Noam Chomsky (19 page)
Authors: Wolfgang B. Sperlich
In the first instance, Chomsky has not been very ‘media savvy’ when it comes to his own public appearances, not minding if people record his speeches on audio and video, or worrying who holds the copyrights to his interviews. It was only as he reached a sort of celebrity status, with people following him wherever he went and recording it all for posterity, that he accepted some advice and half-heartedly employed a sort of media consultant to look after things like copyright and royalties. When two Canadian filmmakers, Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick, approached him in the early 1990s with their project to shoot the film
Manufacturing Consent
, Chomsky said, sure, go ahead, and do whatever you have to do. After all, these guys weren’t in it for the money. It wasn’t Hollywood. Not that Chomsky took an active interest in the proceedings. Anyway, he had been on television before, in North America, Europe, on the
BBC
and even on Dutch television with Foucault. So Achbar and Wintonick shot new footage and used old material, mainly of Chomsky talking and giving speeches. Available news footage relating to topics such as Indonesia and East Timor were also used. The finished product,
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media
, was first screened in 1992 and an entry in Wikipedia (the free online encyclopaedia) informs us that until 2003 ‘it was the most successful documentary in Canadian history, playing theatrically in over 300 cities around the world; winning 22 awards; appearing in more than 50 international film festivals; and being broadcast in over 30 markets. It has also been translated into a dozen languages.’
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Incredibly perhaps, Chomsky has claimed that he has never seen the film and is unlikely to do so. Reason? ‘I hate watching or hearing myself.’
17
I can perhaps understand the stance, having had such an experience myself. But then again, nobody bothered to repeat the experience so that I might eventually get accustomed to it. Surely Chomsky must have had the odd peek himself, since by 2005 his filmography lists a staggering 28 titles in which he appears?
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Alas, he admits to only one, when he was asked to lead a discussion section while Mark Achbar’s documentary
The Corporation
was shown in a small Cambridge theatre – and saw himself on the screen.
It is probably safe to say that many of his screen appearances are less than exciting, and not worth watching if you’ve read the book or heard the talk in person (or listened to the audio tape). The latest offering is a case in point: the 2005
DVD
version of
Noam Chomsky: Rebel without a Pause
(originally a Canadian television production released in 2003). A film crew (surely shooting on a shoestring budget, judging by the quality of the footage) follows Chomsky around for a week on a public lecturing and speaking tour at a university in Canada. Interspersed with a few short interviews with others, including Carol Chomsky, the rest is all of Chomsky speaking, from the lectern and in discussion groups. The visuals are rather boring. If I were Chomsky I wouldn’t watch it either. It’s like watching oneself in the mirror for 60 minutes or so. Perhaps he should withdraw permission for it to be screened in public. It is most definitely a media matter because Chomsky is fast becoming a media commodity, to be released onto a sizeable market of left-of-centre consumers who watch the movie but never read the book. Still, it’s only a storm in a teacup when compared to the real media issues contained in the real
Manufacturing Consent
.
Book and film made Chomsky’s name like nothing else before – and possibly since. It seems a bit unfair on Herman, who wrote, after all, most of the book. Yet he and Chomsky remain close: in 2003, for example, he defended his co-author against a slanderous article, ‘My Very, Very Allergic Reaction to Noam Chomsky: Khmer Rouge, Faurisson, Milosevic’, written by Brad Delong, a neo-liberal economist. Herman’s rebuttal was aptly titled: ‘My Very, Very Allergic Reaction to Brad Delong on Chomsky’.
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Given that Herman and Chomsky had established a very plausible ‘propaganda model’, it seemed inevitable that Chomsky would have to follow up and comment on world events as time passes, stripping away the layers of propaganda, telling us what the real news is and what not. He does not disappoint. Since
Manufacturing Consent
there have been many talks, articles and books dealing specifically with mass-media issues – far too numerous to list here. Only one year after the publication of
Manufacturing Consent
, Chomsky published
Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies
. Once more, it is uncompromising in its denunciation of all that is wrong with the
US
and like-minded democracies:
The poster for Chomsky’s talk given at the University of Florida, 2003.
I will be primarily concerned with one aspect: thought control, as conducted through the agency of the national media and related elements of the elite intellectual culture. There is, in my opinion, much too little inquiry into these matters. My personal feeling is that citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self-defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for more meaningful democracy. It is this concern that motivates the material that follows, and much of the work cited in the course of the discussion.
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Much wider in scope than
Manufacturing Consent
, this book nevertheless has its main focus on the American media, particularly in the first chapter, which is entitled ‘Democracy and the Media’. Again supported by voluminous footnotes and appendices, there is an emphasis on the data that in turn leads to inescapable conclusions, harsh as they may be. Furthermore there is the strong historical aspect that points to previous studies and points of view, so that the reader may see the evolution of particular developments and be in a better position to react to deep-rooted social phenomena. Chomsky’s views on democracy are particularly revealing, inasmuch as they are a devastating critique of the status quo. Three main themes emerge:
Capitalist democracy of the West equals Soviet-style democracy of the East.
Authoritarian American democracy started with the Founding Fathers.
The masses are denied access to democracy run by specialist classes.
In almost biblical terms Chomsky rails against those who perpetuate the crime of withholding true democracy from ordinary people:
At its root, the logic is that of the Grand Inquisitor, who bitterly assailed Christ for offering people freedom and thus condemning them to misery. The Church must correct the evil work of Christ by offering the miserable mass of humanity the gift they most desire and need: absolute submission. It must ‘vanquish freedom’ so as ‘to make men happy’ and provide the total ‘community of worship’ that they avidly seek. In the modern secular age, this means worship of the state religion, which in the Western democracies incorporates the doctrine of submission to the masters of the system of public subsidy, private profit, called free enterprise. The people must be kept in ignorance, reduced to jingoist incantations, for their own good. And like the Grand Inquisitor, who employs the forces of miracle, mystery, and authority ‘to conquer and hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness’ and to deny them the freedom of choice they so fear and despise, so the ‘cool observers’ must create the ‘necessary illusions’ and ‘emotionally potent oversimplifications’ that keep the ignorant and stupid masses disciplined and content.
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Note that the expression ‘necessary illusions’ (and the book’s title) are derived from Reinhold Niebuhr (1932), an influential American intellectual commissar who espoused such views. One must be reminded that Chomsky, as an anarcho-syndicalist, is bound to be dismissive of any style of democracy that lacks full participation of the masses, organized at local level. The implications for the media, in terms of a truly democratic model, are not really addressed in either
Manufacturing Consent
or
Necessary Illusions
, unless one is able to make the jump from what the media is to what it should be. By describing the faults of any system one should be able to discern the correct system, which in terms of democracy and the media are common sense ideas for Chomsky that need no great elaboration. He does provide the occasional hint though, by lending his support to grassroots efforts to ‘democratise the media’ in a meaningful way:
Under the heading ‘Brazilian bishops support plan to democratize media,’ a church-based South American journal describes a proposal being debated in the constituent assembly that ‘would open up Brazil’s powerful and highly concentrated media to citizen participation.’ ‘Brazil’s Catholic bishops are among the principal advocates [of this]… legislative proposal to democratize the country’s communications media,’ the report continues, noting that ‘Brazilian
TV
is in the hands of five big networks [while]… eight huge multinational corporations and various state enterprises account for the majority of all communications advertising.’ The proposal ‘envisions the creation of a National Communications Council made up of civilian and government representatives [that]… would develop a democratic communications policy and grant licenses to radio and television operations.’ ‘The Brazilian Conference of Catholic Bishops has repeatedly stressed the importance of the communications media and pushed for grassroots participation. It has chosen communications as the theme of its 1989 Lenten campaign,’ an annual ‘parish-level campaign of reflection about some social issue’ initiated by the Bishops’ Conference.
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That such efforts are anathema in the United States is of course not surprising. Still, Chomsky is forever pointing out that all is not lost and that the odd individual in American power structures, past and present, does contribute worthwhile judgements, for example Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1919, whom Chomsky lauds for saying that, in a typically unorthodox interpretation of ‘free market’, ‘the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market’ through ‘free trade in ideas’.
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At least one can attribute such optimism to the hard sciences, where the filters are least strong. But pessimism might be called for in the social and political world, where the filters of control are overwhelming.
Following on, it must be said that Chomsky’s work on media issues has had a deep impact on the rise of the alternative media in the
US
and internationally. Today there are literally thousands of so-called alternative radio stations, Internet sites and publishers who often feature the work of Chomsky. Lydia Sargent and Michael Albert, for example, established South End Press, which has published many of Chomsky’s books, including
Necessary Illusions
. Being technologically savvy, they have since spawned
z Magazine and z Net
, which has an incredible amount of material available online, enough to make any political activist’s heart sing.
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Another Chomsky fan in the
US
media world is Roger Leisner of Radio Free Maine, which describes itself as ‘Voices of the Left – Unedited and Uncensored’.
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Leisner is one of those enthusiasts who follows Chomsky with camera and microphone to record every word he utters in public: he has a selection of more than a hundred audio and video tapes, all for sale at cost price. Indeed, radio is Chomsky’s favourite medium. Even in New Zealand, where virtually all the ‘voices of the left’ are in deep sleep, there is a small radio station called, you guessed it, Radio Chomsky.
Let us conclude, though, with yet another seminal contribution to mass-media issues. It is the second edition of
Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda
(2002). Typical of recent Chomsky publications, it is a compilation of the old and the new, the former of which was published in 1991 under the same title. The ‘new’ includes an article entitled ‘The Journalist from Mars’, which in turn is based on a talk given at the celebrations for the fifteenth anniversary of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (
FAIR
) in New York on 23 January 2002. As a final retort to journalists and newspaper publishers everywhere, let us check out this Martian metaphor, which has been applied by Chomsky and many others before in an effort to demonstrate how crazy these so-called humans on Planet Earth really are. Chomsky begins by asking ‘how the media have handled the major story of the past months, the issue of the “war on terrorism,” so-called, specifically in the Islamic world’. Then he introduces his man from Mars – gender implications included:
Let’s approach this by kind of a thought experiment. Imagine an intelligent Martian – I’m told that by convention, Martians are males, so I’ll refer to it as ‘he’. Suppose that this Martian went to Harvard and Columbia Journalism School and learned all kinds of high-minded things, and actually believes them. How would the Martian handle a story like this?
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