Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media Page #5

to their structure.

World news.

It's a sound bite,

that says there's a beach head...

I think 628 is a good one.

This is the operative sound bite for us.

Got a minute for all the times.

I love this sound bite.

And they do this in all sorts of ways, by...

Two and a half minutes to air.

There is an unusual amount of attention today

on the five nations of Central America.

This is democracy's diary.

Here, for our instruction,

are triumphs and disasters,

the pattern of life's changing fabric.

Here is great journalism,

a revelation of the past, a guide to the present,

and a clue to the future.

The New York Times is certainly the most

important newspaper in the United States,

and one could argue,

the most important newspaper in the world.

The New York Times plays an enormous role

in shaping the perception of the current world

on the part of

the politically active, educated classes.

Also, The New York Times has a special role,

and I believe its editors probably feel

that they bear a heavy burden

in the sense that

The New York Times creates history.

What happened years ago may

have a bearing on what happens tomorrow.

Millions of clippings

are preserved in the Times'library,

all indexed for instant use.

A priceless archive of events,

and the men who make them.

That is, history is what appears in

The New York Times archives.

The place where people will go to find out

what happened is The New York Times.

Therefore it's extremely important,

if history is to be shaped in an appropriate way,

that certain things appear, certain things do not,

certain questions be asked, others be ignored,

and that issues be framed

in a particular fashion.

Now, in whose interests

is history being so shaped?

Well, I think that's not very difficult to answer.

The process by which

people make up their minds on this

is a much more mysterious process

than you would ever guess

from reading Manufacturing Consent.

There is a saying about legislation,

that legislation is like making sausage.

The less you know about how it's done,

the better for your appetite.

The same is true of this business.

If you're in a conference

in which decisions are being made

on what to put on page one, or what not,

you would get, I think, the impression

that important decisions were being made

in a flippant and frivolous way,

but in fact, given the pressures of time

to try to get things out,

you resort to a kind of a shorthand,

and you have to fill that paper up every day.

It's curious in a kind of a mirror image way that

Professor Chomsky is in total accord

with Reed Irvine

who at the right-wing end of the spectrum

says exactly what Chomsky does

about the insinuating influence of the press,

of the big media

as "agenda setters", to use

one of the great buzz words of the time,

and, of course,

Reed Irvine sees this as a let-wing conspiracy,

of foisting liberal ideas in both domestic

and foreign affairs on the American people.

But in both cases,

I think that the premise really is an insult

to the intelligence of the people

who consume news.

Now, to eliminate confusion, all of this has

nothing to do with liberal or conservative bias.

According to the propaganda model, both

liberal and conservative wings of the media,

whatever those terms are supposed to mean,

fall within the same framework of assumptions.

In fact, if the system functions well, it ought

to have a liberal bias, or at least appear to,

because if it appears to have a liberal bias,

that will serve to bound thought

even more effectively.

In other words, if the press is indeed adversarial

and liberal, and all these bad things,

then how can I go beyond it?

They're already so extreme in their opposition

to power that to go beyond it

would be to take off from the planet,

so therefore it must be that the presuppositions

that are accepted in the liberal media

are sacrosanct.

Can't go beyond them.

And a well-functioning system

would in fact have a bias of that kind.

The media would then serve to say, in effect:

Thus far and no further.

We ask what would you expect of those media

on just relatively uncontroversial,

guided-free market assumptions?

And when you look at them,

you find a number of major factors

entering into

determining what their products are.

These are what we call the filters -

so one of them, for example, is ownership.

Who owns them?

The major agenda-setting media,

ater all, what are they?

As institutions in the society, what are they?

Well, in the first place

they are major corporations.

In fact, huge corporations.

Furthermore, they're integrated with, and

sometimes owned by, even larger corporations,

conglomerates, so, for example,

by Westinghouse, GE and so on.

What I wanted to know was

how specifically the elites control the media.

That's like asking,

"How do the elites control General Motors"?

Why isn't that a question?

I mean, General Motors is an institution of the

elites. They don't have to control it. They own it.

Except I guess, at a certain level I think...

Like, I guess... I work with student press,

so I know, like, reporters and stuff...

Elites don't control the student press,

but I'll tell you something -

you try in the student press

to do anything that breaks out of conventions,

and you're going to have the whole business

community around here down on your neck,

and the university's going to get threatened,

and you know...

Maybe nobody'll pay any attention to you.

That's possible.

If you get to the point

where they don't stop paying attention to you,

the pressures'll start coming.

Because there are people with power,

there are people who own the country,

and they're not going to

let the country get out of control.

What do you think about that?

This is the old cabal theory that somewhere

there's a room with a baize-covered desk,

and there are a bunch of capitalists

sitting around pulling strings.

These rooms don't exist.

I hate to tell Noam Chomsky this.

- You don't share that view?

- It's the most absolute rubbish I've ever heard.

It's the fashion in the universities.

It's patent nonsense,

and I think it's nothing but a fashion.

It's a way that...

intellectuals have of... of feeling like a clergy.

There has to be something wrong.

So, what we have in the first place

is major corporations

which are parts of even bigger conglomerates.

Now, like any other corporation, they...

they have a product which they sell to a market.

The market is advertisers,

that is, other businesses.

What keeps the media functioning

is not the audience.

They make money from their advertisers, and

remember, we're talking about the elite media,

so they're trying to sell a good product,

a product which raises advertising rates.

And ask your friends in the advertising industry.

That means

that they want to adjust their audience

to the more elite and affluent audience.

That raises advertising rates.

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