Necessary Illusions

Noam Chomsky

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 1995
• eBook ISBN: 9780887848681
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In his national bestselling 1988 CBC Massey Lectures, Noam Chomsky inquires into the nature of the media in a political system where the population cannot be disciplined by force and thus must be subjected to more subtle forms of ideological control. Specific cases are illustrated in detail, using the U.S. media primarily but also media in other societies.

Chomsky considers how the media might be democratized (as part of the general problem of developing more democratic institutions) in order to offer citizens broader and more meaningful participation in social and political life.

1
Democracy and the Media

Under the heading “Brazilian bishops support plan to democratize media,” a church-based South American journal describes a proposal being debated in the constituent assembly that “would open up Brazil’s powerful and highly concentrated media to citizen participation.” “Brazil’s Catholic bishops are among the principal advocates [of this] … legislative proposal to democratize the country’s communications media,” the report continues, noting that “Brazilian TV is in the hands of five big networks [while]… eight huge multinational corporations and various state enterprises account for the majority of all communications advertising.” The proposal “envisions the creation of a National Communications Council made up of civilian and government representatives [that] … would develop a democratic communications policy and grant licenses to radio and television operations.” ‘The Brazilian Conference of Catholic Bishops has repeatedly stressed the importance of the communications media and pushed for grassroots participation. It has chosen communications as the theme of its 1989 Lenten campaign,” an annual “parish-level campaign of reflection about some social issue” initiated by the Bishops’ Conference.¹

The questions raised by the Brazilian bishops are being seriously discussed in many parts of the world. Projects exploring them are under way in several Latin American countries and elsewhere. There has been discussion of a “New World Information Order” that would diversify media access and encourage alternatives to the global media system dominated by the Western industrial powers. A UNESCO inquiry into such possibilities elicited an extremely hostile reaction in the United States.² The alleged concern was freedom of the press. Among the questions I would like to raise as we proceed are: just how serious is this concern, and what is its substantive content? Further questions that lie in the background have to do with a democratic communications policy: what it might be, whether it is a desideratum, and if so, whether it is attainable. And, more generally, just what kind of democratic order is it to which we aspire?

The concept of “democratizing the media” has no real meaning within the terms of political discourse in the United States. In fact, the phrase has a paradoxical or even vaguely subversive ring to it. Citizen participation would be considered an infringement on freedom of the press, a blow struck against the independence of the media that would distort the mission they have undertaken to inform the public without fear or favor. The reaction merits some thought. Underlying it are beliefs about how the media do function and how they should function within our democratic systems, and also certain implicit conceptions of the nature of democracy. Let us consider these topics in turn.

The standard image of media performance, as expressed by Judge Gurfein in a decision rejecting government efforts to bar publication of the Pentagon Papers, is that we have “a cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press,” and that these tribunes of the people “must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.” Commenting on this decision, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times observes that the media were not always as independent, vigilant, and defiant of authority as they are today, but in the Vietnam and Watergate eras they learned to exercise “the power to root about in our national life, exposing what they deem right for exposure,” without regard to external pressures or the demands of state or private power. This too is a commonly held belief.³

There has been much debate over the media during this period, but it does not deal with the problem of “democratizing the media” and freeing them from the constraints of state and private power. Rather, the issue debated is whether the media have not exceeded proper bounds in escaping such constraints, even threatening the existence of democratic institutions in their contentious and irresponsible defiance of authority. A 1975 study on “governability of democracies” by the Trilateral Commission concluded that the media have become a “notable new source of national power,” one aspect of an “excess of democracy” that contributes to “the reduction of governmental authority” at home and a consequent “decline in the influence of democracy abroad.” This general “crisis of democracy,” the commission held, resulted from the efforts of previously marginalized sectors of the population to organize and press their demands, thereby creating an overload that prevents the democratic process from functioning properly. In earlier times, “Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” so the American rapporteur, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, reflected. In that period there was no crisis of democracy, but in the 1960s, the crisis developed and reached serious proportions. The study therefore urged more “moderation in democracy” to mitigate the excess of democracy and overcome the crisis.⁴

Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive.

The Trilateral Commission study reflects the perceptions and values of liberal elites from the United States, Europe, and Japan, including the leading figures of the Carter administration. On the right, the perception is that democracy is threatened by the organizing efforts of those called the “special interests,” a concept of contemporary political rhetoric that refers to workers, farmers, women, youth, the elderly, the handicapped, ethnic minorities, and so on—in short, the general population. In the U.S. presidential campaigns of the 1980s, the Democrats were accused of being the instrument of these special interests and thus undermining “the national interest,” tacitly assumed to be represented by the one sector notably omitted from the list of special interests: corporations, financial institutions, and other business elites.

The charge that the Democrats represent the special interests has little merit. Rather, they represent other elements of the “national interest,” and participated with few qualms in the right turn of the post-Vietnam era among elite groups, including the dismantling of limited state programs designed to protect the poor and deprived; the transfer of resources to the wealthy; the conversion of the state, even more than before, to a welfare state for the privileged; and the expansion of state power and the protected state sector of the economy through the military system—domestically, a device for compelling the public to subsidize high-technology industry and provide a state-guaranteed market for its waste production. A related element of the right turn was a more “activist” foreign policy to extend U.S. power through subversion, international terrorism, and aggression: the Reagan Doctrine, which the media characterize as the vigorous defense of democracy worldwide, sometimes criticizing the Reaganites for their excesses in this noble cause. In general, the Democratic opposition offered qualified support to these programs of the Reagan administration, which, in fact, were largely an extrapolation of initiatives of the Carter years and, as polls clearly indicate, with few exceptions were strongly opposed by the general population.⁵

Challenging journalists at the Democratic Convention in July 1988 on the constant reference to Michael Dukakis as “too liberal” to win, the media watch organization Fairness and Accurary In Reporting (FAIR) cited a December 1987 New York Times/CBS poll showing overwhelming popular support for government guarantees of full employment, medical and day care, and a 3-to-l margin in favor of reduction of military expenses among the 50 percent of the population who approve of a change. But the choice of a Reagan-style Democrat for vice president elicited only praise from the media for the pragmatism of the Democrats in resisting the left-wing extremists who called for policies supported by a large majority of the population. Popular attitudes, in fact, continued to move towards a kind of New Deal-style liberalism through the 1980s, while “liberal” became an unspeakable word in political rhetoric. Polls show that almost half the population believe that the U.S. Constitution—a sacred document—is the source of Marx’s phrase “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” so obviously right does the sentiment seem.⁶

One should not be misled by Reagan’s “landslide” electoral victories. Reagan won the votes of less than a third of the electorate; of those who voted, a clear majority hoped that his legislative programs would not be enacted, while half the population continues to believe that the government is run “by a few big interests looking out for themselves.”⁷ Given a choice between the Reaganite program of damn-the-consequences Keynesian growth accompanied by jingoist flag-waving on the one hand, and the Democratic alternative of fiscal conservatism and “we approve of your goals but fear that the costs will be too high” on the other, those who took the trouble to vote preferred the former—not too surprisingly. Elite groups have the task of putting on a bold face and extolling the brilliant successes of our system: “a model democracy and a society that provides exceptionally well for the needs of its citizens,” as Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance proclaim in outlining “Bipartisan Objectives for Foreign Policy” in the post-Reagan era. But apart from educated elites, much of the population appears to regard the government as an instrument of power beyond their influence and control; and if their experience does not suffice, a look at some comparative statistics will show how magnificently the richest society in the world, with incomparable advantages, “provides for the needs of its citizens.”⁸

The Reagan phenomenon, in fact, may offer a foretaste of the directions in which capitalist democracy is heading, with the progressive elimination of labor unions, independent media, political associations, and, more generally, forms of popular organization that interfere with domination of the state by concentrated private power. Much of the outside world may have viewed Reagan as a “bizarre cowboy leader” who engaged in acts of “madness” in organizing a ”band of cutthroats” to attack Nicaragua, among other exploits (in the words of Toronto Globe and Mail editorials),⁹ but U.S. public opinion seemed to regard him as hardly more than a symbol of national unity, something like the flag, or the Queen of England. The Queen opens Parliament by reading a political program, but no one asks whether she believes it or even understands it. Correspondingly, the public seemed unconcerned over the evidence, difficult to suppress, that President Reagan had only the vaguest conception of the policies enacted in his name, or the fact that when not properly programmed by his staff, he regularly came out with statements so outlandish as to be an embarrassment, if one were to take them seriously.¹⁰ The process of barring public interference with important matters takes a step forward when elections do not even enable the public to select among programs that originate elsewhere, but become merely a procedure for selecting a symbolic figure. It is therefore of some interest that the United States functioned virtually without a chief executive for eight years.

Returning to the media, which are charged with having fanned the ominous flames of “excess of democracy,” the Trilateral Commission concluded that “broader interests of society and government” require that if journalists do not impose “standards of professionalism,” “the alternative could well be regulation by the government” to the end of “restoring a balance between government and media,” Reflecting similar concerns, the executive-director of Freedom House, Leonard Sussman, asked: “Must free institutions be overthrown because of the very freedom they sustain?” And John Roche, intellectual-in-residence during the Johnson administration, answered by calling for congressional investigation of “the workings of these private governments” which distorted the record so grossly in their “anti-Johnson mission,” though he feared that Congress would be too “terrified of the media” to take on this urgent task.¹¹

Sussman and Roche were commenting on Peter Braestrup’s two-volume study, sponsored by Freedom House, of media coverage of the Tet Offensive of 1968.¹² This study was widely hailed as a landmark contribution, offering definitive proof of the irresponsibility of this “notable new source of national power.” Roche described it as “one of the major pieces of investigative reporting and first-rate scholarship of the past quarter century,” a “meticulous case-study of media incompetence, if not malevolence.” This classic of modern scholarship was alleged to have demonstrated that in their incompetent and biased coverage reflecting the “adversary culture” of the sixties, the media in effect lost the war in Vietnam, thus harming the cause of democracy and freedom for which the United States fought in vain. The Freedom House study concluded that these failures reflect “the more volatile journalistic style—spurred by managerial exhortation or complaisance—that has become so popular since the late 1960s.” The new journalism is accompanied by “an often mindless readiness to seek out conflict, to believe the worst of the government or of authority in general, and on that basis to divide up the actors on any issue into the ‘good’ and the ’bad’.” The “bad” actors included the U.S. forces in Vietnam, the “military-industrial complex,” the CIA and the U.S. government generally; and the “good,” in the eyes of the media, were presumably the Communists, who, the study alleged, were consistently overpraised and protected. The study envisioned “a continuation of the current volatile styles, always with the dark possibility that, if the managers do not themselves take action, then outsiders—the courts, the Federal Communications Commission, or Congress—will seek to apply remedies of their own.”

It is by now an established truth that “we tend to flagellate ourselves as Americans about various aspects of our own policies and actions we disapprove of” and that, as revealed by the Vietnam experience, “it is almost inescapable that such broad coverage will undermine support for the war effort,” particularly “the often-gory pictorial reportage by television” (Landrum Bolling, at a conference he directed on the question of whether there is indeed “no way to effect some kind of balance between the advantages a totalitarian government enjoys because of its ability to control or black out unfavorable news in warfare and the disadvantages for the free society of allowing open coverage of all the wartime events”).¹³ The Watergate affair, in which investigative reporting “helped force a President from office” (Anthony Lewis), reinforced these dire images of impending destruction of democracy by the free-wheeling, independent, and adversarial media, as did the Iran-contra scandal. Ringing defenses of freedom of the press, such as those of Judge Gurfein and Anthony Lewis, are a response to attempts to control media excesses and impose upon them standards of responsibility.

Two kinds of questions arise in connection with these vigorous debates about the media and democracy: questions of fact and questions of value. The basic question of fact is whether the media have indeed adopted an adversarial stance, perhaps with excessive zeal; whether, in particular, they undermine the defense of freedom in wartime and threaten free institutions by “flagellating ourselves” and those in power. If so, we may then ask whether it would be proper to impose some external constraints to ensure that they keep to the bounds of responsibility, or whether we should adopt the principle expressed by Justice Holmes, in a classic dissent, that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market” through “free trade in ideas.”¹⁴

The question of fact is rarely argued; the case is assumed to have been proven. Some, however, have held that the factual premises are simply false. Beginning with the broadest claims, let us consider the functioning of the free market of ideas. In his study of the mobilization of popular opinion to promote state power, Benjamin Ginsberg maintains that

western governments have used market mechanisms to regulate popular perspectives and sentiments. The “marketplace of ideas,” built during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, effectively disseminates the beliefs and ideas of the upper classes while subverting the ideological and cultural independence of the lower classes. Through the construction of this marketplace, western governments forged firm and enduring links between socioeconomic position and ideological power, permitting upper classes to use each to buttress the other … In the United States, in particular, the ability of the upper and upper-middle classes to dominate the marketplace of ideas has generally allowed these strata to shape the entire society’s perception of political reality and the range of realistic political and social possibilities. While westerners usually equate the marketplace with freedom of opinion, the hidden hand of the market can be almost as potent an instrument of control as the iron fist of the state.¹⁵

Ginsberg’s conclusion has some initial plausibility, on assumptions about the functioning of a guided free market that are not particularly controversial. Those segments of the media that can reach a substantial audience are major corporations and are closely integrated with even larger conglomerates. Like other businesses, they sell a product to buyers. Their market is advertisers, and the “product” is audiences, with a bias towards more wealthy audiences, which improve advertising rates.¹⁶ Over a century ago, British Liberals observed that the market would promote those journals “enjoying the preference of the advertising public”; and today, Paul Johnson, noting the demise of a new journal of the left, blandly comments that it deserved its fate: “The market pronounced an accurate verdict at the start by declining to subscribe all the issue capital,” and su...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Democracy and the Media
• 2 Containing the Enemy
• 3 The Bounds of the Expressible
• 4 Adjuncts of Government
• 5 The Utility of Interpretations
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Appendix III
• Appendix IV
• Appendix V
• Notes
• Index