think the reason for the ease is partly because there's sort of the same position so you can be either a Marxist Leninist commissar or you can be somebody celebrating the magnificence of state capitalism and you can serve those guys it's more or less the same position you pick one of the other depending on your estimate of where power is and that can change the in fact the mainstream of the intelligentsia I think over the last say through the century have tended to be in one of the other camp either the strong appeal of Marxism Leninism to the intelligentsia for obvious reasons of the bother saying and there's the same appeal of these doctrines to the intelligentsia because it puts them in the position of justifying of having a justified role as ideological managers in the service of real power corporate and state power for the public good of course so you naturally attempted to one of the other position well going on to the post Second World War period the same ideas continued to be expressed for example in 1948 when it was again necessary to drive the reluctant and indifferent majority to a new war fever remember 1948 the war was over everybody was pacifistic they wanted to go home and buy refrigerators and so on they don't want any more Wars they wanted to demobilize we were done with that stuff but they had to be whipped up into a war fever because there was a new war coming along the Cold War which was a real war as as the internal documents explained and it was necessary to bludgeon them into a belief in the demands of the Cold War's Dean Acheson put it the presidential well-known historian presidential historian Thomas Bailey explained in 1948 that because the masses are notoriously short-sighted and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats our state our statesmen are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-run interests deception of the people may in fact be in creepy come increasingly necessary unless we are willing to give our leaders in Washington a freer hand in other words if we continue this nonsense of trying to control them through elections and that sort of thing it's going to be necessary to have deception of the people because the masses are too stupid and ignorant to understand the danger that's at their throat and that's the role of the media to carry out the appropriate deception coming up to the present or near present in 1981 when we were launching a new crusade for freedom in Central America Samuel Huntington who was a professor of government at Harvard and a longtime government adviser explained in a discussion in the Harvard Journal international security that you may have to sell intervention or other military action in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union you're fighting that's what the United States has done ever since the Truman Doctrine and that's what of course we're now doing we're fighting Nicaragua but we've got to create the misimpression that it's the Soviet Union that you're fighting that's the job of the office of Latin American public diplomacy and of the cool observers and of respectable intellectuals and of the media and so on actually that remark of his is quite accurate and gives certain insight into the Cold War and also the modern period well these concerns about controlling the public mind rather typically they arise in the wake of periods of war and turmoil there's a reason for that wars and depressions and such things they have a way of arousing people from apathy and making them think and sometimes even organize and that raises all of these dangers so for example Wilson Woodrow Wilson's Red Scare a very harsh and effective repression immediately followed World War one and that's when you get the this revolution in the art of democracy about the need for manufacture of consent and you get the FBI to really do the job properly by force if necessary as they did McCarthy what we call McCarthyism which is a poor label because it was actually initiated by the Liberal Democrats in the late 1940s and picked up and exploited by McCarthy but what we call McCarthyism was a similar effort to to overcome the the energizing effect of the war and the depression in mobilizing the population and causing them to challenge the to reveal the mysteries of government and do all these bad things and after the Vietnam War the same thing happened the Vietnam War was one factor a major factor in fact in causing the ferment of the 1960s and that caused a lot of concern deep concern which still exists incidentally because they have been able to overcome it the Vietnam the the 60s created what liberal elites called a crisis of democracy that's the title of a quite important book on all of these topics the first and in fact only book length publication of the trilateral commission published in 1975 called the crisis of democracy it's about the problem of governability of Democracies and there was a problem of the governability of Democracies because people were getting out of hand the domestic enemy was getting out of control and something had to be done about it the trilateral commission puts together liberal corporate and state elites from the three major centers of state capitalism Western Europe the United States and Japan that's why the trilateral and it is the liberal elites this is the group around Jimmy Carter it's where he came from in fact and virtually all of his cabinet and top advisors it's that segment of opinion the American reporter they gave the report anemic for the United States was again Samuel Huntington and he pointed out that Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers then there was no crisis democracy that's the way things were supposed to be and so this kind of vulgar Marxist rhetoric is not untypical of internal documents in the government or in the business press and so on and this was intended to be an internal document they didn't really expect people to read it but it's worth reading I'm sure the library has it they should the but but now this crisis of democracy it erupted what had happened was during the 1960's all sorts of segments of the population that are normally apathetic and passive and obedient and don't get in the way a sudden B can't began to become organized and vocal and raise questions and press their demands in the political arena and that caused an overload it caused a crisis of democracy you couldn't just govern the country with a few Wall Street lawyers and bankers any longer you had all these other pressures coming from the general population and that's a problem and we got to overcome the problem and the way to overcome the problem they said all three the whole group is to introduce more moderation and democracy to mitigate the excess of democracy that means in short to return the general population to their apathy and passivity and the obedience which becomes them that's the stupid and ignorant masses have to be kept out of trouble and when you get these crises a democracy got to restore the norm that we had before well that's a view that goes right back to the origins of the republic if you read the sayings of the founding fathers you will discover that that was essentially their view as well they also regarded the public as a dangerous threat the way the country ought to be organized as John J put it the president of the Constitutional Convention in the first Supreme Court Chief Justice Supreme Court his one of his favorite Maxim's according to his biographer was that those who run who those who own the country ought the governor and if they can't govern it by force they got to govern another way and that ultimately requires a deception propaganda indoctrination of the manufacture of consent well let me summarize there's a standard view rhetorical view standard view and rhetoric is basically that of Justice Powell the public ought to exert meaningful control over the political process and it's the role of the media to allow them to do it that's the rhetoric there's a contrary view which is that the public is a dangerous enemy and it has to be controlled for its own good and that contrary view is very widely held in fact I wouldn't be surprised if it's the dominant view among sophisticated commentators on political theory going back to the 17th century Democratic commentators so we got these two views counter posed well with regard to the media turning to the media the standard view is again when I just described by Justice Powell they after the media have to serve going to serve the societal purpose of the First Amendment that be free and open and so on and then the descriptive part of that is that that's exactly what they do that view is expressed for example by Judge Gurfein in in a important case where he permitted the New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers 1970 one or two girl finds decision says that we have a cantankerous press an obstinate press a ubiquitous press and it must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know so granted the presses and nuisance but it's important to allow it to maintain its adversarial and cantankerous ways because even you know it serves an even higher purpose well at that point we begin to have a debate the debate is between the people who say that the media are cantankerous and adversarial and so on and they've gone too far we got to do something to control them and constrain them in fact the trilateral commission liberals also suggested that they said the media have gone much too far in their adversarial ways and we have to if they can't regulate themselves probably the government will have to step in and regulate them that's on the liberal side on the reactionary side of course it's much harder you know harsher ideas come along so you have that the one side says that we've got to curb the press they're too cantankerous and then you've got the spokesman for free speech judge Gurfein and so on they say no no it's we agree they're pretty bad but you've got to allow them to do this because of the higher purposes well that's the debate and if you look over that there is a good deal of discussion of the media and that's the way it's framed assumption the media have our adversarial cantankerous independent and then then maybe even so much that they're threatening democracy and then comes the question should we let them get away with it or should we curb and the advocates of free speech say sorry you got let them get away with it and the others say no there's other values that are more important like the govern ability of the country and so on so we got to stop well outside the spectrum of debate there's another view the other view says that the factual assumption is wrong the factual assumptions taken for granted not even argued is just wrong according to this alternative view Media do fulfill aside societal purpose but it's quite a different one the societal purpose is exactly what is advocated by the elite view that I've described the society inculcate and defend the economic and social and political agenda of particular sectors privileged groups that dominate the domestic society those that own the society and therefore ought to govern it and they do this in all kind of ways they do it by selection topics by distribution of concerns by the way they frame issues by the way they filter information by the way they tell lies like about revolutions Without Borders by emphasis and tone all sorts of ways the most crucial of which is just the bounding of debate what they do is say here's the spectrum of permissible debate and within that you can have a great controversy but you can't go outside it the right-wing continually claims that the press has a liberal bias and there's some truth to that but they don't understand what it means the liberal bias is extremely important in a system of proof in a sophisticated system of propaganda that there ought to be a liberal bias the liberal bias says thus far and no further on as far as you can go and look how a liberal I am and of course it turns out that I accept without question all the presuppositions of the propaganda system notice that that's a beautiful type of system you don't ever express the propaganda that's vulgar and too easy to penetrate you just presuppose it unless you accept the presuppositions you're not part of the discussion and the presuppositions are instilled not by being beating over the head with them but just by making them the foundation of discussion you don't accept them you're not in the discussion so in the cases that say the Vietnam War which was you know major topic of debate if you look over the media there was a big debate over the Vietnam War there were the Hawks who said that if we continue to fight harder and were more violent and so on and so forth then we can achieve the noble end of defending South Vietnam and the free people of South Vietnam from communism and then there were the doves who said it's probably not work and it's probably not going to be - it's going to be too bloody it's going to cost us too much and therefore we're not going to be able to achieve the noble end of defending the people of South Vietnam from communism now again there's another view and that is that we were attacking South Vietnam and that other view has the merit of being true obviously true but it was inexpressible that's outside the spectrum of debate you can enter the debate only if you accept the assumption and if you check the media over the entire period as far as I can see I've hit her Minh and I in this book review the media from about 1950 to the present on Indochina and I don't think you can find an exception to this I mean even statistical error that's the spectrum you got to accept and the same is true and there's a liberal bias in the sense that towards the end of the war like by about 1969 or 1970 after Wall Street had turned against the war then you got a preponderance of doves saying probably aren't going to succeed in defending freedom and democracy in South Vietnam the country that we're attacking well that's this this this conception of the media which noticed challenges the factual assumptions of the entire debate that says that the media function in the way that Herman and I called the propaganda model in this same book they function and accord with the propaganda model now propaganda sounds like a bad word but remember that in more honest days like in the international encyclopedia of social science propaganda was considered a perfectly good word and in fact something that we ought to have more of it because it's needed for the reasons that last well explained well notice that the propaganda model has lots of predictions it predicts the way the media are going to behave and you can test those predictions but it also has a prediction of that's kind of reflexive about the propaganda model itself it predicts that the propaganda model can't be taken seriously there's a reason for that if you think it through the propaganda model states that the debate has got to be within assumptions that are serviceable to powerful interests and the propaganda model challenges those those assumptions so therefore it's got to be out of the debate okay that prediction is instantly very well confirmed it is outside the debate so that's one bit of positive evidence for the propaganda model notice incidentally that this model has a kind of a disconcerting feature to it if you think about it obviously the claims of the propaganda model are either valid or invalid if they're invalid we can dismiss them if they're valid we have to dismiss them right so one way or another you're going to be sure that this model isn't going to be discussed and that's in fact true well now the basic questions from this point on are factual is the factual assumption that bounds the debate correct or is it wrong that's a factual assumption you can study and the real topic you know the topic that ought to be investigated is that now there isn't time to do that now so I'll just make a couple of comments about it and give a few illustrations three comments first first notice that the propaganda model has a number of features one feature that it has is that it's advocated by elites that's that is it's the it conforms with the normative opinion the proposal that the public is dangerous you've got there you've got to ensure that they don't get out of control they have to be controlled by deception and propaganda since you don't have the means to do it by force and the propaganda model simply says well yeah they work the way elites say they ought to work so one point about the propaganda model is that in fact it's it has elite advocacy a second point about the propaganda model is that it's it's got a kind of prior plausibility in fact it's almost natural on completely uncontroversial assumptions if you look at the structure of the society you'd almost predict the propaganda model without even looking at the facts why is that true well simply ask yourself what the major media are now the way the media work there are some media which kind of set the agenda you know the most important ones like the New York Times in the Washington Post big national media they set the agenda if the government wants a story to get into television that evening what it does is leak it to get into the front page of The Washington Post in New York Times on the assumption that television will pick it up and say okay that's important so we'll give newse same is true of national television it sets its you know sets the agenda that makes people think the New York Times front page is sent over the wire services the afternoon of the day before there's a thing if you read the you know you look at that stuff that's ground out of the AP wire you'll notice around four o'clock come something that says the New York Times front page tomorrow is going to look like so-and-so well if you're a an editor of a journal in some small town you read it and say oh that's what the important news is and you frame your own reporting that way you know it's not the 100% but there is a kind of an agenda setting media New York Times Washington Post the three television channels few others that participate to some extent in this well ask yourself what those institutions are answer those institutions are first of all major corporations some of the biggest corporations in the country furthermore they're integrated with and in many cases owned by even larger corporations you know like General Electric and so on so what you have is major corporations and conglomerates now like other corporations they sell a product to a market the market in this case is advertisers that's what keeps them alive the product is audiences they sell audiences to advertisers in fact for the major media they try to sell privileged audiences to advertisers that raises advertising rates and those are the people are trying to reach anyway so what you have is businesses corporations which are selling relatively privileged audiences to other businesses well just ask yourself the natural question what do you expect to come out of this interaction major corporations selling privileged audiences to other corporations what would you expect to come out of it on no further assumptions is an interpretation of the world that reflects the interests and the needs of the sellers the buyers and the product that wouldn't be very surprising in fact it'd be kind of surprising if it weren't true so on relative of course means the propaganda model so what you expect on relatively uncontroversial sort of free-market assumptions with nothing else said is that you'll get the media will function and accord with the propaganda model now if you look more closely there are many other factors which interact to lead the same expectation the ideological managers of the editors and the colonists and the you know the anchor men and all that stuff there are very privileged people there wealthy privileged people whose associations and interests and concerns reflect our closely related to those of the groups that dominate the economy and that dominate the state and in fact it's just a constant flow and interaction among all those groups they're basically the same group they're ultimately the people who own the country are the ones who serve their interests and again it wouldn't be terribly surprising to discover that these people share the perceptions and concerns and feelings and interests and you know attitudes of their associates and the people they're connected with and the people whose positions they aspire to take when they move on to the next job and so on and so forth again that wouldn't be very surprising and on and on I won't proceed there are many other factors which tend in the same direction well that's my second point second point is that the propaganda model has a kind of prior plausibility a third point which is not too well-known is that the propaganda model is assumed to be true by most of the public that is in polls country to what you hear it when when people are asking polls you know what you think about the media and so on the general reaction is there to conformist the two subservient to power you know they're too obedient that's the either plurality or sometimes even majority view the and then they're not critical enough of government for example that's the standard view well we have three observations now the propaganda model has elite advocacy that is elites believe that's the way it ought to be the media oughta be it has prior plausibility it's very plausible on uncontroversial free-market assumptions and it's accepted as valid by a large part probably the majority the population well though as three facts don't prove that it's valid of course but they do suggest that it might be part of the discussion it's not it's off the agenda exactly as the propaganda model itself predicts that's interesting that's an interesting collection of facts well what about the factual matter of how they media behave on this there are by now literally thousands of pages of documentation detailed documentation case studies and so on which have put the model to a test in the harshest ways than anybody can dream up I'll talk about some of the ways of doing it later or you know in discussion if you want but I think it's been subjected to quite a fair test in fact a very harsh test there's no challenge to it as far as I know if there is I've missed it the few cases where there's any discussion of it the level of argument is so embarrassing ly bad that just tends to reinforce the implausibility of the model in fact I think it's fair to say that this is one of the best confirmed theses in the social sciences but in accord with its predictions it's off the agenda you can't even discuss it well what I ought to do now is what has to be done of course actually not in the talk and that is to turn to cases you know method you know ask how you could test it what the results are and so on and there's plenty of material in print and more coming out in which we can check and see whether you convinced that in fact it's plausible or accurate my feeling as it is I'll just give a couple of illustrative cases and let me stress that I do this with some reluctance because the illustrative cases are misleading they suggest that maybe it's a sporadic phenomenon in fact when somebody gives you a couple of cases you rightly ask whether there are an adequate sample you know maybe they were just selected to work so you ought to be suspicious about isolated cases that's why the model has in fact been tested for many approaches but that misleading necessity aside because I can't do more than that let me give you a couple of cases to illustrate the kind of thing I think you will find if you pursue the question of fact let's take something that you'd certainly expect the media to be concerned with namely freedom of press they got a professional interest in that and in fact is a good deal of discussion of freedom of press in the media in the keeping just to the last decade the problems of the press in repressive societies has been very widely discussed many examples the the case that has been by far the most discussed in fact I suspect it has been discussed more than all questions of media of freedom of the press throughout the entire world during this period is the one newspaper in Latin America that 99% of the literate population would be able to name if they were asked to name a newspaper in Latin America namely La Prensa in Nicaragua there has been an overwhelming amount of reporting on the tribulations of La Prensa in Nicaragua one media analyst Francisco Goldman who studied freedom of press in these countries pointed out that in four years he found about 260 references to this in the New York Times that's incredible amount of coverage I'm sure I don't think anybody's done the study but try it if anybody wants I'm sure you'll find that this is more coverage than has been given to problems all other problems of the freedom of press combined all over the world probably by a considerable factor anyhow that's the one you know that's the famous case and this coverage has been very irate and angry because of the tribulations of La Prensa for example when let's go back to the moment when Ronald Reagan succeeded in convincing Congress to vote a hundred million dollars in aid so that we'd have a war a real war in violation of the demand of the World Court that the United States consider its stop terminate its unlawful aggression right after that after the government announced that now we finally got a war a real war the government of Nicaragua suspended La Prensa and that caused tremendous outrage in the United States there's a group of the distinguished group of journalism fellows at Harvard the Nieman Foundation and they immediately gave their award for the year to Violeta Chamorro editor of La Prensa to express their solidarity with her in this moment of crisis and to show how deeply committed they are to freedom of the press The Washington Post had an editorial right after that called newspaper of Valor in which they said Violeta Chamorro should receive ten awards not one award the New York Review of Books had an article by left-liberal correspondent Murray Kempton appealing to people to contribute funds to keep the foot you know prints alive during this period those funds could then be added on to the CIA subvention that had kept the journal going since the Carter Administration in 1979 right after the Sandinista revolution succeeded and in fact in general there was great frenzy and hysteria about this terrible attack on freedom of the press well let's look a little more closely first of all what is la prensa laprincia is a journal which calls for the overthrow of the government of Nicaragua by a foreign power which funds it and which is trying to overthrow the government of Nicaragua it's an interesting fact you might check the history of the West to see whether there's ever been any such thing for example you might ask whether a major newspaper in the United States the wealthiest newspaper in the United States was funded by the Nazis in 1943 calling for the overthrow of the government of the United States and you might ask yourself what would have happened if that was possible well you can get the answer very quickly even tiny little newspapers which weren't funded by anybody and that raised questions about conscientious objection and so on they were censored and controlled and suppressed and so on during the first world war was even more this should we even actually put a presidential candidate in jail for 10 years after the First World War because he had he had declared opposition to the draft the the so the in fact there's nothing comparable to this in the history of the West anymore and in world history altogether now la prensa is described in the United States as the journal that opposed some Koza in fact there was a journal called La Prensa which did oppose the Somoza regime courageously its editor was in fact murdered and had the same name as this journal of Prensa and it's described as the same journal but is that true well it's a little tricky at this point certainly has the same name in 1980 the owners of La Prensa decided to convert the journal into a government into a journal dedicated to the overthrow of the government at that point they fired the editor the brother of the editor who had been murdered under Somoza and there was a split in the staff 80% of the staff left with the editor and formed a new journal only the audio which is the successor of the old La Prensa at least if a newspaper is defined by its editor and its staff not of course if it's defined by the money that's behind it supplied by the CIA then you have a different answer to what's the old La Prensa that instantly is also something that's never discussed but suppose that's true let's suppose it's just a CIA journal and in fact that there's no parallel to it in history of the West or that being true calling for the overthrow of the government funded by the outside power superpower that is trying to overthrow the government well nevertheless a true civil libertarian would defend La Prensa from harassment I think somebody really believes in civil liberties should say yes England should have permitted the press to be dominated by Nazi Germany in 1942 and if they didn't do it that shows they don't believe in freedom that's the position of a real civil libertarian and that's the position of the American intellectual community with regard to La Prensa and now at this point we ask the obvious question is this passionate commitment to freedom of the press based on libertarian enthusiasms and passions or is it based on service to the state well as a way of answering that question in fact we all know the way of answering that question it's a question that we regularly ask or don't even bother asking because the answer is so obvious when we look at propaganda of our enemies so you take a look at the productions of say the World Peace Council which is a communist front peace organization or the East German Peace Committee you know the government Peace Committee you read that material and you'll find that there's all sorts of descriptions they're generally valid descriptions of crimes and atrocities and repression in the United States are committed by the United States and its agents and so on and great outrage over these hearts often that materials accurate and often in fact its material it's not reported here well do we praise them for their you know libertarian passions no we first ask a question we ask how do they deal with repression and atrocities carried out but Soviet Union in its clients where they are the ones they're responsible for well as soon as we get the answer to that question we dismiss the whole story with contempt and ridicule properly even if there are charges are accurate that's a fair test and we ought to have the honesty to apply the same tests to ourselves so let's do it we now ask the same question about the defenders of Liberty of press in the case of La Prensa New York Times The Washington Post New York Review of Books the educated community and so on the Nieman fellows and so on how do we test that well we look at same test we look at cases of repression of freedom of the press in our domains and we ask how they've reacted and there are many such cases very close by in fact so take El Salvador El Salvador had independent newspapers at one time doesn't have many longer these were not newspapers funded by a foreign power trying to overthrow the government of El Salvador they were not newspaper supporting the guerrillas in fact they were mildly liberal newspapers calling for mild reforms like land reform and things like that raising questions about the concentration of land and so on those newspapers don't exist any longer they were not censored they were not harassed rather another technique was used by the government that we installed trained directed and armed the technique was in the case of one newspaper the security forces picked up an editor and a photojournalist in a sense Alva door restaurant took them outside cut them to pieces with machetes and left them in a the owner then flit that took care one newspaper without censorship the second newspaper it took a couple of bombing attempts three assassination attempts finally the military that we trained support and armed surrounded the premises of the newspaper entered it smashed the place up at that point the editor fled that took care of the second newspaper so that's the end of the Free Press in El Salvador well now we ask the question where how would the American press respond to this well that was actually investigated by fair fairness and accuracy in reporting the media monitoring organization they checked eight I guess with eight years of the New York Times to see what there had been what had been said about this well it turns out there was not one word in the news columns of the New York Times about this I checked editorials there was not one phrase and the editorials about this in fact the only reference to that to these two things in the New York Times was that the editor of one of the journals who fled was allowed an op-ed in which he described what had happened and that's important because it means all the civil libertarians knew about it the ones who read the New York Times like the Neiman fellows and the editors in New York Review and the editors of the New York Times they all knew about it it just wasn't important enough to report or to comment on well that tells you where the commitment to freedom of the press is turn to the neighboring country of Guatemala there - there was no censorship they took care of freedom of the press by simply murdering about 50 journalists in the early 80s including people you know journalists murdered the right when they were on radio and television announcing somehow that took care of freedom of the press without any censorship virtually no discussion a few words here and there well now this but this was the government we supported that we supported remember supported enthusiastically with that government supposed to now be a democracy they had an election that we all proudly hail and so on and after the democracy was established one of the editors who had fled returned as his last year just a year ago to try to open a small newspaper again wasn't funded by foreign power you know wasn't calling for the overthrow the government nothing like that just a small very small limited capital sort of left liberal newspaper la época was called he as soon as he came back to the country the death squads which are just adjuncts of the security forces threatened him with death if he didn't leave the country but he continued he started up the newspaper it ran a couple of issues then fifteen armed men surely from the security services broke into the offices firebomb them destroyed the premises kidnapped the night watchmen the editor called a press conference the next day in which he announced that there this shows that there can't be any freedom of the press in the so-called democracy of Guatemala some members of European press came I don't think any American reporter came there was he then he then received another death threat warning him to flee the country or be killed he did flee the country was taken to the airport by a Western ambassador so they wouldn't be killed along the way and he went back into exile in Mexico well how much coverage did that one get in the New York Times in the Washington Post which of the two that I checked the amount of coverage was zero not a word about it and it's not that they didn't know it they did know it and you can prove that they knew it because if you look in the small print you'll find oblique references to it so for example in the culture section of the New York Times a couple of weeks later there's a report of somebody went down to some you know meeting in Mexico and he met this guy and he sort of refers to the facts so they knew about it just wasn't important enough to report let's take the other major client of the United States in fact the major client of the United States the State of Israel that's the major subsidized country of the United States so you want to find out what American elites think about freedom of the press let's take a look at the way they react to freedom of the press in Israel now here history was kind enough to set up some controlled experiments for us the literally the week let's go back to the week when la prensa was suspended remember right after the United States has declared war against Nicaragua as the administration said in violation of the World Court ruling and they suspended this paper funded by the United States and calling for the overthrow of the government well that just right then Israel closed two newspapers in Jerusalem to newspapers Jerusalem were closed permanently it's not the first time that it happened the case went to the Supreme Court Israeli Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled that it was legitimate to close the two newspapers because the security services had claimed that without providing any evidence because they don't have to that these newspapers were funded by hostile elements which presumably means the PLO and the court declared High Court declared that no government would ever permit a business to function however legitimate it maybe that's upon that's funded and supported by a hostile power freedom of press they said exists in Israel but it's limited and is not permitted to to undermine the security of the state that's the High Court well how much coverage was there those two things while everybody was hysterical about La Prensa answer zero or to be precise there was a reference in a letter to the Boston Globe in which I was commenting on the total hypocrisy of Harvard University and the Neiman fellows I mentioned it but that as far as I know is the total ref is the total references in the United States the [Applause] now the week after the the central airing Peace Accords went into operation October 1987 La Prensa was opened again and a return to its task of calling for the overthrow of the government's on its own identifying itself with the Contras and so on the week that looked that la prensa was reopened history again ran a nice experiment for us that week the State of Israel closed the newspaper in Nazareth that's inside Israel and closed the news office in Nablus the newspaper in Nazareth was closed because the state had again alleged without providing any evidence that it was associated with a hostile group and the court went again went to the courts the courts declared that this is legitimate even though the editor had stated which of course was true that everything that appeared in the newspaper had gone through censorship because they have heavy censorship didn't matter the news the office in Nablus I was closed on the same pretext you know some connection with a hostile group as far as I know it never went to the courts so how much coverage was there those two things well the usual answer zero uh I could go on but these facts show very clearly they answer very clearly the first question the concern over freedom of the press in Nicaragua is total fraud it does not have anything to do with concern for freedom of the press it simply has to do with concern for serving the state in fact the number of people in the United States who believe in freedom of the press and who I don't mean ordinary of the people who write about such topics or speak about them the number who believe in freedom to press I think they could easily fit in somebody's living room or maybe in the telephone booth in fact and they would include virtually nobody who's gotten hysterical on this topic or even mentioned it but well that's the kind of thing you'll discover if you look closely I'll just give you one final example when I talk about this topic I like to use this morning's New York Times and you can always find a perfectly good example there on the front page but today unfortunately I didn't have I got up at five o'clock in the morning in Eau Claire and a snowstorm and had to drive you're any have time to find the times so I'll have to use yesterday's I apologize last one I've looked at the lead story in The New York Times yesterday you know major story and left right hand side of the front page is a story entitled US envoy urges Hondurans to let the Contra stay and then comes as the Bush administration's trying and in Honduras to let the Contra stay there and it goes on and get down to the middle of the second page you know the continuation page and you find the following sentence on its face the administration proposal to keep the Contras in place would seem to be inconsistent with the spirit of the regional peace agreement which calls for their relocation but administration officials say there's no in consistency okay there's a fourth right critique of the government let's look at the facts that lie behind that it's not that the proposal seems to be inconsistent with the spirit of the regional peace agreement it's that it's flatly inconsistent with the wording of the regional peace agreement and it doesn't matter which regional peace agreement you're referring to if you're referring to the Central American Peace Accords of August 1987 they identify one indispensable element they call it for bringing peace to the region and that's the termination of any aid logistical technical propagandistic any aid whatsoever to irregular forces or meaning the Contras attacking from another country there was a more recent agreement just a couple of weeks ago in which the president of the Central American presidents committed themselves all five of them to remove the Contras within to work out plans for removing the countries within 90 days so this is not does not seem to be inconsistent with the spirit of the agreement it's flatly inconsistent with their precise wording it goes on the point goes on there's going to be a vote in Congress about humanitarian aid to the Contras who were convincing Nicaragua to leave in Honduras to leave in Nicaragua and the press is going to refer to this as humanitarian aid as they've been doing all along well the term humanitarian aid has a meaning in fact the meaning was made very precise by the World Court the highest authority on such issues in the very same judgment in which it condemned the United States for its aggression in the garage WA they define humanitarian aid as aid which meet to assess qualify as humanitarian aid aid must meet the hallowed purposes of the Red Cross that is must serve civilians in need and suffering and furthermore to qualify as humanitarian aid aid must be given to civilians on both sides of a conflict without discrimination otherwise just doesn't qualify as humanitarian aid so by the ruling of the world court in effect that's the standard definition what the Media called humanitarian aid isn't humanitarian aid at all it's just military aid to keep a military force in present in a so that they can continue to pose a threat to Nicaragua I should add incidentally that it's very likely that the United States is sending military aid to Contras inside Nicaragua illegally from the Yellow Pongo airbase in San Salvador exactly as we'd been doing all along that was that's what's called the Hasan flows route because it was exposed when the American mercenary Eugene hasenfus was shot down now that had been going on for years and the median knew about it for years and they weren't reporting the scandal came when they were forced to report what they had always known and then some of them were honest of them admitted yeah we knew it all along we weren't reporting in fact they were being informed all along by Nicaraguan intelligence that these flights were coming they were told how many there were where they were you know they got radar sightings it just wasn't the kind of story you report if you're a good commissar so none of it was reported until the plane was shot down with the American mercenary and then you know can't stop reporting well the same Nicaraguan sources that were ignored before and were accurate as everyone concedes are once again reporting that Nicaraguan radar starting to pick up contra flights from the Pongo Air Force Base into Nicaragua and there's no particular reason to doubt that those reports are accurate now but I don't think there's a single reference to these reports in the media at least I've been able to find one and it's not cost they don't know it they came across the AP wire which means everybody knows it and it's not that it's an obscure fact after all that's what whole iran-contra hearings were about it's just that a disciplined press doesn't report things like that now this is a free country so you can find out about it all the readers of barakatuh Internacional the Sandinista newspaper that's put out and you know that's distributed from San Francisco so that's about 1,500 people and so on they could find out so fortunately you know nice not to be in a totalitarian country but the readers of the news our people happen have access to the AP wires and read them all day you know they could find out but people who are looking at the two or reading their newspaper I'm not going to find out though it's pretty important well continuing with humanitarian aid there's going to be a vote on it in a couple of weeks and probably they'll vote it the so-called humanitarian aid that's been given is in violation of the Central American agreements it's actually even in violation of the very Congressional legislation that legislated the 8:00 in other words it's an internal self-contradiction which nobody will point out in the media how's that work it works as follows the Congressional legislation last year to give humanitarian aid stipulated that that aid must be in accord with the Central American agreements and with the ceasefire agreement that had been just settled between the Contras and the government of Nicaragua that's the legislation well that's these fire agreement is quite explicit about the point it says aid may be given to Contras in designated ceasefire zones inside Nicaragua for the purpose of relocating them and reintegrating them into a Nicaraguan society now that's what the so that means the Congressional edge the according to congressional legislation that's the only aid we can give furthermore it says that the aid has to be given by a neutral Carrick carrier well Congress immediately voted to violate its own legislation that it had just passed by designating US aid as the carrier by no stretch of the imagination is that neutral in fact it's not to bother talking about that that's a State Department affiliate which is often functioned as a front for the CIA furthermore the aid was to go to Contras in Honduras not ceasefire zones inside Nicaragua and to maintain them not to assist in their relocation and reintegration in the Nicaraguan society so Congress at once voted to violate its own legislation furthermore the same ceasefire agreements designated a responsible authority to determine how the agreements should be met the authority was the Secretary General of the Organization of American States Secretary General Suarez the America of the organization of the American States as soon as this happened he wrote a letter to George Shultz condemning the United States for carrying out this violation of the ceasefire agreement which in fact even violated the the Congressional legislation none of this has ever been reported as far as I know try to find it somewhere so even the fact that that the responsible Authority at once said the aid is illegal even the fact that the Congressional aid is it is violating even its own alleged stipulations let alone the ceasefire agreement than the regional peace accord none of this is reported and I make a prediction when the issue comes up in a couple of weeks about renewing it you're not going to find any of this reported again well that's the kind of thing you find when you look and you find it all over the place in fact I think you find it near universally I mean it'd be hard to find an exception to it it's to be expected that's the way you'd expect the media to function on pretty plausible assumptions let me return finally to the prediction of the propaganda model that I mentioned however well confirm that maybe it's not going to be part of the discussion it's going to be outside the spectrum of discussion be it's very validity guarantees that for the reasons that I mentioned and that conclusion again is quite well confirmed and one consumed with reasonable confidence that that will continue to be the case [Applause] you've been listening to part one of manufacturing consent the political economy of the mass media a lecture presented by Professor Noam Chomsky at the Wisconsin Union Theatre on the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin on the evening of March 15 1989 this lecture was sponsored by the Wisconsin Union directorates distinguished lecture series for the 1988 1989 academic year for more information about Noam Chomsky and his work please visit the Chomsky archive website at Chomsky info the question and answer session from this presentation may be found in part two of this program you can find part two at the PDX justice media productions web site at PDX Justice O are G or at the PDX justice video channels on YouTube or Vimeo this program was produced by PDX justice Media Productions of Portland Oregon to find out more about our work and to access our growing library of free on-demand streaming video and audio programs please visit our website at PDX justice o RG and write to us with your comments and questions at PDX justice at Riseup net we'd love to hear from you many of our programs are available on DVD and blu-ray video discs please write to us for ordering information thanks for tuning in and thanks for supporting listener sponsored radio public access cable television net neutrality independent bookstores and all forms of grassroots democratic community media

Channel: pdxjustice Media Productions

Views: 89,898

Keywords: Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, media, censorship, Warner Communications, Salman Rushdie, pdxjustice, Edward Herman

Id: -5E6lez9Q3I

Length: 79min 49sec (4789 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 02 2012