Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (4 page)

Look, every government has a need to frighten its population, and one way of doing that is to shroud its workings in mystery. The idea that a government has to be shrouded in mystery is something that goes back to Herodotus [ancient Greek historian]. You read Herodotus, and he describes how the Medes and others won their freedom by struggle, and then they lost their freedom when the institution of royalty was invented to create a cloak of mystery around power.
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See, the idea behind royalty was that there’s this other species of individuals who are beyond the norm and who the people are not supposed to understand. That’s the standard way you cloak and protect power: you make it look mysterious and secret, above the ordinary person—otherwise why should anybody accept it? Well, they’re willing to accept it out of fear that some great enemies are about to destroy them, and because of that they’ll cede their authority to the Lord, or the King, or the President or something, just to protect themselves. That’s the way governments work—that’s the way
any
system of power works—and the secrecy system is part of it.

Clandestine terror is a different part of it—if the public will not support direct intervention and violence, then you have to keep it secret from them somehow. So in a way, I think the scale of clandestine government activities is a pretty good measure of the popular dissidence and activism in a country—and clandestine activities shot way up during the Reagan period. That tells you something right there about popular “empowerment”: it’s a reflection of people’s power that the government was forced underground. That’s a victory, you know.

W
OMAN
: Doesn’t seem like much of a victory
.

Well, it depends what you look at. If you look at 200,000 corpses in Central America, it doesn’t seem like much of a victory. But if you look at ten million people who are still alive, it does seem like a victory. It depends where you’re looking. You don’t win what you’d like to win, but you could have lost a lot more.

For example, take El Salvador in the 1980s. The purpose of U.S. policies there was to wipe out the popular organizations and support a traditional Latin American-style regime that would ensure the kind of business climate we expect in the region. So the independent press was destroyed, the political opposition was murdered, priests and labor organizers were murdered, and so on and so forth—and U.S. planners figured they had the problem licked. Well, today it’s right back, it’s right back where it was. New people came up, the organizations are forming again. It’s at a lower level, of course, because there’s been so much destruction, but they’re right back. That wouldn’t have happened if we’d sent in B-52s and the 82nd Airborne. So there is kind of a margin for survival in the Third World that relates to the degree of American dissidence.

Or take the hurricane in Nicaragua [in October 1988]. Well, it was devastating, the country may not survive in fact. But the possibility of survival will come from American dissidents. I mean, there’s been a tremendous amount of hurricane relief raised—Quest for Peace, which is a dozen people at a Jesuit Center in Hyattsville, Maryland, has raised several million dollars in hurricane relief all by themselves, without any funds or any outreach, no media, nothing. Raising several million dollars with no resources is not easy—try it sometime. But that can be done because there’s a large part of the American population which is just out of the system: they don’t believe what the government tells them, they don’t accept anything; they may not have any organization or any media or anything like that, but they’re there, and they can be reached, by letter if nothing else. And that can provide a kind of margin for survival in the Third World.

The Media: An Institutional Analysis

M
AN
: You mentioned the media being only slightly open to dissidents. I’m wondering how long it has been the case that the American government and other powerful interests in the country could count on the participation of the major media when it comes to framing topics and reporting issues more or less the way they want them reported?

Well, you know, I haven’t looked at the entire history, but I would guess since about 1775.

M
AN
: That long?

If you look back at the Revolutionary War period, you’ll find that Revolutionary War leaders, people like Thomas Jefferson (who’s regarded as a great libertarian, and with some reason), were saying that people should be punished if they are, in his words, “traitors in thought but not in deed”—meaning they should be punished if they
say
things that are treacherous, or even if they
think
things that are treacherous. And during the Revolutionary War, there was vicious repression of dissident opinion.
  ³¹

Well, it just goes on from there. Today the methods are different—now it’s not the threat of force that ensures the media will present things within a framework that serves the interests of the dominant institutions, the mechanisms today are much more subtle. But nevertheless, there is a complex system of filters in the media and educational institutions which ends up ensuring that dissident perspectives are weeded out, or marginalized in one way or another. And the end result is in fact quite similar: what are called opinions “on the left” and “on the right” in the media represent only a limited spectrum of debate, which reflects the range of needs of private power—but there’s essentially nothing beyond those “acceptable” positions.

So what the media do, in effect, is to take the set of assumptions which express the basic ideas of the propaganda system, whether about the Cold War or the economic system or the “national interest” and so on, and then present a range of debate
within
that framework—so the debate only enhances the strength of the assumptions, ingraining them in people’s minds as the entire possible spectrum of opinion that there is. So you see, in our system what you might call “state propaganda” isn’t expressed as such, as it would be in a totalitarian society—rather it’s implicit, it’s presupposed, it provides the framework for debate among the people who are admitted into mainstream discussion.

In fact, the nature of Western systems of indoctrination is typically not understood by dictators, they don’t understand the utility for propaganda purposes of having “critical debate” that incorporates the basic assumptions of the official doctrines, and thereby marginalizes and eliminates authentic and rational critical discussion. Under what’s sometimes been called “brainwashing under freedom,” the critics, or at least, the “responsible critics” make a major contribution to the cause by bounding the debate within certain acceptable limits—that’s why they’re tolerated, and in fact even honored.

M
AN
: But what exactly are these “filters” that create this situation—how does it actually
work
that really challenging positions are weeded out of the media?

Well, to begin with, there are various layers and components to the American media—the
National Enquirer
that you pick up in the supermarket is not the same as the
Washington Post
, for example. But if you want to talk about presentation of news and information, the basic structure is that there are what are sometimes called “agenda-setting” media: there are a number of major media outlets that end up setting a basic framework that other smaller media units more or less have to adapt to. The larger media have the essential resources, and other smaller media scattered around the country pretty much have to take the framework which the major outlets present and adapt to it—because if the newspapers in Pittsburgh or Salt Lake City want to know about Angola, say, very few of them are going to be able to send their own correspondents and have their own analysts and so on.
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Well, if you look at these larger media outlets, they have some crucial features in common. First of all, the agenda-setting institutions are big corporations; in fact, they’re mega-corporations, which are highly profitable—and for the most part they’re also linked into even bigger conglomerates.
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And they, like other corporations, have a product to sell and a market they want to sell it to: the product is audiences, and the market is advertisers. So the economic structure of a newspaper is that it sells readers to other businesses. See, they’re not really trying to sell newspapers to people—in fact, very often a journal that’s in financial trouble will try to cut
down
its circulation, and what they’ll try to do is up-scale their readership, because that increases advertising rates.
  ³⁴
So what they’re doing is selling audiences to other businesses, and for the agenda-setting media like the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
and the
Wall Street Journal
, they’re in fact selling very privileged, elite audiences to other businesses—overwhelmingly their readers are members of the so-called “political class,” which is the class that makes decisions in our society.

Okay, imagine that you’re an intelligent Martian looking down at this system. What you see is big corporations selling relatively privileged audiences in the decision-making classes to other businesses. Now you ask, what picture of the world do you expect to come out of this arrangement? Well, a plausible answer is, one that puts forward points of view and political perspectives which satisfy the needs and the interests and the perspectives of the buyers, the sellers, and the market. I mean, it would be pretty surprising if that
weren’t
the case. So I don’t call this a “theory” or anything like that—it’s virtually just an observation. What Ed Herman and I called the “Propaganda Model” in our book on the media [
Manufacturing Consent
] is really just a kind of truism—it just says that you’d expect institutions to work in their own interests, because if they didn’t they wouldn’t be able to function for very long. So I think that the “Propaganda Model” is primarily useful just as a tool to help us think about the media—it’s really not much deeper than that.
  ³⁵

Testing the “Propaganda Model”

W
OMAN
: Could you give us kind of a thumbnail sketch of how you’ve used that tool?

Well, essentially in
Manufacturing Consent
what we were doing was contrasting two models: how the media
ought
to function, and how they
do
function. The former model is the more or less conventional one: it’s what the
New York Times
recently referred to in a book review as the “traditional Jeffersonian role of the media as a counter-weight to government”—in other words, a cantankerous, obstinate, ubiquitous press, which must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the right of the people to know, and to help the population assert meaningful control over the political process.
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That’s the standard conception of the media in the United States, and it’s what most of the people in the media themselves take for granted. The alternative conception is that the media will present a picture of the world which defends and inculcates the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate the domestic economy, and who therefore also largely control the government. According to this “Propaganda Model,” the media serve their societal purpose by things like the way they select topics, distribute their concerns, frame issues, filter information, focus their analyses, through emphasis, tone, and a whole range of other techniques like that.

Now, I should point out that none of this should suggest that the media always will agree with state policy at any given moment. Because control over the government shifts back and forth between various elite groupings in our society, whichever segment of the business community happens to control the government at a particular time reflects only
part
of an elite political spectrum, within which there are sometimes tactical disagreements. What the “Propaganda Model” in fact predicts is that this entire
range
of elite perspectives will be reflected in the media—it’s just there will be essentially nothing that goes beyond it.

Alright, how do you prove this? It’s a big, complex topic, but let me just point out four basic observations to start with, then we can go into more detail if you like. The first point is that the “Propaganda Model” actually has a fair amount of elite advocacy. In fact, there’s a very significant tradition among elite democratic thinkers in the West which claims that the media and the intellectual class in general
ought
to carry out a propaganda function—they’re supposed to marginalize the general population by controlling what’s called “the public mind.”
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This view has probably been the dominant theme in Anglo-American democratic thought for over three hundred years, and it remains so right until the present. You can trace the thinking on this back to the first major popular-democratic revolution in the West, the English Civil War in the 1640s [an armed conflict between supporters of the King and the Parliament for sovereignty over England from 1642 to 1648].

See, elites on both sides of the Civil War in England—on the one hand the landed gentry and rising merchant class, who were aligned with Parliament, and on the other the Royalists, who represented more traditional elite groupings—were very worried about all the popular ferment that was starting to develop in the context of the elite struggle. I mean, there were popular movements springing up which were challenging everything—the relationship between master and servant, the right of authority altogether; there was a lot of radical publishing taking place because the printing press had just been invented, and so on and so forth. And elites on both sides of the Civil War were very worried that the general population suddenly was beginning to get out of control. As they put it, the people are becoming “so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule.”
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So both the King and the Parliament were losing the capacity to coerce, and they had to react to that.