Secrets, Lies and Democracy (Interviews with Noam Chomsky) Copyright © 1994 by David Barsamian
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The media

Let's talk about media and democracy. In your view, what are the communications requirements of a democratic society?

I agree with Adam Smith on this -- we'd like to see a tendency toward equality. Not just equality of opportunity, but actual equality -- the ability, at every stage of one's existence, to access information and make decisions on the basis of it. So a democratic communications system would be one that involves large-scale public participation, and that reflects both public interests and real values like truth, integrity and discovery.

Bob McChesney, in his recent book Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy, details the debate between 1928 and 1935 for control of radio in the US. How did that battle play out?

That's a very interesting topic, and he's done an important service by bringing it out. It's very pertinent today, because we're involved in a very similar battle over this so-called "information superhighway."

In the 1920s, the first major means of mass communication since the printing press came along -- radio. It's obvious that radio is a bounded resource, because there's only a fixed bandwidth. There was no question in anyone's mind that the government was going to have to regulate it. The question was, What form would this government regulation take?

Government could opt for public radio, with popular participation. This approach would be as democratic as the society is. Public radio in the Soviet Union would have been totalitarian, but in, say, Canada or England, it would be partially democratic (insofar as those societies are democratic).

That debate was pursued all over the world -- at least in the wealthier societies, which had the luxury of choice. Almost every country (maybe every one -- I can't think of an exception) chose public radio, while the US chose private radio. It wasn't 100%; you were allowed to have small radio stations -- say, a college radio station -- that can reach a few blocks. But virtually all radio in the US was handed over to private power.

As McChesney points out, there was a considerable struggle about that. There were church groups and some labor unions and other public interest groups that felt that the US should go the way the rest of the world was going. But this is very much a business-run society, and they lost out.

Rather strikingly, business also won an ideological victory, claiming that handing radio over to private power constituted democracy, because it gave people choices in the marketplace. That's a very weird concept of democracy, since your power depends on the number of dollars you have, and your choices are limited to selecting among options that are highly structured by the real concentrations of power. But this was nevertheless widely accepted, even by liberals, as the democratic solution. By the mid- to late 1930s, the game was essentially over.

This struggle was replayed -- in the rest of the world, at least -- about a decade later, when television came along. In the US this wasn't a battle at all; TV was completely commercialized without any conflict. But again, in most other countries -- or maybe every other country -- TV was put in the public sector.

In the 1960s, television and radio became partly commercialized in other countries; the same concentration of private power that we find in the US was chipping away at the public-service function of radio and television. At the same time in the US, there was a slight opening to public radio and television.

The reasons for this have never been explored in any depth (as far as I know), but it appears that the private broadcasting companies recognized that it was a nuisance for them to have to satisfy the formal requirements of the Federal Communications Commission that they devote part of their programming to public-interest purposes. So CBS, say, had to have a big office with a lot of employees who every year would put together a collection of fraudulent claims about how they'd met this legislative condition. It was a pain in the neck.

At some point, they apparently decided that it would be easier to get the entire burden off their backs and permit a small and underfunded public broadcasting system. They could then claim that they didn't have to fulfill this service any longer. That was the origin of public radio and television -- which is now largely corporate -- funded in any event.

That's happening more and more. PBS [the Public Broadcasting Service] is sometimes called "the Petroleum Broadcasting Service."

That's just another reflection of the interests and power of a highly class-conscious business system that's always fighting an intense class war. These issues are coming up again with respect to the Internet [a worldwide computer network] and the new interactive communications technologies. And we're going to find exactly the same conflict again. It's going on right now.

I don't see why we should have had any long-term hopes for something different. Commercially run radio is going to have certain purposes -- namely, the ones determined by people who own and control it.

As I mentioned earlier, they don't want decision-makers and participants; they want a passive, obedient population of consumers and political spectators -- a community of people who are so atomized and isolated that they can't put together their limited resources and become an independent, powerful force that will chip away at concentrated power.

Does ownership always determine content?

In some far-reaching sense it does, because if content ever goes beyond the bounds owners will tolerate, they'll surely move in to limit it. But there's a fair amount of flexibility.

Investors don't go down to the television studio and make sure that the local talk-show host or reporter is doing what they want. There are other, subtler, more complex mechanisms that make it fairly certain that the people on the air will do what the owners and investors want. There's a whole, long, filtering process that makes sure that people only rise through the system to become managers, editors, etc., if they've internalized the values of the owners.

At that point, they can describe themselves as quite free. So you'll occasionally find some flaming independent-liberal type like Tom Wicker who writes, Look, nobody tells me what to say. I say whatever I want. It's an absolutely free system.

And, for him, that's true. After he'd demonstrated to the satisfaction of his bosses that he'd internalized their values, he was entirely free to write whatever he wanted.

Both PBS and NPR [National Public Radio] frequently come under attack for being left-wing.

That's an interesting sort of critique. In fact, PBS and NPR are elite institutions, reflecting by and large the points of view and interests of wealthy professionals who are very close to business circles, including corporate executives. But they happen to be liberal by certain criteria.

That is, if you took a poll among corporate executives on matters like, say, abortion rights, I presume their responses would be what's called liberal. I suspect the same would be true on lots of social issues, like civil rights and freedom of speech. They tend not to be fundamentalist, born-again Christians, for example, and they might tend to be more opposed to the death penalty than the general population. I'm sure you'll find plenty of private wealth and corporate power backing the American Civil Liberties Union.

Since those are aspects of the social order from which they gain, they tend to support them. By these criteria, the people who dominate the country tend to be liberal, and that reflects itself in an institution like PBS.

You've been on NPR just twice in 23 years, and on The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour once in its almost 20 years. What if you'd been on MacNeil-Lehrer ten times? Would it make a difference?

Not a lot. By the way, I'm not quite sure of those numbers; my own memory isn't that precise. I've been on local PBS stations in particular towns.

I'm talking about the national network.

Then probably something roughly like those numbers is correct. But it wouldn't make a lot of difference.

In fact, in my view, if the managers of the propaganda system were more intelligent, they'd allow more leeway to real dissidents and critics. That would give the impression of broader debate and discussion and hence would have a legitimizing function, but it still wouldn't make much of a dent, given the overwhelming weight of propaganda on the other side. By the way, that propaganda system includes not just how issues are framed in news stories but also how they're presented in entertainment programming -- that huge area of the media that's simply devoted to diverting people and making them more stupid and passive.

That's not to say I'm against opening up these media a bit, but I would think it would have a limited effect. What you need is something that presents every day, in a clear and comprehensive fashion, a different picture of the world, one that reflects the concerns and interests of ordinary people, and that takes something like the point of view with regard to democracy and participation that you find in people like Jefferson or Dewey.

Where that happens -- and it has happened, even in modern societies -- it has effects. In England, for example, you did have major mass media of this kind up until the 1960s, and it helped sustain and enliven a working class culture. It had a big effect on British society.

What do you think about the Internet?

I think that there are good things about it, but there are also aspects of it that concern and worry me. This is an intuitive response -- I can't prove it -- but my feeling is that, since people aren't Martians or robots, direct face-to-face contact is an extremely important part of human life. It helps develop self-understanding and the growth of a healthy personality.

You just have a different relationship to somebody when you're looking at them than you do when you're punching away at a keyboard and some symbols come back. I suspect that extending that form of abstract and remote relationship, instead of direct, personal contact, is going to have unpleasant effects on what people are like. It will diminish their humanity, I think.


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