Noam Chomsky (17 page)
Authors: Wolfgang B. Sperlich
Something that young Noam soon learned was that there were the
News
and
Mirror
type of tabloids that everybody bought – if only for the sports sections – and that there were all these alternative media in the style of pamphlets, news sheets, journals, magazines that practically nobody bought. Why was that? He would have found out when he also visited the offices of the
Freie Arbeiter Stimme
(Fraye Arbeter Shtime/ Free Voice of Labour), a weekly Jewish anarchist-orientated paper at 45 West 17th Street. Staffed by volunteers, it was operated on a shoe-string budget. The only income came from selling copies of the weekly – which few people bought. They obviously didn’t get any advertising revenue from big or small business – well, they weren’t exactly in favour of private property. They disseminated information for the sake of information. It was a labour of love. The tabloid news, on the other hand, were big business. If young Chomsky had had the opportunity to visit the headquarters of William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire he would have been able to make the comparison without having to read about it in the
Freie Arbeiter Stimme
. In addition, just by standing for a time on a street corner in New York, he would have seen glimpses of that other American Dream – the super rich, the famous, the powerful – as gloated over in the society pages of the tabloid press. Read all about it! Citizen Kane! Income from the sale of copies is peanuts. Income from advertising is hugely profitable. News is secondary, if even that. Still, the tabloids shape public opinion, and that is something to think about. Chomsky thought about it a lot. His much older radical friends derided anyone who read, let alone bought, a copy of the daily tabloid press. How about studying the enemy instead of ignoring him? Not that the young Chomsky would say so at that time, but eventually he became an expert media analyst who dissected the American media industry like no other before him. This is the story of how he got there.
One important skill he acquired early on was learned from his father, who as a Jewish scholar valued text not only for its own sake, but as a means to instigate a kind of internal dialogue, talking back to the text, as it were. This tradition gives rise to the fine art of textual interpretation, annotation and the systematic archiving of any such secondary text. Excellent mental organization is called for, especially as Chomsky’s filing system to this day consists of random piles of papers stacked all over the place. At least by the time Chomsky became seriously interested in linguistics he could draw on these skills and thus assemble a vast amount of notes that turned into articles and books with amazing speed. When it comes to reading newspapers every day, many people absorb a vast amount of information, often quite randomly and unrelated, and by the next day most of it is forgotten. Occasionally one strains to remember where one read such and such, for it would be good to have that information at hand now. There are those on the other hand who are like collectors of ‘useful’ junk, just in case it will come in handy one day. Whenever they read an interesting article they cut it out and file it away. It may come in handy. Chomsky developed this, too, into a fine art. Look at any of his popular books on politics and current affairs and you will see a plethora of notes that direct the reader to articles that appeared in any number of newspapers. A casual count of the notes in his book
Hegemony or Survival yields
a total of 456 notes, some 212 of which refer to newspapers or news magazines.
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Newspapers and news magazines quoted include the
New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Guardian, Newsweek, Observer, Independent, Irish Times, Economist, Al-Ahram Weekly, Ha’aretz, Jerusalem Post and Newsday
. Nobody can accuse Chomsky of citing only obscure sources!
Chomsky in his new office with a poster of Bertrand Russell.
‘All the news that’s fit to print’ is the motto of the
New York Times
– a fitting tribute to all the news media, as it unashamedly asserts the editorial policy of someone deciding what is – and what is not – ‘fit’ to print. Even when a news item has been deemed ‘fit’ to be printed, there is a wide range of perspectives as to how such an item gets reported. Every newspaper has a political slant – the alternative press included. It is a moot point whether newspapers write for a certain readership or whether they create one, but the effect is the same. When the
Daily Mail was
launched in England in 1896 the Marquess of Salisbury termed the symbiotic relationship as ‘written by office boys for office boys’.
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Chomsky knew all that when he was a boy too. What he also learned was that the media is not only a benign ‘fourth estate’ that keeps governments and the business community honest, but that it can have very sinister dimensions, especially when the media becomes a tool of propaganda.
He would have learned that from many sources on his reading list, but George Orwell in particular would have confirmed his suspicions. Orwell’s powerful metaphor of ‘newspeak’, whereby language itself becomes subservient to propaganda, can be applied to many a news article ever since. Orwell, whose early work Chomsky much admires, was essentially a reporter who chronicled what he read and what he saw, commenting with devastating honesty and wit on the discrepancies between the two. Quite naturally Chomsky came to adopt Orwell’s style, even if Chomsky initially grappled more with the discrepancies between what he read in mainstream press reports and anarcho-syndicalist pamphlets.
Steven Fischer, Wolfgang Sperlich and Carol and Noam Chomsky in New Zealand, 1998.
As Chomsky, following Orwell, began to travel the world and actually saw many of the things that do or don’t get reported in the daily ‘foreign’ news, his perspective became broader and he could comment – as did Orwell – on the discrepancies between what he had seen and experienced (and/or researched) and what was being reported back home. And as Barsky has put it perceptively, ‘the measurement of the distance between the realities presented by these two sources, and the evaluation of why such a gap exists, remained a passion for Chomsky’.
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The operative word here is ‘measurement’. Here Orwell and Chomsky diverge. Chomsky applies his scientific mind to the task of ‘measuring’ the discrepancies, resulting not in any great literary effort, but in exceptionally well researched treatises on the role of the mass media. Even so Chomsky’s language is not obscured by scientific jargon – indeed he is twice winner of the Orwell Award, granted by the National Council of Teachers of English for ‘Distinguished Contributions to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language’. It is a fitting award, in view of some criticism that his language is often dense and difficult to follow.
The actual effort in making detailed media ‘measurements’ might never have happened without the meeting of minds, namely the notable collaboration between Edward S. Herman and Chomsky. They came into contact with one another during the late 1960s, when Herman was a lecturer in finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, but with a passion for media analysis, especially as related to the Vietnam War which was raging at the time. They corresponded on these matters, exchanging ideas and articles they had written or were about to write, and before long they developed a synergy that led to the idea to write something together. The first such effort ready for publication was
Counter-Revolutionary Violence
(1973). As detailed in the previous chapter it was taken out of circulation, after it was printed, by the parent company of the publisher, namely Warner Communications. Not an auspicious beginning for a pair of media analysts! A French translation appeared in 1974, but this was not exactly to the liking of the authors either. Chomsky says that ‘it was mistranslated to satisfy the ideological needs of the French left at that time’.
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Chomsky and Herman kept working on the original version and a much expanded version appeared only in 1979 as part of the two-volume set of
The Political Economy of Human Rights
. Indeed Herman later cautioned an Internet website that wanted to post the original
Counter-Revolutionary Violence
as follows:
I presume you understand that Chomsky and I greatly expanded and improved
Counterrevolutionary Violence
in the two volume set we put out in 1979 under the general heading of the
Political Economy of Human Rights
. In the first volume,
The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism
, we had a Prefatory Note that describes the suppression of
CRV
. If you want to put
CRV
onto the Web, it is important that you add a prefatory note pointing out that
CRV
was greatly expanded and improved in a two volume set, the first volume, [title], the second volume
After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology
, both still available from South End Press.
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Despite the difficult gestation of their first effort, Herman and Chomsky persevered and continued their work together, culminating in
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
(1988). A classic in its own right,
Manufacturing Consent
became a byword for a generation or more of media watchers. The authors begin by pointing out that their idea of a ‘propaganda model’ as applied to the
US
mass media is nothing new; indeed the very term ‘manufacturing consent’ was coined by Walter Lippmann, an influential American columnist writing in the 1920s. What is new is the way in which the present analysis is undertaken. Herman as the economics and finance expert shines through when they announce that their analysis is a ‘free market analysis with the results largely an outcome of the workings of the market forces’.
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It just turns out that the ‘free market’ isn’t so free after all. It is in fact very much a ‘guided market system’, with mostly voluntary self-censorship in the first instance.
Cover of Herman and Chomsky’s
Manufacturing Consent
.
Perhaps one should pause here and explain the use of the term ‘free market’, as it is usually akin to the red rag dangled by the capitalist matador before the enraged bull of Socialism. The consolidated Left sneers at the author of the famous phrase of the ‘invisible hand’ of the free and capitalist market fixing all there is to fix – Adam Smith. Surprisingly perhaps, Chomsky has defended Adam Smith, and his seminal book
Wealth of Nations
(1776), by noting that Smith has said no such thing. Indeed what Smith did say was that the effort of the individual worker contributes to the common good more than any effort directed from above:
Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it… By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for society that it was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.
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