On Fake News and Other Societal Woes

Noam Chomsky interviewed by Irene

NoOne's Listening, December 7, 2005

Interviewer: Hi Professor Chomsky.

Chomsky: Speaking.

Interviewer: This is Irene from No One's Listening, but in honor of your appearance on the show today we're entitling it Noam's listening.

Chomsky: Oh, well, that's nice.

Interviewer: So our show today is about video news releases.

Chomsky: Video news releases?

Interviewer: Video news releases and fake news. I imagine you don't have time to watch much tv since you've written 90 books but I think the reason you'd be so good for this show is because you could give a historical analysis of the print media.

Chomsky: Well there was a period, in the mid-19th century, that's the period of the freest press, both in England and in the US. And it's quite interesting to look back at it. Over the years, that's declined. It declined for two basic reasons. One reason is the increased capital that was required to run a competitive press. And as capital requirements increased, that of course lead to a more corporatized media. The other effect is advertisement. In the 19th century, the United States had something kind of approximating a market system. Now we have nothing like a market--they may teach you [that] in economics courses, but that's not the way it works. And one of the signs of the decline of the market is advertisement. So if you have a real market you don't advertise: you just give information. For example, there are corners of the economy that do run like markets--for example stock markets. If you have ten shares of General Motors that you want to sell, you don't put up an ad on television with a sexy model holding up the ten shares saying "ask your broker if this is good for you; it's good for me," or something like that. What you do is you sell it at the market price. If you had a market for cars, toothpaste, or whatever, lifestyle drugs, you would do the same thing. GM would put up a brief notice saying here's the information about our models. Well, you've seen television ads, so I don't have to tell you how it works. The idea is to delude and deceive people with imagery. And the same has happened to the print media. Take the New York Times for example. They have something called the news hole. When the editors lay out tomorrow's newspapers, the first thing they do is the important things - they put the ads around. Then they have a little bit left that's called the news hole, and they stick little things there. Quite apart from that the media are just big corporations and of course represent the interests of their owners, their markets, which are advertisers, and for the elite newspapers, more or less the managerial class, the educated population they deal with. The end result is that you get a very narrow perspective of what the world is like.