Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  MAN: I posed this question to the president of the Chamber of Commerce: “Is economic growth really a desirable thing?” That’s a radical question, and I got an answer to it.

  But it’s not a radical question here, because preventing economic growth is helping business interests in this region. You happen to be in a special position on that issue. Suggest a redistribution of income, increase of business taxes for welfare purposes. Try that.

  WOMAN: But that’s not reporting.

  Why not? He says, “opinions on both sides.” That’s an opinion on both sides.

  Look, one of the things that Edward Herman and I did in Manufacturing Consent was to just look at the sources that reporters go to. In a part that I wrote, I happened to be discussing Central America, so I went through fifty articles by Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times beginning in October 1987, and just asked: whose opinions did he try to get? Well, it turns out that in fifty articles he did not talk to one person in Nicaragua who was pro-Sandinista. Now, there’s got to be somebody—you know, Ortega’s mother, somebody’s got to be pro-Sandinista. Nope, in fact, everybody he quotes is anti-Sandinista. [Daniel Ortega was the Sandinista President.]

  Well, there are polls, which the Times won’t report, and they show that all of the opposition parties in Nicaragua combined had the support of only 9 percent of the population. But they have 100 percent of Stephen Kinzer—everyone he’s found supports the opposition parties, 9 percent of the population. That’s in fifty articles. 56

  MAN: I think your indictment of subtlety is again simplistic. For instance, I read an article you wrote for The Progressive about reporters’ dependence on government sources—that’s really important, you have to get economic figures, you have to develop long-term sources, you can’t get the information otherwise. 57 Why do you have such a low opinion of the readership to think that they’re not going to pick up on the subtlety? It may be in the fifth or sixth paragraph, but you can see the reporter’s own opinion there.

  I don’t understand what you’re saying. What I’m saying is that if you look at the sources reporters select, they are not sources that are expert, they are sources that represent vested interests: that’s propaganda.

  WOMAN: But I don’t think the journalists say that to themselves—they want to think they’re doing an honest job.

  Sure they do, but you can see exactly how it works. Suppose that as a reporter you start going outside of vested interests. You will find, first of all, that the level of evidence that’s required is far higher. You don’t need verification when you go to vested interests, they’re self-verifying. Like, if you report an atrocity carried out by guerrillas, all you need is one hearsay witness. You talk about torture carried out by an American military officer, you’re going to need videotapes. And the same is true on every issue.

  I mean, if a journalist quotes an unnamed “high U.S. government official,” that suffices as evidence. What if they were to quote some dissident, or some official from a foreign government that’s an enemy? Well, they’d have to start digging, and backing it up, and the reporter would have to have mountains of evidence, and expect to pick up a ton of flack, and maybe lose their job, and so on. With factors of that kind, it’s very predictable which way they’re going to go. And reporters generally pick the easy way; I mean, the laziness is phenomenal.

  WOMAN: Would you characterize this media analysis as a “conspiracy theory” at all?

  It’s precisely the opposite of conspiracy theory, actually—in fact, in general this analysis tends to downplay the role of individuals: they’re just replaceable pieces.

  Look, part of the structure of corporate capitalism is that the players in the game try to increase profits and market shares—if they don’t do that, they will no longer be players in the game. Any economist knows this: it’s not a conspiracy theory to point that out, it’s just taken for granted as an institutional fact. If someone were to say, “Oh no, that’s a conspiracy theory,” people would laugh. Well, what we’ve been discussing are simply the institutional factors that set the boundaries for reporting and interpretation in the ideological institutions. That’s the opposite of conspiracy theory, it’s just normal institutional analysis, the kind of analysis you do automatically when you’re trying to understand how the world works. For people to call it “conspiracy theory” is part of the effort to prevent an understanding of how the world works, in my view—“conspiracy theory” has become the intellectual equivalent of a four-letter word: it’s something people say when they don’t want you to think about what’s really going on.

  MAN: What role would you say the alternative media play in the “Propaganda Model”?

  Well, it varies. I think to some extent the alternative media play a role within the “Propaganda Model.” So a lot of what’s called the “alternative media” in the United States is really just a kind of commercialization of freakishness—like 95 percent of the Village Voice, for example, or maybe 99 percent. I regard that as just another technique of marginalization of the public: it’s sort of another version of the National Enquirer, just for a different audience.

  However, to a significant extent the alternative media play a very constructive role—often they present people with an alternative view of the world, and that does make a difference. For example, I travel around giving talks all over the country, and I’ve noticed that in places that have listener-supported radio, there’s just a different feel in the community—there’s a place that people can go to, and relate themselves to, and find out what’s going on, and hear other people, and contribute, and construct a different conception of the world and how it works on a continuing basis. I mean, you feel it right away if something like that is going on, and you feel it if nothing’s going on. The alternative political journals are the same.

  But notice that anything that’s alternative is going to be lacking in resources and lacking in outreach—it’s like alternatives to automobile production: you can do it, but it’s going to be extremely difficult. So I don’t know the details, but I imagine that if you compare the resources behind, say, F.A.I.R. [Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, a left-wing media-monitoring group] and A.I.M. [Accuracy In Media, a right-wing one], you’ll come out with a very good estimate of what’s involved. 58 And it’s only natural that powerful interests wouldn’t want to support genuinely alternative structures—why would an institution function in such a way as to undermine itself? Of course that’s not going to happen.

  WOMAN: Recently on public television there was a series of programs about clandestine activities and the atomic bomb which brought out a lot of information that seemed to go against those powerful interests, though—it was very unusual, the kind of thing you almost never see. I’m wondering what you think its purpose might have been.

  I was extremely surprised at the openness of what was being said: they mentioned Operation MONGOOSE, the assassination attempts on Castro, connections between the Kennedys and the Mafia; they talked about the U.S. recruiting some of the worst Nazis to work for us at the end of World War II. 59 I’m curious why those kinds of things are coming out now: why is it happening at this point, and in such a public forum? You were talking before about things sometimes slipping through the cracks—this is more than slipping through the cracks.

  Well, is it really? How many people saw it? See, and these are pretty activist people, people who are attuned to that sort of thing. And it’s not the first time that this has happened—a lot of this material already appeared in the media, in 1975. So it would be interesting to know exactly why it is coming out now, but some things come to mind right off.

  The first set of exposures was in 1975, which was right after Watergate; the second set of exposures is right now, which happens to be right after Iran-contra. And it’s very typical that after government scandals like these, there’s a period of relative openness in the media, which then closes up again. In fact, there are plenty of journalists who are very well aware of this fact, and who
wait for government scandals to try to sneak through stories which they know they couldn’t get published at other times. I can give you examples of that, if you’d like. And it’s obvious why it’s going to happen: there’s a scandal, so the institutions want to legitimize themselves, and there’s popular pressure, so journalists who want to write about things like this have a little bit of an opening to do it. That may be the reason.

  Incidentally, there are going to be some more exposures in the media in a week or two on the show Frontline—which if P.B.S. runs it (they’re now debating it), will be very interesting. It’s an episode on the Middle East by Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, and from what I’ve heard, it’s extremely well done. So it’s not that these systems are completely closed to dissidents—even on commercial television, there are possibilities. For instance, when Leslie Cockburn was working at C.B.S., she was able to expose information of real importance about U.S. government involvement in drug-running through the contras. I don’t know if some of you saw that, but this was on a national network program, West 57th—tens of millions of people were watching American pilots in jail testifying about how they would fly arms down to the contras and come back with their planes loaded with cocaine, land at Homestead Air Force base in Florida guided in by radar, then trucks would come up and unload the drugs and take them away, all right on the Air Force base. That was on C.B.S. 60

  So there are openings for investigative reporting, and there are people in the media who look for them and find them. In fact, some of the top investigative reporters in the country are very conscious of the way the system works and play it like a violin, just looking for moments when they can sneak stories through. Some of the best-known of them are even more cynical about the media than I am, actually—but they just find ways to work within the system, and often they get out material that’s very important. So people will store up stories on topics they’ve researched, and wait for a time when it’s going to be a little bit more lax and they can put them in. Or they’ll look for the right editor, they write their points very carefully and frame them so they’ll just get by.

  Remember, there really are conflicting values in these systems, and those conflicts allow for possibilities. One value is service to power; another value is professional integrity—and journalists can’t do their job of serving power effectively unless they know how to work with some integrity, but if they know how to work with some integrity, they’re also going to want to exercise that value in other areas. It’s extremely hard to control that conflict, and things certainly do get through sometimes.

  Plus, you know, there also just is a need in the media to present a tolerably accurate picture of the world—and that also creates openings. So for example, take the Wall Street Journal, the prototypical business press: the editorial pages are just comical tantrums, but the news coverage is often quite interesting and well done, they have some of the best reporting in the country, in fact. And I think the reason for that is pretty clear. On the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, the editors can scream and yell and foam at the mouth and nobody cares very much, but people in the business world have to have a realistic picture of what’s happening in the world if they’re going to make sane decisions about their money. Well, that also creates openings, and those openings can often be capitalized on.

  So the main point is not total suppression of information by the media—that’s rare, although it certainly exists. The main point is the shaping of history, the selection, the interpretation that takes place. I mean, just to give one illustration, I doubt that any story ever received the kind of fanatical level of coverage as the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by the Russians in 1983—that was presented as sure proof that the Russians were the worst barbarians since Attila the Hun, and that we therefore had to install missiles in Germany, and step up the war against Nicaragua, and so on. Well, for the month of September 1983 alone, the New York Times index—you know, the very densely printed index of articles that have appeared in the Times—has seven full pages devoted to this story. That’s the index, for one month alone. The liberal Boston Globe on the first day of coverage had I think its first ten full pages devoted to that story and nothing else. I mean, I didn’t check, but I doubt that even the outbreak of the Second World War had that much coverage.

  Alright, there were other events that took place in the midst of all of the furor over the K.A.L. flight—for example, the Times devoted one hundred words and no comment to the following fact: U.N.I.T.A., who are the so-called “freedom fighters” supported by the United States and South Africa in Angola, took credit for downing an Angolan civilian jet plane with 126 people killed. Now, there were no ambiguities in this case: the plane wasn’t off course, there was no R.C.-135 confusing the issue [K.A.L. Flight 007 had flown off course into Soviet airspace, and a U.S. Air Force R.C.-135 spy plane had been patrolling the same area earlier that day]. This was just premeditated mass murder—and that deserved a hundred words and no further comment. 61 A few years earlier, in October 1976, a Cuban airliner was bombed by C.I.A.-backed terrorists, killing 73 civilians. How much coverage was there of that? 62 In 1973, Israel downed a civilian plane lost in a sandstorm over the Suez Canal with 110 people killed. There was no protest, only editorial comments about—I’m quoting from the Times—how “no useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame.” 63 Four days later, Golda Meir [the Israeli Prime Minister] arrived in the United States, and the press troubled her with few embarrassing questions—in fact, she returned home with new gifts of military aircraft. 64 Going back to 1955, an Air India plane carrying the Chinese delegation to the Bandung Conference was blown up in the air in what the Hong Kong police called “a carefully planned mass murder”; an American defector later claimed that he had planted the bomb in the service of the C.I.A. 65 In July 1988, the U.S. warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in a commercial air corridor off the coast of Iran with 290 people killed—out of a need to prove the viability of its high-tech missile system, according to U.S. Navy Commander David Carlson, who was monitoring the event from a nearby ship and said that he “wondered aloud in disbelief.” 66 None of these incidents was held to demonstrate “barbarism,” and in fact all have been quickly forgotten.

  Well, one could offer thousands of such examples, and a lot of people, including me, have done so in print. These are the ways in which history is shaped in the interests of those in power—and that’s the kind of thing I’m saying about the press. The information sometimes is reported, but the media isn’t presenting it. 67

  Honest Subordination

  MAN: I’m wondering how people inside the media tend to respond to this type of institutional critique.

  Well, to draw a broad brush-stroke through it, by and large the media love to be attacked from the right—they love it when they’re attacked as being subversive, adversarial, going so far in their passion to undermine power that they’re destroying democracy, and so on. They even love being told that they’re lying in their commitment to undermine power—there are dramatic examples of this. And it’s obvious why they like it so much: then they can come back and say, as Katharine Graham [owner of the Washington Post] did in a commencement address, well yes, it’s true that in our anti-establishment zeal we sometimes go too far, but that’s the price you have to pay in a free society. It makes great copy.

  On the other hand, if they’re criticized from the opposite side, saying: “Look, you may do your work with a good deal of integrity, but you’re very subordinated to power—indeed servile, often—in the way that you select topics, and shape them, and adopt perspectives,” that they hate. So they don’t like to be told that they’re doing their work honestly but subordinated to power—they much prefer to be told, “You’re dishonest in your efforts to undermine power.”

  To give you a recent example, one of the major right-wing attacks on the media was a huge two-volume study published by an organization called “Freedom House”
(nice Orwellian name) which criticized media coverage of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War, reaching the conclusion that the media basically lost the war for us by their lack of patriotism. 68 The thrust of the study was that the media had lied about the Tet Offensive and had presented a North Vietnamese/Viet Cong defeat as a great victory for the enemy, and had thereby undermined the American war effort. That was the fundamental claim, and to support it they alleged that the media had distorted what people had said, and had falsified the evidence, and so on and so forth. The media loved it, they just lapped it up—and ever since then, that’s been the standard story. 69

  Well, the fact of the matter is that this Freedom House study was immediately exposed as a hoax, in a journalism review which was widely read. I wrote the article. 70 The study was almost a total fraud: when you corrected the hundreds of crucial errors and falsifications, what you were left with was the conclusion that American journalists had covered the Tet Offensive quite honestly, in a very narrow sense—that is, they had described accurately what was in front of their eyes—but they had done it within a framework of patriotic premises which distorted the whole picture quite considerably.