Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  Perpetuating Brainwashing Under Freedom

  MAN: Why is it that across the board in the media you cant find examples of people using their brains?

  You can find them, but typically they’re not in the mainstream press.

  MAN: Why is that?

  Because if they have the capacity to think freely and understand these types of things, they’re going to be kept out by a very complicated filtering system—which actually starts in kindergarten, I think. In fact, the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on—because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions. I mean, it would be highly dysfunctional to have people in the media who could ask questions like this. So by the time you’ve made it to Bureau Chief or Editor, or you’ve become a bigshot at C.B.S. or something, the chances are that you’ve just got all this stuff in your bones—you’ve internalized values that make it clear to you that there are certain things you just don’t say, and in fact, you don’t even think about them anymore.

  This was actually discussed years ago in an interesting essay by George Orwell, which happens to be the introduction to Animal Farm. Animal Farm is a satire on Soviet totalitarianism, obviously, and it’s a very famous book, everybody reads it. But what people don’t usually read is its introduction, which talks about censorship in England—and the main reason people don’t read it is because it was censored, nicely; it simply wasn’t published with the book. It was finally rediscovered about thirty years later and somebody somewhere published it, and now it’s available in some modern editions. But in this essay Orwell said, look, this book is obviously about Stalinist Russia, however it’s not all that different in England. And then he described how things work in England. He said: in England there isn’t any commissar around who beats you over the head if you say the wrong thing, but nevertheless the results are not all that different. And then he had a two-line description of how the press works in England, which is pretty accurate, in fact. One of the reasons why the results are similar, he said, is because the press is owned by wealthy men who have strong interests in not having certain things said. The other, which he said is equally pertinent, is that if you’re a well-educated person in England—you went to the right prep schools, then to Oxford, and now you’re a bigshot somewhere—you have simply learned that there are certain things that it is not proper to say. 14

  And that’s a large part of education, in fact: just internalizing the understanding that there are certain things it is not proper to say, and it is not proper to think, And if you don’t learn that, typically you’ll be weeded out of the institutions somewhere along the line. Well, those two factors are very important ones, and there are others, but they go a long way towards explaining the uniformity of ideology in the intellectual culture here. 15

  Now, of course, it’s not a hundred percent—so you’ll get a few people filtering through who will do things differently. Like I say, in this “United in Joy” business, I was able to find two people in the United States who were not “United in Joy,” and were able to say so in the mainstream press. But if the system is really working well, it’s not going to do things which undermine itself. In fact, it’s a bit like asking, “How come Pravda under Stalin didn’t have journalists denouncing the Gulags [Soviet penal labor camps]?” Why not? Well, it would have been dysfunctional to the system. I suspect it’s not that the journalists in Pravda were lying—I mean, that was a different system, they used the threat of force to silence dissidents, which we don’t use much here. But even in the Soviet Union, chances are very strong that if you actually bothered to look, you’d find that most of the journalists actually believed the things they wrote. And that’s because people who didn’t believe that kind of thing would never have made it onto Pravda in the first place. It’s very hard to live with cognitive dissonance: only a real cynic can believe one thing and say another. So whether it’s a totalitarian system or a free system, the people who are most useful to the system of power are the ones who actually believe what they say, and they’re the ones who will typically make it through.

  So take Tom Wicker at the New York Times: when you talk to him about this kind of stuff, he gets very irate and says, “Nobody tells me what to write.” And that’s perfectly true, nobody tells him what to write—but if he didn’t already know what to write, he wouldn’t be a columnist for the New York Times. Like, nobody tells Alex Cockburn what to write, and therefore he’s not a columnist for the New York Times, because he thinks different things. You think the wrong thoughts, you’re not in the system.

  Now, it’s interesting that the Wall Street Journal allows this one opening, Alex Cockburn. I mean, the opening is so minuscule that it’s not even worth discussing—but it so happens that once a month, there is one mainstream journal in the United States which allows a real dissident to write a free and open column. So that means, like, .0001 percent of the coverage is free and independent. And it’s in the Wall Street Journal, which doesn’t care: for their audience the New York Times is Communist, so here’s a guy who’s even more Communist.

  And the result of all of this is that it’s a very effective system of ideological control—much more effective than Soviet totalitarianism ever was. In fact, if you look at the entire range of media in the Soviet Union that people were actually exposed to, they had much more dissidence in the 1980s than we do, overtly, and people were in fact reading a much broader range of press, listening to foreign broadcasts, and so on—which is pretty much unheard of in the U.S. 16 Or just to give one other example, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, there was even a newscaster [Vladimir Danchev] who made broadcasts over Moscow radio for five successive nights back in 1983, denouncing the Russian invasion of Afghanistan—he actually called it an “invasion”—and calling on the Afghans to resist, before he was finally taken off the air. 17 That’s unimaginable in the United States. I mean, can you imagine Dan Rather or anybody else getting on the radio and denouncing the U.S. “invasion” of South Vietnam, and calling on the Vietnamese to resist? That’s inconceivable. The United States couldn’t have that amount of intellectual freedom.

  MAN: Well, I don’t know if that’s “intellectual freedom,” for a journalist to say that.

  Sure it is. It’s intellectual freedom when a journalist can understand that 2 + 2 = 4; that’s what Orwell was writing about in 1984. Everybody here applauds that book, but nobody is willing to think about what it means. What Winston Smith [the main character] was saying is, if we can still understand that 2 + 2 = 4, they haven’t taken everything away. Okay? Well, in the United States, people can’t even understand that 2 + 2 = 4.

  MAN: Couldn’t an editorialist say it, though, even if a reporter can’t?

  Have any of them done it, in thirty years?

  MAN: I don’t know.

  Well, I’ll tell you, nobody has; I’ve checked, actually. 18

  WOMAN: You make it sound so uniform, though—like there’s only one or two people in the entire U.S. media who aren’t dishonest or blindly serving power.

  Well, that’s really not my point: obviously in any complex institution, there are going to be a fair number of people who want to do their work with integrity, and are good at it, and don’t just end up serving power—these systems aren’t totally monolithic, after all. A lot of people go into journalism with a real commitment to professional integrity—they like the field, and they want to do it honestly. And some of them continue to do an admirable job of it—in fact, some of them even manage to do it at journals like the New York Times.

  In fact, to a large degree I think you can tell when the New York Times’s editors want a story covered accurately just by looking at who they send to the place. For instance, when they send John Kifner, that means they want the story told—because he’s an honest journalist, and he’s going to tell the story. I mean, I don’t know him per
sonally, but you can just tell from his work that he’s a journalist of real integrity, and he’s going to dig, he’s going to find out the truth, and he’s going to write about it—and the editors must know that. So I don’t know anything about how they assign stories at the Times, but I’m willing to make a bet that when there’s a story the Times’s editors want told, they’ll send Kifner, and when his job is done they’ll probably send him back to the “Metro” desk or something.

  On the other hand, most of the people at the Times who make it to be correspondent or editor or whatever tend to be either very obedient or very cynical. The obedient ones have adapted—they’ve internalized the values and believe what they’re saying, otherwise they probably wouldn’t have made it that far. But there are also some plain cynics. James LeMoyne at the Times is a perfect example: James LeMoyne is an absolute crook, he’s one of the most dishonest journalists I’ve ever seen. The dishonesty of his reporting is so extreme, in fact, that it can’t just be indoctrination in his case. Actually, LeMoyne’s tenure as a correspondent in Central America ended up with an exposure so bad that even the Times had to publish an admission about it. Did you follow that?

  In 1988 LeMoyne had written a story which talked about two people in El Salvador who he claimed were tortured by left-wing guerrillas trying to undermine the elections; it was one part of a whole effort in the American press at the time to maintain support for the U.S. client regime in El Salvador despite its atrocities. 19 Well, a freelance journalist in Central America, Chris Norton, saw LeMoyne’s article and was surprised by it, because the atrocities LeMoyne described were supposed to have taken place in an area of the country reporters couldn’t get to, because it was under military occupation. Norton wanted to figure out just how LeMoyne knew about these people being tortured, so he went up as close to that region as he could, and he talked to the mayor, and to the priest, and to people in the community—and he discovered that one of the alleged victims didn’t exist, and the other was perfectly fine. He then went back to San Salvador and did some more checking—and he discovered that LeMoyne had simply taken the story straight from a San Salvadoran newspaper, where it had been attributed to an army officer. It was in fact just straight army disinformation of a standard sort, which LeMoyne then reported in the New York Times as if he knew something about it. Then the State Department picked it up from the New York Times and distributed it to Congress to show that the Salvadoran guerrillas were undermining the election.

  Well, Norton uncovered this, then another freelance journalist, Mark Cooper, picked up Norton’s story and published something about it in the L.A. Weekly, an alternative weekly in Los Angeles. The piece then appeared in the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting journal, Extra!—F.A.I.R. is a very good media analysis group in New York. Still no reaction from the Times. Finally, Alex Cockburn got ahold of it, and mentioned it in his column in The Nation. 20 Well, by that time word was sort of getting around about this, so the Times figured they had to react, and they published a correction—I think it’s the longest correction they’ve ever published, it’s several paragraphs long. It said, our usual high standards were not met in this case, one thing or another like that. 21

  Well, that’s kind of an extreme example—but it’s by no means the only case like that. In fact, just let me mention one other one, which was even more important—here LeMoyne really plied his trade.

  Journalism LeMoyne-Style: A Sample of the Cynical Aspect

  As you know, for years it was necessary for the U.S. government to maintain the pretense that the contras in Nicaragua were a guerrilla force, not a U.S. proxy army. Now, it’s perfectly obvious that they were not a guerrilla force—there are no guerrillas in history that have had anything remotely like the degree of support we gave the contras: there are no guerrillas in history that had three supply flights a day bringing them food and supplies and weapons, and who complained that they didn’t have enough airplanes, and that they needed more helicopters. I mean, the whole thing was completely ridiculous: these guys had armaments that some units of the American army didn’t have, they had computer centers, they had communications equipment. And they needed all of that, because Nicaragua was under constant surveillance by high-performance American reconnaissance aircraft to determine where Sandinista troops were being deployed, and the contras had to have some way of receiving that information. 22

  But the point is, it was necessary for the propaganda system to pretend that the contras were like the F.M.L.N. in El Salvador—just a regular indigenous guerrilla force opposing the government. And part of the method for claiming that these two forces were equivalent was to say that the F.M.L.N. guerrillas also had outside support from a foreign government—in other words, from the government of Nicaragua—and that was the only reason they could survive. Well, it’s conceivable that the F.M.L.N. was getting outside support, but if so, it would have been some kind of a miracle—because it was undetectable. I mean, it’s not that the United States is a primitive, stone-age society: there are technological means around to discover evidence of such things, but they never were able to detect any support coming from Nicaragua at all.

  According to the State Department propaganda, the main arms flow from Nicaragua to the F.M.L.N. was across the Gulf of Fonseca. 23 Well, David MacMichael, who was the C.I.A. analyst in charge of analyzing this material in the early 1980s and then quit the Agency, testified at the World Court and pointed out what this meant. He described the situation: the Gulf of Fonseca is thirty kilometers wide; it’s completely patrolled by the U.S. Navy; there’s an island in the middle of it which had a super-sophisticated U.S. radar system that could pick up boats up and down the Pacific Coast; there were U.S. Navy S.E.A.L. teams running all around the place—yet they never even picked up a canoe. So if Nicaragua were sending arms across the Gulf of Fonseca, they had to have had some super-sophisticated methods. 24 I mean, the Nicaraguans had no problem whatsoever detecting the U.S. arms flow to the contras—they told reporters exactly where it was coming from; it was unreported in the United States, because the reporters chose not to report it, but the Nicaraguans had no problem detecting it. 25 Anyway, that was the propaganda line that had to be maintained in the American press, that was the official story. Now we come back to James LeMoyne.

  The United States government opposed the Central American peace accords that were signed in 1987 [Esquipulas II, the so-called “Arias plan”], so it was therefore necessary to demolish them. And one of the ways of demolishing them was to increase aid to the contras. The press committed itself with great passion to helping this effort along; LeMoyne was right up front. Right after the accords were signed, LeMoyne published an article in which he wrote: there is “ample evidence” that the Salvadoran guerrillas are being supplied with arms by Nicaragua in violation of the peace accords, and without that support the guerrillas couldn’t survive. 26 Alright, that had always been the necessary story, but just then it was especially important to drive it home—because right then the United States was tripling its supply flights to the contras in response to the accords, and of course in violation of the accords. 27 So the press wouldn’t report that we were escalating our support for the contras, but they kept reporting that the Nicaraguans were illegally arming the F.M.L.N. in El Salvador—and now James LeMoyne says that there is “ample evidence” of it.

  Well, when that story appeared, F.A.I.R. wrote a letter to the New York Times, asking them to please have James LeMoyne enlighten their readers about the “ample evidence” of this arms flow to the F.M.L.N.—since the World Court couldn’t find it, and no independent investigator’s been able to find it, and the guys who worked on it in the C.I.A. didn’t know about it: could they please do that? Well, the Times didn’t publish their letter, but F.A.I.R. did get a personal response back from the Foreign Editor, Joseph Lelyveld, who said, yes, maybe LeMoyne’s report was a bit imprecise this time, it didn’t meet his usual high standards, and so on. 28

  Then followed a period in
which the Times had plenty of time to correct the “imprecision”—but instead article after article appeared by LeMoyne, George Volsky, Steven Engelberg and others, repeating exactly the same falsehood: that there was ample evidence of an arms flow from Nicaragua. 29 But F.A.I.R. just kept after them, and finally they got another letter back from Lelyveld, the Foreign Editor—this was around March now, their first letter was in August. Lelyveld said he had recently assigned LeMoyne to do a major story on the arms flow to the F.M.L.N., to really nail the thing down once and for all, and that they should wait for that story. Okay, they waited. Nothing happened. Six months later, they figured nothing was going to happen, so they published this interchange of letters with Lelyveld in the F.A.I.R. newsletter, and said: we don’t see the story, what’s going on? 30

  Two months after that, a story did finally appear in the Times—I think it was LeMoyne’s last story before he left the Times, or whatever he did, took a leave or something. This is now fifteen months after his original story about the “ample evidence,” nine months after he was assigned to do the follow-up. And if you take a look at the article the Times finally published, you’ll discover that the “ample evidence” had turned into no evidence. LeMoyne said: well, there really is no direct evidence of any supply of arms from Nicaragua; some people say this, some people say that, but there’s nothing concrete, there’s nothing to point to. So that’s the end of the story: it turns out the “ample evidence” is no evidence. 31

  Now, that’s no joke—this is fabrication in the service of the state that has led to tens of thousands of people being killed, because maintaining this pretense over the years has been one of the ways in which the U.S. government has supported the terror in El Salvador and extended the war against Nicaragua. It’s not a small point. This is serious lying, very serious. And it’s just one of thousands of cases demonstrating that the media in the United States serve the interests of state-corporate power, they are organs of propaganda, as in fact one would expect them to be. 32