Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media Page #3

And that means an attack

on the fundamental structure of state capitalism.

I think that's in order.

That's not something far off in the future.

Your life work.

The alphabet has only 26 letters.

With these 26 magic symbols, however,

millions of words are written every day.

Nowhere else are people so addicted

to information and entertainment

via the printed word.

Every day the world comes thumping

on the American doorstep,

and nothing that happens anywhere

remains long a secret

from the American newspaper reader.

It comes to us pretty casually, the daily paper,

but behind its arrival on your doorstep

is one ofjournalism's major stories.

How it got there.

There is a standard view about democratic

societies, and the role of the media within them.

It's expressed for example

by Supreme Court Justice Powell

when he spoke of the crucial role of the media

in effecting the societal purpose

of the First Amendment,

namely enabling the public to assert

meaningful control over the political process.

That kind of formulation

expresses the understanding that

democracy requires free access

to information, and ideas, and opinion,

and the same conceptions hold

not only with regard to the media,

but with regard to educational institutions,

publishing, the intellectual community generally.

It is basic to the health of a democracy

that no phase of government activity

escape the scrutiny of the press.

Here reporters are assigned to stories

fateful not only to our nation, but to all nations.

"Congress", says the First Amendment,

"shall pass no law

abridging the freedom of the press".

And the Chief Executive himself

throws open the doors of the White House

to journalists representing papers

of all shades of political opinion.

But is worth bearing in mind

that there is a contrary view,

and in fact the contrary view is very widely held,

and deeply rooted

in our own civilisation.

It goes back to

the origins of modern democracy,

to the 17th-century English revolution

which was a complicated affair

like most popular revolutions.

There was a struggle between Parliament

representing largely

elements of the gentry and the merchants,

and the Royalists

representing other elite groups,

and they fought it out.

But like many popular revolutions,

there was also a lot of popular ferment going

that was opposed to all of them.

There were popular movements

that were questioning everything -

the relations between master and servant,

the right of authority altogether...

All kinds of things were being questioned.

There was a lot of radical publishing - the

printing presses had just come into existence -

and this disturbed all the elites

on both sides of the Civil War.

So as one historian pointed out at the time

in 1660...

He criticised the radical democrats,

the ones who were calling for

what we would call democracy, because...

Now, underlying these doctrines

which were very widely held

is a certain conception of democracy.

It's a game for elites.

It's not for the ignorant masses

who have to be marginalised,

diverted and controlled

of course, for their own good.

The same principles were upheld

in the American colonies.

The dictum of the founding fathers

of American democracy that:

"People who own the country

ought to govern it",

quoting John Jay.

Fire!

Now, in modern times for elites,

this contrary view about the intellectual life,

and the media, and so on,

this contrary view in fact is the standard one,

I think, apart from rhetorical flourishes.

From Washington DC,

he is intellectual, author and linguist

Professor Noam Chomsky.

Manufacturing Consent -

what is that title meant to describe?

Well, the title is actually borrowed from a book

by Walter Lippmann written back around 1921

in which he described

what he called the manufacture of consent

as a revolution in the practice of democracy.

What it amounts to is a technique of control,

and he said this was useful and necessary

because the common interests, the general

concerns of all people, elude the public.

The public just isn't up to dealing with them,

and they have to be the domain

of what he called a specialized class.

Notice that that's the opposite

of the standard view about democracy.

There's a version of this expressed

by the highly respected moralist and theologian

Reinhold Niebuhr

who was very influential

on contemporary policy makers.

His view was

that rationality belongs to the cool observer,

but because of the stupidity of the average

man, he follows not reason but faith,

and this nave faith

requires necessary illusion

and emotionally potent over-simplifications

which are provided by the myth maker

to keep the ordinary person on course.

It's not the case, as the nave might think,

that indoctrination

is inconsistent with democracy.

Rather, as this whole line of thinkers observes,

it's the essence of democracy.

The point is that in a military state,

or a feudal state,

or what we would nowadays

call a totalitarian state,

it doesn't much matter what people think,

because you've got a bludgeon over their head,

and you can control what they do.

But when the state loses the bludgeon,

when you can't control people by force,

and when the voice of the people can be heard,

you have this problem -

it may make people so curious and so arrogant

that they don't have the humility

to submit to a civil rule,

and therefore you have to

control what people think.

And the standard way to do this

is to resort to what in more honest days

used to be called propaganda.

Manufacture of consent.

The creation of necessary illusions.

Various ways of

either marginalising the general public,

or reducing them to apathy in some fashion.

The oldest of two boys,

Avram Noam Chomsky was born in

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1928.

As a Jewish child,

the anti-Semitism of the time affected him.

Both parents taught Hebrew,

and he became fascinated by literature,

reading translations

of French and Russian classics.

He also took an interest

in a grammar book written by his father

on Hebrew of the Middle Ages.

He recalls a childhood

absorbed in reading curled up on the sofa,

oten borrowing up to 12 books at once

from the library.

He is married to Carol,

and they have three children.

I don't like to

impose on my wife and children a form of life

that they certainly

haven't selected for themselves,

namely one of public exposure,

exposure to the public media.

That's their choice, and I don't believe

they themselves have selected this.

I don't impose it on them,

and I would like to protect them from it, frankly.

The second sort of perhaps principled point

is that I'm rather against the whole notion

of developing public personalities...

...who are treated as stars

of one kind or another,

where aspects of their personal life

are supposed to have some significance.

Take one in the reception room.

Rate this script:3.0 / 1 vote