Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky

Would you characterize this media analysis as a “conspiracy theory” at all? It’s precisely the opposite of conspiracy theory, actually—in fact, in general this analysis tends to downplay the role of individuals: they’re just replaceable pieces.

What I’m saying is that if you look at the sources reporters select, they are not sources that are expert, they are sources that represent vested interests: that’s propaganda.

for the agenda-setting media like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, they’re in fact selling very privileged, elite audiences to other businesses—overwhelmingly their readers are members of the so-called “political class,” which is the class that makes decisions in our society.

it’s only natural that powerful interests wouldn’t want to support genuinely alternative structures—why would an institution function in such a way as to undermine itself? Of course that’s not going to happen.

some of the top investigative reporters in the country are very conscious of the way the system works and play it like a violin, just looking for moments when they can sneak stories through. Some of the best-known of them are even more cynical about the media than I am, actually—but they just find ways to work within the system,

a lot of what the popular movements had been fighting for slowly began to work its way into the development of British political democracy [e.g. constitutional monarchy was established in 1689 and a Bill of Rights adopted]. And ever since then, every time popular movements have succeeded in dissolving power to a certain extent, there has been a dee

history doesn’t construct controlled experiments for you, but there are lots of historical events that are more or less paired, and it’s possible to compare how the media deal with them. So we’ve examined media coverage of atrocities committed by enemy states and compared it to coverage of atrocities which were roughly on the same scale, but for wh

And sometime in the Seventies, the American army shifted to a traditional mercenary army of the poor, which they call a “volunteer army.” People in power learn, you know. They’re sophisticated, and they’re organized, and they have continuity—and they realize that they made a mistake in Vietnam. They don’t want to make that same mistake again.

Life magazine made My Lai famous.80 My Lai, they did—but first of all, note the timing: it’s a year and a half after it happened, a year and a half after corporate America turned against the war. And the reporting was falsified. See, My Lai was presented as if it was a bunch of crazy grunts who got out of control because they were being directed by

Six months in early 1986 and six months in early 1987 happened to have been the periods of greatest debate over Nicaragua, right before the big contra aid bills came to Congress. The New York Times and the Washington Post in those two periods published only two columns that even raised the possibility that the Sandinistas should be permitted to sur