Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media Page #4

You said you were just like us -

you went to school, got good grades.

What made you start being critical, you know,

and seeing the different...

What started the change?

Well, you know, there are all kinds

of personal factors in anybody's life.

Don't forget I grew up in the Depression.

My parents actually happened to have jobs,

which was kind of unusual.

They were Hebrew school teachers,

so lower middle class.

For them,

everything revolved around being Jewish.

Hebrew, and Palestine in those days,

and so on.

I grew up in that milieu, so I learned Hebrew,

went to Hebrew school,

became a Hebrew school teacher,

went to Hebrew college, led youth groups,

summer camp, Hebrew camps...

The whole business.

The branch of Zionist movement

that I was part of

was all involved in socialist bi-nationalism,

and Arab-Jewish cooperation,

and all sorts of nice stuff.

What did they think of you

hopping on a train, going up to New York,

and hanging out at anarchist book stores

on Fourth Avenue, and talking to...

They didn't mind, because...

I don't want to totally trust

my childhood memories, obviously,

but the family was split up.

Like a lot of Jewish families,

it went in all sorts of directions.

There were sectors that were super-Orthodox.

There were other sectors

that were very radical, and very assimilated,

and working-class intellectuals,

and that's the sector

that I naturally gravitated towards.

It was a very lively intellectual culture.

For one thing, it was a working-class culture,

had working-class values.

Values of solidarity, socialist values, and so on.

There was a sense

somehow things would get better.

An institutional structure was around, a method

of fighting, of organising, of doing things

which had some hope.

And I also had the advantage of having gone

to an experimental progressive school,

to a Deweyite school which was quite good,

run by a university there, and you know,

there was no such thing as competition.

There was no such thing

as being a good student.

Literally, the concept of being a good student

didn't even arise until I got to high school.

I went to the academic high school,

and suddenly discovered I'm a good student.

I hated high school, because I had to do

all the things you have to do to get into college.

But until then,

it was kind of a free, pretty open system,

and lots of other things as well.

Maybe I was just cantankerous.

As a historian,

I have read with interest and amazement

your long review article

of Gabriel Jackson's Spanish Civil War.

It's a very respectable piece of history.

I appreciate how much work goes into it.

You know when I did that work?

I did that work in the early 1940s

when I was about 12 years old.

The first article I wrote was right

ater the fall of Barcelona in the school paper,

and it was a lament

about the rise of Fascism in 1939.

I guess one of the people who was

the biggest influence in my life was an uncle

who had never gone past fourth grade,

had a background in crime,

and let-wing politics, and all sorts of things.

But he was a hunchback,

and as a result

he could get a newsstand in New York.

They had some programme

for people with physical disabilities.

Some of you are from New York, I guess.

Well, you know the 72nd Street kiosk?

Yes!

That's where I got my political education.

At 72nd Street - where you come out of the

subway, everybody goes towards 72nd Street.

There were two newsstands on that side

which were doing fine,

and there's two on the back.

Nobody comes out the back,

and that's where his newsstand...

But it was a very lively place.

He was a very bright guy.

It was the '30s. There were a lot of migrs.

A lot of people were hanging around there,

and in the evenings especially

it was sort of a literary-political salon.

There were, kind of, guys

hanging around arguing and talking, and...

as a kid, like 11, 12 years old,

the biggest excitement

was to work the newsstand.

You write in Manufacturing Consent

that it's the primary function of the mass media

in the United States

to mobilise public support

for the special interests

that dominate the government

and the private sector.

What are those interests?

Well, if you want to understand

the way any society works,

ours or any other,

the first place to look is who makes...

who is in a position

to make the decisions

that determine the way the society functions.

Societies differ, but in ours

the major decisions

over what happens in the society -

decisions over investment, and production,

and distribution and so on -

are in the hands of

a relatively concentrated network

of major corporations and conglomerates,

and investment firms, and so on.

They are also the ones who staff the major

executive positions in the government,

and they are the ones who own the media,

and they are the ones who have to be

in a position to make the decisions.

They have an overwhelmingly dominant role

in the way life happens,

you know, what's done in the society.

Within the economic system,

by law and in principle, they dominate.

The control over resources,

and the need to satisfy their interests

imposes very sharp constraints

on the political system

and the ideological system.

When we talk about manufacturing of consent,

whose consent is being manufactured?

To start with, there are two different groups.

We can get into more detail,

but at the first level of approximation,

there's two targets for propaganda.

One is what is sometimes called

the political class.

There's maybe 20 per cent of the population

which is relatively educated,

more or less articulate.

They'll play some kind of role

in decision making.

They're supposed to sort of participate

in social life,

either as managers, or cultural managers,

like, say, teachers, and writers, and so on.

They're supposed to vote.

They're supposed to play some role in the way

economic and political and cultural life goes on.

Now, their consent is crucial.

That's one group that has to be

deeply indoctrinated.

Then there's maybe 80 per cent

of the population

whose main function is to follow orders,

and not to think, you know.

Not to pay attention to anything,

and they're the ones who usually pay the costs.

All right, Professor Chomsky, Noam,

you outlined a model - filters propaganda

is sent through on its way to the public.

Will you briefly outline those?

It's basically an institutional

analysis of the major media,

what we call a propaganda model.

We're talking primarily about the national

media, those media that set a general agenda

that others more or less adhere to,

to the extent that they even pay much attention

to national or international affairs.

Now, the elite media are the sort of

agenda-setting media.

The New York Times, The Washington Post,

the major television channels, and so on.

They set the general framework.

Local media more or less adapt

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