Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media Page #8

as a way to promote the community.

We're a very high

promotion-conscious community.

When you walk through Media,

you'll be treated very well,

and you find that people have taken the idea

of being everybody's hometown to heart.

The local paper, The Talk of the Town...

The Town Talk.

- Do you read that?

- Yes, I read The Town Talk.

What do you think the difference is between

The Wall Street Journal and The Talk?

Well, I mean, The Town Talk

is completely local news,

and it's fun, it's nice to read, it's interesting.

You read about your neighbours, see what's

going on in the district, and things like that.

We're in business to make bucks,

just like the big daily newspapers,

and like the big radio stations,

and we do quite well,

and rightfully so, cos we work very hard at it.

I just wanna show you a copy of the paper here,

the way it is this week.

It's plastic-wrapped on all four sides.

Weatherproof,

and hung on everybody's front door.

And many times you'll find this paper runs

well over 100 pages a week.

You have to remember there are five editions.

This happens to be

the Central Delaware County edition,

which is the edition

that covers Media, Pennsylvania.

What you see here

is the advertising and composition department.

- Say hello, guys, will you?

- Hi.

And what we're doing now is we're putting

red dots, green dots, and yellow dots

up on the map wherever there is a store.

The red dots are the stores

that don't advertise with us at all.

The green dots are the ones

that advertise with us every week,

and the yellow dots

are the ones that run sporadically.

Now, we have computer print-outs

of every one of these stores,

and what we do is we take the print-outs

of all the red dots which are the bad guys,

and our idea is to turn these red dots into yellow

dots, and turn the yellow dots into green dots,

and eventually make them all green dots,

so 100 per cent of the stores

and 100 per cent of the merchants and service

people advertise in our paper every week.

That way, we won't have any more red dots.

I guess there'll always be a few,

but I have high hopes

there'll be a lot more green ones

than red when we're finished.

Hi, I'm Jim Morgan.

I'm with the Corporate Relations Department

of The New York Times,

and I'm here to take you on a tour

of The New York Times, so... let's begin.

So, they're just taking audio in here, yeah.

They're taking audio in here.

Audio. No cameras, no still.

We went over this quite thoroughly.

They don't even take a still camera in here.

We're in the composing room.

This is where the pages are composed.

This is the typographical area.

This might seem big, but it is average.

In fact, below average.

Our 60 per cent might include on some days

maybe...

where the rest of the newspaper

is weighted much heavier news to advertising,

but the paper in its entirety every day,

large or small,

is 60 ads, 40 news.

Well, that completes our tour

of The New York Times,

and I hope you found it informative, and...

...I hope that you read The New York Times

every day of your life from now on.

There are other media too

whose basic social role is quite different.

It's diversion.

There's the real mass media, the kinds

that are aimed at the guys who... Joe Six-pack.

That kind. The purpose of those media

is just to dull people's brains.

This is an over-simplification,

but for the 80 per cent or whatever they are,

the main thing for them is to divert them,

to get them to watch National Football League,

and to worry about the... you know...

mother with child with six heads,

or whatever you pick up in the... you know...

in the thing that you pick

up on the supermarket stands, and so on.

Or, you know, look at astrology, or get involved

in fundamentalist stuff, or something.

Just get them away, you know.

Get them away from things that matter.

And for that,

it's important to reduce their capacity to think.

The sports section is handled

in another special department.

The sports reporter must be a specialist

in his knowledge of sports.

He gets his story right at the sporting event,

and often sends it in to his paper play by play.

Sports.

That's another crucial example

of the indoctrination system in my view.

For one thing, because it... you know,

it offers people something to pay attention to

that's of no importance.

- That keeps them from worrying about...

...keeps them from worrying

about things that matter to their lives

they might have some idea

about doing something about.

And in fact, it's striking to see the intelligence

that's used by ordinary people in sports.

You listen to radio stations where people call in.

They have the most exotic information

and understanding

about all kinds of arcane issues,

and the press undoubtedly does a lot with this.

I remember in high school - I was pretty old -

I suddenly asked myself at one point,

"Why do I care

if my high school team wins the football game?"

I mean, I don't know anybody on the team,

you know.

It had nothing to do with me.

I mean, why am I cheering for my team?

It doesn't make any sense.

But the point is, it does make sense.

It's a way of building up irrational attitudes

of submission to authority,

and, you know, group cohesion behind...

you know, leadership elements.

In fact, it's training in irrational jingoism.

That's also a feature of competitive sports.

I think...

If you look closely at these things,

I think, typically, they do have functions,

and that's why

energy is devoted to supporting them,

and creating a basis for them,

and advertisers are willing to pay for them.

I'd like to ask you a question

about the methodology

and study in the propaganda model,

and how would one go about doing that?

Well, there are a number of ways to proceed.

One obvious way is to try to find

more or less paired examples.

History doesn't offer true controlled

experiments,

but it oten comes pretty close.

So one can find atrocities or abuses of one sort

that on the one hand are committed

by official enemies, and on the other hand

are committed by friends and allies,

or by the favoured state itself.

By the United States, in the US' case.

The question is whether the media

accept the government framework,

or whether they use the same agenda,

same set of questions,

the same criteria for dealing with the two cases

as any honest outside observer would do.

If you think America's involvement

in the war in Southeast Asia is over, think again.

The Khmer Rouge are the

most genocidal people on the face of the earth.

Peter Jennings

Reporting From The Killing Fields.

Thursday.

I mean, the great act of genocide

in the modern period is Pol Pot.

That atrocity...

I think it would be hard to find any example

of a comparable outrage and outpouring of fury,

and so on and so forth,

so that's one atrocity.

It just happens that in that case,

history did set up a controlled experiment.

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