Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media

Three, two, one, take two.

Good morning. Welcome to Erin Mills town centre.

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 want to 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 today,

so... let's get on with it.

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 in England, they're in Japan.

All over the place.

- Jesus. - They must have 500 hours of tape.

Bet they put together a really doozy when they're done, huh?

I can't imagine who's going to want to hear somebody talk for an hour.

But I guess they know what they're doing.

So, where are you all from?

- Florida. - Florida?

Yeah, Gulf Coast.

You all talk like in chorus.

We're making a film about Noam Chomsky. Does anybody know who Noam Chomsky is?

No!

Good aternoon and welcome to Wyoming Talks.

My guest today is well-known intellectual Noam Chomsky.

Thank you for being on our programme today.

Very glad to be here.

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, 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 marginalise and control the public in a democratic society.

But particularly to look at the evidence that's been accumulated,

about the way the major media,

The agenda-setting media, I mean, the national press,

and 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.

I think Jane will find some very surprising things about the democratic system.

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.

I gather there are some people behind that blackness there.

But if I don't look you in the eye, it's because I don't see you, all I see is the blackness.

Perhaps I ought to begin by reporting something that's never read.

The line about "arguably the most important intellectual in the world," and so on

comes from a publisher's blurb and you got to watch those.

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?"

They never quote that part.

If it wasn't for that second sentence, I'd 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 he doesn't like to be told it.

The Emperor's lap dogs, like The New York Times, will not enjoy the experience if you do.

Good evening. I'm Bill Moyers.

What's more dangerous: The big stick of 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 going to do it if you ask them to, you have to deceive them into doing it.

There are many truths like that. We don't face them.

Do you believe in common sense?

Absolutely. I believe in Cartesian common sense.

I think people have the capacities to see through the deceit in which they're ensnared.

But you got to 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 common people with such appreciation.

I think scholarship, at least the field 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 just in a normal way, nothing particularly fancy,

reflects deep-seated features of human creativity,

which separate human beings from any other biological system we know.

Tonight, scientists talk to the animals. But are they talking back?

The Journal with Barbara Frum and Mary Lou Finlay.

Communicating with animals is a serious scientific pursuit.

This is Nim Chimpsky.

Nim, jokingly named ater 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.

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.

He also has 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.

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 had generated the specific rules of actual or natural languages.

The general approach I'm taking seems to me rather simple minded and unsophisticated,

but, nevertheless, correct.

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 is 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-ty

- Facility. - Facility.

That in turn explains the astonishing facility children have

in learning the rules of natural language, no matter how complicated, incredibly quickly,

from what are imperfect and oten degenerate samples.

- Compli... - Complicated.

It's a complicated word.

Do you know what "complicated" means? It means it's complicated.

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 programme.

Well, plainly there are different languages.

In fact, the apparent variation of languages is quite superficial.

It's certain - as certain as anything else is -

that humans are not genetically programmed to learn one or another language.

So, you bring up a Japanese baby in Boston, and it'll speak Boston English.

You bring up my child in Japan, it'll speak Japanese.

And that means that... From that it fol... 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.

Incidentally, I think there is no doubt the same must be true

of other aspects of human intelligence,

and systems of understanding and interpretation,

and moral and aesthetic judgement, and so on.

The implications of these views have washed over the fields of psychology,

education, sociology, philosophy, literary criticism, and logic.

In the '50s and '60s the bridge between your theoretical work

and your political work seems to have been the attack on behaviourism,

but now behaviourism 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.

FOUCAULT

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 for...

...for free creation without the...

...arbitrary, limiting effects of coercive institutions,

then of course it will follow that a decent society should maximise the possibilities

for this fundamental human characteristic to be realised.

Now, a federated, decentralised...

...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 organisation

for an advanced technological society

in which human beings do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in a machine.

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, and self-delusions of prevailing ideologies.

Under the liberal administration 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 into this community.

In fact, you're invited and encouraged to enter it.