Lo and behold,
someone has put together on Tumblr a fantastic collection of great quotes by the world's most cited intellectual, curated and verified by fans of his.
Chomsky also has his own site , a vast trove of speeches, articles, interview transcripts -- and lots else.
You can easily spend hours poring through it if you're not careful,
reading up on the history of propaganda or the American empire. But the
Chomsky quote site is great if you are looking for a thought of the day
and you're on the run.
Here are 10 Chomsky quotes worth mulling over on the media:
1. "The major media-particularly, the elite media that set the
agenda that others generally follow-are corporations “selling”
privileged audiences to other businesses. It would hardly come as a
surprise if the picture of the world they present were to reflect the
perspectives and interests of the sellers, the buyers, and the product.
Concentration of ownership of the media is high and increasing.
Furthermore, those who occupy managerial positions in the media, or gain
status within them as commentators, belong to the same privileged
elites, and might be expected to share the perceptions, aspirations, and
attitudes of their associates, reflecting their own class interests as
well. Journalists entering the system are unlikely to make their way
unless they conform to these ideological pressures, generally by
internalizing the values; it is not easy to say one thing and believe
another, and those who fail to conform will tend to be weeded out by
familiar mechanisms."
2. “If the media were honest, they would say, Look, here are the
interests we represent and this is the framework within which we look at
things. This is our set of beliefs and commitments. That’s what they
would say, very much as their critics say. For example, I don’t try to
hide my commitments, and the Washington Post and New York Times
shouldn’t do it either. However, they must do it, because this mask of
balance and objectivity is a crucial part of the propaganda function. In
fact, they actually go beyond that. They try to present themselves as
adversarial to power, as subversive, digging away at powerful
institutions and undermining them. The academic profession plays along
with this game.”
3."The leading student of business propaganda, Australian social
scientist Alex Carey, argues persuasively that “the 20th century has
been characterized by three developments of great political importance:
the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth
of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against
democracy."
4. "The public relations industry, which essentially runs the
elections, is applying certain principles to undermine democracy which
are the same as the principles that applies to undermine markets. The
last thing that business wants is markets in the sense of economic
theory. Take a course in economics, they tell you a market is based on
informed consumers making rational choices. Anyone who’s ever looked at a
TV ad knows that’s not true. In fact if we had a market system an ad
say for General Motors would be a brief statement of the characteristics
of the products for next year. That’s not what you see. You see some
movie actress or a football hero or somebody driving a car up a mountain
or something like that. And that’s true of all advertising. The goal is
to undermine markets by creating uninformed consumers who will make
irrational choices and the business world spends huge efforts on that.
The same is true when the same industry, the PR industry, turns to
undermining democracy. It wants to construct elections in which
uninformed voters will make irrational choices. It’s pretty reasonable
and it’s so evident you can hardly miss it."
5. "The Obama campaign greatly impressed the public relations
industry, which named Obama ‘Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for
2008,’ easily beating out Apple computers. A good predictor of the
elections a few weeks later. The industry’s regular task is to create
uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices, thus undermining
markets as they are conceptualized in economic theory, but benefiting
the masters of the economy. And it recognizes the benefits of
undermining democracy in much the same way, creating uninformed voters
who make often irrational choices between the factions of the business
party that amass sufficient support from concentrated private capital to
enter the electoral arena, then to dominate campaign propaganda."
6. "Control of thought is more important for governments that are
free and popular than for despotic and military states. The logic is
straightforward: a despotic state can control its domestic enemies by
force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to
prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which
are none of their business…the public are to be observers, not
participants, consumers of ideology as well as products."
7. "The first modern propaganda agency was the British Ministry of
Information a century ago, which secretly defined its task as “to direct
the thought of most of the world” — primarily progressive American
intellectuals, who had to be mobilized to come to the aid of Britain
during World War I."
8. "One of the questions asked in that study was, How many
Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the
Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is
about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual
figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the
study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German
political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in
the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us
about German political culture?"
9. "You don’t have any other society where the educated classes are
so effectively indoctrinated and controlled by a subtle propaganda
system – a private system including media, intellectual opinion forming
magazines and the participation of the most highly educated sections of
the population. Such people ought to be referred to as “Commissars” –
for that is what their essential function is – to set up and maintain a
system of doctrines and beliefs which will undermine independent thought
and prevent a proper understanding and analysis of national and global
institutions, issues, and policies."
10. “Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course
of intellectual self defense to protect themselves from manipulation
and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy.”
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