Noam Chomsky Calls Out "Liberal" Media For What it is.

Noam Chomsky calls it like he sees it

Ajaz Ashraf, Anuradha Raman Interview Noam Chomsky

  

“Western media submits to an intellectual culture restricting any analysis and criticism of state action.”

	“Liberal media doesn’t discuss attacks on civil rights today, for they are coming from the Obama administration.”

The major media, the New York Times and so on, tend to be what is called liberal. That implies they are highly supportive of state power, state violence and state crimes.

Their major commitment is to the centres of power—state and private. For example, there are major attacks on civil rights today but because those are coming from the Obama administration, the liberal media barely discusses the violations.

Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism. It enables the elite to dull the will of people, depriving them of the capacity to make political choices?

Back in the 1920s, it was openly called propaganda. But the word acquired a bad flavour with Nazism in the 1930s. So now, it’s not called propaganda any more. But they were right in the 1920s.

The huge public relations industry, for example, has as its goal to control attitudes and beliefs. Liberal commentators, like Walter Lippmann, said we have to manufacture consent and keep the rabble away from the decision-making.

We are the responsible men, we have to make decisions and we have to be protected “from the trampling under the rage of the bewildered herd—the public”.

In the democratic process, we are the participants, they watch. And the task of intellectuals, media and so on is to make sure that they are quiet, subdued and obedient.

That is the view from the liberal end of the spectrum. Yes, I don’t doubt that the media is liberal in that sense. The media becomes the voice of the government and elite.

In his introduction to Animal Farm, George Orwell writes that the British (the audience for which he was writing) should not be too complacent about his satire on the crimes of the totalitarian enemy.

He said in free England unacceptable ideas could be suppressed voluntarily, without the use of force. He says the reasons are that the press is owned by wealthy men who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed.

In the more modern period, generally, the media are either big corporations or parts of mega corporations or closely linked to the government.

The other reason, maybe more significant, is that if you have a good education, you would have instilled into you that there are certain things that it just wouldn’t do to say.