Noam_Chomsky___Media_Control.pdf

THE OPEN MEDIA PAMPHLET S E R I E S

Copyright © 1991, 1997 by Noam Chomsky

A Seven Stories Press First Edition,
published in association with Open Media.

Open Media Pamphlet Series editors,
Greg Ruggiero and Stuart Sahulka.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form, by any means, including
mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior written permission
of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chomsky, Noam.
Media control: the spectacular achievements of

propaganda / Noam Chomsky.
p. cm. —(The Open Media Pamphlet Series)
ISBN 1-888363-49-5
1. Propaganda. 2. Propaganda—United States. 3.

Mass media—Political aspects. 4. Mass media and
public opinion. I. Title. II. Series.
HM263.C447 1997
303.375—dc21 96-53580

CIP

Book design by Cindy LaBreacht

9 8 7 6 5

The role of the media
in contemporary politics forces us to ask what
kind of a world and what kind of a society we
want to live in, and in particular in what sense
of democracy do we want this to be a democ-
ratic society? Let me begin by counter-posing
two different conceptions of democracy. One
conception of democracy has it that a democ-
ratic society is one in which the public has the
means to participate in some meaningful way
in the management of their own affairs and the
means of information are open and free. If you
look up democracy in the dictionary you’ll get
a definition something like that.

An alternative conception of democracy is
that the public must be barred from managing
of their own affairs and the means of informa-
tion must be kept narrowly and rigidly con-
trolled. That may sound like an odd conception
of democracy, but it’s important to understand
that it is the prevailing conception. In fact, it
has long been, not just in operation, but even
in theory. There’s a long history that goes back
to the earliest modern democratic revolutions
in seventeenth century England which largely
expresses this point of view. I’m just going to
keep to the modern period and say a few words
about how that notion of democracy develops
and why and how the problem of media and dis-
information enters within that context.

E A R L Y HISTORY OF PROPAGANDA

Let’s begin with the first modern government
propaganda operation. That was under the
Woodrow Wilson Administration. Woodrow
Wilson was elected President in 1916 on the
platform “Peace Without Victory.” That was
right in the middle of the World War I. The pop-
ulation was extremely pacifistic and saw no rea-
son to become involved in a European war. The
Wilson administration was actually committed
to war and had to do something about it. They
established a government propaganda com-
mission, called the Creel Commission which
succeeded, within six months, in turning a
pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mon-
gering population which wanted to destroy
everything German, tear the Germans limb
from limb, go to war and save the world. That
was a major achievement, and it led to a further
achievement. Right at that time and after the
war the same techniques were used to whip up
a hysterical Red Scare, as it was called, which
succeeded pretty much in destroying unions
and eliminating such dangerous problems as
freedom of the press and freedom of political

thought. There was very strong support from
the media, from the business establishment,
which in fact organized, pushed much of this
work, and it was, in general, a great success.

Among those who participated actively and
enthusiastically in Wilson’s war were the pro-
gressive intellectuals, people of the John
Dewey circle, who took great pride, as you can
see from their own writings at the time, in hav-
ing shown that what they called the “more
intelligent members of the community,”
namely, themselves, were able to drive a
reluctant population into a war by terrifying
them and eliciting jingoist fanaticism. The
means that were used were extensive. For
example, there was a good deal of fabrication
of atrocities by the Huns, Belgian babies with
their arms torn off, all sorts of awful things that
you still read in history books. Much of it was
invented by the British propaganda ministry,
whose own commitment at the time, as they
put it in their secret deliberations, was “to
direct the thought of most of the world.” But
more crucially they wanted to control the
thought of the more intelligent members of the
community in the United States, who would
then disseminate the propaganda that they
were concocting and convert the pacifistic

country to wartime hysteria. That worked. It
worked very well. And it taught a lesson: State
propaganda, when supported by the educated
classes and when no deviation is permitted
from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson
learned by Hitler and many others, and it has
been pursued to this day.

SPECTATOR DEMOCRACY

Another group that was impressed by these
successes was liberal democratic theorists and
leading media figures, like, for example, Wal-
ter Lippmann, who was the dean of American
journalists, a major foreign and domestic pol-
icy critic and also a major theorist of liberal
democracy. If you take a look at his collected
essays, you’ll see that they’re subtitled some-
thing like “A Progressive Theory of Liberal
Democratic Thought.” Lippmann was
involved in these propaganda commissions and
recognized their achievements. He argued that
what he called a “revolution in the art of
democracy,” could be used to “manufacture
consent, ” that is, to bring about agreement on
the part of the public for things that they did-
n’t want by the new techniques of propaganda.
He also thought that this was a good idea, in
fact, necessary. It was necessary because, as he
put it, “the common interests elude public
opinion entirely” and can only be understood
and managed by a “specialized class “of
“responsible men” who are smart enough to
figure things out. This theory asserts that only

a small elite, the intellectual community that
the Deweyites were talking about, can under-
stand the common interests, what all of us
care about, and that these things “elude the
general public.” This is a view that goes back
hundreds of years. It’s also a typical Leninist
view. In fact, it has very close resemblance to
the Leninist conception that a vanguard of rev-
olutionary intellectuals take state power,
using popular revolutions as the force that
brings them to state power, and then drive the
stupid masses toward a future that they’re too
dumb and incompetent to envision for them-
selves. The liberal democratic theory and
Marxism-Leninism are very close in their
common ideological assumptions. I think
that’s one reason why people have found it so
easy over the years to drift from one position
to another without any particular sense of
change. It’s just a matter of assessing where
power is. Maybe there will be a popular revo-
lution, and that will put us into state power;
or maybe there won’t be, in which case we’ll
just work for the people with real power: the
business community. But we’ll do the same
thing. We’ll drive the stupid masses toward a
world that they’re too dumb to understand for
themselves.

Lippmann backed this up by a pretty elab-
orated theory of progressive democracy. He
argued that in a properly functioning democ-
racy there are classes of citizens. There is first
of all the class of citizens who have to take
some active role in running general affairs.
That’s the specialized class. They are the peo-
ple who analyze, execute, make decisions, and
run things in the political, economic, and ide-
ological systems. That’s a small percentage of
the population. Naturally, anyone who puts
these ideas forth is always part of that small
group, and they’re talking about what to do
about those others. Those others, who are out
of the small group, the big majority of the pop-
ulation, they are what Lippmann called “the
bewildered herd.” We have to protect ourselves
from “the trampling and roar of a bewildered
herd”. Now there are two “functions” in a
democracy: The specialized class, the respon-
sible men, carry out the executive function,
which means they do the thinking and plan-
ning and understand the common interests.
Then, there is the bewildered herd, and they
have a function in democracy too. Their func-
tion in a democracy, he said, is to be “specta-
tors,” not participants in action. But they have
more of a function than that, because it’s a

democracy. Occasionally they are allowed to
lend their weight to one or another member of
the specialized class. In other words, they’re
allowed to say, “We want you to be our leader”
or “We want you to be our leader.” That’s
because it’s a democracy and not a totalitarian
state. That’s called an election. But once
they’ve lent their weight to one or another
member of the specialized class they’re sup-
posed to sink back and become spectators of
action, but not participants. That’s in a prop-
erly functioning democracy.

And there’s a logic behind it. There’s even
a kind of compelling moral principle behind
it. The compelling moral principle is that the
mass of the public are just too stupid to be
able to understand things. If they try to par-
ticipate in managing their own affairs, they’re
just going to cause trouble. Therefore, it
would be immoral and improper to permit
them to do this. We have to tame the bewil-
dered herd, not allow the bewildered herd to
rage and trample and destroy things. It’s pretty
much the same logic that says that it would
be improper to let a three-year-old run across
the street. You don’t give a three-year-old that
kind of freedom because the three-year-old
doesn’t know how to handle that freedom.

Correspondingly, you don’t allow the bewil-
dered herd to become participants in action.
They’ll just cause trouble.

So we need something to tame the bewil-
dered herd, and that something is this new
revolution in the art of democracy: the manu-
facture of consent. The media, the schools, and
popular culture have to be divided. For the
political class and the decision makers they
have to provide them some tolerable sense of
reality, although they also have to instill the
proper beliefs. Just remember, there is an
unstated premise here. The unstated premise
—and even the responsible men have to dis-
guise this from themselves—has to do with the
question of how they get into the position
where they have the authority to make deci-
sions. The way they do that, of course, is by
serving people with real power. The people
with real power are the ones who own the soci-
ety, which is a pretty narrow group. If the spe-
cialized class can come along and say, I can
serve your interests, then they’ll be part of the
executive group. You’ve got to keep that quiet.
That means they have to have instilled in them
the beliefs and doctrines that will serve the
interests of private power. Unless they can
master that skill, they’re not part of the spe-

cialized class. So we have one kind of educa-
tional system directed to the responsible men,
the specialized class. They have to be deeply
indoctrinated in the values and interests of pri-
vate power and the state-corporate nexus that
represents it. If they can achieve that, then they
can be part of the specialized class. The rest of
the bewildered herd basically just have to be
distracted. Turn their attention to something
else. Keep them out of trouble. Make sure that
they remain at most spectators of action, occa-
sionally lending their weight to one or another
of the real leaders, who they may select
among.

This point of view has been developed by
lots of other people. In fact, it’s pretty con-
ventional. For example, the leading theologian
and foreign policy critic Reinhold Niebuhr,
sometimes called “the theologian of the estab-
lishment, ” the guru of George Kennan and the
Kennedy intellectuals, put it that rationality is
a very narrowly restricted skill. Only a small
number of people have it. Most people are
guided by just emotion and impulse. Those of
us who have rationality have to create “nec-
essary illusions” and emotionally potent
“oversimpli-fications” to keep the naive sim-
pletons more or less on course. This became a

substantial part of contemporary political sci-
ence. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Harold Lass-
well, the founder of the modern field of
communications and one of the leading Amer-
ican political scientists, explained that we
should not succumb to “democratic dogma-
tisms about men being the best judges of their
own interests.” Because they’re not. We’re the
best judges of the public interests. Therefore,
just out of ordinary morality, we have to make
sure that they don’t have an opportunity to act
on the basis of their misjudgments. In what is
nowadays called a totalitarian state, or a mil-
itary state, it’s easy. You just hold a bludgeon
over their heads, and if they get out of line you
smash them over the head. But as society has
become more free and democratic, you lose
that capacity. Therefore you have to turn to the
techniques of propaganda. The logic is clear.
Propaganda is to a democracy what the blud-
geon is to a totalitarian state. That’s wise and
good because, again, the common interests
elude the bewildered herd. They can’t figure
them out.

PUBLIC RELATIONS

The United States pioneered the public rela-
tions industry. Its commitment was “to con-
trol the public mind/’ as its leaders put it. They
learned a lot from the successes of the Creel
Commission and the successes in creating the
Red Scare and its aftermath. The public rela-
tions industry underwent a huge expansion at
that time. It succeeded for some time in cre-
ating almost total subordination of the public
to business rule through the 1920s. This was
so extreme that Congressional committees
began to investigate it as we moved into the
1930s. That’s where a lot of our information
about it comes from.

Public relations is a huge industry. They’re
spending by now something on the order of a
billion dollars a year. All along its commitment
was to controlling the public mind. In the
1930s, big problems arose again, as they had
during the First World War. There was a huge
depression and substantial labor organizing. In
fact, in 1935 labor won its first major legisla-
tive victory, namely, the right to organize, with
the Wagner Act. That raised two serious prob-

lems. For one thing, democracy was misfunc-
tioning. The bewildered herd was actually win-
ning legislative victories, and it’s not supposed
to work that way. The other problem was that
it was becoming possible for people to organize.
People have to be atomized and segregated and
alone. They’re not supposed to organize,
because then they might be something beyond
spectators of action. They might actually be
participants if many people with limited
resources could get together to enter the polit-
ical arena. That’s really threatening, A major
response was taken on the part of business to
ensure that this would be the last legislative
victory for labor and that it would be the begin-
ning of the end of this democratic deviation of
popular organization. It worked. That was the
last legislative victory for labor. From that
point on — although the number of people in
the unions increased for a while during the
World War II, after which it started drop-
ping — the capacity to act through the unions
began to steadily drop. It wasn’t by accident.
We’re now talking about the business com-
munity, which spends lots and lots of money,
attention, and thought into how to deal with
these problems through the public relations
industry and other organizations, like the

National Association of Manufacturers and the
Business Roundtable, and so on. They imme-
diately set to work to try to find a way to
counter these democratic deviations.

The first trial was one year later, in 1937.
There was a major strike, the Steel strike in
western Pennsylvania at Johnstown. Business
tried out a new technique oflabor destruction,
which worked very well. Not through goon
squads and breaking knees. That wasn’t work-
ing very well any more, but through the more
subtle and effective means of propaganda. The
idea was to figure out ways to turn the public
against the strikers, to present the strikers as
disruptive, harmful to the public and against
the common interests. The common interests
are those of “us,” the businessman, the
worker, the housewife. That’s all “us.” We
want to be together and have things like har-
mony and Americanism and working together.
Then there’s those bad strikers out there who
are disruptive and causing trouble and break-
ing harmony and violating Americanism.
We’ve got to stop them so we can all live
together. The corporate executive and the guy
who cleans the floors all have the same inter-
ests. We can all work together and work for
Americanism in harmony, liking each other.

That was essentially the message. A huge
amount of effort was put into presenting it.
This is, after all, the business community, so
they control the media and have massive
resources. And it wrked, very effectively. It
was later called the “Mohawk Valley formula”
and applied over and over again to break
strikes. They were called “scientific methods
of strike-breaking,” and worked very effec-
tively by mobilizing community opinion in
favor of vapid, empty concepts like American-
ism. Who can be against that? Or harmony.
Who can be against that? Or, as in the Persian
Gulf War, “Support our troops.” Who can be
against that? Or yellow ribbons. Who can be
against that? Anything that’s totally vacuous .

In fact, what does it mean if somebody
asks you, Do you support the people in Iowa?
Can you say, Yes, I support them, or No, I don’t
support them? It’s not even a question. It does-
n’t mean anything. That’s the point. The point
of public relations slogans like “Support our
troops” is that they don’t mean anything. They
mean as much as whether you support the peo-
ple in Iowa. Of course, there was an issue. The
issue was, Do you support our policy? But you
don’t want people to think about that issue.
That’s the whole point of good propaganda.

You want to create a slogna that nobody’s
going to be against, and everybody’s going to
be for. Nobody knows what it means, because
it doesn’t mean anything. Its crucial value is
that it diverts your attention from a question
that does mean something: Do you support our
policy? That’s the one you’re not allowed to
talk about. So you have people arguing about
support for the troops? “Of course I don’t not
support them.” Then you’ve won. That’s like
Americanism and harmony. We’re all
together, empty slogans, let’s join in, let’s
make sure we don’t have these bad people
around to disrupt our harmony with their talk
about class struggle, rights and that sort of
business.

That’s all very effective. It runs right up to
today. And of course it is carefully thought out.
The people in the public relations industry
aren’t there for the fun of it. They’re doing
work. They’re trying to instill the right values.
In fact, they have a conception of what democ-
racy ought to be: It ought to be a system in
which the specialized class is trained to work
in the service of the masters, the people who
own the society. The rest of the population
ought to be deprived of any form of organiza-
tion, because organization just causes trouble.

They ought to be sitting alone in front of the
TV and having drilled into their heads the mes-
sage, which says, the only value in life is to
have more commodities or live like that rich
middle class family you’re watching and to
have nice values like harmony and American-
ism. That’s all there is in life. You may think
in your own head that there’s got to be some-
thing more in life than this, but since you’re
watching the tube alone you assume, I must be
crazy, because that’s all that’s going on over
there. And since there is no organization per-
mitted—that’s absolutely crucial—you never
have a way of finding out whether you are
crazy, and you just assume it, because it’s the
natural thing to assume.

So that’s the ideal. Great efforts are made
in trying to achieve that ideal. Obviously,
there is a certain conception behind it. The
conception of democracy is the one that I men-
tioned. The bewildered herd is a problem.
We’ve got to prevent their roar and trampling.
We’ve got to distract them. They should be
watching the Superbowl or sitcoms or violent
movies. Every once in a while you call on
them to chant meaningless slogans like “Sup-
port our troops.” You’ve got to keep them
pretty scared, because unless they’re properly

scared and frightened of all kinds of devils that
are going to destroy them from outside or
inside or somewhere, they may start to think,
which is very dangerous, because they’re not
competent to think. Therefore it’s important
to distract them and marginalize them.

That’s one conception of democracy. In
fact, going back to the business community,
the last legal victory for labor really was 1935,
the Wagner Act. After the war came, the unions
declined as did a very rich working class cul-
ture that was associated with the unions. That
was destroyed. We moved to a business-run
society at a remarkable level. This is the only
state-capitalist industrial society which does-
n’t have even the normal social contract that
you find in comparable societies. Outside of
South Africa, I guess, this is the only industrial
society that doesn’t have national health care.
There’s no general commitment to even min-
imal standards of survival for the parts of the
population who can’t follow those rules and
gain things for themselves individually.
Unions are virtually nonexistent. Other forms
of popular structure are virtually nonexistent.
There are no political parties or organizations.
It’s a long way toward the ideal, at least struc-
turally. The media are a corporate monopoly.

They have the same point of view. The two par-
ties are two factions of the business party. Most
of the population doesn’t even bother voting
because it looks meaningless. They’re mar-
ginalized and properly distracted. At least that’s
the goal. The leading figure in the public rela-
tions industry, Edward Bernays, actually came
out of the Creel Commission. He was part of
it, learned his lessons there and went on to
develop what he called the “engineering of con-
sent,” which he described as “the essence of
democracy.” The people who are able to engi-
neer consent are the ones who have the
resources and the power to do it—the business
community—and that’s who you work for.

ENGINEERING OPINION

It is also necessary to whip up the population
in support of foreign adventures. Usually the
population is pacifist, just like they were dur-
ing the First World War. The public sees no rea-
son to get involved in foreign adventures,
killing, and torture. So you have to whip them
up. And to whip them up you have to frighten
them. Bernays himself had an important
achievement in this respect. He was the per-
son who ran the public relations campaign for
the United Fruit Company in 1954, when the
United States moved in to overthrow the cap-
italist-democratic government of Guatemala
and installed a murderous death-squad society,
which remains that way to the present day
with constant infusions of U.S. aid to prevent
in more than empty form democratic devia-
tions. It’s necessary to constantly ram through
domestic programs which the public is
opposed to, because there is no reason for the
public to be in favor of domestic programs that
are harmful to them. This, too, takes extensive
propaganda. We’ve seen a lot of this in the last
ten years. The Reagan programs were over-

whelmingly unpopular. Voters in the 1984
“Reagan landslide,” by about three to two,
hoped that his policies would not be enacted.
If you take particular programs, like arma-
ments, cutting back on social spending, etc.,
almost every one of them was overwhelmingly
opposed by the public. But as long as people are
marginalized and distracted and have no way
to organize or articulate their sentiments, or
even know that others have these sentiments,
people who said that they prefer social spend-
ing to military spending, who gave that answer
on polls, as people overwhelmingly did,
assumed that they were the only people with
that crazy idea in their heads. They never heard
it from anywhere else. Nobody’s supposed to
think that. Therefore, if you do think it and you
answer it in a poll, you just assume that you’re
sort of weird. Since there’s no way to get
together with other people who share or rein-
force that view and help you articulate it, you
feel like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay
on the side and you don’t pay any attention to
what’s going on. You look at something else,
like the Superbowl.

To a certain extent, then, that ideal was
achieved, but never completely. There are insti-
tutions which it has as yet been impossible to

destroy. The churches, for example, still exist.
A large part of the dissident activity in the
United States comes out of the churches, for
the simple reason that they’re there. So when
you go to a European country and give a polit-
ical talk, it may very likely be in the union hall.
Here that won’t happen, because unions first
of all barely exist, and if they do exist they’re
not political organizations. But the churches do
exist, and therefore you often give a talk in a
church. Central American solidarity work
mostly grew out of the churches, mainly
because they exist.

The bewildered herd never gets properly
tamed, so this is a constant battle. In the 1930s
they arose again and were put down. In the
1960s there was another wave of dissidence.
There was a name for that. It was called by the
specialized class “the crisis of democracy.”
Democracy was regarded as entering into a cri-
sis in the 1960s. The crisis was that large seg-
ments of the population were becoming
organized and active and trying to participate
in the political arena. Here we come back to
these two conceptions of democracy. By the
dictionary definition, that’s an advance in
democracy. By the prevailing conception that’s
a problem, a crisis that has to be overcome. The

population has to be driven back to the apathy,
obedience and passivity that is their proper

-state. We therefore have to do something to
overcome the crisis. Efforts were made to
achieve that. It hasn’t worked. The crisis of
democracy is still alive and well, fortunately,
but not very effective in changing policy. But
it is effective in changing opinion, contrary to
what a lot of people believe. Great efforts were
made after the 1960s to try to reverse and over-
come this malady. One aspect of the malady
actually got a technical name. It was called the
“Vietnam Syndrome.” The Vietnam Syn-
drome, a term that began to come up around
1970, has actually been defined on occasion.
The Reaganite intellectual Norman Podhoretz
defined it as “the sickly inhibitions against the
use of military force.” There were these sickly
inhibitions against violence on the part of a
large part of the public. People just didn’t
understand why we should go around torturing
people and killing people and carpet bombing
them. It’s very dangerous for a population to be
overcome by these sickly inhibitions, as
Goebbels understood, because then there’s a
limit on foreign adventures. It’s necessary, as
the Washington Post put it rather proudly dur-
ing the Gulf War hysteria, to instill in people

respect for “martial value.” That’s important.
If you want to have a violent society that uses
force around the world to achieve the ends of
its own domestic elite, it’s necessary to have
a proper appreciation of the martial virtues and
none of these sickly inhibitions about using
violence. So that’s the Vietnam Syndrome. It’s
necessary to overcome that one.

REPRESENTATION AS REALITY

It’s also necessary to completely falsify history.
That’s another way to overcome these sickly
inhibitions, to make it look as if when we
attack and destroy somebody we’re really pro-
tecting and defending ourselves against major
aggressors and monsters and so on. There has
been a huge effort since the Vietnam war to
reconstruct the history of that. Too many peo-
ple began to understand what was really going
on. Including plenty of soldiers and a lot of
young people who were involved with the peace
movement and others. That was bad. It was nec-
essary to rearrange those bad thoughts and to
restore some form of sanity, namely, a recog-
nition that whatever we do is noble and right.
If we’re bombing South Vietnam, that’s because
we’re defending South Vietnam against some-
body, namely, the South …