Brainwashing in Freedom
The "brainwashing in freedom"
By Noam Chomsky
September 15, 2007
Source: Le Monde Diplomatique
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2007/08/CHOMSKY/14992
You will not read this text in the press, in the mainstream press. It does not open its columns to this major voice, the linguist Noam Chomsky. He analyzes the reasons why information is so filtered in all the media. He adds that when one asks any journalist: "Are you free in your writings?" he immediately answers "yes." This is usually true. But journalists in our "liberal world" (in the Larousse, Liberal means: favorable to freedom) are all sitting on an ejection seat. If they express opinions and analyses that do not match those of the group that owns the media outlet and that do not serve its interests, this ejection seat will soon be activated and the person will no longer find any job in the profession. It is a constraint as strong as threats to life. One does not threaten physical existence, but professional life.
An example is the journalist Michel Polac, who for years achieved impressive results in terms of audience in his program "Droit de réponse," at a time when live broadcasts were still being done. One day, he found it opportune to disclose information he claimed to have, according to which a powerful French company would have paid bribes to obtain a state contract, I believe, for the construction of a bridge. He had forgotten, in passing, that the entrepreneur who had been in charge of the works was also the main shareholder of the company that supported him. He picked up the phone. The "ejection seat" was activated. Michel Polac, a real media star at the time, was fired immediately and did not find work in the profession for many years. Another example: the star journalist Jacques Pradel, who lost his job after broadcasting two programs on the "Roswell alien." For years, he found all doors closed at all channels and took a long time to recover. At the time, he had confirmed to me by phone the difficulties he had encountered after his abrupt ejection from the media sphere. It seems that the lesson took, because Jacques, who was a very close friend and with whom we produced many radio programs, no longer answers my letters.
This pressure is found in all environments. Are judges independent? Have you ever seen a judge accusing another judge, a surgeon accusing another surgeon? Etc...
I remember a friend from Aix, a surgeon, who had been informed of an operating error that had resulted in the death of a young woman. She had been operated on by one of his colleagues, who had entered the operating room completely drunk. With a careless incision, he had touched the bladder. This had resulted in sepsis. He could at least have anonymously warned the family, so that they would know whom to turn to. But no, the law of silence applied. If it had been known that he had been the cause of this mistake, he would have been quickly excluded from the medical community.
Lee Smolin, in a recent book: "Nothing Is Wrong in Physics, published by Dunod," has denounced a "scientific brainwashing." The mechanism is the same.
To be free, one must be able to lose one's audience, fortune, friends, profession, life. Those best placed to denounce are those who have a safe shelter: retirees, civil servants. As a researcher, all one risks is the loss of funding and the blocking of one's career. I find it cheap to pay for being able to look at oneself in the mirror every morning.
The Internet distorts this merciless game. It is our first and last space of freedom.
The public is not mistaken, beginning to no longer believe in its institutional press, less and less
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September 15, 2007. Interviewed by Daniel Mermet Even more effective than dictatorships The "brainwashing in freedom" Buyouts of major newspapers - the "Wall Street Journal" in the United States, "Les Echos" in France - by wealthy men accustomed to bending the truth to suit their interests (see also, in this issue, "Press Predators and Influence Merchants," by Marie Bénilde), excessive media coverage of Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy, the cannibalization of information by sports, weather, and trivial news, all in a flood of advertisements: "communication" is the instrument of permanent government of democratic regimes. It is, for them, what propaganda is for dictatorships. In an interview with the France Inter journalist Daniel Mermet, the American intellectual Noam Chomsky analyzes these mechanisms of domination and places them in their historical context. He recalls, for example, that totalitarian regimes have relied on the mechanisms of the advertising communication perfected in the United States after the First World War. Beyond that, he talks about the prospects for social change in the current world, and what the utopia might look like for those who, despite the pedagogy of impotence hammered by the media, have not given up on changing the world.
By Noam Chomsky Let's start with the question of the media. In France, in May 2005, during the referendum on the European Constitution treaty, most media outlets were in favor of the "yes," yet 55% of the French voted "no." The power of media manipulation does not seem absolute. Did this vote of citizens also represent a "no" to the media?
The work on media manipulation or the manufacture of consent done by Edward Herman and me does not address the question of the effects of the media on the public ( ). It is a complicated subject, but the few in-depth studies conducted on this topic suggest that, in reality, the influence of the media is greater on the more educated fraction of the population. The mass of public opinion seems less dependent on the media's discourse.
Take, for example, the possibility of a war against Iran: 75% of Americans believe that the United States should end its military threats and favor the search for an agreement through diplomatic means. Surveys conducted by Western institutes suggest that the Iranian public opinion and that of the United States also converge on certain aspects of the nuclear issue: the overwhelming majority of the population of both countries believes that the area extending from Israel to Iran should be completely rid of nuclear weapons, including those possessed by the American troops in the region. Yet, to find this kind of information in the media, one has to search for a long time.
As for the main political parties of the two countries, none of them defend this point of view. If Iran and the United States were authentic democracies within which ...