Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (5 page)

Well, the first thing they tried to do was to reintroduce the capacity to coerce: there was an absolutist state for a time, and then the King was restored [Charles II regained the throne in 1660 after several years of rule by Oliver Cromwell’s military administration]. But they couldn’t change everything back, they couldn’t regain total control, and a lot of what the popular movements had been fighting for slowly began to work its way into the development of British political democracy [e.g. constitutional monarchy was established in 1689 and a Bill of Rights adopted]. And ever since then, every time popular movements have succeeded in dissolving power to a certain extent, there has been a deepening recognition among elites in the West that as you begin to lose the power to control people by force, you have to start to control what they think. And in the United States, that recognition has reached its apogee.

So in the twentieth century, there’s a major current of American thought—in fact, it’s probably the dominant current among people who think about these things (political scientists, journalists, public relations experts and so on)—which says that precisely because the state has lost the power to coerce, elites need to have more effective propaganda to control the public mind. That was Walter Lippmann’s point of view, for example, to mention probably the dean of American journalists—he referred to the population as a “bewildered herd”: we have to protect ourselves from “the rage and trampling of the bewildered herd.” And the way you do it, Lippmann said, is by what he called the “manufacture of consent”—if you don’t do it by force, you have to do it by the calculated “manufacture of consent.”
  ³⁹

Back in the 1920s, the major manual of the public relations industry actually was titled
Propaganda
(in those days, people were a little bit more honest). It opens saying something like this: the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is a central feature of a democratic system—the wording is virtually like that. Then it says: it is the job of the “intelligent minorities” to carry out this manipulation of the attitudes and opinions of the masses.
  ⁴⁰
And really that’s the leading doctrine of modern liberal-democratic intellectual thought: that if you lose the power to control people by force, you need better indoctrination.
  ⁴¹

Alright, that’s the first point about the “Propaganda Model”—it has traditionally been supported and advocated by a substantial part of the elite intellectual tradition. The second point I’ve already mentioned—it’s that the “Propaganda Model” has a kind of prior plausibility: if you look at their institutional structure, you’d expect that the corporate media
would
serve a propaganda function in a business-dominated society like ours. A third point is that the general public actually tends to agree with the basic features of the “Propaganda Model.” So contrary to what’s usually said, if you look at poll results, most of the public thinks that the media are too conformist and too subservient to power—it’s very different from the media’s self-image, obviously, but that’s the public’s image of them.
  ⁴²

Well, from just these three initial observations—elite advocacy, prior plausibility, and the public’s perspective—you would at least draw one conclusion: that the “Propaganda Model” ought to be a part of the ongoing
debate
about how the media function. You would think that would be enough grounds to make it a part of the discussion you often hear presented about the media’s role, right? Well, it never is a part of that discussion: the “debate” is always over whether the media are too extreme in their undermining of authority and their criticism of power, or whether they are simply serving their “traditional Jeffersonian role” as a check on power. This other position—which says that there
is
no “traditional Jeffersonian role,” and that the media, like the intellectual community in general, are basically subservient to power—is never part of the discussion at all. And there’s a very good reason why that’s the case, actually—because discussing the “Propaganda Model” would
itself
be dysfunctional to the institutions, so therefore it simply is excluded. The “Propaganda Model” in fact
predicts
that it won’t be discussible in the media.

So, okay, those are the first three observations. The fourth has to do with the empirical validity of the “Propaganda Model”—and that’s of course the meat of the matter. Is the “Propaganda Model” descriptively accurate? Is it true that the media serve the “traditional Jeffersonian role,” or do they rather follow the “Propaganda Model”?

Well, to answer that question satisfactorily for yourself, you have to do a lot of investigation and examine an extensive amount of material on the question. But just to give you kind of an outline of how one can go about it, methodologically speaking—the first way we tested the model in
Manufacturing Consent
was to submit it to what is really its harshest possible test: we let the opponents select their own ground. See, if you don’t do this, a critic can always attack you by saying, “Well, you’re just picking examples that work.” Fine, so you let the opponents select their own ground: you take the cases that people on the other side of the spectrum point to to show that the media go too far in their undermining of authority, you take the examples
they
select to prove
their
position—like the Vietnam War, or Watergate, or other cases like that—and you look at those examples to see whether they follow the “Propaganda Model.” So that was the first thing we did: we let the opponents pick the ground, so there would be no question of taking the wrong sample or anything like that. And the result was, even when you let the opponents pick the ground, you still get very strong confirmation of the “Propaganda Model.”

Another thing we’ve done is to document the range of permitted opinion in the media, just to discover what the bounds of expressible thought actually are in the mainstream. We’ve looked at crucial historical examples in detail. We’ve studied media treatment of closely paired examples—I mean, history doesn’t construct controlled experiments for you, but there are lots of historical events that are more or less paired, and it’s possible to compare how the media deal with them. So we’ve examined media coverage of atrocities committed by enemy states and compared it to coverage of atrocities which were roughly on the same scale, but for which the United States was responsible. We’ve compared coverage of elections in enemy states and in client states. We’ve looked at the treatment of problems of freedom of the press in official enemies and in client states. And there are a lot of other topics we’ve investigated as well.
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So we’ve studied a great number of cases, from every methodological point of view that we’ve been able to think of—and they all support the “Propaganda Model.” And by now there are thousands of pages of similar material confirming the thesis in books and articles by other people too—in fact, I would hazard a guess that the “Propaganda Model” is one of the best-confirmed theses in the social sciences. There has been no serious counter-discussion of it at all, actually, that I’m aware of.
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But that’s all irrelevant within the mainstream culture—and the point is, it will all
stay
irrelevant, even if the level of proof were to reach way beyond what could ever be achieved in the social sciences. In fact, even if you could prove it at the level of physics, it would always remain irrelevant within the mainstream institutions. And the reason for that is that the “Propaganda Model” is in fact valid, and it predicts that it will be irrelevant—and in fact, not even be
understandable
within the elite culture—no matter how well it’s proven. And that’s because what it reveals undermines very effective and useful ideological institutions, so it’s dysfunctional to them, and will be excluded.

The Media and Elite Opinion

M
AN
: But Mr. Chomsky, don’t you think you might be making a bit of an intellectually lazy assumption as you draw up this analysis—namely, that there’s this monolith “the media”? Isn’t it a bit hypocritical to expect the media to he any different from the rest of the American population in the views it advocates?

Well, the media
are
different from the general population—they’re very much like American elites.

M
AN
: I’m not necessarily sure that’s true, I’m not sure how you could prove it one way or the other
.

I think you
can
prove it, actually: on major issues there is a very noticeable split between elite and popular opinion, and the media consistently reflect
elite
opinion. So for example, on things like, say, dismantling welfare state programs, or on a nuclear weapons freeze, or on U.S. policies in Central America in the 1980s, or on the nature of the Vietnam War, the views expressed in the media have always been very different from public opinion, and in line with elite opinion.
  ⁴⁵

M
AN
: My point is that it’s not necessarily a transformation of the media, hut a transformation of society that you’re looking towards. It can be a lazy diversion just to talk about the media as “them.”

Well, I think you
would
need a transformation of society to change the media—but I still think it’s right to call the media “them.”

M
AN
: Take a look at the word “media,” it is “us talking to us.”

O
THERS
: No, no
.

W
OMAN
: You’re wrong
.

There I really disagree. I mean, I think it’s a good question to examine, but I don’t agree. After all, what
are
the media? Who are they? Are they “us”? Take C.B.S., or the
New York Times
—who are they? They’re among the major corporations in the country, they’re not “us.” They are no more “us” than General Motors is “us.”

The question is: are the media like a sample of public opinion? Is it that the public has a certain range of beliefs and the media are just a sample of it? If that were the case, the media would be very democratic in fact.

M
AN
: The only poll that I’ve seen about journalists is that they are basically narcissistic and left of center.

Look, what people call “left of center” doesn’t mean anything—it means they’re conventional liberals, and conventional liberals are very state-oriented, and usually dedicated to private power.

M
AN
: But if there is only a small percentage of the American population that is actively dissident, I think it’s unfair to expect any greater percentage than that in the media
.

Again, you have to look closely: I think there’s plenty of evidence that public opinion and media presentation have differed quite sharply. The general public regarded the media as much too easy on the Reagan administration, they thought there should have been
more
exposure. In fact, they thought that the media were too hard on Carter, but too easy on Reagan—it’s exactly the opposite of what everybody says.

W
OMAN
: Where do you get all this information?

From polls. Actually, that point is made in a pretty interesting book by Mark Hertsgaard, called
On Bended Knee
, which is about media coverage of the Reagan administration.
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M
AN
: You gave the example of the public being more in favor of welfare state programs than the media—but in Massachusetts right now, there’s strong support in the general population for dismantling a lot of social services, and for no new taxes. Don’t you agree the support’s pretty strong for that these days?

No. If you ask people, “Do you want new taxes?” they’ll say no; but if you ask them, “Do you want better medical services?” they’ll say yes.

M
AN
: But there has been no strong popular response against a very austere state budget here which eliminates a lot of social services
.

But is there anybody pushing for developing
meaningful
social services? See, suppose there was somebody with a platform saying, “We want everybody in Massachusetts to have access to adequate medical care”—I’ll bet you if somebody was pushing
that
, they’d get overwhelming support. But if you just come to people and say, “Do you want to have new taxes?” of course they’ll say no. If you have something on the ballot saying, “Should we put a limit on property taxes?” the answer will be, “Sure, why should I pay more?” But you’re not asking the right question. If you ask people, “Do you want your roads clean? Do you want good schools? Do you want medical services?” then they’ll say yes. So part of the reason there isn’t much response is that there’s no one offering real alternatives.

Now, it’s also true that there are a lot of people who just look at the world and say, “Don’t confuse me with the facts, it’s too painful,” or “I don’t want to know about reality, it’s too ugly.” But they’re not even reading the news anymore—they only read the “Style” section, and the “Sports” and so on. However, if you take the people who still pay attention to the world, it’s pretty striking: the population tends to regard the media as too conformist, too subservient to power. It’s exactly the opposite of what everybody says.
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