Let me give an analogy that may not be totally appropriate but I find is kind of illuminating: Many people, based on their everyday experience, believe in the existence of the centrifugal force (otherwise how to explain what they are experiencing daily). Then, their physics professor explains to them that in reality there is no such thing. Only if they study physics farther than the freshman year do they learn that that is not true either. Other similar examples of hypercorrection can be given (see this interesting answer: http://physics.stackexchange.com/a/13568/852). The intent of the professor is benign, i.e. not to confuse the students, but it perpetuates a half-truth.
Coming from a non-US country, I have to say that those of you who heavily criticize US media for manipulating opinion should look deeper into the media of other countries (not that I'm saying that the US media is non-manipulative, it's that the breadth of publicly sharable opinion is astonishing).
He's presenting another view of the world where, even in a free and democratic society, the media has institutional, structural weaknesses that cause it to serve power. To amplify certain messages, and attenuate others.
It's an attempt to explain how a free society could have committed such atrocities as the Vietnam War, and later, gotten suckered into the Iraq War.
I have seen the debate about this shift in my lifetime. In the early 90s, when the Manufacturing Consent movie came out, I was in a journalism program and even interviewed the makers of that film. Many of the other students in my classes found the film bewildering. They quite honestly believed the media were just serving the people in the great engine of democracy.
Nowadays everyone is aware of how badly the media is failing the public. There are satirists who make this point on a literally Daily basis.
Of course, the general public's cynicism is often unsophisticated, and manifests itself as accusations of intentional bias. But there is more and more awareness of how the structure of the media itself affects what gets covered - perhaps because the Internet offers a counterexample.
I so hope that you are right about that one.
http://www.people-press.org/2012/08/16/further-decline-in-cr...
It would help Chomsky's case a lot if he identified a post-WW2 "good war". Does he think intervening in Korea was a good idea?
It would help him identifying a "good war" if there were one.
EDIT: I'm not saying there's no such thing as a "good war", though I probably have a vastly higher bar for what might qualify for that than most. Instead, I'm saying that the "wars" the US has engaged in post-WWII have largely been motivated by cynical self-interest, and often at the expense of everyone involved, including — perhaps even especially — itself.
I think this is a concept inserted by a lot of Chomsky nay-sayers. I don't recall that being part of the worldview. My limited reading and viewing has left me with the impression, perhaps more disturbing, that there is no secret power. This really is just how people behave, and to really understand what's happening in real time, so that better interventions can be made, is going to take whole new fields of study.
I think the solutions of anarchism or communism that some Chomskyites put forward are mainly bold attempts to add those vectors into the other much larger vectors that are already present in the public debate and tend to make the space appear very inhospitable to alternative view points. Much like Aaron described, the world seems very lonely afterwards, and hearing a shout in the distance is very welcome to the man alone in the desert.
Yap and I think mixing Chomsky up with conspiracy theorists and building straw men arguments is a common tactic of those who are ideologically minded and want to protect their preconceived notions. "Chomsky is a commy nut", "CNN isn't in cahoots with Walmart and FBI, he is just crazy".
The point to take home, I think, is that there are rules and assumptions built into the system that make it evolve in a certain way. There aren't necessarily heads of state and corporations sitting down in dark basement and scheming against the poor and the weak.
Now this doesn't mean the rules cannot be changed. It just means there isn't one central surface of attack. Like "well if we just replace all these people, things will fix themselves" one sort of has chip away and find what incentive and rewards there are.
However, this also doesn't mean that individuals who are part of the system and play by its rules even when that is at odds with basic morality (like in the case of Aaron) shouldn't bear responsibility. Both approaches should be taken.
For the record, I'm not a Chomsky nay-sayer, any intelligent person's (and he's brilliant, of course) opinion needs to be taken into account to update our worldview. It's just that the extremity of some of his positions (in linguistics, too) has made me lower the weight I use while I incorporate his views in the periodic update of my worldview on things.
"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.
"Look, part of the structure of corporate capitalism is that the players in the game try to increase profits and market shares—if they don’t do that, they will no longer be players in the game. Any economist knows this: it’s not a conspiracy theory to point that out, it’s just taken for granted as an institutional fact. If someone were to say, “Oh no, that’s a conspiracy theory,” people would laugh. Well, what we’ve been discussing are simply the institutional factors that set the boundaries for reporting and interpretation in the ideological institutions. That’s the opposite of conspiracy theory, it’s just normal institutional analysis, the kind of analysis you do automatically when you’re trying to understand how the world works. For people to call it “conspiracy theory” is part of the effort to prevent an understanding of how the world works, in my view—“conspiracy theory” has become the intellectual equivalent of a four-letter word: it’s something people say when they don’t want you to think about what’s really going on."
[...]
"Well, this term “conspiracy theory” is kind of an interesting one. For example, if I was talking about Soviet planning and I said, “Look, here’s what the Politburo decided, and then the Kremlin did this,” nobody would call that a “conspiracy theory” — everyone would just assume that I was talking about planning. But as soon as you start talking about anything that’s done by power in the West, then everybody calls it a “conspiracy theory.” You’re not allowed to talk about planning in the West, it’s not allowed to exist. So if you’re a political scientist, one of the things you learn—you don’t even make it into graduate school unless you’ve already internalized it—is that nobody here ever plans anything: we just act out of a kind of general benevolence, stumbling from here to here, sometimes making mistakes and so on. The guys in power aren’t idiots, after all. They do planning. In fact, they do very careful and sophisticated planning. But anybody who talks about it, and uses government records or anything else to back it up, is into “conspiracy theory.”
"It’s the same with business: business is again just operating out of a generalized benevolence, trying to help everybody get the cheapest goods with the best quality, all this kind of stuff. If you say: “Look, Chrysler is trying to maximize profits and market share,” that’s “conspiracy theory.” In other words, as soon as you describe elementary reality and attribute minimal rationality to people with power—well, that’s fine as long as it’s an enemy, but if it’s a part of domestic power, it’s a “conspiracy theory” and you’re not supposed to talk about it."
Any over correction is on the part of the reader, not the writer.
It's roughly equivalent to being in a car which accelerates quickly so that you feel pressure from the seat on your back. The centrifugal force in this case would be the pseudo force that's propelling you backward with respect to the car.
The seat's force pushing you forward is analogous to centripetal force.
So I would argue it's a full truth with a pedantic asterisk - you can make any force appear by moving the reference frame. The same "force" would be present if you were standing stationary on the sidewalk and the car were accelerating toward you.
I took it to mean you will see things more clearly, yourself. I may be wrong though.
Someone pointed Chomsky to me. I read some. I think it was Failed State or Manufacturing Consent. And thought, well, surely this is all liberal commy bullshit. Except for one little problem -- Chomsky seemed to have thorough references and footnotes, with which it was very hard to argue.
Stuff like "Well those countries hates because of our freedoms", a common slogan, kind of ingrained in many people's minds by now. Well it turns out that that isn't the case. Even results from National Security Council' finding show that (Many hate us because we installed and supported brutal dictators and suppressed locally elected governments). That's just one silly example.
Or, for example, assumption about how we have free media who regularly reports objective and informative news as opposed to media, that is heavily biased. Then Manufacturing Consent carefully dissects that and presents a different picture. I read that not wanting it to be true, however Chomsky has this nasty habit of providing good references for his points, not accepting them would be intellectually dishonest.
Anyway, if you google "the herman chomsky propaganda model twenty years on" and then click the pdf link you may find what you want.
I can't post the link here because google is so paranoid about being crawled that they obfuscate links to the point where you can't get easily get a link to a pdf without going through the search manually.
The easiest way around this is to just click the link and copy it from your browser.
http://www.fifth-estate-online.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011...