💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › noam-chomsky-project-censored-25th-anniversary.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:58:54. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Project Censored 25th Anniversary Author: Noam Chomsky Date: April 2001 Language: en Topics: capitalism Source: Retrieved on 23rd June 2021 from https://chomsky.info/200104__/ Notes: In Peter Phillips (ed.), Project Censored 2001, Seven Stories Press.
A review of the stories that have been selected by Project Censored over
25 years reveals several clear patterns. The stories are of considerable
interest to the media constituencies: the corporate sector, the state
authorities, and the general public. They fall in a domain in which
corporate-state interests are rather different from those of the public.
That such stories would tend to be downplayed, reshaped, and obscured
—”censored,” in the terminology of the project—is only to be expected on
the basis of even the most rudimentary inspection of the institutional
structure of the media and their place in the broader society.
Media service to the corporate sector is reflexive: the media are major
corporations. Like others, they sell a product to a market: the product
is audiences and the market is other businesses (advertisers). It would
be surprising indeed if the choice and shaping of media content did not
reflect the interests and preferences of the sellers and buyers, and the
business world generally. Even apart from the natural tendency to
support state power, the linkage of the corporate sector and the state
is so close that convergence of interests on major issues is the norm.
The status of audiences is more ambiguous. The product must be available
for sale; people must be induced to look at the advertisements. But
beyond this common ground, divisions arise.
We can make a rough distinction between the managerial class and the
rest. The managers take part in decision-making in the state, the
private economy, and the doctrinal institutions. The rest are to cede
authority to state and private elites, to accept what they are told, and
to occupy themselves elsewhere. There is a corresponding rough
distinction between elite and mass media, the former aiming to be
instructive, though in ways that reflect dominant interests; the latter
primarily to shape attitudes and beliefs, and to divert “the great
beast,” as Alexander Hamilton termed the annoying public.
The managers must have a tolerably realistic picture of the world if
they are to advance “the permanent interests of the country,” to borrow
the phrase of James Madison, the leading framer of the constitutional
order, referring to the rights of men of property. The world view of
planners and decision makers should conform to the permanent interests,
not just parochially but more broadly. The great beast, in contrast,
must be caged. The public must have faith in the leaders who pursue
“America’s mission,” perhaps subject to personal flaws, or making errors
in an excess of good will or naivete, but dedicated to the path of
righteousness. Firm in this conviction, the public is to keep to
pursuits that do not interfere with the permanent interests. It must
accept subordination as normal and proper; better still, it should be
invisible, the way life is and must be.
The political order is largely an expression of these goals, and the
doctrinal institutions—the media prominent among them—serve to reinforce
and legitimate them. These are tendencies that one would be inclined to
expect on elementary assumptions, and there is ample evidence to support
such natural conjectures.
The realities are commonly revealed during the electoral extravaganzas.
The year 2000 was no exception. As usual, almost half the electorate did
not participate and voting correlated with income. Voter turnout
remained “among the lowest and most decisively class-skewed in the
industrial world.”[1] This feature of so-called “American
exceptionalism,” reflecting the unusual dominance and class
consciousness of concentrated private power, has been plausibly
attributed to “the total absence of a socialist or laborite mass party
as an organized competitor in the electoral market.”[2] The same is true
of the “media market”: it is virtually 100 percent corporate, with a
“total absence of socialist or laborite” mass media. In both respects,
“the system works.”
Control of the media market by private capital is no more a law of
nature than its control of the electoral market. In earlier days, there
was a vibrant labor-based and popular press that reached a mass audience
of concerned and committed readers, on the scale of the commercial
press. As in England, it was undermined by concentration of capital and
advertiser funding; one should not succumb to myths about markets
fostering competition. Unlike in most of the world, business interests
are so powerful in the United States that they quickly took control of
radio and television, and are now seeking to do the same with the new
electronic media that were developed primarily in the state sector over
many years—a terrain of struggle today with considerable long-term
implications.
Most of the population did not take the year 2000 presidential elections
very seriously. Three-fourths of the population regarded the process as
a game played by large contributors (overwhelmingly corporations), party
leaders, and the PR industry, which crafted candidates to say “almost
anything to get themselves elected,” so that one could believe little
that they said even when their stand on issues was intelligible. On most
issues citizens could not identify the stands of the candidates—not
because of ignorance or lack of concern; again, the system is working.
Public opinion studies found that among voters concerned more with
policy issues than “qualities,” the Democrats won handily. But issues
were displaced in the political-media system in favor of style,
personality, and other marginalia that are of little concern to the
concentrated private power centers that largely finance campaigns and
run the government. Their shared interests remained safely off the
agenda, independently of the public will.[3]
Crucially, questions of economic policy must be deflected. These are of
great concern both to the general population and to private power and
its political representatives, but commonly with opposing preferences.
The business world and its media overwhelmingly support “neoliberal
reforms”: corporate-led versions of globalization, the investor-rights
agreements called “free trade agreements,” and other devices that
concentrate wealth and power. The public tends to oppose these measures,
despite near-uniform media celebration. And unless care is taken, people
might find ways to articulate and even implement their concerns.
Opponents of the international economic arrangements favored by the
business-government-media complex have an “ultimate weapon,” the Wall
Street Journal observed ruefully: the general public, which must
therefore be marginalized.[4]
For the public, the trade deficit had become the most important economic
issue facing the country by 1998, outranking taxes or the budget
deficit—the latter a concern for business, but not the public, so that
lack of public interest must be portrayed as the public’s
“balanced-budget obsession.”[5] People understand that the trade deficit
translates into loss of jobs; for example, when U.S. corporations
establish plants abroad that export to the domestic market. But free
capital mobility is a high priority for the business world: it increases
profit and also provides a powerful weapon to undermine labor organizing
by threat of job transfer—technically illegal, but highly effective, as
labor historian Kate Bronfenbrenner has demonstrated in important
work.[6] Such threats contribute to the “growing worker insecurity” that
has been hailed by Alan Greenspan and others as a significant factor in
creating a “fairy-tale economy” by limiting wages and benefits, thus
increasing profit and reducing inflationary pressures that would be
unwelcome to financial interests. Another useful effect of these
measures is to undermine democracy. Unions have traditionally offered
people ways to pool limited resources, to think through problems that
concern them collectively, to struggle for their rights, and to
challenge the monopoly of the electoral and media markets. Capital
mobility provides a new way to avert these threats, one of several that
are cleaner than the resort to violence to crush working people that was
another feature of “American exceptionalism” over a long period.
No such matters are to intrude into the electoral process: the general
population is induced to vote (if at all) on the basis of peripheral
concerns.
Higher-income voters favor Republicans, so that the class-skewed voting
pattern benefits the more openly pro-business party. But more revealing
than the abstention of those who are left effectively voiceless is the
way they vote when they do participate. The voting bloc that provided
Bush with his greatest electoral success was middle-to-lower income
white working class voters, particularly men, but women as well. By
large margins they favored Gore on major policy issues, insofar as these
arose in some meaningful way during the campaign. But they were diverted
to safer preoccupations.
The public is well aware of its marginalization. In the early years of
Project Censored, about half the population felt that the government is
run by “a few big interests looking out for themselves.” During the
Reagan years, as “neoliberal reforms” were more firmly instituted, the
figure rose to over 80 percent. In 2000, the director of Harvard’s
Vanishing Voter Project reported that “Americans’ feeling of
powerlessness has reached an alarming high,” with 53 percent responding
“only a little” or “none” to the question: “How much influence do you
think people like you have on what government does?” The previous peak,
30 years ago, was 41 percent. During the campaign, over 60 percent of
regular voters regarded politics in America as “generally pretty
disgusting.” In each weekly survey, more people found the campaign
boring than exciting, by a margin of 5 to 3 in the final week.
The election was a virtual statistical tie, with estimated differences
within the expected error range. A victor had to be chosen, and a great
deal of attention was devoted to the process and what it reveals about
the state of American democracy. But the major and most revealing issues
were largely ignored in favor of dimpled chads and other technicalities.
Among the crucial issues sidelined was the fact that most of the
population felt that no election took place in any serious sense, at
least as far as their interests were concerned.
A leading theme of modern history is the conflict between elite sectors,
who are dedicated to securing “the permanent interests,” and the
unwashed masses, who have a different conception of their role in
determining their fate and the course of public affairs. Over the
centuries, rights have been won by constant and often bitter popular
struggle, including rights of workers, women, and victims of a variety
of other forms of discrimination and oppression; and the rights of
future generations, the core concern of the environmental movements. The
last 40 years have seen notable advances in this regard. But progress is
by no means uniform. New mechanisms are constantly devised to restrict
the rights that have been gained to formal exercises with little
content.
The political order was consciously designed to defend the “permanent
interests” against the “levelling spirit” of the growing masses of
people who will “labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly
sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings,” Madison feared,
that they may seek to improve their conditions by such measures as
agrarian reform (and today, far more). The political system must
“protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” Madison
advised his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention. Power was
therefore to be in the hands of “the wealth of the nation,” not the
great masses of people “without property, or the hope of acquiring it,”
and who “cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with [the rights
of the propertied minority or] to be safe depositories of power” over
these rights, Madison observed 40 years later, reflecting on the course
and prospects of the system of which he was the most influential
designer.
The problems and conflicts persist, though their nature has radically
changed over time. A particularly important shift took place with the
“corporatization of America” a century ago, which sharply concentrated
power, creating “a very different America from the old” in which “most
men are servants of corporations,” Woodrow Wilson observed. This
“different America,” he continued, is “no longer a scene of individual
enterprise,…individual opportunity and individual achievement” but a
society in which “small groups of men in control of great corporations
wield a power and control over the wealth and business opportunities of
the country,” administering markets and becoming “rivals of the
government itself”; more accurately, becoming barely distinguishable
from “the government itself.” Wilsonian progressivism also gave a new
cast to the traditional vision of the political order. In his
“progressive essays on democracy,” Walter Lippmann, the most influential
figure in American journalism in the 20^(th) century, described the
public as “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” who should be mere
“spectators of action,” not participants; their role is limited to
periodic choice among the “responsible men,” who are to function in
“technocratic insulation,” in World Bank lingo, “securing the permanent
interests.”
The doctrine, labelled “polyarchy” by democratic political theorist
Robert Dahl, is conventional in elite opinion. It has been given still
firmer institutional grounds by the reduction of the public arena under
the “neoliberal reforms” of the past 20 years, which shift authority
even more than before to unaccountable private concentrations of power,
under the cynical slogan “trust the people.” Democracy is to be
construed as the right to choose among commodities. Business leaders
explain the need to impose on the population a “philosophy of futility”
and “lack of purpose in life,” to “concentrate human attention on the
more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable consumption.”
People may then accept and even welcome their meaningless and
subordinate lives, and forget ridiculous ideas about managing their own
affairs. They will abandon their fate to the responsible men, the
self-described “intelligent minorities” who serve and administer
power—which lies elsewhere, a hidden but crucial premise. It is within
this general framework that the media function.
Like other major sectors of the economy, the corporate media are tending
toward oligopoly. The process reduces still more the limited possibility
that public concerns might come to the fore when they interfere with
state-corporate interests, or that state policies might be seriously
challenged.
On loyalty to state power, the common understanding is sometimes
articulated with refreshing candor. For example, the leading political
commentator of The New York Times opened the new year by hailing
Clinton’s “creative compromise” for the Middle East. Since the President
has spoken, we “now know what the only realistic final deal looks like,”
and “now that we know what the deal looks like, the only question left
is: Will either side be able to take it?”[7] How could there be a
different question?
Not appropriate for discussion, and kept in the shadows, are the terms
of the President’s statesmanlike plan. Anyone with access to the Israeli
press and a map, or the alternative media here, could have discovered
throughout the recent negotiations and the seven-year “peace process”
that Clinton’s “creative compromise,” like its predecessors, is designed
to imprison the Palestinian population in isolated enclaves in the
territories that Israel conquered in 1967, separated from one another,
and from the vastly expanded region called “Jerusalem,” by Israeli
settlements and infrastructure projects, and also separated from the
Arab world; one well-known Middle East specialist estimates that “25
percent of West Bank territory has been arbitrarily absorbed into
Jerusalem” alone, with U.S. authorization and support.[8] In
“Jerusalem,” we learn from the press, Arab neighborhoods are to be
administered by Arabs and Jewish neighborhoods by Jews. What could be
more fair? At least, until we look a little further and find that the
Arab neighborhoods are isolated sections of the tiny former East
Jerusalem, while the Jewish “neighborhoods” that are to be integrated
within Israel include “settlements like Ma’ale Adumim”[9]—a city that
was established well to the east in order to bisect the West Bank—along
with other “neighborhoods” extending far to the north and south. Like
other major settlement projects of the Oslo period, Ma’ale Adumim has
flourished thanks to the Labor doves whose magnanimity we are called
upon to admire for their “concessions” in the territories they conquered
in 1967. Another part of the “compromise” is an Israeli salient that
partially bisects the remaining territories to the north, and other
mechanisms to ensure that the resources and usable land of the occupied
territories will be in the hands of the leading U.S. client state, long
a pillar of U.S. policy in the strategic Middle East region.[10]
Without proceeding, the outcome conforms very well to the rejectionist
stand that the United States has upheld in international isolation for
more than 25 years, effectively denying the national rights of one of
the two contending parties in the former Palestine. The record has been
dispatched to the depths of the memory hole with a degree of efficiency
and uniformity that is rather impressive in a free society. Without
substantial independent research, readers of the U.S. media could
scarcely have even a limited grasp of one of the major stories of the
year 2000.
Even the most elementary facts are not proper media fare if they
interfere with the image of impartial benevolence. Consider just a
single illustration: the role of U.S. helicopters, very important to the
Israeli army because “it is impractical to think that we can manufacture
helicopters or major weapons systems of this type in Israel,” the
Ministry of Defense director-general General Amos Yaron reported. The
late 2000 confrontations began on September 29, when Israeli troops
killed several people and wounded over 100 as they left the al-Aqsa
Mosque in Jerusalem after Friday prayers. On October 1, U.S. helicopters
with Israeli pilots killed two Palestinians. The next day, helicopters
killed 10 and wounded 35 at Netzarim, the scene of a great deal of
fighting: the small Israeli settlement there is hardly more than an
excuse for a military base and roads that cut the Gaza Strip in two,
isolating Gaza City and separating it from Egypt as well (with other
barriers to the south). On October 3, the defense correspondent of
Israel’s leading journal, Ha’aretz, reported the largest purchase of
U.S. military helicopters in a decade: Blackhawks and parts for Apache
attack helicopters sent a few weeks earlier. On October 4, Jane’s
Defence Weekly, the world’s most prominent military journal, reported
that the Clinton Administration had approved a request for new Apache
attack helicopters, the most advanced in the U.S. arsenal, having
decided, apparently, that the upgrades were not sufficient for the
current needs of attacking the civilian population. The same day, the
U.S. press reported that Apaches were attacking apartment complexes with
rockets at Netzarim. The German press agency quoted Pentagon officials
who said that “U.S. weapons sales do not carry a stipulation that the
weapons can’t be used against civilians. We cannot second-guess an
Israeli commander who calls in helicopter gunships.” So matters
continued. A few weeks later, the local Palestinian leader Hussein
Abayat was killed by a missile launched from an Apache helicopter (along
with two women standing nearby), as the assassination campaign against
the indigenous leadership was initiated.[11]
Rushing new military helicopters under these circumstances was surely
newsworthy, and it was reported: in an opinion piece in Raleigh, North
Carolina, on October 12. An Amnesty International condemnation of the
sale of U.S. helicopters on October 19 also passed in virtual
silence.[12] Such facts will not do. Rather, we must join in praise for
our leaders, recognizing that their words stipulate the “only realistic
final deal,” while we ponder the strange character flaws of the intended
beneficiaries of their solicitude.
The examples are selected virtually at random. In fact, even the
valuable record of 25 years provided by Project Censored can do no more
than barely skim the surface. What it has been investigating is a major
phenomenon of “really existing democracy,” which we ignore at our peril.
[1] Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn (Hill & Wang, 1986).
[2] Walter Dean Burnham, “The 1980 Earthquake,” in T. Ferguson and J.
Rogers, eds, The Hidden Election (Pantheon, 1981).
[3] For data on the elections, here and below, see Ruy Teixeira,
American Prospect, December 18; Thomas Patterson, head of the Harvard
University Vanishing Voter Project, op-eds, NYT, November 8, Boston
Globe, December 15, 2000.
[4] Glenn Burkins, “Labor Fights Against Fast-Track Trade Measure,” WSJ,
September 16, 1997.
[5] On how the feat was accomplished, see my “Consent without Consent,”
Cleveland State Law Review, 44.4 (1996).
[6] Uneasy Terrain: The Impact of Capital Mobility on Workers, Wages,
and Union Organizing, Cornell 2000, updating her earlier studies.
[7] Thomas Friedman, NYT, January 2, 2001.
[8] Augustus Richard Norton, Current History, January 2001.
[9] Jane Perlez, “Clinton Presents a Broad New Plan for Mideast Peace,”
NYT, December 26, 2000.
[10] As the “Clinton compromise” faced collapse, it was finally
recognized that the Palestinians object to the Bantustan-style enclave
structure imposed by U.S.-Israeli diplomatic and development programs
during the Clinton years. See Jane Perlez, Joel Greenberg, NYT, January
3, 2001, citing Palestinian objections.
[11] Yaron, Globes, Journal of Israel’s Business Arena, December 21,
2000. October 1–2 attacks, Report on Israeli Settlement (Washington DC),
November-December 2000. Amnon Barzilai, “Israel Air Force closes largest
helicopter deal of decade,” Ha’aretz, October 3. Robin Hughes, “USA
approves Israel’s Apache Longbow request,” Jane’s Defence Weekly,
October 4. Charles Sennott, Boston Globe, October 4. Dave McIntyre
(Washington), Deutsche Presse-Agentur, October 3, 2000. Gideon Levy,
Ha’aretz, December 24, and Graham Usher, Middle East Report, Winter
2000, on Abayat assassination in Beit Sahur on November 9.
[12] Ann Thompson Cary, “Arming Israel…,” News and Observer (Raleigh,
NC), October 12. “Amnesty International USA Calls for Cessation of all
Attack Helicopter Transfers to Israel,” AI release, October 19, 2000.