(light music)
(logo squeaking)
(somber music)
(helicopter rotors whirring)
(camera clicking)
- Good morning welcome, good
morning welcome to Erin,
good morning welcome to
Erin Mills Town Center.
(jangling music)
Three, two, one, take two.
Good morning, welcome to
Erin Mills Town Center,
the home of the world's largest permanent,
point-of-purchase video wall installation.
My name is Kelvin Flook
and I'm your video host
all day here at EMTV.
I wanna take this opportunity to extend
a special and warm welcome
to the film crew from Necessary Illusions.
We've got an excellent line-up
of television programming
for you today, so
let's get on with it.
(jangly music)
- So how long have they been working
on this documentary?
- Gosh, they've been working on it
I don't know how long.
Every country I show up,
they're always there.
- They're there, huh?
- Yeah, they were in England,
they're in Japan, all
over the place, Jesus.
My God, they must have
500 hours' worth of tape.
- [Woman] But they put
together a real doozy
when they're done, huh?
- [Noam] I can't imagine who's gonna wanna
hear somebody talk for an hour.
But I guess they know what they're doing.
(sirens wailing)
(birds twittering)
- [Man] So where are y'all from?
- [All] Florida!
- [Man] Florida?
- Yeah.
- Gulf Coast.
- [Man] You all talk like in chorus.
(students laughing)
We're making a film
about Noam Chomsky, does anybody
know who Noam Chomsky is?
- [Student] No.
(whistle blowing)
(up-tempo music)
(machines whirring)
(machine whirring)
(people speaking faintly)
- [Woman] Good afternoon and
welcome to "Wyoming Talks."
My guest today is well-known
intellectual Noam Chomsky.
Thank you for being on our program today.
- [Noam] Very glad to be here.
- Well, I know probably the main purpose
for your trip to Wyoming is to discuss
thought control in a democratic society.
Now, all right, say I'm just Jane USA.
And I say, "Well, gee, this
is a democratic society.
"And what do you mean, thought control?"
"I make up my own mind,
I create my own destiny."
What would you say to her?
- Well, I would suggest
that Jane take a close look
at the way the media operate,
the way the public
relations industry operates.
The extensive thinking
that's been going on
for a long, long period,
about the necessity for finding ways
to marginalize and control the public
in a democratic society.
(tense music)
But particularly look at the evidence
that's been accumulated about
the way the major media,
the sort of agenda-setting media,
I mean, the national press,
the television and so on,
the way that they shape and control
the kinds of opinions that appear.
The kinds of information
that comes through,
the sources to which they go and so on.
And I think that Jane will find
some very surprising things
about the democratic system.
(somber, fast music)
(stapler clicking)
- [Man] I'd like to welcome all of you
to this lecture today.
Several years ago, Professor
Chomsky was described
in "The New York Times
Book Review" as follows:
"Judged in terms of the
power, range, novelty
"and influence of this thought,
Noam Chomsky is arguably
"the most important intellectual alive."
Professor Noam Chomsky.
(audience applauding)
- I gather there are some people
out behind that blackness there.
But if I don't look you in the eye,
it's 'cause I don't see you,
all I see is the blackness.
Perhaps I oughta begin
by reporting something that's never read.
The line about the
"arguably the most important
"intellectual in the world," and so on
comes from a publisher's blurb
and you've always gotta
watch those things.
Because if you go back to the original,
you'll find that that
sentence is actually there.
This is in "The New York Times."
But the next sentence is,
"Since that's the case,
how can he write such
"terrible things about
American foreign policy?"
(audience laughing)
(Noam laughing)
And they never quote that part.
But in fact if it wasn't
for that second sentence,
I would begin to think that
I'm doing something wrong.
And I'm not joking about that.
It's true that the emperor
doesn't have any clothes,
but the emperor doesn't
like to be told it.
And the emperor's lap dogs,
like "The New York Times,"
are not gonna enjoy the
experience if you do.
- Good evening, I'm Bill Moyers.
What's more dangerous: the
big stick or the big lie?
Governments have used both
against their own people.
Tonight I'll be talking with a man
who has been thinking about
how we can see the developing lie.
He says that propaganda is to democracy
what violence is to a dictatorship.
But he hasn't lost faith in
the power of common people
to speak up for the truth.
You have said that we live entangled
in webs of endless deceit,
that we live in a highly
indoctrinated society
where elementary truths are easily buried.
Elementary truths such as...
- Such as the fact that
we invaded South Vietnam.
Or that we're standing in
the way of significant,
and have for years,
of significant moves
towards arms negotiation.
Or the fact that the military system
is to a substantial extent,
not totally, but to a substantial extent,
a mechanism by which
the general population
is compelled to provide a subsidy
to high-technology industry.
Since they're not gonna
do it if you ask them to,
you have to deceive them into doing it.
There are many truths like
that, and we don't face them.
- [Bill] Do you believe in
common sense, I mean you're--
- Absolutely.
- You do?
- I believe
in Cartesian common sense.
I think people have the capacities to see
through the deceit in
which they're ensnared.
But they've gotta make the effort.
- It seems a little incongruous to hear
a man from the ivory tower
of Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, a scholar,
a distinguished linguistics scholar,
talk about the common people
with such appreciation.
- I think that scholarship,
at least the field that I work in,
has the opposite consequences.
My own studies in language
and human cognition
demonstrate to me, at least,
what remarkable creativity
ordinary people have.
The very fact that people
talk to one another
is a reflection, and just in a normal way,
nothing particularly fancy,
reflects deep-seated features
of human creativity, which
in fact separate human beings
from any other biological system we know.
- [Announcer] Tonight,
scientists talk to the animals.
But are they talking back?
(dramatic music)
(chimp shrieking)
"The Journal" with Barbara
Frum and Mary Lou Finlay.
- Communicating with animals
is a serious scientific pursuit.
This is Nim Chimpsky; Nim, jokingly named
after the great linguist Noam Chomsky,
was the great hope of animal
communication in the 1970s.
For four years Pettito
and others coached him
in sign language, but in the end
they decided it was a lost cause.
Nim could ask for things,
but not much more.
- I would have loved to
have a conversation with Nim
and understand how he
looked at the universe.
He failed to communicate
that information to me,
and we gave him every opportunity.
(horns honking)
(upbeat music)
- [Man] Noam Chomsky, theorist of language
and political activist, has
had an extraordinary career.
I can think of none like it
in recent American history
and few anywhere any time.
He has literally transformed
the subject of linguistics.
At the same time he's become
one of the most consistent
critics of power politics
in all its protean guises.
Scholar and propagandist, his two careers
apparently reinforce each other.
In 1957, he published his
"Syntactic Structures,"
which began what has
frequently been called
the Chomskyan Revolution in Linguistics.
(lively jazz music)
Like a latter-day Copernicus,
Chomsky proposed a radically new way
of looking at the theory of grammar.
Chomsky worked out the formal
rules of the universal grammar
which generated the specific rules
of actual or natural languages.
(crow cawing)
- The general approach
I'm taking seems to me
rather simple-minded and unsophisticated,
but, nevertheless, correct.
(people speaking faintly)
- [Man] Later he came to
argue that such systems
are innate features of human beings.
They belong to the
characteristics of the species
and have been, in effect, programmed
into the genetic equipment of the mind
like the machine language in a computer.
- One needn't be interested
in this question.
Of course, I am interested in it.
The interesting question
from this point of view
would be what is the nature
of the initial state?
That is, what is human
nature in this respect?
- That in turn explains
the...
- Astonishing.
Try the next one.
- Fa-cki-li-tee?
- Facility.
- Facility.
- [Man] That in turn explains
the astonishing facility
that children have in learning
the rules of natural language,
no matter how complicated,
incredibly quickly,
from what are imperfect
and often degenerate samples.
- [Mira] Complain...
- [Peter] Complicated.
- Complicated.
- It's a complicated word.
Do you know what "complicated" means?
It means it's complicated.
(gentle music)
(mouse squeaking)
- If in fact our minds were a blank slate
and experience wrote on them,
we would be very impoverished
creatures indeed.
So the obvious hypothesis
is that our language
is the result of the unfolding
of a genetically determined program.
Well, plainly there are
different languages.
In fact, the apparent
variation of languages
is quite superficial.
It's certain, as certain as anything is,
that humans are not genetically programmed
to learn one or another language.
So, you bring up a
Japanese baby in Boston,
it'll speak Boston English.
You bring up my child in
Japan, it'll speak Japanese.
And that means that, from that it,
from that it simply follows by logic
that the basic structure of the languages
must be essentially the same.
Our task as scientists
is to try to determine
exactly what those
fundamental principles are
that cause the knowledge
of language to unfold
in the manner in which it does
under particular circumstances,
and incidentally, I think
there is no doubt that
the same must be true
of other aspects of human intelligence,
and systems of understanding
and interpretation,
and moral and aesthetic
judgment, and so on.
- [Jonathan] The
implications of these views
have washed over the fields of psychology,
education, sociology, philosophy,
literary criticism, and logic.
(jazz music)
- In the '50s and '60s
the bridge between your theoretical work
and your political work seems to have been
the attack on behaviorism,
but now behaviorism is no longer an issue,
or so it seems,
so how does this leave the link
between your linguistics
and your politics?
- Well, I've always regarded the link,
I've never really
perceived much of a link,
to tell you the truth.
Again, I would be very
pleased to be able to discover
intellectually convincing connections
between my own anarchist
convictions, on the one hand,
and what I think I can demonstrate,
or at least begin to see
about the nature of human
intelligence on the other.
But I simply can't find
intellectually satisfying
connections between those two domains.
I can discover some
tenuous points of contact.
(speaking in foreign language)
- If it is correct, as I believe it is,
that a fundamental element of human nature
is the need for
creative work, or creative inquiry, or
for free creation without the
arbitrary, limiting effects
of coercive institutions,
then of course it will follow
that a decent society should
maximize the possibilities
for this fundamental human
characteristic to be realized.
Now a federated, decentralized
system of free associations,
incorporating economic as
well as social institutions,
would be what I refer to
as anarcho-syndicalism,
and it seems to me that
it is the appropriate form
of social organization
for an advanced technological society
in which human beings
do not have to be forced
into position of tools,
of cogs in a machine.
- [Narrator] Since the 1960s,
Noam Chomsky has been the voice
of a very characteristic brand
of rationalist libertarian socialism.
He's attacked the abuses of
power wherever he saw them.
He's made himself deeply unpopular
by his criticism of American policy.
The subservience of the intelligentsia,
the degradation of Zionism,
the distortions of media,
self-delusions of prevailing ideologies.
(slow jazz music)
(gentle music)
- Under the liberal
administrations of the 1960s,
the club of academic intellectuals
designed and implemented
the Vietnam War and other
similar though smaller actions.
This particular community
is a very relevant one
to consider at a place
like MIT because of course,
you're all free to enter this community.
In fact, you're invited
and encouraged to enter
the community of technical intelligentsia
and weapons designers and
counter-insurgency experts
and pragmatic planners
of an American empire
is one that you have a
great deal of inducement
to become associated with.
The inducements, in fact, are very real.
They're rewards and power and affluence
and prestige and authority.
Jamie.
This came with the mail.
Be with you in a second.
Oh.
They've still got their cameras, okay?
- Ready?
Well let's start.
In your essay "Language
and Freedom," you write,
"Social action must be animated
"by a vision of a future society."
I was wondering what vision
of a future society animates you?
- Oh, well, I have my own ideas
as to what a future
society should look like.
I've written about them.
I mean, I think that we should,
at the most general level,
we should be seeking out forms
of authority and domination
and challenging their legitimacy.
Now sometimes they are legitimate.
That is, let's say, they're
needed for survival.
So for example, I wouldn't suggest
that during the Second World
War, the forms of authority,
we had a totalitarian society, basically.
And I thought there was
some justification for that,
under the wartime conditions.
And there are other forms of,
relations between parents
and children, for example,
involve forms of coercion,
which are sometimes justifiable.
But any such, any form
of coercion and control
requires justification.
And most of them are
completely unjustifiable.
Now, at various stages
of human civilization,
it's been possible to challenge
some of them but not others.
Others are too deep seated.
Or you don't see them, or whatever.
And so at any particular
point, you try to detect
those forms of authority and domination
which are subject to change
and which do not have
any legitimacy, in fact,
which often strike at
fundamental human rights
and your understanding
of fundamental human nature and rights.
Well, what are the major
things, say, today?
There are some that are
being addressed in a way.
The feminist movement is addressing some.
The Civil Rights Movement
is addressing others.
The one major one that's not
being seriously addressed
is the one that's really at the core
of the system of domination.
And that's private control over resources.
And that means an attack
on the fundamental structure
of state capitalism.
Now I think that's in order.
That's not something
far off in the future.
- [Narrator] Your life work.
(gentle music)
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 of journalism's major
stories, how it got there.
(birds twittering)
(gentle music)
- 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.
(upbeat music)
- [Narrator] 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.
(emotionally stirring orchestral music)
- But it 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 civilization.
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 on
that was opposed to all of them.
There were popular movements
that were questioning everything.
The relation 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 has
just come into existence.
Now this disturbed all the elites
on both sides of the Civil War.
So as one historian pointed
out at the time, in 1660,
he criticized the radical democrats,
the ones who were calling for
what we would call democracy,
because they are making
the people so curious
and so arrogant that they will
never find humility enough
to submit to a civil rule.
(dramatic music)
(objects clattering)
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 marginalized, 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, I'm quoting, "the
people who own the country
"ought to govern it," quoting John Jay.
- Fire!
(gunshots booming)
(fife and drum music)
(woman screaming)
- [Noam] 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.
(gentle music)
- From Washington DC,
he's intellectual, author
and linguist Professor Noam Chomsky.
"Manufacturing Consent,"
what is that title meant to describe?
- Well, the title was 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 policymakers.
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 naive faith
requires necessary illusion
and emotionally potent
over-simplifications,
which are provided by the myth maker
to keep the ordinary person on course.
(space weapons whooshing)
(explosion booming)
It's not the case, as
the naive 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 civil rule.
And therefore, you have to
control what people think.
And the standard way to
do this is the resort
to what in more honest days
used to be called propaganda,
manufacture of consent, the
creation of necessary illusions,
various ways of either
marginalizing the general public
or reducing them to
apathy in some fashion.
(somber music)
(train rumbling)
(train brakes squeaking)
(somber music)
(gong resounds)
(stately music)
(audience applauding)
(speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter] 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 in the sofa, often 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,
(tape recorder squeaking)
that's their choice,
and I don't believe that
they have, themselves,
selected this; I don't
wanna impose it on them.
I would like to protect
them from it, frankly.
The second, the sort of,
perhaps principal point,
that is that I'm rather against the idea,
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 and so on.
- [Woman] Take one in the reception room.
- You said that you were just like us.
You went to school, got good grades.
And what made you start
being critical, you know?
And seeing the different,
what started the change?
- You know, there are all
kinds of personal factors
in anybody's life, I mean,
first of all, don't forget,
I grew up in the Depression.
(tires squealing)
(objects clattering)
(sentimental music)
(people speaking faintly)
(typewriters clacking)
(people speaking faintly)
My parents actually happened to have jobs,
which was kind of unusual.
They were Hebrew school teachers,
so sort of lower middle class.
For them, everything
revolved around being Jewish.
Hebrew and Palestine in
those days, and so on.
And I grew up in that milieu.
So you know, I learned Hebrew
and went to Hebrew school,
became a Hebrew school teacher.
Went to Hebrew college, led
youth groups, summer camps,
Hebrew camps, the whole business.
The branch of Zionist
movement that I was a part of
was all involved in
socialist bi-nationalism
and our Jewish cooperation
and all sorts of nice stuff.
(dramatic music)
(train bell clanging)
(train horn wailing)
(folksy music)
- [Man] So what did they think
of your hopping on a train
and going up to New York and hanging out
at anarchist bookstores on 4th Avenue?
And talking to--
- They didn't mind, because--
- [Man] Your working-class
relatives there?
- I mean, I don't wanna 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.
It had working-class values.
Values of solidarity,
socialist values, and so on.
There was a sense, somehow,
things were going to get better.
And the institutional structure was around
the method of fighting,
you know, of organizing,
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.
I mean, 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.
And I hated high school 'cause
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 I don't know, there were
lots of other things as well.
Maybe I was just cantankerous.
- [Interviewer] As a
historian, I have read
with interest and amazement
your long review article
of Gabriel Jackson's "Spanish Civil War."
And that's a very
respectable piece of history.
And I can appreciate how
much work goes into that.
Where do you find--
- You know
when I did that work?
- When did you do that?
- I did that work in the early 1940s
when I was about 12 years old.
(dramatic music)
The first article I wrote was right after
the fall of Barcelona,
in the school newspaper.
It was a lament about the
rise of fascism in 1939.
(dramatic music)
Actually, I guess, one of the people
who was the biggest influence
in my life was an uncle
who had never gone past fourth grade.
He was, you know, had
a background in crime,
then left-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 program for people
with physical disabilities.
Some of you are from of New York, I guess.
You know, well, you know
the 72nd Street kiosk?
- Yes!
- You know that?
That's where I got my political education.
At 72nd Street there's a place
where you come out of the subway.
And there's, everybody
goes towards 72nd Street.
And there were two
newsstands on that side,
which were doing fine.
Then there's two newsstands on the back.
And nobody comes out the back, you know?
And that's where his newsstand was.
(audience laughing)
But it was a very lively place,
he was a very bright guy.
It was the '30s, there
were a lot of emigres.
You know, so a lot of people
were hangin' around there.
And in the evenings especially,
it was sort of a literary political salon.
You know, there were the kind of guys
hanging around, arguing and talking.
And as a kid, like I
was 11 and 12 years old,
the biggest excitement
was to work the newsstand.
(mid-tempo jazz music)
- You write, in "Manufacturing Consent,"
that it's the primary
function of the mass media
in the United States to
mobilize public support
for the special interests that dominate
the government and the private sector.
What are those interests?
- Well, if you wanna understand
the way any society works,
ours or any other, the first
place to look is who makes,
who's 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're 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.
(dramatic music)
(sirens wailing)
- When you 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's sometimes
called the political class.
(lively marching band music)
There's maybe 20% of the population
which is relatively educated,
more or less articulate.
They 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, 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% of the population,
whose main function is to follow orders
and not to think, you know?
And not to pay attention to anything.
And they're the ones who
usually pay the costs.
- [Ron] All right,
Professor Chomsky, Noam,
you outlined a model with filters
that the propaganda is sent through
on its way to the public; can
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 sort
of 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 agenda-setting media.
That means "The New York
Times," "The Washington Post,"
the major television channels and so on,
they set the general framework.
The local media more or less
adapt to their structure.
(telephone ringing)
- World News.
(people speaking faintly)
- [Man] there's sound bite that says
that there's a beach head.
- I think that 6:28 is a good one.
- Yeah, but I think, I
think six is a good start.
- [Man] This is the operative
sound bite for us, he's ours.
(people speaking faintly)
- I've got a minute for
all the time, so that's...
- [Man] I love this sound bite.
- [Noam] And they do this
in all sorts of ways,
by selection of topics, by
distribution of concerns,
by emphasis and framing of issues,
by filtering of information,
by bounding of debate
within certain limits.
(telephone ringing)
(people speaking faintly)
- [Man] Two and a half minutes to air.
- [Woman] They know.
(people speaking faintly)
- 45 seconds.
- [Noam] They determine, they select,
they shape, they control, they restrict,
in order to serve the interests
of dominant, elite groups in the society.
- [Peter] There is an unusual
of attention focused today
on the five nations of Central America.
- [Reporter] 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.
(light music)
(discordant music)
(tiger roaring)
(tiger snarling)
- "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.
- [Narrator] 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 as what
appears in "The New York Times"
archives, the place where
people will go to find out
what happens is "The New York Times."
Therefore, it's extremely
important if history
is going to be shaped
in an appropriate way
that certain things appear,
certain things not appear.
Certain questions be asked,
other questions be ignored,
and that issues be framed
in a particular fashion.
Now in whose interests is
the 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,
that 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 whatnot, 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,
quote, "agenda setters,"
to use one of the great
buzz words of the time.
And, of course, Reed Irvine sees this
as a left-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 balance
out 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 asked, 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, after 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 and GE and so on.
(eerie music)
- What I wanted to know was how,
specifically, the elites
control the media.
What I mean is--
- It's like asking,
how do the elites control General Motors?
Well 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,
I guess, I work with student press.
And I, so I know, like,
reporters and stuff.
- With that, 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 gonna have the
whole business community
around here down on your neck.
And the university's going
is gonna get threatened.
And you know, I mean, maybe
nobody will pay attention
to you, that's possible,
but 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 gonna let the
country get out of control.
- What do you think about that?
- This is the old cabal theory
that somewhere there's a,
there's a room with a baize-covered desk.
And there are a bunch of
capitalists sitting around.
And they're pulling strings;
these rooms don't exist.
I mean, I hate to tell Noam Chomsky this.
- You don't, you don't share that idea?
- I think it is the most
absolute rubbish I've ever heard.
This is a current fashion
in the universities.
You know, it's patent nonsense.
And I think it's nothing but a fashion.
It's a way that intellectuals have
of feeling like a clergy.
I mean, there has to be something wrong.
(ominous music)
(eerie music)
- So what we have, in the first place,
is major corporations, which are parts
of even bigger conglomerates.
Now, like any other corporation,
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.
So what you have is
institutions, corporations,
big corporations, that are selling
relatively privileged
audiences to other businesses.
Well, what point of view would you expect
to come out of this?
I mean, without any further assumptions,
what you'd predict is that what comes out
is a picture of the world,
a perception of the world,
that satisfies the needs and the interests
and the perceptions of the sellers,
the buyers, and the product.
(somber music)
Now there are many other factors
that press in the same direction.
If people try to enter the system
who don't have that point of view,
they're likely to be excluded
somewhere along the way.
After all, no institution
is going to happily
design a mechanism to self destruct.
That's not the way institutions function.
So they all work to exclude
or marginalize or eliminate
dissenting voices or
alternative perspectives,
and so on, because they're dysfunctional.
They're dysfunctional to
the institution itself.
- Do you think you've escaped
the ideological indoctrination
of the media and of the
society that you grew up in?
- Do I?
- Mm-hmm.
- Often not, I mean, when I look back
and think of the things
that I haven't done
that I should have done,
it's very,
it's not a pleasant experience.
- [Man] So what's the story of
young Noam in the schoolyard?
- Yeah, another, I mean, that
was a personal thing for me.
I don't know why it's of
interest to anyone else.
But I do remember.
- [Man] Well, you drew
certain conclusions--
- Well, yeah, I mean, it
had a big influence on me.
I mean, I remember when I was about six,
I guess, first grade.
There was the standard fat
kid who everybody made fun of.
And I remember, in the schoolyard,
he was on a, standing on a,
right outside the school classroom.
And a bunch of kids outside,
so taunting him, and so on.
And one of the kids actually
brought over his older brother,
sort of like from third grade
instead of first grade, you know?
Big kid, and he was gonna, you know,
beat him up or something, and I remember
going up to stand next to him,
feeling somebody oughta help him.
I did for a while, and then I
got scared, and I went away.
And I was very much
ashamed of it afterwards
and sort of felt, you know,
I'm not gonna do that again.
That's a feeling that's stuck with me.
You should stick with the underdog.
And the shame remained, I
should have stayed there,
(gentle music)
- [Man] You were already established.
You were a professor at MIT,
you'd made a reputation.
You had a terrific career ahead of you.
You decided to become
a political activist.
Now here is a classic case of somebody
whom the institution does not
seem to have filtered out.
I mean, you were good boy
up until then, were you?
Or you'd always been a slight rebel?
- [Noam] Yeah, pretty much.
I had been pretty much outside.
- [Man] You felt isolated,
you felt out of sympathy
with the prevailing
currents of American life.
But a lot of people do
that, suddenly, in 1964,
You decide, "I have to
do something about this."
What made you do that?
- [Noam] Well, that was
a very conscious decision
and a very uncomfortable decision.
Because I knew what the
consequences would be.
I was in a very favorable position.
I had the kind of work I liked.
We had a lively, exciting department.
The field was going well,
personal life was fine.
I was living in a nice
place, children growing up.
Everything looked perfect,
and I knew I was giving it up.
And, at that time, remember,
it was not just giving talks.
I became involved right
away in resistance.
And I expected to spend years in jail
and came very close to it.
In fact, my wife went
back to graduate school
in part because we assumed
she was going to have
to support the children.
These were the expectations.
(gentle music)
(helicopter rotors whirring)
(people speaking faintly)
And I recognized that if I
returned to these interests,
which were the dominant
interests of my own youth,
life would become very uncomfortable.
But I know that in the United States,
you don't get sent to
a psychiatric prison.
And they don't send a death
squad after you and so on.
But there are definite penalties
for breaking the rules.
So these were real decisions.
And it simply seemed at that point
that it was just hopelessly
immoral not to do it.
(rapid percussive music)
I'm Noam Chomsky, I'm on faculty at MIT.
And I've been getting more
and more heavily involved
in anti-war activities
for the last few years.
(bombs whistling)
(gunshots booming)
(somber music)
(helicopter rotors whirring)
I remember beginning with
writing articles and making speeches,
and speaking to congressmen
and that sort of thing.
And gradually getting involved
more and more directly
in resistance activities of various sorts.
I've come to the feeling myself,
that the most effective
form of political action
that is open to a responsible
and concerned citizen at the moment
is action that really involves
direct resistance, refusal to
take part in what I think are war crimes
to raise the domestic cost of
American aggression overseas
through non-participation
and support for those who
are refusing to take part,
in particular, draft resistance
throughout the country.
(somber music)
(helicopter rotors whirring)
(gunshots booming)
(airplane roaring)
I think that we can see quite clearly
some very, very serious defects
and flaws in our society,
our level of culture, our institutions,
which are going to have to be corrected
by operating outside of the framework
that is commonly accepted.
I think we're gonna have to find new ways
of political action.
(crowd clamoring)
(somber music)
(crowd clamoring)
(objects clattering)
(people speaking faintly)
(whistle blowing)
(people speaking faintly)
(ominous music)
- I rejoice in your disposition
to argue the Vietnam question,
especially when I recognize
what an act of self
control this must involve.
- [Noam] It does, it really
does, I mean, I think that this
is the kind of issue--
- And you're doing very well.
- Sometimes I lose my temper, maybe not--
- Maybe not tonight. (chuckling)
Because, if you would I'd
smash you in the goddamn face.
(audience laughing)
(Bill chortling)
When you said, you say--
- It's a good reason for
not losing my temper.
- When you say, the war
is simply an obscenity,
a depraved act by weak and miserable men.
- [Noam] Including all
of us, including myself.
- Well then--
- Including every,
that's the next sentence, same sentence.
- Oh sure, sure, sure, sure.
Because you count everybody
in the company of the guilty.
- [Noam] I think that's true in this case.
- But the thing--
- See one of the points
I was trying--
- This is a sense
of theological observation, isn't it?
- No, I don't think so.
- Because if somebody points
out, if everybody's guilty
of everything, than
nobody's guilty of anything.
- No, I don't, well--
- That's true, that.
- No, I don't, I don't believe that.
So yeah, I think that, I think the point
that I'm trying to make and
I think ought to be made
is that the real,
at least to me, I say this
elsewhere in the book,
what seems to me, a very, in a sense,
terrifying aspect of our
society and other societies,
is the equanimity and the detachment
with which sane,
reasonable, sensible people
can observe such events.
I think that's more terrifying
than the occasional Hitler
or LeMay or other that crops up.
These people would not be able to operate
were it not for the, this
apathy and equanimity.
And therefore, I think
that it's, in some sense,
the sane and reasonable and
tolerant people who should,
who share a very serious burden of guilt
that they very easily throw
on the shoulders of others
who seem more extreme and reviled.
(dramatic music)
- 12 million pounds of confetti dropped
into New York City's
so-called Canyon of Heroes.
Americans were officially
welcoming the troops home
from the Persian Gulf War.
(horns blaring)
- So it worked out
really great for us, I mean,
it just goes to show that
we're a mighty nation.
And we'll be there for, no
matter what comes along.
I mean, it's the strongest
country in the world.
And you gotta be glad to live here.
- [Woman] So, tell me what you feel
about the media coverage of the war.
- I guess it was good.
It got to be a bit much after a while.
But I guess it was good
to know everything.
You know, because I guess in
Vietnam you didn't really know
a lot of what was going on.
But here, you're pretty much
up to the moment on everything.
So I guess it was good to be informed.
(dramatic music)
- For the first time,
because of technology,
we have the ability to be live
from many locations around the globe.
And because of the format,
an all-news network,
we can spend whatever time is
necessary to bring the viewer
the complete context of that
day's portion of the story.
And by context, I mean
the institutional memory
that is critical to
understand why and how.
And that's those who are
analysts and do commentary
and those who can explain.
- [Man] Slug that last piece.
ITN, Israel, post war.
- David Brinkley once said
that you step in front of the camera,
and you get out of news
business and into show business.
But nonetheless, that
should not, in any way,
subtract or obscure the need
for the basic standards
of good journalism.
- Pat, hang tight.
Let me give you a lead for
Salinger right now, okay?
So President Bush and Prime Minister Major
have closed or have almost rejected
the Soviet peace talk,
peace efforts, okay?
In Saudi Arabia, the
door is being left open.
Rick Salinger is standing by
live in Riyadh with the latest.
- All but closed.
- Yeah, all but closed.
- All but closed?
- Right.
- [Ed] Accuracy, speed,
a fair approach, honesty
and integrity within their reporter to try
and bring the truth,
whatever the truth may be.
- Going to war is a serious business.
In a totalitarian society
the dictator just says,
we're going to war, and everybody marches.
- [Narrator] And with this
weapon of human brotherhood
in our hands, we are seeing
the war for men's minds
not as a battle of truth against lies,
but as a lasting alliance
pledged in faith,
with all those millions
driving forward to create
the true new order, the world order
of the people first,
the people before all.
- In democratic society,
the theory is that
if the political leadership
is committed to the war,
they present reasons.
And they've got a very heavy
burden of proof to meet.
Because a war is a very
catastrophic affair,
as it's been proven to be.
Now the role of the media, at that point,
is to present the relevant background,
for example, the possibilities
of peaceful settlement,
such as, what they may be,
they have to be presented.
And then to present, to
offer a forum, in fact,
encourage a forum of debate
over this very dread decision
to go to war and, in this case,
kill hundreds of thousands
of people and leave two
countries wrecked and so on.
That never happened.
There was never well, you
know, when I say never,
I mean 99.9% of the discussion
excluded the option of
a peaceful settlement.
- [Man] The Washington Office
of War Information holds one
of the most vital and
constructive tasks of this war.
- This is a peoples' war, and to win it,
the people oughta know as
much about it as they can.
This office will do its
best to tell the truth
and nothing but the truth,
both at home and abroad.
- [Man] The first weapon in
this worldwide strategy of truth
is the great machine of information
represented by the free press,
with its powers of molding public thought
and leading public action,
with all its lifelines for
the exchange of new ideas
between fighting nations
spread across the earth.
- [Noam] Every time George
Bush would appear and say,
"There will be no negotiations,"
there would be 100 editorials the next day
lauding him for going the
last mile for diplomacy.
If he said, "You can't
reward an aggressor,"
instead of cracking up in ridicule
the way people did in the
civilized segments of the world,
like the whole Third
World, the media said,
"Oh man, a fantastic principle.!
You know, for the invader of
Panama, the only head of state
who stands condemned for
aggression in the world.
The guy who was head of
the CIA during the Timor
aggression, he says
aggressors can't be rewarded.
The media just applauded.
- [Man] The motion picture industry,
with its worldwide organization
of newsreel camera crews,
invaluable for bringing into vivid focus
the background drama and
perspectives of the war.
Mobilized, too, in this all-out
struggle for men's minds,
are the radio networks,
with all their experience
and the swift reporting of
great occasion and event.
From every strategic center
and front line stronghold,
their reporters are
sending back the lessons
of new tactics, new ways of war.
- The result was it's a media war.
I mean, there was tremendous
fakery all along the line.
The UN is finally living up
to its mission, you know,
wondrous sea change, "The
New York Times" told us.
The only wondrous sea change was that
for once the United States didn't veto
a Security Council resolution
against aggression.
People don't want a war
unless you have to have one.
And they would have known that
you don't have to have one.
Well, the media kept
people from knowing that.
And that means we went to war, very much,
in the manner of a totalitarian state,
thanks to the media subservience,
that's the big story.
(somber music)
(people hooting)
(loon calling)
Now, remember, I'm not talking about
a small radio station in Laramie.
I'm talking about the
national agenda-setting media.
If you're on a radio news show in Laramie,
chances are very strong that you pick up
what was in the "Times" that morning
and you decide that's the news.
In fact, if you follow the AP wires,
you find that in the afternoon
they send across tomorrow's front page
of "The New York Times."
That's so that everybody
knows what the news is.
And the perceptions and
the perspectives and so on
are sort of transmitted down.
And not to the precise detail,
but the general picture
is pretty much transmitted elsewhere.
(teletype machine rattling)
- The foreign news comes here
to the foreign news desk.
The editor is Bob Hanley.
Bob, I suppose you get
far more foreign news
than you can possibly use in the paper?
- Yes, we do, we get a great deal more
than we can accommodate in a day.
- And your job is to
weed it out, I suppose?
- This is the selection
center, as it were.
And when I have selected it,
I pass it across the desk
to one or the other of the sub-editors.
It comes back to me, and on
this chart I design the page,
that is, page one and page two.
- Fine, Bob, thank you very much.
(tram clanging)
(tram squealing)
- Why do you want to make
a film about media for?
- Well--
- Such a nice, quiet town.
- [Man] It's a beautiful town.
Well, we're making a film
about the mass media.
So we thought, what a good place to come.
- You wanna know where they got the name?
- [Man] So maybe you could
start by introducing yourself.
- Yes, I'm Bohdan Senkow,
I'm the Main Street manager
and the executive director of
the media business authority.
And we are in Media, Delaware County,
in the southeastern part of Pennsylvania.
Media is called everybody's hometown.
The motto was developed 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.
- [Man] The local paper,
"The Talk of the Town."
- "The Town Talk."
- [Man] Do you read that? (chuckling)
- Yes, I read "The Town Talk," yes.
- [Man] What do you
think the difference is
between "The Boston Journal"
and the town, the talk of--
- Oh, well, "The Town Talk"
is completely local news.
And it's fun, it's nice
to read, it's interesting.
You read about your neighbors
and see what's going on,
the school district and things like that.
- We're in business to make bucks,
just like the big daily newspapers,
just like the radio stations,
and we do quite well.
And rightfully so, 'cause
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, many times
you'll find that this paper
runs well over 100 pages a
week, this particular edition.
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 now is
the advertising and
composition department.
Say hello, guys, will you?
- Hi.
- Hi.
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.
Now 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 would run sporadically.
Now we have computer printouts
of every one of these stores.
And what we do is, we take the printouts
of all the red dots,
which are the bad guys,
and what our idea is, 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% of the stores
and 100% of the merchants
and the service people advertise
in our newspaper every week.
That way, we won't have any more red dots.
I guess there'll always be a few red dots.
But I have high hopes that
there'll be a lot more
green ones than red ones
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.
- [Man] So they're just
taking audio, in here, yeah.
They're taking audio in here.
- [Man] Audio, no cameras, no still.
We went over this quite thoroughly.
They don't even take a
still camera in here.
- [Jim] We're in the composing room.
This is where the pages are composed.
This is the typographical area.
- [Man] What's the ratio
of news to advertising?
- 60% ads.
(rapid music)
This might seem big.
But it is average, in fact, below average.
Our 60% might include,
on some days, maybe 20 pages
of classified advertising
almost to itself,
where the rest of the newspaper's 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.
(easy listening music)
- Now, 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, Joe six pack, that kind.
The purpose of those media is
just to dull peoples' brains.
This is an oversimplification,
but for the 80%, 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, you know,
a motherless child with six
heads, or whatever you pick up
in the thing that you pick up
on the supermarket stands and so on.
Or, you know, look at
astrology or get involved in,
you know, 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.
- [Narrator] 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 favorite play by play.
- Take, say, sports, that's
another crucial example
of the indoctrination system, in my view.
For one thing, because it
offers people something
to pay attention to
that's of no importance,
that keeps them from
learning about, you know--
(audience applauding)
It keeps them from worrying
about things that matter
to their lives that 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.
I mean, you listen to the radio stations
where people call in, they have
the most exotic information
understanding about, you know,
all kind of arcane issues.
And the press, undoubtedly,
does a lot with this.
I remember, in high school
already, I was pretty old,
I suddenly asked myself at
one point, why do I care
if my high school team
wins the football game?
(audience laughing)
I mean,
I don't know anybody
on the team, you know?
They have nothing to do with me.
I mean, why am I cheering for my team?
It doesn't make any sense, you know?
But the point is, it does make sense.
It's a way of building
up irrational attitudes
of submission to authority.
(buzzer buzzing)
And you know, group cohesion
behind 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 they have, typically,
they do have functions.
And that's why energy is
devoted to supporting them
and creating a basis for
them and advertisement
are willing to pay for them and so on.
(horn blaring)
(marching band music)
- I'd like to ask you a
question, essentially,
about the methodology in
studying 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 often 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 favored state itself,
so by the United States in the US case.
And the question is,
whether the media accept
the government framework or whether
they use the same agenda,
the same set of questions,
the same criteria for
dealing with the two cases,
as any honest outside observer would do.
- [Man] If you think America's involvement
in the war in Southeast
Asia is over, think again.
- [Man] The Khmer Rouge are
the most genocidal people
on the face of the earth.
- [Man] "Peter Jennings Reporting
"from the Killing Fields," Thursday.
- I mean, the great act of
genocide in the modern period
is Pol Pot, from 1975 through 1978.
From that atrocity, I think it'd 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.
Well, it just happens that in that case,
history did set up a
controlled experiment.
- [Woman] Have you ever heard
of a place called East Timor?
- I can't say that I have.
- Where?
- East Timor.
- Nope.
- No, huh?
- Well, it happens that right at the time
there was another atrocity,
very similar in character,
but differing in one respect.
We were responsible for it, not Pol Pot.
- Hello, I'm Louise Penney,
and this is "Radio Noon."
If you've been listening to
the program fairly regularly
over the last few months, you'll know
East Timor has come into the
conversation more than once,
particularly when we were
talking about foreign aid
and also the war and a new world order.
People wondered why,
if the UN was serious
about a new world order,
no one was doing anything
to help East Timor.
The area was invaded by Indonesia 1975.
There are reports of atrocities
against the Timorese people.
And yet, Canada and other
nations have consistently voted
against UN resolutions
to end the occupation.
Today we're going to take a
closer look at East Timor,
what's happened to it, and why
the international community
is doing nothing to help.
One of the people who
have been most active
is Elaine Briere, a photojournalist
from British Columbia.
She's the founder of the
East Timor Alert Network,
and she joins me in the studio now, hello.
- Hi.
- [Louise] One tragedy
compounding a tragedy
is that a lot of people don't
know much about East Timor.
Where is it?
- East Timor is just north of Australia,
about 420 kilometers.
And it's right between the
Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Just south of East Timor
is a deep-water sea lane,
perfect for US submarines to pass through.
There's also huge oil reserves there.
(seabirds calling)
(mid-tempo music)
One of the unique things
about East Timor is that
it's truly one of the last
surviving ancient civilizations
in that part of the world.
(folk music)
The Timorese spoke 30 different
languages and dialects.
And that's in a group of 700,000 people.
(singing in foreign language)
Today, less than 5% of the world's people
live like the East Timorese.
Basically self-reliant,
they live really outside
of the global economic system.
(man humming)
(gentle music)
Small societies like the East Timorese
are much more democratic,
and much more egalitarian.
And there's much more
sharing of power and wealth.
(singing in foreign language)
Before the Indonesians invaded,
most people in small, rural villages.
(light percussion music)
The old people in the village
were like the university.
They passed on tribal wisdom
from generation to generation.
Children grew up in a safe,
stimulating, nurturing environment.
(children singing in foreign language)
A year after I left East
Timor, I was appalled
when I heard that Indonesia had invaded.
They didn't want a small,
independent country
setting an example for the region.
(insects chirring)
- [Noam] East Timor was
a Portuguese colony.
Indonesia had no claim to it and, in fact,
stated that they had no claim to it.
During the period of colonization,
there was a good deal
of politicization that
different groups developed.
(speaking in foreign language)
(gunshots booming)
A civil war broke out in August, '75.
(speaking in foreign language)
(gunshots booming)
(people screaming)
(gunshots booming)
It ended up in a victory for Fretilin,
which was one of the groupings described
as populist Catholic in character
with some typical left-ish rhetoric.
(horns honking)
Indonesia at once started intervening.
- [Man] What's the situation?
When do the ships come in?
- They start arriving since Monday.
Six, seven boat together,
very close to our border.
They are not there just for fun, you know?
They're preparing a massive operation.
- Something happened here last night
that moved us very deeply.
It was so far outside our
experience as Australians,
that we'll find it very
difficult to convey to you.
But we'll try.
Sitting on woven mats,
under a thatched roof,
in a hut with no walls, we
were the target of a barrage
of questioning from men who
know they may die tomorrow
and cannot understand why
the rest of the world does not care.
That's all they want,
for the United Nations
to care about what is happening here.
The emotion here last night
was so strong that we,
all three of us, felt
that we should be able
to reach out into the warm
night air and touch it.
Greg Shackleton, in an unnamed village
which we'll remember
forever in Portuguese Timor.
(camera clicks)
(gunshots booming)
(insects chirring)
(gunshots booming)
- [Noam] Ford and
Kissinger visited Jakarta.
I think it was December 5th.
We know that they had requested
that Indonesia delay the
invasion until after they left
because it would be too embarrassing.
And within hours, I
think, after they left,
the invasion took place on December 7th.
- What happened on December
7, 1975, is just one
of the great, great evil deeds of history.
Early in the morning, bombs
began dropping on Dili.
The number of troops that
invaded Dili that day
almost outnumbered the entire
population of the town.
And for two or three
weeks, there was just,
they just killed people.
(speaking in foreign language)
- This council must consider
Indonesian aggression
against East Timor as the
main issue of the discussion.
- [Noam] When the Indonesians invaded,
the UN reacted as it always does,
calling for sanctions and
condemnation and so on.
Various watered-down
resolutions were passed.
But the US was very clearly not going
to allow anything to work.
(people singing)
(people speaking faintly)
(clock chiming)
(people speaking faintly)
- So the Timorese were fleeing
into the jungles by the thousands.
By late 1977, '78, Indonesia
set up receiving centers
for those Timorese who
came out of the jungle
waving white flags.
Those the Indonesians
thought were more educated
or who were suspected
of belonging to Fretilin
or other opposition parties
were immediately killed.
They took women aside and
flew them off to Delhi
in helicopters for use by
the Indonesian soldiers.
They killed children and babies.
But in those days, their main strategy
and their main weapon was starvation.
- By 1978, it was approaching
really genocidal levels.
The church and other sources estimated
about 200,000 people killed;
the US backed it all the way.
The US provided 90% of the arms.
Right after the invasion, arms
shipments were stepped up.
When the Indonesians actually
began to run out of arms
in 1978, the Carter
administration moved in
and increased arms sales,
and other Western countries did the same,
Canada, England, Holland.
(audience applauding)
Everybody who could
make a buck was in there
trying to make sure they
could kill more Timorese.
There is no Western concern
for issues of aggression,
atrocities, human rights
abuses, and so on,
if there's a profit to be made from them.
Nothing could show it more
clearly than this case.
(somber music)
It wasn't that nobody had
ever heard of East Timor.
Crucial to remember that
there was plenty of coverage
in "The New York Times" and
elsewhere before the invasion.
The reason was that there
was concern at the time
over the breakup of the Portuguese empire
and what that would mean.
There was a fear that it
would lead to independence
or Russian influence, or whatever.
After the Indonesians
invaded the coverage dropped.
There was some, but it was
strictly from the point of view
of the State Department
and Indonesian generals,
never a Timorese refugee.
(somber music)
(garbage clinking)
As the atrocities reached
their maximum peak in 1978,
when it really was becoming genocidal,
coverage dropped to zero in
the United States and Canada,
the two countries I've looked at closely,
literally dropped to zero.
All this was going on
at exactly the same time
as the great protest of
outrage over Cambodia.
The level of atrocities was
comparable in relative terms.
It was probably considerably
higher in Timor.
(light gamelan music)
It turns out, right in Cambodia,
in the preceding years,
1970 through 1975, there was
also a comparable atrocity
for which we were responsible.
(explosions booming)
The major US attack
against Cambodia started
with the bombings of the early 1970s.
They reached a peak in 1973.
And they continued up till 1975.
They were directed against Inner Cambodia.
Very little is known about that
because the media wanted it to be secret.
They knew what was going on.
They just didn't want to
know what was happening.
(bicycle bell dings)
The CIA estimates about 600,000 killed
during that five-year
period, which is mostly
either US bombing or a US-sponsored war.
So that's pretty significant killing.
But also, the conditions
in which it left Cambodia
were such that high US officials predicted
that about a million people
would die in the aftermath,
just from hunger and disease,
(gunshot booming)
because of the wreckage of the country.
Pretty good evidence from
US government sources
and scholarly sources that
the intense bombardment
was a significant force,
maybe a critical force,
in building up peasant
support for the Khmer Rouge,
who, before that, were a
pretty marginal element.
well, that's just the wrong story.
After 1975, atrocities continued.
And that became the right story.
Because now they're being
carried out by the bad guys.
Well, it was bad enough.
In fact, current estimates
are that well, you know,
they vary, I mean, the CIA claimed
50 to 100,000 people killed,
and maybe another million or
so who died one way or another.
Michael Vickery is the one person
who's given a really
close, detailed analysis.
His figure is, maybe, 750,000
deaths above the normal.
Others, like Ben Kiernan,
suggest higher figures.
But so far, without a detailed analysis,
anyway, it was terrible,
no doubt about it.
Although the atrocities,
the real atrocities, were bad enough,
they weren't quite good enough
for the purposes needed.
Within a few weeks after
the Khmer Rouge takeover,
"The New York Times" was already
accusing 'em of genocide.
At that point, maybe a couple hundred
or maybe a few thousand
people had been killed.
And from then on, it was a
drumbeat, a chorus of genocide.
(somber music)
(singing in foreign language)
The big best-seller on
Cambodia, on Pol Pot,
is called "Murder in a Gentle Land."
Up until April 17th,
1975, it was a gentle land
of peaceful, smiling people.
And after that, some horrible
Holocaust took place.
Very quickly, a figure of two
million killed was hit upon.
In fact, what was claimed was
that the Khmer Rouge boast
of having murdered two million people.
The facts are very dramatic.
In the case of atrocities
committed by the official enemy,
extraordinary show of
outrage, exaggeration,
no evidence required,
faked photographs are fine,
anything goes, also, vast amount of lying.
I mean, an amount of lying that
would've made Stalin cringe.
It was fraudulent, and we
know that it was fraudulent
by looking at the response
to comparable atrocities
for which the United
States was responsible.
Early '70s Cambodia, Timor,
are two very closely paired examples.
Well, the media response
was quite dramatic.
(typewriter rattling)
(somber piano music)
(typewriter carriage dings)
(typewriter carriage rattles)
(typewriter carriage rasping)
(somber piano music)
(typewriter clacking)
(typewriter carriage dinging)
- Back in 1980, I taught a
course at Tufts University.
Well, Chomsky came around to this class.
And he made a very powerful
case that the press underplayed
the facts that the Indonesian
government and next,
this former Portuguese colony in 1975.
And that if you compare it,
for example, with Cambodia,
where there was acreage of things,
that this was a communist atrocity,
whereas the other was
not a communist atrocity.
Well, I got quite interested
in this, and I went to talk
to the then deputy foreign
editor of the "Times."
And I said, you know, we've
had very poor coverage on this.
And he said, "You're absolutely right.
"There are dozen
atrocities around the world
"that we don't cover, this
is one for various reasons."
So I took it up.
- I was working as a reporter
and writer for a small,
alternative radio program
in upstate New York.
And we received audiotapes
of interviews with Timorese leaders.
And we were quite surprised that,
given the level of American involvement,
that there was not more coverage,
indeed, practically any coverage
of the large-scale Indonesian killing
in the mainstream American media.
We formed a small group of people to try
to monitor the situation
and see what we could do
over time to alert public opinion
to what was actually
happening in East Timor.
- [Noam] There were, literally,
about half a dozen people
who simply dedicated themselves,
with great commitment,
to getting the story to break through.
And they reached a couple
of people in Congress.
They got to me, for example.
I was able to testify at
the UN on rights and things.
They kept at it, kept at it, kept at it.
Whatever is known about the
subject mainly comes from,
essentially comes from their work.
'Cause there's not much else.
- I wrote, first, an editorial called
"An Unjust War in East Timor."
It had a map and it said
exactly what had happened.
We then ran a dozen other
editorials on it, they were read.
They were entered in the
Congressional Record.
And several Congressmen
then took up the cause.
And then something was done in
Congress as a result of this.
- The fact that the editorial
page of "The New York Times,"
on Christmas Eve, published that editorial
put our work on a very different level.
And it gave a great deal
of legitimacy to something
that we were trying to
advance for a long time.
And that was the idea and the reality
that a major tragedy was
unfolding in East Timor.
- If one takes literally the various
theories that Professor Chomsky puts out,
one would feel that there
was a tacit conspiracy
between the establishment
press and the government
in Washington to focus on certain things
and ignore certain things.
So that if we broke the
rules, that we would instantly
get a reaction, a sharp reaction,
from the overlords in Washington.
They would say, "Hey, what are you doing,
"speaking up on East Timor?
"We're trying to keep that quiet."
We didn't hear a thing.
What we did hear, and this
was quite interesting,
is that there was a
guy named Arnold Kohen.
And he became a one-person lobby.
- I appreciate the nice things
that Karl Meyer said
about me in his interview.
But I object to the notion
that a one-man lobby was
formed or anything like that.
I think that if there
weren't a large network
composed of the American
Catholic Bishops Conference,
composed of other church groups,
composed of human rights groups,
composed of simply concerned
citizens and others,
and a network of concern
within the news media,
I think that it would have been impossible
to do anything at all at any time.
And it certainly would
have been impossible
to sustain things for as long
as they've been sustained.
- [Karl] Professor Chomsky
and a lot of people who engage
in this kind of press analysis
have one thing in common.
Most of them have never
worked for a newspaper.
Many of them know very little
about how newspapers work.
- Dr. Davis, telephone.
- When Chomsky came around,
he had with him a file of all the coverage
in "The New York Times,"
"The Washington Post,"
and other papers, of East Timor.
And he would go to the
meticulous degree that if,
for example, "The London Times"
had a piece on East Timor,
and then it appeared in
"The New York Times,"
that if a paragraph was cut
out, he'd compare and he'd say,
"Look, this key paragraph
right near the end,
"which is really what
tells the whole story,
"was left out of 'The
New York Times' version
"of 'The London Times' thing."
(dramatic music)
(flatline beep resonating)
- There was a story in "The London Times"
which was pretty accurate.
"The New York Times" revised it radically.
They didn't just leave a paragraph out.
They revised it and gave it
a totally different cast.
(dramatic music)
(typewriter clacking)
(somber music)
(dramatic music)
(tools clicking)
It was then picked up by "Newsweek,"
giving it "The New York Times" cast.
It ended up being a whitewash,
whereas the original
was an atrocity story.
- So I said to Chomsky
at the time, I said,
"Well, it may be that you're
misinterpreting ignorance,
"haste, deadline pressure, et cetera,
"for some kind of determined effort
"to suppress an element of the story."
He said, "Well, if it
happened once or twice
"or three times I might agree with you.
"But if it happens a
dozen times, Mr. Meyer,
"I think there's something else at work."
- And it's not a matter
of happening one time,
two times, five times, 100
times, it happened all the time.
- I said, Professor Chomsky,
having been in this business,
it happens a dozen times.
That these are very
imperfect institutions.
- When they did give coverage,
it was from the point of view
of, it was a whitewash
of the United States.
Now, you know, that's not an error.
That's systematic, consistent behavior.
In this case, without even any exception.
- This is a much more subtle process
than you get
in the kind of the sledgehammer rhetoric
of the people that make an A-to-B equation
between what the government
does, what people think,
and what newspapers say.
That sometimes, what the "Times" does
can make enormous, a difference.
And other times it has
no influence whatsoever.
- So one of the greatest
tragedies of our age
is still happening in East Timor.
The Indonesians have killed up
to a third of the population.
They're in concentration camps.
They conduct large-scale
military campaigns
against the people who are
resisting, campaigns with names
like Operation Eradicate
or Operation Clean Sweep.
Timorese women are subjected
to a forced birth control program,
in addition to bringing
in a constant stream
of Indonesian settlers
to take over the land.
Whenever people are brave
enough to take to the streets
in demonstrations, or show
the least sign of resistance,
they just massacre them.
It's sort of like Indonesia,
if we allow them to continue
to stay in East Timor, the
international community,
they will simply digest
East Timor and turn it into,
they're turning, trying
to turn it into cash crop.
- I mean, this is way
beyond just demonstrating
the subservience of the media to power.
I mean, they are actual,
they have real complicity
in genocide in this case.
The reason that the atrocities can go on
is because nobody knows about them.
If anyone knew about them,
there'd be protests and
pressure to stop them.
So therefore, by suppressing the facts,
the media are making a major
contribution to some of the,
probably the worst act of
genocide since the Holocaust.
- [Man] You say that what
the media do is to ignore
certain kinds of atrocities
that are committed
by us and our friends
(telephone ringing)
and to play up, enormously, atrocities
that are committed by
them and our enemies.
And you posit that there's
a test of integrity
and moral honesty, which is
to have a kind of equality
of treatment of corpses.
- Equality of principles.
- I mean, that every dead person
should be, in principle, equal
to every other dead person.
- That's not what I say.
That's not what I say at all.
- Well, I'm glad
that's not what you say,
because that's not what you do.
- [Noam] Of course it's not
what I do, nor would I say it.
- That's right.
- In fact, I say the opposite.
What I say is that we
should be responsible
for our own actions primarily.
- Because your method
is not only to ignore
the corpses created by them,
but also to ignore the corpses
that are created by neither
side, but which are irrelevant
to your ideological..
- That's totally untrue.
- Well let me give you an example.
That one of your own causes
that you take very seriously
is the cause of the Palestinians.
And a Palestinian corpse
weighs very heavily
on your conscience, and yet
a Kurdish corpse does not.
- That's not true at all.
I've been involved in Kurdish
support groups for years.
That's absolutely true,
that's absolutely false.
I mean, just ask the Kurdish.
Ask the people who are involved.
And I mean, you know, they come to me.
I sign their petitions
and so on and so forth.
And yet, if you look at
the things we've written,
I mean, actually let's take a look.
I mean I'm not Amnesty
International, I can't do everything.
I'm a single person.
(audience applauding)
But if you read, say, take a look, say,
at the book Edward Herman
and I wrote on this topic.
In it, we discuss three
kinds of atrocities.
What we called benign bloodbaths,
which nobody cares about,
constructive bloodbaths,
which are the ones we like,
and nefarious bloodbaths,
which are the ones
that the bad guys do.
The principle that I
think we ought to follow
is not the one that you stated.
You know, it's a very
simple, ethical point.
You're responsible for the
predictable consequences
of your actions.
You're not responsible for
the predictable consequences
of somebody else's actions.
The most important thing,
for me and for you,
is to think about the
consequences of your actions.
What can you effect?
These are the things to keep in mind.
These are not just academic exercises.
We're not analyzing the media on Mars
or in the 18th century
or something like that.
we're dealing with real human
beings who are suffering
and dying and being tortured and starving,
because of policies
that we are involved in.
We, as citizens of democratic societies,
are directly involved in
and are responsible for.
And what the media are doing
is ensuring that we do not act
on our responsibilities and
that the interests of power
are served, not the needs
of the suffering people.
And not even the needs
of the American people
who would be horrified if they realized
the blood that's dripping from their hands
because of the way they're
allowing themselves
to be deluded and
manipulated by this system.
(gentle music)
(wordless vocal music)
- [Man] And what about the Third World?
- Well, despite everything,
and it's pretty ugly and awful,
these struggles are not over.
The struggle for freedom and independence
never is completely over.
(gentle music)
(wordless vocal music)
Their courage in fact, is
really remarkable and amazing.
I've personally had the
privilege, and it is a privilege,
of witnessing it a few times,
in villages in Southeast Asia
and Central America, and recently
in the occupied West Bank.
And it is astonishing to see.
(gentle music)
(wordless vocal music)
And it's always amazing, at
least to me it's amazing.
I can't understand it; it's
also very moving very inspiring.
In fact, it's kind of awe inspiring.
Now, they rely, very crucially,
one a very slim margin
for survival that's provided
by dissidence and turbulence
within the imperial societies.
And how large that margin
is, is for us to determine.
(gentle music)
(wordless vocal music)
(dramatic music)
- In today's "On The Spot"
assignment we're going
to see just what's behind
the making of movies.
The director and the crew are
shooting a documentary film.
Let's take a closer look.
Bob, this word, documentary,
what would you say
is the difference between
a documentary film
and a feature movie?
- Well, there are a good many differences.
One would be length, generally speaking,
documentaries are a good deal
shorter than feature films.
Also, documentaries have something to say
in the way of a message,
they are informational films.
Also, another term that's
used interchangeably
with documentary is the word
actuality, actuality films.
- [Interviewer] Bob, is
this the thing you hold up
in front of the camera before each scene?
- This is a clapper board, yes.
This identifies on the visual camera
the scene number and the take number.
And also, as you heard, on the soundtrack,
the editor back at the
studio puts the two pieces
of film together, matches where the lips
of the clapper come together;
and there you are, in sync.
- Before the break, you
were mentioning the media
putting forth information
that they power elite want.
I'm not sure if I understand.
How does the power elite do this?
And why do, why do we stand for it?
Why does it work so well?
- okay, well, I think here we have to,
I mean, there really
are two questions here.
One, is this picture of the media true?
And there you have to
look at the evidence.
I mean, I've given one example.
And that shouldn't convince anybody.
One has to look at a lot of evidence
to see whether this is true.
I think anyone who
investigates it will find out
that the evidence to support
it is simply overwhelming.
In fact, it's probably one of
the best supported conclusions
in the social sciences.
But the other question
is, how does it work?
- [Man] I'm the, I'm the media guy.
- Oh, you're in the media?
- What would you like?
I got you an "International
Herald Tribune," you want that?
- I want anything in a Western language.
(man chuckling)
What do you got?
- "Financial Times."
- "Financial Times," absolutely.
(man chuckling)
That's the only paper
that tells the truth.
- [Man] You get the one where
they've been debating back and forth.
So "NRC Handelsblad."
- Handelsblad?
- That's it.
(tense music)
- Train to...
- Ammerswurth.
- Ammerswurth.
Well, this evening's program
is scheduled as a debate,
which puzzled me all the way through.
There are some problems.
One problem is that no
proposition has been set forth.
As I understand debate,
people are supposed
to advocate something
and oppose something.
Rather, more sensibly,
a topic has been proposed for discussion.
The topic is manufacture of consent.
- [Man] It's somewhat unusual
for a member of the government
to debate with a professor in public.
It hasn't happened in Holland before.
I don't think it's
often happens elsewhere.
(audience chattering)
(bell rings)
- [Man] Mr. Bolkestein,
the floor is yours.
- Now we all know that the theory
can never be established
merely by examples.
It can only be established
by showing some internal inherent logic.
Professor Chomsky has not done so.
- [Man] Professor Chomsky?
- He's quite right when he says
you can't just pick examples.
You have to do them in a rational way.
That's why we compared examples.
- The truth is, that
things are not as simple
as Professor Chomsky maintains.
Another of Professor
Chomsky's case studies
concerns the treatment
that Cambodia has received
in the Western press; here,
he goes badly off the rails.
(audience laughing)
- We didn't discuss Cambodia.
We compared Cambodia with East Timor,
two very closely paired examples.
And we gave approximately 300
pages of detail covering this
in "Political Economy of Human Rights,"
including a reference to every article
we could discover about Cambodia.
- Many Western intellectuals do not like
to face the facts, and
balk at the conclusions
that any untutored person would draw.
- Many people are very
irritated by the fact
that we exposed the extraordinary
deceit over Cambodia
and paired it with the
simultaneous suppression
of the US-supported ongoing
atrocities in Timor.
People don't like that; for one thing,
we were challenging the right to lie
in defense of the state for
another thing we were exposing,
the apologetics and support
for actual ongoing atrocities.
That doesn't make you popular.
(audience cheering)
(bell dings)
- Where did he learn about
the atrocities in East Timor
or in Central America, if
not in the same free press
which he so derides?
- You can find out where
I learned about them
by looking at my footnotes.
I learned about them from
human rights reports,
from church reports, from refugee studies,
and extensively from the Australian press.
There was nothing from the American press
because there was silence.
- Chairman, this is an attempt
at intellectual intimidation.
These are the ways of the bully.
Professor Chomsky uses the
oldest debating trick on record.
He erects a man of straw and
proceeds to hack away at him.
(audience cheering)
(bell dings)
Professor Chomsky calls this
the manufacture of consent.
I call it the creation of consensus.
In Holland we call it
(speaking in foreign language),
which means foundation.
Professor Chomsky thinks it
is deceitful, but it is not.
In a representative democracy
it means winning people
for one's point of view.
But I do not think that Professor Chomsky
believes in representative democracy.
I think he believes in direct democracy.
With Rosa Luxemburg, he
longs for the creative,
spontaneous, self-correcting
force of mass action.
That is the vision of the anarchist.
It is also a boy's dream.
(audience member laughing)
- Those who believe in
democracy and freedom
have a serious task ahead of them.
What they should be doing, in my view,
is dedicating their efforts to helping
the despised common people
to struggle for their rights
and to realize the democratic goals
that constantly surface
throughout history.
They should be serving,
not power and privilege,
but rather their victims.
Freedom and democracy are, by now,
not merely values to be treasured.
They are, quite possibly,
the prerequisite to survival.
- It's a conspiracy
theory, pure and simple.
It is not borne out by the facts.
Mr. Chairman, I have to go to Amsterdam.
If you'll excuse me, I'm leaving.
(audience laughing)
(audience applauding)
(audience murmuring)
- One thing is sure,
that consent has not been
manufactured tonight.
(eerie music)
- There is nothing more remote
from what I'm discussing
or what we have been discussing
than a conspiracy theory.
If I give an analysis of,
say, the economic system,
and I point out that General
Motors tries to maximize profit
and market share, that's
not a conspiracy theory.
That's an institutional analysis.
It has nothing to do with conspiracies.
And that's precisely the sense in which
we're talking about the media.
The phrase conspiracy theory
is one of those that's
constantly brought up.
And I think its effect, simply,
is to discourage institutional analysis.
(tram bell dings)
(tram whirring)
(horns honking)
- [Man] Do you think there's
a connection, somehow,
about what the government wants us to know
and what the media tell us?
- It's not Communism, but I think
to a certain point, it is sensitized.
- You don't always tell, I mean, I guess
they don't always tell the
truth, the way it goes, huh?
- You got that right.
- [Man] Do you think that the
information you're getting
from this paper is biased in any way?
- Oh yeah.
- I think by and large, it's well done.
You get both sides of the stories.
You get the liberal side
and the conservative side, so to speak.
- But I don't think you get
a very balanced picture.
Because they only have
20 seconds, 30 seconds
for a news item or whatever,
and they're gonna pick out a highlight.
And every network is gonna
cover the same highlight.
And that's all you're gonna see.
- You get what they want you to hear.
- Do you think they're
biased in some way, then?
- Yeah.
Here we go!
See you later!
(lively music)
(train rumbling)
- Is it possible for the
lights to get a little brighter
so I can see somebody out there?
- Yeah, for the last hour and 41 minutes,
you've been whining about how the elite
and how the government have
been using thought control
to keep radicals like yourself
out of the public limelight.
Now you're here; I don't see any CIA men
waiting to drag you off;
you were in the paper.
That's where everyone here
heard you were coming from, in the paper.
And I'm sure they're gonna
publish your comments
in the paper; now, a lot of countries,
you would have been shot for
what you have done today.
So what are you whining about?
This is, we are allowing you to speak.
And I don't see any thought control.
- First of all, I haven't been saying,
I hadn't said one word
about my being kept out of the limelight.
The way it works here is quite different.
Now I don't think you
heard what I was saying.
But the way it works here is
that there is a system of
shaping, control, and so on,
which gives a certain
perception of the world.
I gave one example; I'll give you sources
where you can find thousands of others.
That's, and it has nothing to do with me.
It has to do with marginalizing the public
and ensuring that they don't
get in the way of elites
who are supposed to run
things without interference.
- In a review of "The Chomsky Reader,"
it was written that as he's
been forced to the margins,
he's become strident and rigid.
Do you feel less categorization
of your later writings is accurate?
And that you've been a
victim of sort of this
sort of process you've been describing?
- Well, the business about being forced
to the, other people will have
to judge about the stridency.
I won't talk about, I don't believe it.
But anyway, that's for
other people to judge.
However, the matter of
being forced to the margins
is a matter of fact.
And the fact is the
opposite of what is claimed.
The fact is it's much
easier to gain access
to even the major media now
than it was 20 years ago.
- You've dealt in such unpopular truths
and have been such a lonely
figure as a consequence of that.
Do you ever regret either that
you took the stands you took,
have written the things you have written?
Or that they, we had
listened to you earlier?
- I don't; I mean, there
are particular things
which I would do differently.
Because if you think about
things, you do 'em differently.
But in general, I would
say I do not regret it.
I mean, I've been--
- [Bill] Do you like being controversial?
- No, it's a nuisance.
- Because this mass medium
pays little attention
to the views of dissenters.
Not just Noam Chomsky, but
most dissenters do not get much
of a hearing in this medium.
- No, in fact, that's, again,
completely understandable.
They wouldn't be performing
their societal function
if they allowed favored
truths to be challenged.
(somber music)
Now, notice that that's not true
when I cross the border anywhere.
So that easy access to
the media in just about
every other country in the world,
there's a number of reasons for that.
And one reason is, I'm primarily talking
about the United States, and
it's much less threatening.
- Your view there is that militarization
of the American economy,
essentially, has come about
because there are not other means
of controlling the American population.
- [Noam] In a democratic society.
I mean, it's maybe paradoxical,
but the freer the society
is, the more it's necessary
to resort to devices like induced fear.
(printing press rumbling)
- Okay, I'll go along with that; arguably,
he is the most important
intellectual alive today.
And if my program can get
him 500,000 people listening,
or three quarters of a
million people listening,
I'll be delighted.
Okay, Professor, in your own time.
- Wartime planners understood
that actual war aims
should not be revealed.
A part of the reason why the
media in Canada and Belgium
and so on are more open, is
that it just doesn't matter
that much what people think.
It matters very much what the
politically articulate sectors
of the population,
those narrow minorities,
think and do in the United States because
of its overwhelming
dominance on the world scene.
But of course, that's
also a reason for wanting
to work here, what we might
call the fifth freedom,
the freedom to rob, exploit, and dominate,
and to curb mischief
by any feasible means.
(person speaking faintly)
(static buzzing)
That's conclude, not include.
- [Man] So we should go back to the top.
(somber music)
(people speaking faintly)
- [Noam] The United States
is ideologically narrower,
in general, than other countries.
Furthermore, the structure
of the American media is such
as to pretty much eliminate
critical discussion.
- Our guests are as far
apart on the Contra question
as American intellectuals can be.
- Now if we had the slightest
concern with democracy,
which we do not in our foreign
affairs and never have,
we would turn to countries
where we have influence, like El Salvador.
Now in El Salvador they don't
call the archbishop bad names.
What they do is murder him.
They do not censor the press;
they wipe the press out.
They sent the army in to blow
up the church radio station.
The editor of the independent
newspaper was found
in a ditch, mutilated and
cut to pieces with a machete.
- Don't you dare--
- May I continue?
I didn't not interrupt you.
- Well, don't you ever wanna
put a time value on anything you say?
Or do you wanna lie
systematically on television?
- I'm talking about 1980's.
- You are a systematic liar.
- Did these things happen or didn't they?
- These things did not
happen in the context
in which you suggest at all.
- Really?
I think--
- You are a phony, Mister.
And it's time that the
people read you correctly.
- It's clear why you wanna
divert me from the discussion
that I'm--
- No, it's not.
- Now let me--
- We get tired of rubbish.
- But let's continue with--
- Yeah, except we can't.
I'm afraid we're out of time.
We thank you both, John
Silber and Noam Chomsky.
- [Noam] Yeah, okay.
(upbeat music)
- Last time you were
here, you spoke about how
when you go overseas you are
given access to the mass media.
But here, that doesn't
seem to be the case.
Has that changed at all?
Have you ever been invited to appear
on "Nightline" or "Brinkley"?
- Yes, I have, a couple
times, been invited
to speak on "Nightline," I couldn't do it.
I had another talk and something or other.
And to tell you the honest truth,
I don't really care very much.
FAIR, the media monitoring group,
published a very interesting
study of "Nightline."
It shows that their conception
of a spectrum of opinion
is ridiculously narrow,
at least by European or world standards.
(upbeat music)
Let me tell you a personal experience.
I happened to be in Madison, Wisconsin,
on a listener-supported radio station,
a community radio
station, a very good one.
I was having an interview
with the news director.
I'd been on that program dozens of times,
usually by telephone.
And he's very good, he
gets all sorts of people.
And he started the interview
by playing for me a tape
of an interview that he had
just had and had broadcast
with the guy who's some
mucky-muck in "Nightline."
I think his name is Jeff
Greenfield, or some such name.
Does that name mean anything?
- I'm Jeff Greenfield for
"Nightline" in New York.
- [Man] What about, just
in the selection of guests,
to analyze things, why is Noam
Chomsky never on "Nightline"?
- [Jeff] I couldn't begin to tell you.
- [Man] He's one of the
leading intellectuals
in the entire world.
- Well, I have no idea.
I mean, I can make some guesses.
He may be one of the
leading intellectuals who
can't talk on television.
You know, that's a standard
that's very important to us.
If you've got a 22-minute show
and a guy takes five minutes to warm up,
now, I don't know whether
Chomsky does or not, he's out.
One of the reasons why
"Nightline" has the usual suspects
is one of the things you have
to do when you book a show
is know that the person can make the point
within the framework of television.
And if people don't like
that, they should understand
it is about as sensible to book somebody
who will take eight
minutes to give an answer
as it is to book somebody
who doesn't speak English.
But in the normal given flow,
that's another culture-bound thing.
We've gotta have English-speaking people.
We also need concision.
- So Greenfield, or whatever his name is,
hit the nail on the head.
The US media are alone in that it is,
you must meet the condition of concision.
You gotta say things
between two commercials
or in 600 words.
And that's a very important fact.
Because the beauty of concision, you know,
saying a couple of sentences
between two commercials,
the beauty of that is that
you can only repeat conventional thoughts.
- [Jeff] I was reading
Chomsky 20 years ago.
I think his notion, doesn't he have a,
didn't he coauthor a new book
called "Engineering Consent,"
or "Manufacturing of Consent"?
I mean, some of that stuff, to me,
looks like it's from Neptune.
- [Man] This is the first time
the Neptune system has been
seen clearly by human eyes.
These pictures, taken only
hours ago by Voyager 2,
are its latest contribution.
- [Jeff] You know, he's perfectly entitled
to say that I've seen
it through a prism too.
But my view of that, of his
notions about the limits
of debate in this country
is absolutely wacko.
- Suppose I get up "Nightline," say.
I'm given whatever it is, two minutes.
And I say, Qaddafi's a terrorist.
Khomeini is a murderer,
et cetera, et cetera.
The Russians invaded Afghanistan,
all this sort of stuff.
I don't need any evidence;
everybody just nods.
On the other hand,
suppose you say something
that just isn't regurgitating
conventional pieties.
Suppose you say something
that's the least bit
unexpected or controversial.
Suppose you say, I mean,
the biggest international
terror operations
that are known are the ones
that are run out of Washington.
Or suppose you say, what
happened in the 1980s
is the US government
was driven underground.
Suppose I say the United States
is invading South Vietnam, as it was.
The best political leaders are the ones
who are lazy and corrupt.
If the Nuremberg laws were applied,
then every postwar American president
would have been hanged.
The Bible is probably
the most genocidal book
in our total canon.
Education is a system
of imposed ignorance.
There's no more morality in
world affairs, fundamentally,
than there was in the
time of Genghis Khan.
There are just different, you know,
there are just different
factors to be concerned with.
- Noam Chomsky, thank you.
- Well, you know, people
will quite reasonably expect
to know what you mean;
why did you say that?
I never heard that before.
If you said that, you better
have a reason, you know?
Better have some evidence.
In fact, you better
have a lot of evidence,
because that's pretty startling comment.
You can't give evidence if
you're stuck with concision.
That's the genius of this
structural constraint.
And in my view, if people,
like, say, "Nightline"
and you know, Lehrer
and so on, were smarter,
if they were better propagandists,
they would let dissidents on,
let them on more, in fact.
The reason is that they would sound like
they're from Neptune.
- [Robert] Then comes
our special conversation
on the Middle East crisis.
Tonight's is with the activist, writer,
and professor Noam Chomsky.
- Again, there is, has
been an offer on the table,
which we rejected, an
Iraqi offer last April--
- Okay, I have to--
- To eliminate their chemical
and other unconventional arsenals
if Israel were to
simultaneously do the same.
- I have end it there.
- They rejected it.
But I think that should
be pursued as well.
- [Robert] Sorry to interrupt
you, I have to end it there.
That's the end of our time.
Professor Chomsky, thank you
very much for joining us.
- [Announcer] AT&T has supported
"The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour" since 1983,
because quality information
and quality communication
is our idea of a good connection.
AT&T the right--
(recorder clicks)
- [Man] Oh, okay.
- Could you just sit
there for half a second?
It's just for two shots, that's all.
And then we can do anything else.
Okay, yeah, what about the mic?
Is that a problem?
(overlapping voices)
- [Noam] I think there's some
stuff hanging around here.
- The idea of this one is it's just a shot
where I'm seen talking to you
and you're sitting there listening to me.
I'll ask you though, if
you don't speak to me
or move your lips so that I can be seen
to be asking you a question.
The reason for this shot is simply this--
- I'm used to it.
- Okay.
Just don't talk to me and I'll
keep going, that's the thing.
The reason for the shot,
I'll explain it through.
'Cause I usually find that's
the easiest way to do it.
The reason for this shot is I need a shot
where you're sitting
and seen listening to me
while I'm asking you a question.
We can use this shot to introduce
you, explain who you are,
where you fit into the piece I'm doing.
But if you don't speak to
me I can also use, got it?
Okay, thanks for your time, right-o.
- If there is a narrow range of opinion
in the United States, and
it is harder to express
a variety of different opinions,
why do you live in the US?
- I think, well, first
of all, it's my country.
And secondly, it's, in many
ways, as I said before,
it's the freest country in the world.
I mean, I think there's more possibilities
for change here than in
any other country I know.
But again, comparatively
speaking, it's the country
where the state is
probably most restrictive.
- But isn't what you should be looking at,
comparatively, rather than--
- Yes, I do.
- in absolute terms?
- Of course.
- But you don't.
You don't create that impression.
- On the contrary, well, maybe
I don't give the impression.
I certainly say it often enough.
What I've said over and over again,
and I've been saying it all tonight.
I've written it a million times,
is that the United States
is a very free society.
It's also a very rich society.
Of course, the United States is a scandal
from the point of view of its wealth.
I mean, given the natural advantages
that the United States
has in terms of resources
and lack of enemies and so on,
the United States should have
a level of health and welfare
and so on, that's an order of magnitude
beyond anybody else in the world.
We don't; the United States is last
among 20 industrialized
societies in infant mortality.
That's a scandal in American capitalism.
And it ends up being a very free society
which does a lot of rotten
things in the world, okay?
There's no contradiction there.
I mean, you know, Greece
was a free society
by the standards of Athens, you know?
It was also a vicious society
from the point of view
of its imperial behavior.
There's virtually no
correlation between the,
maybe none, between the internal freedom
of a society and its external behavior.
- You start your line of
discussion at a moment
that is historically useful for you.
- You, that's why I said,
you picked the beginning.
- The grand fact of the postwar world
is that the communist imperialists,
by the use of terrorism,
by the deprivation of freedom,
have contributed to the
continuing bloodshed.
And the sad thing about it
is, not only the bloodshed,
but the fact that they
seem to dispossess you
of the power of rational observation.
- May I say something?
- Sure.
- I think that's about 5% true and about,
or maybe 10% true, it certainly is true.
- Why do you give that?
- May I complete a sentence?
- Sure.
- It's perfectly true that
there were areas of the world,
in particular, Eastern Europe,
where Stalinist imperialism
very brutally took control
and still maintains control.
But there are also very
vast areas of the world
where we were doing the same thing.
And there's quite an
interplay in the Cold War.
You see, what you just described is a,
I believe, a mythology about the Cold War,
which might have been
tenable 10 years ago,
but which is quite inconsistent with
contemporary scholarship.
- Ask a Czech.
- Ask a Guatemalan, ask a Dominican.
Ask the President of
the Dominican Republic.
Ask, you know, ask a--
- You don't--
- [Noam] person from South
Vietnam, you know, ask a Thai.
- If you can't distinguish
between the nature of our venture
in Guatemala and the nature of the
Soviet Union's in Prague--
- What's the--
- Then we have real difficulty.
- Explain the differences.
(upbeat music)
Now, what about making the media
more responsive and democratic?
Well, there are very
narrow limits to that.
It's kind of like asking,
how do we make corporations
more democratic?
Well, the only way to do that
is get rid of them, you know?
I mean, if you have concentrated
power you can, I mean,
I don't wanna say you can
do nothing, like you can,
like the church can show up
at the stockholder's meeting
and start screaming about not
investing in South Africa.
And sometimes that has marginal effects.
I don't wanna say it has no effect.
But you can't really affect
the structure of power.
Because if, I mean, to do that
would be a social revolution.
And unless you're ready for
a social revolution, that is,
power is gonna be somewhere else.
The media are gonna have
their present structure,
and they're gonna represent
their present interests.
Now that's not to say that one
shouldn't try to do things.
I mean, it makes sense to try
to push the limits of a system.
- It only takes one or
two people that think
they have integrity as journalists
to give you some good press.
- See, that's important,
now that goes back
to something that came up before.
I mean, there's a lot,
you know, there are,
things are complex, it's not monolithic.
I mean, the mass media themselves
are complicated institutions
with internal contradictions.
So on the one hand, there's the commitment
to indoctrination and control,
but on the other hand,
there's the sense of
professional integrity.
- [Narrator] She works
alone as her own boss,
writing newspaper columns and
producing radio commentaries
for a hodgepodge of small
clients across the country.
This so-called leather-lung
Texan has been firing questions
at our chief executive
for almost 40 years.
- And many a young man in this
country's been disillusioned
totally by his government these days.
- Well, this is a question
which you very properly bring
to the attention of the nation.
- It's not that we haven't
been holding press conferences.
I was just waiting for Sarah to come back.
(audience laughing)
- Mr. President,
that is very nice of
you and I appreciate it.
Sir, I wanna call your
attention to a real problem
we've got in this country today.
- [Man] Those unique and often terrifying
McClendon questions reflect her desire
to dig out information.
- [Sarah] And I wanted
to ask you, are you mad?
What he feels...
(audience laughing)
- [Man] With enough
know-how and persistence,
she usually gets her man.
- What would you do if
you were in a situation
where you were trying
to be an honest reporter
and you were worried
sick about your country
and you saw how sick it was, and you were
facing this weak White
House and a weak Congress,
as a reporter, what would you do?
- I think there are a lot of reporters
who do a very good job.
I have a lot of friends in the press
who I think do a terrific job.
- [Sarah] I know they are,
but I mean, they want to.
But now, what would
you do if you were him?
- Well, first of all,
you have to understand
what the system is.
And smart reporters do
understand what it is.
You have to understand
what the pressures are,
what the commitments are,
what the barriers are,
and what the openings are.
Like right after the Iran Contra hearings,
a lot of good reporters understood, well,
things are gonna be a little more open
for a couple of months, so
they could ram through stories
that they knew they couldn't
even talk about before.
- After Watergate.
- And the same after Watergate.
And then, you know, it
closes up again, and so on.
Most people, I imagine,
simply internalize the values.
That's the easiest way and
the most successful way.
You just internalize the values.
And then you regard yourself, in a way,
correctly, as acting perfectly freely.
- All right, let's get
to the White House now,
where I think veteran correspondent
Frank Sesno can tell us
a little bit about self-censorship.
That inertial guidance system
is always going on, isn't it?
Is there any formal censorship there?
- Well, there's no self-censorship, Reed.
If somebody tells me something
I'm going to pass it on,
unless there's a particular
and compelling reason not to.
I can't deny that I
wouldn't like to have access
to the Oval Office and all
the same maps and charts
and graphs that the
president's looking at.
But that's not possible,
it's not realistic.
And it's probably not even desirable.
(light music)
- [Man] Hello.
- How are you?
- Hi, fine.
- [Man] Go sit down now, please.
Welcome to Holland.
I'll introduce you first, in a few lines.
Professor Chomsky, Noam Chomsky,
(speaking in foreign language)
- Chomsky has been called the Einstein
of modern linguistics; "The
New York Times" has said
he's arguably the most important
intellectual alive today.
But his presence here
has sparked a protest.
- This book, that has poisoned the world.
And all lie are in there.
And as a Vietnamese people,
we come here to burn the book.
♪ Vietnam, Vietnam ♪
- He said that in Vietnam
there's no violation
of human rights and no crime
in Cambodia, it's wrong.
- Chomsky using, he's a professor.
He using that to poison the world.
And we come here to protest that.
- [Noam] I don't mind the
denunciations, frankly.
I mind the lies.
Well, I mean, intellectuals
are very good at lying.
They're professionals at it.
You know, vilification
is a wonderful technique.
There's no way of responding to it.
If somebody calls you a
you know, an anti-Semite,
what can you say, "I'm
not an anti-Semite"?
Or you know, somebody
says, you're a racist,
you're a Nazi or something,
this, you always lose.
I mean, the person who
throws the mud always wins.
Because there's no way of
responding to such charges.
- Professor Chomsky seems to believe
that the people he criticizes
fall into one of two
classes, liars or dupes.
Consider what happens when I discuss
the case of Robert Faurisson.
Let me recall the facts.
- Let's not go into
details please, because--
- [Noam] The details
happen to be important.
- Yes, but I have only
one question for you, so--
- Do the facts matter,
or don't they matter?
- They, of course they do.
- Well, let me tell you
what the facts are.
(people speaking faintly)
- Faurisson says that
the massacre of the Jews
in the holocaust is--
- Get off!
- is a historic lie.
- [Woman] Can't we have
the next question, please?
- No.
- Now this
is an important one.
It has a lot to do with the topic.
- [Audience Member] Get off!
- Your views are extremely controversial.
And perhaps, one of the things
that has been most controversial
and that you've been most
strongly criticized for
was your defense of a French intellectual
who was suspended from his university post
for contending that there were
no Nazi death camps in World War II.
- My name is Robert Faurisson, I am 60.
I am university professor
in Lyons, France.
Behind me, you may see
the Courthouse of Paris,
the Palais de Justice.
In this place, I was convicted many times
at the beginning of the '80s.
I was charged by
nine associations,
mostly Jewish associations, for
inciting hatred,
racial hatred, for racial defamation,
for damage by falsifying a story.
- Professor Chomsky and a
number of other intellectuals
signed a petition in which Faurisson
is called a respected
professor of literature
who merely tried to make
his findings public.
- Perhaps we can start
with just the story of
Robert Faurisson and your involvement.
- More than 500 people signed,
maybe 600.
Mostly, (speaking in foreign language)
- Scholars.
- Voila.
- [Man] And what happened
to the other 499 of them?
How come we only hear
about Chomsky's signature?
- Well, I think it's because Chomsky is,
in himself, a kind of political power.
("The Marseillaise")
- I signed the petition
calling on the tribunal
to defend his civil rights.
At that point, the French press,
which apparently has no
conception of freedom of speech,
concluded that since I had
called for his civil rights,
I was therefore defending his theses.
- Faurisson then published a book in which
he tried to prove that the Nazi
gas chambers never existed.
- What we deny is that there was
an extermination program
and an extermination actually,
especially in gas chambers or gas vents.
- [Fritz] The book
contains a preface written
by Professor Chomsky in
which he calls Faurisson
a relatively apolitical sort of liberal.
- A communist is a man, a Jew is a man.
A Nazi is a man, I am a man.
- [Man] Are you a Nazi?
- I am not a Nazi.
- [Man] How would you
describe yourself politically?
- Nothing.
- [Fritz] The preface that you wrote,
whether you were trying--
- No, no,
that's not the preface that I wrote
because I never wrote a preface.
- You didn't?
- And you know
that I never wrote a preface.
(man speaking faintly)
He's referring to a statement
of mine on civil liberties,
which was added to a
book in which Faurisson,
Excuse me.
- You are a linguist!
- Yes, I used to--
- And the language
you use has meaning.
- That's right.
- And when you describe--
- And the language I use--
- [Man] As an apolitical
liberal, or as someone
whose views can be dignified by the words
findings or conclusions,
that is a judgment!
And that is a favorable
judgment of his views!
- On the contrary, can I
continue with the fact?
- Yes, you can continue
with the facts for hours.
But I mean...
- But they are crucial.
- There are a few facts
that, yeah, okay.
- Let's get to the so-called preface.
I was then asked, by
the person who organized
the petition, to write a
statement on freedom of speech.
Just banal comments
about freedom of speech,
pointing out the difference between
defending a person's
right to express his views
and defending the views
expressed, so I did that.
I wrote a rather banal statement called
"Some Elementary Remarks
on Freedom of Expression."
And I told him, do what you like with it.
- So Pierre produced a book
in which all the arguments
of Faurisson were to be
put in front of the court.
And we thought wise to use the text
of Noam Chomsky as a kind
of warning, a foreword,
to say that it was a matter
of freedom of expression,
of freedom of thought,
freedom of research.
- Why did you try, at the last
moment, to get it back from--
- That's the one thing I'm sorry about.
The one thing.
- That's the real,
the real important thing.
- No it's not.
It's not.
- Of course.
- You mean, the fact that
I tried to retract it?
- With that, you said it
was wrong of you to do it.
- No, I didn't, see, in fact,
take a look at what I
wrote, I wrote a letter,
which was then publicized
in which I said, look,
things have reached a point where
the French intellectual
community simply is incapable
of understanding the issues.
At this point, it's just gonna
confuse matters even more
if my comments on freedom of speech happen
to be attached to this book
which I didn't know existed.
So just to clarify things,
I better separate them.
Now, in retrospect, I think
I probably shouldn't have done that.
I should have just said,
fine, then let it appear.
Because it ought to appear.
But that's, apart from that,
I regard this as not only trivial,
but as compared with
other positions I've taken
on freedom of speech, invisible.
I do not think that the
state ought to have the right
to determine historical truth
and to punish people who deviate from it.
I'm not willing to give
the state that right,
even if they happened to fall--
- But are you denying that
the gas chambers ever existed?
- Of course not, but I'm saying,
if you believe in freedom of speech,
you believe in freedom of
speech for views you don't like.
I mean, Goebbels was in
favor of freedom of speech
for views he liked, right?
So was Stalin.
If you're in favor of freedom of speech,
that means you're in
favor of freedom of speech
precisely for views you despise.
Otherwise you're not in
favor of freedom of speech.
There's two positions you can
have on freedom of speech.
And you can decide
which position you want.
With regard to my defense
of the utterly offensive,
the people who express
utterly offensive views,
I haven't the slightest doubt
that every commissar says
"You're defending that
person's views"; no, I'm not.
I'm defending his right to express them.
The difference is crucial.
And the difference has been understood
outside of fascist circles
since the 18th century.
- Is there anything like, objectivity,
scientific objectivity, reality?
As a scientist, where---
- Look, I'm not saying--
- do you stand on this point?
- I defend the views, look,
if somebody publishes a scientific article
which I disagree with, I do not say
the state ought to put
him in jail, all right?
- All right, but you don't have
to support him right away--
- I don't support him.
- And say, you know,
I support him just for the sake
of anybody saying that,
whatever he wants to say.
- Fine, but suppose that
this guy is taken to court
and charged with falsification.
Then I'm gonna defend him, even
though I disagree with him.
- Right, but he wasn't taken to court.
- Oh, you're wrong.
- But there is,
but when did you write the support?
I mean, did you--
- When he was
brought to court.
And in fact, the only support
that I gave him is to say,
he has a right of freedom
of speech, period.
- [Man] There is no doubt
in my mind that the example
that I gave about the story,
the Holocaust did not exist,
is very, very typical.
- How much of the--
- I think
the other example is--
- How much of the
American press believes that
Faurisson has anything to say?
Or any press?
How much of the press in France?
- Since I follow--
- What percentage,
would you say?
- I'll tell you.
- Is it higher than zero?
- I know, I'll tell you.
- Is it higher than zero?
- I'll tell you,
I'll tell you.
- Have you ever
seen anything in any newspaper--
- If you ask me I'll--
- or any journal--
- I'll try to answer--
- Saying that this man
is anything other than a lunatic?
- I'll try to answer, I try to answer.
I think that I just follow the case.
- That's a simple question.
- I followed the case
five or six years ago.
And I happened to see
that Noam Chomsky was in
for strong criticism, even
from some of his supporters,
for doing something which
could be interpreted
only in terms of a
campaign against Israel.
- Going back years, I
am absolutely certain
that I've taken far more extreme positions
on people who deny the
Holocaust than you have.
For example, you go back
to my earliest articles,
and you will find that
I say that even to enter
into the arena of debate on the question
of whether the Nazis
carried out such atrocities
is already to lose one's humanity.
So I don't even think you
ought to discuss the issue
if you want to know my opinion.
But if anybody wants to refute Faurisson,
there's certainly no
difficulty in doing so.
(somber music)
(flames crackling)
(somber music)
- I'm not interested in
freedom of speech and
all that; I have to win.
And that's the question, and I shall win.
- Cut.
(people speaking faintly)
(sad music)
(train horn whistling)
(birds twittering)
- I'm just an ordinary mom
who just thinks in terms
of I don't wanna some day
be holding my grandchildren
and watching something horrible happen
and feel like I didn't do anything.
And I mean, it's obvious
what you're doing.
And my question is, on a practical level,
where do you see the most practical place
to put your energy?
I mean, tonight I feel like in overwhelm.
Like, I feel like it's too big.
It's too much to even make a dent in.
- The way things change
is because lots of people
are working all the time.
And you know, they're
working in their communities
and in their workplace or
wherever they happen to be.
And they're building up the
basis for popular movements
which are gonna make changes.
That's the way everything
has ever happened
in history, you know, whether
it was the end of slavery
or whether it was the
democratic revolutions
or anything you want, you name
it, that's the way it worked.
You get a very false picture
of this from the history books.
In the history books
there's a couple of leaders.
You know, George Washington,
or Martin Luther King, or whatever.
And I don't wanna say that
those people are unimportant.
Martin Luther King was
certainly important,
but he was not the civil rights movement.
Martin Luther King can
appear in the history books
'cause lots of people whose
names you will never know,
and whose names who are all forgotten
and who may have been killed and so on,
were working down in the South.
When you have active
activists and people concerned
and people devoting themselves
and dedicating themselves
to social change or issues or whatever,
then people like me can appear.
And we can appear to be prominent.
But that's only 'cause somebody
else is doing the work.
My work, whether it's giving
hundreds of talks a year
or spending 20 hours a
week writing letters,
or writing books, is not directed
to intellectuals and politicians.
It's directed to what are
called ordinary people.
And what I expect from them is,
in fact, exactly what they are.
That they should try
to understand the world
and act in accordance with
their decent impulses.
And that they should try
to improve the world.
And many people are willing to do that.
But they have to understand, and in fact,
as far as I can see, in these things,
I feel that I'm simply
helping people develop
courses of intellectual self defense.
- What did you mean by that?
What would such a course be?
- Well, I don't mean go to school.
'Cause you're not gonna get it there.
It means, you have to
develop an independent mind.
And work on it.
(sirens wailing)
Now, that's extremely hard
to do alone, you know?
The beauty of our system
is it isolates everybody.
Each person is sitting alone,
sit in front of the tube.
That's very hard, to
have ideas or thoughts
under those circumstances.
You can't fight the world alone.
Some people can, but it's pretty rare.
The way to do it is through organization.
So of course, as an intellectual,
self defense will have
to be in the context of
political and other organization.
(light music)
And it makes sense, I think, to look
at what the institutions are trying to do.
And to take that almost as a key.
What they're trying to do is
what we're trying to combat.
If they're trying to keep
people isolated and separate
and and so on, well, we're
trying do to the opposite.
We're trying to bring them together.
So in your local community
you wanna have sources
of alternative action,
people with parallel concerns
maybe differently
focused, but at the core,
sort of similar values,
and a similar interest
in helping people learn
how to defend themselves
against external power and
taking control of their lives
and you know, reaching out your
hand to people who need it.
That's a common array of concerns.
You can learn about your own values.
And you could figure out
how to defend yourself,
and so on, in conjunction with others.
- Are there one or two
publications that I,
as an average person,
a biologist, can read
to bypass this filter of our press?
- Now, if you ask what media can I turn to
to get the right answers, first
of all, I wouldn't tell you.
Because I don't think there's an answer.
The right answers are what you
decide are the right answers.
Maybe everything I'm
telling you is wrong, okay?
It could perfectly well be, I'm not God.
But that's something
for you to figure out.
I mean, I could tell you what I think
happens to be, more or less, right.
But there isn't any reason why
you should pay any attention to it.
- What impact do you
feel alternative media
is currently having or
could potentially have?
I'm actually a little more
interested in its potential.
- [Noam] Potential.
- And just to define my
terms, by alternative media,
I'm referring to media
that are or could be
citizen controlled as opposed
to state or corporate control.
- You know, that's what's
kept people together,
to the extent that people are able
to do something constructive,
it's because they have
some way of interacting.
I mean, I've always felt it
would be a very positive thing.
And it should be pushed
as far as it can go.
I think it's gonna have a very hard time.
There's just such a concentration
of resources and power
that alternative media,
while extremely important,
are gonna have quite a battle.
It's true, there are things
which are small successes.
But it's because people
have just been willing
to put in incredible effort.
I'd say, take "Z Magazine".
I mean, that's a national magazine which,
it literally has a staff
of two and no resources.
- [Man] Tell us a little
bit about "Z Magazine,"
what it is and what makes it different.
- Go ahead.
- Go ahead?
(Michael laughing)
Thank you.
- We just wanted to do a
magazine that would address
all the sides of
political life, economics,
race, gender, authority,
political relations.
And we wanted to do it in a
way that would incorporate
attention to how to not only
understand what's going on,
but how to make things
better, what to aim for,
and to provide, at the
same time, humor, culture,
a kind of a magazine
that people could relate
and get a lot out and
could participate in.
- And what we wanted to
do, which we didn't think
was provided by the existing magazines,
was to give it a real activist slant,
so that it could be very useful
to the variety of
movements in the country.
And we just felt there wasn't a magazine
that reflected that, that inspired people
and that gave people sort of a strategy
and perhaps even a vision of
how things could be better.
(lively music)
- South End Press has sort of made it.
That is, they're surviving.
It's a small collective,
again, with no resources.
And they've put out a lot of books,
including quite a lot of good books.
But for a South End book to get reviewed
is almost impossible.
- Editorially and business
wise, we make decisions
based on politics that
no corporate publisher
can really advocate because of their ties
to corporate America.
We can solicit manuscripts
based on what we feel
is the relevance for the movement.
And we can make our
business decisions based on
whether we feel people
can afford our books,
whether we feel that a book
might not make that much money
but it needs to be out there.
And maybe there is 1,000
people who would buy it.
And those are criteria that
we feel are very precious
in this day of corporate mergers.
- Well, and likewise, our
structure about sharing work
and continuing our training process
as long as we're at the
press, there are losses there
in terms of productivity.
But in terms of empowerment,
all of us are then able to say,
my perspective is different from yours.
Then all of our intelligence gets used
in making those decisions
and not just whoever happens
to have done it the
longest, whoever happens
to have graduated from the best schools
in order to be the best editor
making all the decisions
and only using his or her intelligence.
- Listener-supported
radio in the United States
has undergone a remarkable
growth in the last decade.
It's perhaps the fastest
growing alternative media.
There are many reasons for this.
First and foremost, is that
it's enormously economical.
And it reaches communities
that have not been served
by community radio before.
And in Boulder, particular,
we see with someone
like Noam Chomsky who's
been there, I believe,
three times in the last six years,
he has a tremendous audience
and KGNU is partly responsible for that.
Because we play his
tapes on a regular basis.
We play his lectures and his interviews.
So when he does come to Boulder
and people hear what he has to
say, they're able to tune in.
It's not something exotic or esoteric
that he's talking about.
It's material that they're
very familiar with.
And he's noted this, incidentally.
- [Noam] I mean, if there's
a listener-supported radio station,
that means that people
can get daily, every day,
a different way of looking at the world,
not just what the corporate
media want you to see,
but a different picture,
a different understanding.
Not only can you hear it, but
you can participate in it.
You can add your own thoughts, you know.
And you can learn something and so on.
Well, that's the way people
become human, you know?
That's the way you
become human participants
in a social and political system.
(dramatic rock music)
- Hello, I'm Ned Robinson.
And this is "Non-Corporate News."
What is "Non-Corporate News"
and why is it necessary?
I didn't want just to show another film
at a library or something.
I wanted to make my own statement.
I thought it'd be more fun to do.
And perhaps I'd get other
people involved in a project.
Besides showing a film we
could make a film or a video.
The local cable station's hooked up
to three communities, Lynn,
Swampscott, and Salem.
So that's 30,000 people.
Or 30,000 homes, I'm not sur.
But I'm sure a lot of people see it.
And they'll be the kind of people
who don't go out to see a film.
It'll go right into their houses.
So if they're flipping
through the channels
they might be able to get
a completely new idea of the world.
(upbeat music)
- So there's kind of networks
of cooperation developed.
Which, I mean, like here, for example,
there's a collection of
stuff from a friend of mine
in Los Angeles who does careful monitoring
of the whole press in Los Angeles,
and a lot of the British
press, which he reads,
and does selections.
So I don't have to read the movie reviews
and the local gossip and
all this kind of stuff.
But I get the occasional
nugget that sneaks through
and that you find if you're
carefully and intelligently
and critically reviewing
a wide range of press.
Well, there are a fair
number of people who do this.
And we exchange information.
- We wrote this two-volume
work, which we saw one another
for a couple weeks when
we were getting started.
But then we wrote two
volumes, essentially,
without seeing one another, just by phone,
by mail, and exchanging manuscripts.
But this takes a lot of
communication by mail.
And my Chomsky file is
a couple of feet thick.
- The end result is that you
do have access to resources,
in a way which I doubt
that any national intelligence
agency can duplicate,
let alone scholarship, so
there are ways of compensating
for the absence of resources,
people can do things.
Like, for example, I found
out about the arms flow
to Iran by reading transcripts of the BBC
and by reading, an interview somewhere
with an Israeli ambassador in one city
and reading something
else in the Israeli press.
Now, okay, the information is there.
But it's there to a fanatic, you know?
Somebody who wants to
spend a substantial part
of their time and energy
exploring it and comparing
today's lies with
yesterday's leaks, and so on.
That's a research job, and it's, you know,
it just simply doesn't make any sense
to ask the general population
to dedicate themselves
to this task on every issue.
I'm not given to false modesty.
There are things that I can do
and I know that I can
do them reasonably well,
including analysis and
study, research, I mean I know
how to do that sort of thing.
And I think I have a
reasonable understanding
of the way the world works
as much as anyone can.
And that turns out to be
a very useful resource
for people who are
doing active organizing,
trying to engage themselves in a way which
will make it a little
bit of a better world.
And if you can help in those
things or participate in them,
well, that's you know, that's rewarding.
- I wonder if you can envision a time
when people like myself
again, the naive people
in this world can again take
pride in the United States?
And is that even a healthy wish now?
Because it may be this hunger
for pride in our country
that makes us more easily manipulated
by the powers that you talk about.
- I think you, first of all, have to ask
what you mean by your country.
Now, if you mean by the
country, the government,
I don't think you can be proud of it.
And I don't think you
could ever be proud of it,
or you couldn't be
proud of any government.
It's not our government.
(audience applauding)
And you shouldn't be; states
are violent institutions.
The government of any
country, including ours,
represents some sort of
domestic power structure.
And it's usually violent.
States are violent to the
extent that they're powerful.
That's roughly accurate.
You look at American history,
it's nothing to write home about.
You know, why are we here?
We're here because, say,
some 10 million Native
Americans were wiped out.
That's not very pretty.
Until the 1960s, it was
still cowboys and Indians.
In the 1970s, for the first time, really,
it became possible, even for scholarship,
to try to deal with
the facts as they were.
For example, to deal with the fact
that the Native American
population was far higher
than had been claimed, millions higher,
maybe as many as 10 million
higher than had been claimed,
and that they had advanced civilization.
And that there was something that,
the genocide that took place.
Now, we went through
200 years of our history
without facing that fact.
One of the effects of the
1960s is it's possible
to at least begin to come
to think about the facts.
Well, that's an advance.
- [Woman] Do you think that
this activism 20 years ago
has made a difference in
our society operates now?
- It has not changed the institutions
or the way they function.
But it has led to very
significant cultural changes.
Now remember, these movements
of the '60s expanded
in the '70s and expanded
further in the '80s.
And they reached into other parts
of the society and different issues.
A lot of things that seemed outrageous
in the '60s are taken for granted today.
So for example, take the
feminist movement, for example,
which barely began to exist in the '60s.
Now it's part of general
consciousness and awareness.
The ecological movements
began in the '70s.
The solidarity, the Third
World solidarity movements
were very limited in the
'60s, it was really Vietnam.
And in the '60s, also, it was
a student movement as you say.
Now it's not, now it's mainstream America.
(stately music)
- If there is more dissidence
now than you can remember,
why do you go on to write
that the people feel isolated?
- Because I think much of the
general population recognizes
that the organized
institutions do not reflect
their concerns and interests and needs.
They do not feel that they
participate meaningfully
in the political system.
They do not feel that the media
are telling them the truth
or even reflect their concerns.
They go outside of the
organized institutions to act.
- We see more and more
of our elected leaders
and know less and less
of what they're doing.
- Yeah, that's--
- This medium does that.
- Very striking, in fact,
the presidential elections
have been almost removed
from the point where the public
even takes them seriously
as involving a matter of choice.
- [Reporter] So what do you think
about what goes on in the White House?
- [Man] It's kept too private, I think.
- [Man] Yeah, they should come
out and talk to the people.
- I know, yeah.
- [reporter[ Who should
talk to the people?
- [Man] George Bush.
- Well, it means that the
political system increasingly,
increasingly functions
without public input.
It means, to an increasing
extent, not only
do people not ratify
decisions presented to them,
but they don't even take the
trouble of ratifying them.
They assume that the decisions
are going on independently
of what they may do in the polling booth.
- [Bill] Ratification
would have, would be what?
- [Noam] Well, ratification
would mean a system
in which there are two positions
presented to me, the voter.
I go into the polling booth,
and I push one or another button,
depending on which of
those positions I want.
That's a very limited form of democracy.
Really meaningful democracy would mean
that I play a role in
forming those decisions.
And making and creating those positions.
And that would be real democracy.
- And that's not--
- We're very far from that.
But we're even departing from the point
where there is ratification.
When you have stage-managed elections now,
with the public relations
industry determining
what words come out of people's mouth.
Candidates decide what to
say on the basis of tests
that determine what the effect will be
across the population.
Somehow, people don't see
how profoundly contemptuous
that is of democracy.
(pencil snaps)
(jubilant music)
- The solemn moment is near.
But first, the swearing in of Dan Quayle.
(jubilant music)
(audience applauding)
- [Announcer] Please move to your seats.
- For the first time in this century,
for the first time in perhaps all history,
man does not have to invent
a system by which to live.
We don't have to talk late into the night
about which form of government is better.
We don't have to wrest justice
from the kings.
We only have to summon
it from within ourselves.
This is a time when the future seems
a door you can walk right through
into a room called tomorrow.
Great nations of the world
are moving toward democracy,
through the door to freedom.
The people of the world agitate
for free expression and free thought.
Through the door to the moral
and intellectual satisfactions
that only liberty allows.
(airplane roaring)
We know how to secure a more
just and prosperous life
for man on earth, through free markets,
free speech, free elections,
and the exercise of free
will unhampered by the state.
I've spoken of a thousand points of light,
of all the community
organizations that are spread
like stars throughout
the nation, doing good.
To the world, too, we offer new engagement
and a renewed vow.
(sirens wailing)
We will stay strong to protect the peace.
(helicopter rotors whirring)
The offered hand is a reluctant fist.
America is never wholly herself
unless she is engaged
in high moral principle.
We as the people have
such a purpose today.
It is to make kinder
the face of the nation
and gentler the face of the world.
- Referring back to your earlier
comment about escaping from
or doing away with
capitalism, I was wondering
what scheme, workable scheme,
you would put in its place?
- [Noam] Me?
- Or--
- Well, what I would,
yeah, what really, you--
- What would you suggest to others
who might be in a position to
set it up and get it going?
- [Noam] Well, I mean, I think
that what used to be called
centuries ago wage slavery is intolerable.
I mean, I don't think
people ought to be forced
to rent themselves in order to survive.
I think that the economic
institutions ought to be run
democratically by their participants,
by the communities in which
they exist, and so on.
And I think, basically,
through various kinds of free association.
(gentle music)
(upbeat music)
- [Peter] Historically,
have there been any
sustained examples on any
substantial scale of societies
which approximated to the anarchist ideal?
- There are small
societies, small in number,
that have, I think, done so quite well.
And there are a few
examples of large-scale
libertarian revolutions,
which were largely anarchist
in their structure.
As to the first, small societies extending
over a long period, I myself
think the most dramatic example
is perhaps the Israeli kibbutzim.
Which, for a long period,
may or may not be true today,
really were constructed
on anarchist principles,
that is, of direct worker control,
integration of agriculture, industry,
service, personal life.
On an egalitarian basis
with direct and, in fact,
quite active participation
in self management.
And were, I should think,
extraordinarily successful.
A good example of a really
large-scale anarchist revolution,
or largely anarchist revolution,
in fact, the best example
to my knowledge is the
Spanish Revolution in 1936.
And in fact, you can't tell
what would have happened
if that anarchist revolution
was simply destroyed by force.
But during the period
in which it was alive,
I think it was an inspiring
testimony to the ability
of poor, working people to
organize, manage their affairs
extremely successfully
without coercion and control.
- How far does the success
of libertarian socialism
or anarchism as a way
of life really depend
on a fundamental change
in the nature of man,
both in his motivation, his altruism,
and also in his knowledge
and sophistication?
- I think it not only
depends on it, but in fact,
the whole purpose of libertarian socialism
is that it will contribute to it.
It will contribute to a
spiritual transformation,
precisely that kind of
great transformation
in the way humans conceive of themselves
and their ability to act, to decide,
to create, to produce, to inquire.
Precisely that spiritual transformation
that social thinkers from
the left Marxist tradition,
from Luxemburg, say, on over
through anarcho-syndicalists
have always emphasized.
So on the one hand, it requires
that spiritual transformation.
On the other hand, its purpose
is to create institutions
which will contribute
to that transformation.
(upbeat music)
- You've written that "in
looking at contributions
"of gifted thinkers, one must make sure
"to understand their contributions,
"but also to eliminate
the errors in them."
And of your ideas, what would
you guess would be discarded?
And what would be assimilated
by future thinkers?
- Well, I mean, I would assume
virtually everything would be discarded.
For example, and here
we have to distinguish,
I mean, the work that I do
in my professional area,
if I still believed what
I believed 10 years ago,
I'd assume the field is dead.
So I assume that when, next
time you read a student's paper,
you're gonna see something
that has to be changed
and you continue to make progress.
In dealing with social and
political issues, in my view,
what is at all understood
is pretty straightforward.
I don't think, there may be
deep and complicated things.
But if so, they're not understood.
The basic ways, to the extent
that we understand society
at all, it's pretty straightforward.
And I don't think that
those simple understandings
are likely to undergo much change.
The point is, you have to work.
And that's why the propaganda
system is so successful.
Very few people are gonna
have the time or the energy
or the commitment to carry
out the constant battle
that's required to get
outside of, you know,
MacNeil-Lehrer, or Dan
Rather, or somebody like that.
The easy thing to do, you
know, you come home from work.
You're tired, you just had a busy day.
You're not going to spend the evening
carrying out a research
project, so you turn on the tube
and say, "It's probably right."
Or you look at the headlines in the paper
and then you watch the
sports or something.
'Cause that's basically the way
the system of indoctrination works.
Sure, the other stuff is there.
But you're gonna have to work to find it.
(gentle music)
Modern industrial
civilization has developed
within a certain system
of convenient myths.
The driving force of modern
industrial civilization
has been individual material
gain, which is accepted
as legitimate, even
praiseworthy, on the grounds
that private vices yield public benefits,
in the classic formulation.
Now it's long been understood, very well,
that a society that is
based on this principle
will destroy itself in time.
It can only persist with
whatever suffering and injustice
it entails, as long as
it's possible to pretend
that the destructive forces
that humans create are limited,
that the world is an infinite resource,
and that the world is
an infinite garbage can.
At this stage of history,
either one of two things is possible.
Either the general
population will take control
of its own destiny and will concern itself
with community interests,
guided by values of solidarity
and sympathy and concern for others.
Or alternatively, there will be no destiny
for anyone to control.
As long as some specialized
class is in a position
of authority, it is going to set policy
and the special interests that it serves.
But the conditions of
survival, let alone justice,
require rational social planning
in the interests of the
community as a whole.
And by now that means
the global community.
The question is whether
privileged elites should dominate
mass communication and
should use this power
as they tell us they
must, namely to impose
necessary illusions, to
manipulate and deceive
the stupid majority, and remove
them from the public arena.
The question, in brief, is
whether democracy and freedom
are values to be preserved
or threats to be avoided.
In this possibly terminal
phase of human existence,
democracy and freedom are more
than values to be treasured.
They may well be essential
to survival; thank you.
(gentle music)
(audience applauding)
- He's up there thinking for himself.
And he's deciphering this
tremendously over-weighted body
of information, which
he puts into an order
and gives you the feeling that
you can do the same thing,
that the whole thing is decipherable.
And he also gives you the
sense that there is a source.
There's a center to the,
to a dissenting population,
although we feel that there's no center.
And I think that is what reactivated in me
a desire to get back,
get reacquainted with the political scene
after 30 years of alienation from it.
- You do hundreds of
interviews and lectures.
And you're dealing with
massacres in East Timor
and invasions of Panama, et cetera,
pretty horrific stuff, death
squads; what keeps you going?
I mean, don't you get
burned out on this material?
- You know, it's mainly
a matter of whether
you can look yourself
in the mirror, I think.
- [Conductor] Up, gotta go!
Get these people to town.
- [Reporter] Okay, maybe you
could say all aboard for us?
- Okay.
(light music)
All aboard!
- Bye bye!
- Bye!
(gentle music)
(printing press rattling)
(machine beeping)
- Nope, couldn't see it!
Just hit the microphone.
- [Man] Thank you, bye
Canada, goodbye Canada.
- (laughing) Bye.
(upbeat music)
(people speaking faintly)
- Looks like I've gone past
the hour that you agreed to.
- Can I--
- In your introduction,
you said that he's from Harvard.
- [Noam] Oh, I heard that.
- Oh, yes, that is true,
yeah, we'll bleep it.
(bleep)
- Sorry about making you answer that.
- No, that's okay.
- Such short--
- It worked.
Did we hit in two minutes, or--
- Well, we did pretty well, actually.
That means less sports
and that's fine with me.
- You know, the poor people out there,
they don't know what's going on.
If the people hear what
you say here today,
they'd happily change.
- There'd be a revolution.
- Thank you.
- On that optimistic
note, Professor Chomsky,
thank you very much indeed.
- So how did it go?
- Oh, I thought it was sort
of, sort of technical sounding.
But, I don't know, there
wasn't much of a rhythm.
- [Man] Did you ever think
of running for president?
(audience laughing)
- If I ran for president,
the first thing I'd do
is tell people not to vote for me.
- [Woman] This guy's gotta
go home, he really does.
- [Man] People still believe,
people still believe that the Celtics
lost the world champions....
- [Woman] Couldn't you let him go home?
- Thanks.
- Thanks.
(upbeat music)
(gentle music)
(wordless vocal music)
(train rumbling)
(train bell dinging)
(gentle music)
(wordless vocal music)
(static buzzing)
(wordless vocal music)
(gentle music)
