Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Noam Chomsky

Delivered at University of Wisconsin – Madison, March 15, 1989

(transcription courtesy of William Greene)

Hi.

Well, let me begin with two recent events, both of them widely publicized.

The first has to do with the famous Salman Rushdie case. A couple of days ago, you may have noticed, the Prime Minister of Iran suggested a very simple way to resolve the crisis concerning Rushdie, he suggested that what should happen is that all the copies of his book, The Satanic Verses, should simply be burned. And I guess the implication is that if that happened then they could cancel the death sentence. That’s one case. Lots of coverage.

Second case had to do with an interesting thing that happened here. There was a- what some people are calling, a mega-merger of two media giants — Time Incorporated and Warner Communications Incorporated — each of them huge conglomerates, and putting- coming together they form, apparently, the biggest- the world’s biggest media empire. Now, that also had a lot of publicity, even outside the business pages, and there was concern over the effects of the merger, by increasing media concentration so effectively, the effects on freedom of expression.

Well these two events are- they seem rather remote from one another, and in a sense they are. But we can draw them together by recalling an event which was not considered important enough to be reported, but which I happen to know about because I was personally involved.

The title for this talk is, you may have noticed, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. That’s actually the title of a recent book that I was co-author of with- my co-author is Edward Herman, and the two of us have been working together for many years. We- the first- our first book was published in 1974, a book on American foreign policy and the media, in fact, and it was published by a publisher, a textbook publisher, flourishing textbook publisher, which happened to be a subsidiary of Warner Communications Incorporated.

Well, unless you’re a very rare person you never saw that book. And the reason was that when the advertising for the book appeared, after 20,000 copies were published, one of the executives of Warner Communications saw the advertising, and didn’t like the feel of it, and asked to see the book, and liked it even less, in fact, was appalled. And then followed a- an interaction which I won’t bother describing, but the end result of it was that the parent company, Warner Communications, simply decided to put the publisher out of business, and to end the whole story that way.

Now, they didn’t burn the books, they pulped them, which is more civilized. Also, books don’t burn very well actually, I’m told, they’re kind of like bricks, but pulping works. And it wasn’t just our book that was eliminated, it was all the books published by that publisher.

Well, there are a couple of differences between this and the case of the Prime Minister of Iran. One difference is that this was actually done, not just suggested. The second difference is it wasn’t just one book, it was all books, which happened to be tainted by being published by the publisher who had done this bad thing. A third difference is the reaction. The reaction in the case of Warner Communications putting the publisher out of business to prevent them from publishing our book, the reaction to that was zero. Not because it wasn’t known, it just was not considered of any significance. Whereas the Rushdie affair, of course, has had a huge furor, as it should, and the Prime Minister’s proposal was greeted with ridicule and contempt as a demonstration of what you can expect from these barbarous people. So there are some differences.

Well, let’s go back to the question about the mega-merger. Would the- will this new media empire restrict freedom of expression by excessive media concentration? Possibly, but the marginal difference is slight given what already exists, as is, perhaps, illustrated by this case. This is, incidentally, not the only case, far from the only case, which illustrates how hypocritical and cynical the reaction to the Rushdie affair is. The reaction is legitimate, but we can ask the question whether it’s principled or not. And if we look, I think we find that it’s not.

Well actually, this whole story that I’ve just told is kind of misleading. It’s accurate in identifying the locus of decision-making power — not only in publishing and in the media, but in political life and in social life generally — in that respect it’s accurate, but it’s very misleading with regard to how that power is typically exercised. This is a very unusual case. I wouldn’t want to suggest that this is what happens typically. It’s usually much more subtle than this, but no less effective. Now, I’m going to come back to some of the more subtle ways, and the reasons for them, and in fact if there’s time, or maybe back in discussion, I’ll talk about the aftermath of this particular incident, which is also kind of illuminating in this respect, though more complex.

Well, with that much as background let me turn to the main topic, manufacturing consent, a- a topic- and, thought control and indoctrination and so on. Now, there’s a- and, I’m going to discuss how this relates to the media.

Now, there is a standard view about the media and the way they function. The standard view is expressed, for example, by Supreme Court Justice Powell, when he describes what he calls the crucial role of the media in effecting the societal purpose of the first amendment, that is, enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process. So the idea is, this is a kind of an instrumental defense of the first amendment. The value to be achieved is the democratic process, and for the democratic process to function, it’s necessary for the public to have free access, open access to relevant information and opinion- a wide range of opinion, and it’s the job of the media to ensure that, and the first amendment has the instrumental function of guaranteeing that this is served, and the media then do it. That’s the standard view. And notice that it has a kind of a descriptive component and also a normative component. It says, this is what the media ought to be like, and this is what they are like.

Now, that they ought to be this way seems sort of obvious, in fact, kind of almost tautological, if democracy means- has something to do with the public having a capacity to shape their own affairs, it obviously presupposes information, and that means the information system in a free society would have to serve this function.

Since it seems so obvious, it’s worth bearing in mind that there is a contrary view. And in fact, the contrary view is very widely held. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the contrary view is the dominant view among people over the last couple of centuries who have thought about liberal democracy and freedom, and how it ought to function. In any event, it’s certainly a major position.

This contrary view can be traced back to the origins of modern democracy in the 17th century English revolution, when, for the first time, the- there was a challenge to the right of authority — whether it was the gentry, or the king, or whatever — and there was actually the beginnings of a real, radical, democratic movement, with a commitment on the part of the people involved, who were very widespread in England, to public involvement and control over affairs. They didn’t want to be ruled by the king, and they didn’t want to be ruled by parliament, they wanted to run their own affairs. And they were defeated, the radical democrats were defeated, but not before doing some important things which had a lasting effect.

Well, what I’m interested in now is the reaction to this. The reaction to the first efforts at popular democracy — radical democracy, you might call it — were a good deal of fear and concern. One historian of the time, Clement Walker, warned that these guys who were running- putting out pamphlets on their little printing presses, and distributing them, and agitating in the army, and, you know, telling people how the system really worked, were having an extremely dangerous effect. They were revealing the mysteries of government. And he said that’s dangerous, because it will, I’m quoting him, it will make people so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule. And that’s a problem.

John Locke, a couple of years later, explained what the problem was. He said, day-laborers and tradesmen, the spinsters and the dairy-maids, must be told what to believe; the greater part cannot know, and therefore they must believe. And of course, someone must tell them what to believe. Now, there’s a modern version of that — and of course he didn’t just mean those categories, he meant the general public — there’s a modern version of that. This goes all the way up to the modern times, it’s discussed in the American revolution, and all the way through to the modern period. But let’s just come up to the contemporary period.

Now in the last- in the modern period you get a much more sophisticated development of these ideas. So, for example, Reinhold Niebuhr, who is a much-respected moralist and commentator on world affairs, he wrote that rationality belongs to the cool observers, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason but faith. And this na•ve faith requires that necessary illusions be developed. Emotionally potent oversimplifications have to be provided by the myth-makers to keep the ordinary person on course, because of the stupidity of the average man. That’s the same view, basically.

Walter Lippman, who was the dean of American journalists, is the man who invented the phrase manufacture of consent. He described the manufacture of consent as a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. This, he said, is quite important, this is a revolution in the practice of democracy, and he thought it was a worthwhile revolution. The reason is, again, the stupidity of the average man. The common interests, he said, very largely elude public opinion entirely, and they can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality. That’s Niebuhr’s cool observers. You can guess who’s part of them. The person who pronounces these views is always part of that group. It’s the others who aren’t. This is in Walter Lippman’s book Public Opinion, which appeared shortly after World War I. And the timing is important.

World War I was a period in which the liberal intellectuals, John Dewey’s circle primarily, were quite impressed with themselves for their success, as they described in their own words, for their success in having imposed their will upon a reluctant or indifferent majority.

Now, there was a problem in World War I. The problem was that the population was, as usual, pacifistic, and didn’t see any particular reason in going out and killing Germans and getting killed; if the Europeans want to do that, that’s their business. And in fact, Woodrow Wilson won the 1916 election on a mandate, which was, peace without victory. That’s how he got elected. And, not surprisingly, he interpreted that as meaning victory without peace. And the problem was to get this reluctant and indifferent majority, and get them to be- to create emotionally potent oversimplifications and necessary illusions, so that they would then be properly jingoistic, and support this great cause.

And the liberal intellectuals were convinced that they were the ones who had primarily succeeded in doing this, and they thought it was a very good task, for obvious reasons. And, in fact, they probably had some role. Whether they had as much role as they think you could question, but some role. They used all sorts of necessary illusions, for example, fabrications about Hun atrocities, Belgian babies with their arms torn off, and all sorts of things that were concocted by the British foreign service and fed to the educated classes in the United States, who picked them up and were quite enthusiastic about them, and distributed them. They used such devices as, what they called, historical engineering. That was a phrase proposed by Frederick Paxon, an American historian who was the founder of a group called the National Board for Historical Service. That was a group of historians who got together to serve the State by explaining the issues of the war that we might better win it. That’s historical engineering.

The Wilson administration established the country’s, I think, first official propaganda agency — it’s called the Creel Commission — which was dedicated to convincing this reluctant or indifferent majority that they’d better be properly enthusiastic about the war that they were opposed to.

That had some institutional consequences. In fact, there were a number of institutional consequences to this whole period. One was the institution of the national political police, the FBI, which has been dedicated to thought control and repression of freedom ever since; that’s it’s primary activity. And another development- institutional development was the enormous growth of the public relations industry.

A lot of people learned lessons from the capacity to control the public mind, as they put it — slogan of the public relations industry. One of the people who came out of the Creel Commission was a man named Edward Bernays, who became the patron saint of the public relations industry. That’s a big, substantial industry which is actually an American creation, though it’s since spread throughout other parts of the world. It’s dedicated to controlling the public mind, again quoting it’s publications, to educate the American people about the economic facts of life to ensure a favorable climate for business, and, of course, a proper understanding of the common interests.

Bernays developed the concept of engineering of consent, which, he said, is the essence of democracy. That’s- and of course he didn’t bother saying that there are only some groups who are in a position to carry out the engineering of consent — those who have the power and the resources.

He himself showed how this was done. Often. By, for example, demonizing the government of Guatemala, the capitalist democratic government that we were planning to overthrow with a successful CIA coup. He was then working for the United Fruit Company, which was opposed to the government because it was planning to take over unused lands of the United Fruit Company, and hand them over to landless peasants, paying the rates that the United Fruit Company had given as their value for tax purposes, which, of course, they regarded as very unfair, because they had, naturally, been lying and cheating about the value. So that was his achievement. And in fact the public relations industry in general has been dedicated to this project ever since.

The Creel Commission, incidentally, is a predecessor of a contemporary phenomenon that the Reagan administration constructed, it’s their Office of Latin American Public Diplomacy. That’s by far the largest propaganda agency in American history, and maybe one of the largest of any Western government. And it was also dedicated to controlling the public mind. It was dedicated, primarily, to controlling the debate and discussion over Central America, to demonizing the Sandinistas, as one of its officials put it, and mobilizing support for the U.S. terror States in the region. And it did it by framing the debate, by intimidating critics, by producing fabrications which were then happily repeated by the media.

So, for example, one famous one, just to illustrate some of it’s achievements, when Ronald Regan in 1986 read a spectacular and effective speech, which convinced Congress to vote a hundred-million dollars of aid for the Contras, right after the World Court had denounced the United- had condemned the United States for the unlawful use of force, and called upon it to end this aggression. This speech was extremely effective. It described all the- you know, whole litany of Nicaraguan crimes, and it ended up by saying that these communists actually concede that they are planning to conquer the hemisphere and undermine us all. They themselves say that they are carrying out a revolution without borders. That was the peroration, that’s the way he ended up, you know, big excitement, Congress voted the aid, the Reagan administration declared that this meant war, this was a real war, and everybody was excited and happy.

Now, that phrase, revolution without borders, actually had already been used. It had been used by a State department pamphlet that was called revolution without borders, describing Sandinista crimes. And there’s actually a version of that phrase that exists. The phrase appears, or something like it appears, in a speech by Sandinista commandante Tomas Borge. He had given a speech in which he said that the Nicaraguan- the Sandinistas hoped to construct a kind of a model society, a society which will be- which will work so well, and will serve the needs of the poor so well, that others will be inclined to try to do the same thing for themselves. And he went on to say that there- that every country has to- every country has to carry out its own revolution, there’s no way for one country to make a revolution somewhere else, but the model that the Sandinistas were constructing, he hoped, was to be so successful that others would want to do it, and he said, in this sense our revolution transcends borders.

Well, that phrase was immediately picked up by the Office of Public Diplomacy and turned into a threat to conquer the hemisphere. That fraud was at once exposed by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, which sends out a weekly news analysis in Washington that journalists read. It was even exposed- it was even mentioned in the Washington Post, somewhere in the back pages. They noted that the phrase, revolution without borders, was not exactly what he had said. In fact it was nothing to do- it was the opposite of what he had said, but that didn’t make any difference. The phrase was useful, the construction was useful, and since then, the media — and when the State department document came out there was no criticism of it, when Reagan made the speech nobody pointed out that this was a fabrication, even the Washington Post, which had exposed it, referred to the Sandinista revolution without borders — the media have repeatedly- have repeated this over and over again, look they say themselves they’re going to have a revolution without borders, and so on.

Well, that’s the kind of thing that’s done by an effective propaganda agency, of course, if the media are willing to go along, because it wasn’t very hard to figure out that this was an incredible fraud. Well, that’s the kind of thing that was done.

All of these operations were completely illegal. There was a Congressional report done on them- General- GAO report, which simply pointed out that of course they’re illegal — they were run out of the National Security Council, and, not allowed to propagandize Americans. But it was very successful. When this was exposed during the Iran-Contra hearings, one top administration official described the activities of the Office of Public Diplomacy as one of their really great achievements. It was a, he said, a spectacular success. He described it as the kind of operation that you carry out in enemy territory. And that’s quite an appropriate phrase. I think the phrase expresses exactly the way in which the public is viewed by people with power: it’s an enemy, it’s a domestic enemy, and you got to keep it under control, and you have to make sure that the mysteries are not revealed, so that the people don’t become so curious and arrogant that they refuse to submit to a civil rule, to put it in 17th Century terms. And to control that domestic enemy, propaganda and fabrications, and so on, are important, and that’s what the public relations industry is for, for corporate purposes, and what the media are for if they properly serve the State.

Well that’s- notice again, we have a view that says the media should not function the way the standard rhetoric claims.

There’s also an academic twist to this — let’s come closer to home.

If you go back to the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences published in 1933 — days when people were a little more open and honest in what they said — there’s an article on propaganda, and it’s well worth reading. There’s an entry under propaganda. The entry is written by a leading- one- maybe the leading American political scientist, Harold Lasswell, who was very influential, particularly in this area, communications, and so on. And in this entry in the International Encyclopedia on propaganda he says, we should not succumb to democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests. They’re not, he said. Even with the rise of mass education- doesn’t mean that people can judge their own interests. They can’t. The best judges of their interests are elites — the specialized class, the cool observers, the people who have rationality — and therefore they must be granted the means to impose their will. Notice, for the common good. Because, again, because- well, he says, because of the ignorance and superstition of the masses, he said it’s necessary to have a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda. Propaganda, he says, we shouldn’t have a negative connotation about, it’s neutral. Propaganda, he says, is as neutral as a pump handle. You can use it for good, you can use it for bad; since were good people, obviously, — that’s sort of true by definition — we’ll use it for good purposes, and there should be no negative connotations about that. In fact, it’s moral to use it, because that’s the only way that you can save the ignorant and stupid masses of the population from their own errors. You don’t let a three year old run across the street, and you don’t let ordinary people make their own decisions. You have to control them.

And why do you need propaganda? Well, he explains that. He says, in military-run or feudal societies — what we would these days call totalitarian societies — you don’t really need propaganda that much. And the reason is you’ve got a- you’ve got a club in your hand. You can control the way people behave, and therefore it doesn’t matter much what they think, because if they get out of line you can control them — for their own good, of course. But once you lose the club, you know, once the State loses its capacity to coerce by force, then you have some problems. The voice of the people is heard — you’ve got all these formal mechanisms around that permit people to express themselves, and even participate, and vote, and that sort of thing — and you can’t control them by force, because you’ve lost that capacity. But the voice of the people is heard, and therefore you’ve got to make sure it says the right thing. And in order to make sure it says the right thing, you’ve got to have effective and sophisticated propaganda, again, for their own good.

So in a- as a society becomes more free — that is, there’s less capacity to coerce — it simply needs more sophisticated indoctrination and propaganda. For the public good.

The similarity between this and Leninist ideology is very striking. According to Leninist ideology, the cool observers, the radical intelligentsia, will be the vanguard who will lead the stupid and ignorant masses on to, you know, communist utopia, because they’re too stupid to work it out by themselves.

And in fact there’s been a very easy transition over these years between one and the other position. You know, it’s very striking that continually people move from one position to the other, very easily. And I think the reason for the ease is partly because they’re sort of the same position. So you can be either a Marxist-Leninist commissar, or you can be somebody celebrating the magnificence of State capitalism, and you can serve those guys. It’s more or less the same position. You pick one or the other depending on your estimate of where power is, and that can change.

The- and in fact the mainstream of the intelligentsia, I think over the last, say, through this century, have tended to be in one or the other camp. Either- there’s this strong appeal of Marxism-Leninism to the intelligentsia, for obvious reasons — I don’t have to bother saying. And there’s the same appeal of these doctrines to the intelligentsia, because it puts them in the position of justifying- of having a justified role as ideological managers, in the service of real power, corporate/State power. For the public good, of course. So you naturally are tempted to one or the other position.

Well, going on to the post Second World War period, the same ideas continue to be expressed. For example in 1948, when it was again necessary to drive the reluctant and indifferent majority to a new war fever — remember 1948, the war was over, everybody was pacifistic, they wanted to go home and buy refrigerators, and so on, and they didn’t want any more wars, they wanted to de-mobilize, we’re done with that stuff — but they had to be whipped up into a war fever, because there was a new war coming along, the Cold War, which was a real war, as the internal documents explain, and it was necessary to bludgeon them into a belief in the demands of the Cold War, as Dean Acheson put it.

The- a presidential- well-known historian, presidential historian, Thomas Baily, explained in 1948, that because the masses are notoriously short-sighted, and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats, our statesmen are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-run interests. Deception of the people may, in fact, become increasingly necessary, unless we are willing to give our leaders in Washington a freer hand.

In other words, if we continue this nonsense of trying to control them through elections, and that sort of thing, it’s going to be necessary to have deception of the people, because the masses are too stupid and ignorant to understand the danger that’s at their throat. And that’s the role of the media, to carry out the appropriate deception.

Coming up to the present, or near-present. In 1981, when we were launching a new crusade for freedom, in Central America, Samuel Huntington, who is a professor of government at Harvard, and a long-time government advisor, explained in a discussion in the Harvard journal International Security, that you may have to sell intervention or other military action in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union you’re fighting. That’s what the United States has done ever since the Truman Doctrine. And that’s what, of course, we’re now doing. We’re fighting Nicaragua, but you’ve got to create the misimpression that it’s the Soviet Union that you’re fighting. That’s the job of the Office of Latin American Public Diplomacy, and of the cool observers, and of respectable intellectuals, and of the media, and so on. Actually that remark of his is quite accurate. It gives a certain insight into the Cold War, and also the modern period.

Well, these concerns about controlling the public mind, rather typically they arise in the wake of periods of war and turmoil. There’s a reason for that. Wars, depressions, and such things, they have a way of arousing people from apathy, and making them think, and sometimes even organize, and that raises all of these dangers.

So for example, Woodrow Wilson’s red scare — a very harsh and effective repression — immediately followed World War I. And that’s when you get the- this revolution in the art of democracy, about the need for manufacture of consent, and you get the FBI to really do the job properly, by force if necessary, as they did. What we call McCarthyism — which is actually a poor label because it was actually initiated by the liberal democrats in the late 1940s, and picked up and exploited by McCarthy — but what we call McCarthyism was a similar effort to overcome the energizing effect of the war and the depression in mobilizing the population, and causing them to challenge the- to reveal the mysteries of government, and do all these bad things. And after the Vietnam war the same thing happened. The Vietnam war was one factor, a major factor in fact, in causing the ferment of the 1960s. And that caused a lot of concern, deep concern which still exists, incidentally, because they haven’t been able to overcome it.

The Vietnam- the 60s created what liberal elites called a crisis of democracy. That’s the title of a quite important book on all of these topics, the first, and in fact, only book-length publication of the Trilateral Commission, published in 1975, called The Crisis of Democracy. It’s about the problem of governability of democracies. And there was a problem of the governability of democracies because people were getting out of hand. The domestic enemy was getting out of control, and something had to be done about it.

The Trilateral Commission puts together liberal corporate/State elites from the three major centers of State capitalism — Western Europe, the United States, and Japan, that’s why the trilateral. And it is the liberal elites. This is the group around Jimmy Carter. That’s where he came from, in fact, and virtually all of his cabinet and top advisers. It’s that segment of opinion.

The American rapporteur, the guy who gave the report on the- for the United States, was, again, Samuel Huntington. And he pointed out that Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers. Then there was no crisis of democracy. That’s the way things are supposed to be.

Incidentally, this kind of vulgar Marxist rhetoric is not untypical of internal documents in the government, or in the business press, and so on, and this was intended to be an internal document; they didn’t really expect people to read it, but it’s worth reading. I’m sure the library has it. They should.

The- but now this crisis of democracy had erupted. What had happened was, during the 1960s all sorts of segments of the population that are normally apathetic and passive and obedient and don’t get in the way, began to become organized and vocal and raise questions and press their demands in the political arena, and that caused an overload. That caused a crisis of democracy. You couldn’t just govern the country with a few Wall Street lawyers and bankers any longer, you had all these other pressures coming from the general population, and that’s a problem. And we’ve got to overcome the problem. And the way to overcome the problem, they said, all three- the whole group, is to introduce more moderation in democracy to mitigate the excess of democracy. That means, in short, to return the general population to their apathy and passivity, and the obedience which becomes them. That’s the stupid and ignorant masses have to be kept out of trouble, and when you get these crises of democracy, you’ve got to restore the norm, what we had before.

Well, that’s a view that goes right back to the origins of the republic. If you read the sayings of the founding fathers, you will discover that that was essentially their view as well. They also regarded the public as a dangerous threat. The way the country ought to be organized, as John Jay put it, the president of the constitutional convention and the first supreme court- chief justice of the supreme court, his- one of his favorite maxims, according to his biographer, was that those who run- those who own the country ought to govern it. And if they can’t govern it by force, they’ve got to govern it in another way, and that ultimately requires deception, propaganda, indoctrination, the manufacture of consent.

Well, let me summarize. There’s a standard view- rhetorical view, a standard view in rhetoric is basically that of Justice Powell — the public ought to exert meaningful control over the political process, and it’s the role of the media to allow them to do it. That’s the rhetoric. There’s a contrary view, which is that the public is a dangerous enemy, and it has to be controlled for its own good. And that contrary view is very widely held. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the dominant view among sophisticated commentators on political theory, going back to the 17th Century- democratic commentators. So we’ve got these two views counterposed.

Well, with regard to the media, turning to the media, the standard view is, again, the one I just described by Justice Powell, they have to- the media have to serve- if you’re going to serve the societal purpose of the first amendment, they have to be free and open and so on, and then the descriptive part of that is that that’s exactly what they do. That view is expressed, for example, by Judge Gurfein in a important case where he permitted the New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers, Nineteen Seventy-One or -Two. Gurfein’s decision says, that we have a cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press, and it must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression, and the right of the people to know. So, granted, the press is a nuisance, but it’s important to allow it to maintain its adversarial and cantankerous ways, because it’s even, you know, serves an even higher purpose.

Well, at that point we begin to have a debate. The debate is between the people who say that the media are cantankerous and adversarial, and so on, and they’ve gone too far, and we’ve got to do something to control them and constrain them. In fact, the Trilateral Commission liberals also suggested that. They said the media have gone much too far in their adversarial ways, and we have to- if they can’t regulate themselves, probably the government will have to step in and regulate them. That’s on the liberal side. On the reactionary side, of course it’s much harder, you know, harsher ideas come along. So you have- the one side says that, we’ve got to curb the press, they’re too cantankerous, and then you’ve got the spokesmen for free speech, Judge Gurfein and so on, they say no, no, we agree, they’re pretty bad, but you’ve got to allow them to do this because of the higher purposes.

Well that’s the debate. And if you look over- there is a good deal of discussion of the media, and that’s the way it’s framed. Assumption: the media are adversarial, cantankerous, independent, and maybe even so much that they’re threatening democracy. And then comes the question: should we let them get away with it, or should we curb them? And the advocates of free speech say, sorry, you’ve got to let them get away with it, and the others say, no, there’s other values that are more important, like the governability of the country, and so on, so we’ve got to stop them.

Well, outside the spectrum of debate there’s another view. The other view says that the factual assumption is wrong — the factual assumption that’s taken for granted, not even argued, is just wrong. According to this alternative view, the media do fulfill a societal purpose, but it’s quite a different one. The societal purpose is exactly what is advocated by the elite view that I’ve described. The society inculcate and defend the economic and social and political agenda of particular sectors — privileged groups that dominate the domestic society, those that own the society and therefore ought to govern it — and they do this in all kind of ways. They do it by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by the way they frame issues, by the way they filter information, by the way they tell lies, like about revolutions without borders, by emphasis and tone, all sorts of ways, the most crucial of which is just the bounding of debate. What they do is say, here’s the spectrum of permissible debate, and within that you can have, you know, great controversy, but you can’t go outside it.

The right wing continually claims that the press has a liberal bias, and there’s some truth to that, but they don’t understand what it means. The liberal bias is extremely important in a system- in a sophisticated system of propaganda. In fact there ought to be a liberal bias. The liberal bias says, thus far and no further, I’m as far as you can go, and look how liberal I am. And of course it turns out that I accept without question all the presuppositions of the propaganda system. Notice that that’s a beautiful type of system. You donÕt ever express the propaganda, that’s vulgar and too easy to penetrate, you just presuppose it. Unless you accept the presuppositions, you’re not part of the discussion. And the presuppositions are instilled, not by, you know, beating you over the head with them, but just by making them the foundation of discussion. You don’t accept them, you’re not in the discussion.

So, in the case of the, say, the Vietnam war, which was a major topic of debate, if you look over the media, there was a big debate over the Vietnam war. There were the hawks who said that if we continue to fight harder, if we’re more violent, and so on and so forth, then we can achieve the noble end of defending South Vietnam and the free people of South Vietnam from communism. And then there were the doves who said it’s probably not going to work, it’s probably not going to be too- itÕs going to be too bloody, and it’s going to cost us too much, and therefore we’re not going to be able to achieve the noble end of defending the people of South Vietnam from communism.

Now, again, there’s another view, and that is that we were attacking South Vietnam. That other view has the merit of being true, obviously true, but it was inexpressible. That’s outside the spectrum of debate. You can enter the debate only if you accept the assumption. And if you check the media over the entire period as far as I can see — I’ve- Hermann and I in this book review the media from about 1950 to the present on Indochina, and I don’t think you can find an exception to this, even statistical error — that’s the spectrum, you’ve got to accept it. And the same is true- and there’s a liberal bias in the sense that towards the end of the war, like by about 1969 or 1970, after Wall Street had turned against the war, then you got a preponderance of doves, saying you probably aren’t going to succeed in defending freedom and democracy in South Vietnam, the country that we’re attacking.

Well, that’s- this conception of the media, which, notice, challenges the factual assumptions of the entire debate, that says that the media function in the way that Hermann and I call the propaganda model in this same book — they function in accord with the propaganda model. Now, propaganda sounds like a bad word, but remember that in more honest days, like in the International Encyclopedia of Social Science, propaganda was considered a perfectly good word, and in fact something that we ought to have. More of it. Because it’s needed for the reasons that Lasswell explained.

Well, notice that the propaganda model has lots of predictions. It predicts the way the media are going to behave. You can test those predictions. But it also has a prediction that’s kind of reflexive about the propaganda model itself. It predicts that the propaganda model can’t be taken seriously. And there’s a reason for that if you think it through. The propaganda model states that the debate has got to be within assumptions that are serviceable to powerful interests, and the propaganda model challenges those assumptions, so therefore it’s got to be out of the debate. Ok. That prediction is, incidentally, very well confirmed. It is outside the debate. So that’s one bit of positive evidence for the propaganda model.

Notice, incidentally, that this model has a kind of disconcerting feature to it, if you think about it. Obviously the claims of the propaganda model are either valid or invalid. If they’re invalid, we can dismiss them. If they’re valid, we have to dismiss them. Right? So one way or another, you can be sure that this model isn’t going to be discussed. And that’s, in fact, true.

Well, now the basic questions from this point on are factual. Is the factual assumption that bounds the debate correct, or is it wrong? That’s a factual assumption, you can study it. And the real topic, you know the topic that ought to be investigated is that. Now, there isn’t time to do that now, so I’ll just make a couple of comments about it, and give a few illustrations.

Three comments first.

First, notice that the propaganda model has a number of features. One feature that it has, is that it’s advocated by elites. That is, it conforms with the normative opinion — the proposal that the public is dangerous, you got to ensure that they don’t get out of control, they have to be controlled by deception and propaganda since you don’t have the means to do it by force — and the propaganda model simply says, well yeah, they work the way elites say they ought to work. So, one point about the propaganda model is that, in fact, it has elite advocacy.

A second point about the propaganda model is that itÕs- itÕs got a kind of prior plausibility. In fact it’s almost natural under completely uncontroversial assumptions. If you look at the structure of the society you’d almost predict the propaganda model without even looking at the facts. Why is that true? Well, simply ask yourself what the major media are.

Now, the way the media work, there are some media which kind of set the agenda, you know, the most important ones, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, big national media, they set the agenda. If the government wants a story to get into television that evening, what it does is leak it to get into the front page of The Washington Post and The New York Times, on the assumption that television will pick it up and say, ok that’s important, so we’ll give it the front news. The same is true of national television. It sets- it sets the agenda that makes people think. The New York Times front page is sent over the wire services the afternoon of the day before — there is a thing, if you read the- you know, you look at that stuff that’s ground out of the AP wire, you’ll notice around four o’clock comes something that says, The New York Times front page tomorrow is going to look like so-and-so. Well, if you’re an editor of a journal in some small town, you read it and you say, oh, that’s what the important news is, and you frame your own reporting that way. Now, you know, it’s not, sort of, a hundred percent, but there is a kind of an agenda setting media — New York Times, Washington Post, the three television channels, a few others that participate to some extent in this.

Well, ask yourself what those institutions are. Answer: those institutions are first of all major corporations, some of the biggest corporations in the country. Furthermore, they’re integrated with, and in many cases owned by, even larger corporations, you know, like General Electric, and so on. So what you have is major corporations and conglomerates. Now, like other corporations, they sell a product to a market. The market in this case is advertisers; that’s what keeps them alive. The product is audiences. They sell audiences to advertisers. In fact for the major media, they try to sell privileged audiences to advertisers. That raises advertising rates, and those are the people they’re trying to reach anyway.

So, what you have is businesses- corporations, which are selling relatively privileged audiences to other businesses. Well, just ask yourself the natural question: what do you expect to come out of this interaction — major corporations selling privileged audiences to other corporations. Well, what you expect to come out of it, on no further assumptions, is an interpretation of the world that reflects the interests and the needs of the sellers, the buyers, and the product. That wouldn’t be very surprising, in fact it would be kind of surprising if it weren’t true. So on relatively- and that, of course, means the propaganda model. So what you expect on relatively uncontroversial, sort of, free market assumptions, with nothing else said, is that you’ll get- the media will function in accord with the propaganda model.

Now, if you look more closely, there are many other factors which interact to lead to the same expectation. The ideological managers — the editors, and the columnists, and the, you know, the anchormen, and all that stuff — they’re very privileged people. They are wealthy, privileged people, whose associations and interests and concerns are closely related to those of the groups that dominate the economy, and that dominate the State, and in fact, it’s just a constant flow and interaction among all those groups. They’re basically the same group. They’re ultimately the people who own the country, or the ones who serve their interests. And, again, it wouldn’t be terribly surprising to discover that these people share the perceptions and concerns and feelings and interests and, you know, attitudes of their associates and the people they’re connected with, and the people whose positions they aspire to take when they move on to the next job, and so on and so forth. Again, that wouldn’t be very surprising. And on and on, I won’t proceed. There are many other factors which tend in the same direction.

Well, that’s my second point. The second point is that the propaganda model has a kind of prior plausibility.

A third point, which is not too well known, is that the propaganda model is assumed to be true by most of the public. That is, in polls — contrary to what you hear — when people are asked in polls, you know, what do you think about the media, and so on, the general reaction is, they’re too conformist, they’re too subservient to power, you know, they’re too obedient. ThatÕs the either plurality or sometimes even the majority view. And they’re not critical enough of government, for example, that’s the standard view.

Well, we have three observations now. The propaganda model has elite advocacy — that is, elites believe that’s the way it ought to be- the media ought to be. It has prior plausibility, it’s very plausible on uncontroversial free market assumptions. And it’s accepted as valid by a large part, probably the majority of the population. Well, those three facts don’t prove that it’s valid of course, but they do suggest that it might be part of the discussion. It’s not. It’s off the agenda, exactly as the propaganda model itself predicts. That’s interesting. That’s an interesting collection of facts.

Well, what about the factual matter of how the media behave? On this there are by now literally thousands of pages of documentation, detailed documentation, case studies and so on, which have put the model to a test in the harshest ways that anybody can dream up. I’ll talk about some of the ways of doing it later, you know, in discussion if you want, but I think it’s been subjected to quite a fair test, in fact a very harsh test. There’s no challenge to it as far as I know. If there is, I’ve missed it. The few cases where there’s any discussion of it, the level of argument is so embarrassingly bad that it just tends to reinforce the plausibility of the model. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that this is one of the best confirmed theses in the social sciences. But in accord with its predictions, it’s off the agenda. You can’t even discuss it.

Well, what I ought to do now is what has to be done in a course, actually, not a talk, and that is to turn to cases — you know, ask how you can test it, what the results are, and so on. And there’s plenty of material in print, and more coming out, which you can check and see whether you’re convinced that in fact it’s plausible, or accurate. My feeling is, it is. I’ll just give a couple of illustrative cases. And let me stress that I do this with some reluctance, because the illustrative cases are misleading, they suggest that maybe it’s a sporadic phenomenon. In fact, when somebody gives you a couple of cases, you rightly ask whether they’re an adequate sample, you know, maybe they were just selected to work. So you ought to be suspicious about isolated cases. That’s why the model has, in fact, been tested from many approaches. But that misleading necessity aside, because I can’t do more than that, let me give you a couple of cases to illustrate the kind of thing that I think you will find if you pursue the question of fact.

Let’s take something that you’d certainly expect the media to be concerned with, namely, freedom of the press; they’ve got a professional interest in that. And in fact there’s a good deal of discussion of freedom of the press in the media.

In the- keeping just to the last decade, the problems of the press in repressive societies has been very widely discussed. Many examples. The case that has been by far the most discussed, in fact I suspect it has been discussed more than all questions of media- of freedom of the press throughout the entire world during this period, is the one newspaper in Latin America that ninety-nine percent of the literate population would be able to name if they were asked to name a newspaper in Latin America, namely, La Prensa in Nicaragua.

There has been an overwhelming amount of reporting on the tribulations of La Prensa in Nicaragua. One media analyst, Francisco Goldman, who studied freedom of the press in these countries, pointed out that in four years he found about two hundred and sixty references to this in the New York Times. That’s an incredible amount of coverage. I’m sure — I don’t think anybody’s done the study, but try it, if anybody wants — I’m sure you’ll find that this is more coverage than has been given to all other problems of the freedom of the press, combined, all over the world, probably by a considerable factor. Anyhow, that’s the one- you know, that’s the famous case.

And this coverage has been very irate and angry because of the tribulations of La Prensa. For example, when- well, let’s go back to the moment when Ronald Reagan succeeded in convincing Congress to vote a hundred million dollars in aid so that we’d have a war a real war, in violation of the demand of the World Court that the United States consider its- stop- terminate it’s unlawful aggression. Right after that, after the government announced that we finally got a war a real war, the government of Nicaragua suspended La Prensa. And that caused tremendous outrage in the United States.

There’s a group- thereÕs a distinguished group of journalism fellows at Harvard, the Nieman Foundation, and they immediately gave their award for the year to Violeta Chamorro, the editor of La Prensa, to express their solidarity with her in this moment of crisis, to show how deeply committed they are to freedom of the press. The Washington Post had an editorial right after that called newspaper of valor, in which they said Violeta Chamorro should receive ten awards, not one award. The New York review of books had an article by a left liberal correspondent, Murray Kempton, appealing to people to contribute funds to keep, you know, La Prensa alive during this period. Those funds could then be added on to the CIA subvention that had kept the journal going since the Carter administration in 1979, right after the Sandinista revolution succeeded. And in fact in general there was great frenzy and hysteria about this terrible attack on freedom of the press.

Well, let’s look a little more closely.

First of all, what is La Prensa? La Prensa is a journal which calls for the overthrow of the government of Nicaragua by a foreign power, which funds it, and which is trying to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. It’s an interesting fact. You might check the history of the West to see whether there’s ever been any such thing.

For example, you might ask whether a major newspaper in the United States, you know, the wealthiest newspaper in the United States was funded by the Nazis in 1943 calling for the overthrow of the government of the United States, and you might ask yourself what would have happened if that was possible. Well, you can get the answer very quickly. Even tiny little newspapers which weren’t funded by anybody, and that raised questions about conscientious objection, and so on, they were censored and controlled and suppressed, and so on. During the First World War it was even more vicious, we even actually put a Presidential candidate in jail for ten years after the First World War because he had- because he had declared opposition to the draft. The- so- and in fact there’s nothing comparable to this in the history of the West, or in world history altogether.

Now, La Prensa is described in the United States as the journal that opposed Somoza. In fact there was a journal called La Prensa which did oppose the Somoza regime, courageously, its editor was, in fact, murdered, and it had the same name as this journal, La Prensa, and it’s described as the same journal. But is that true? Well, now it’s a little tricky at this point. It certainly has the same name.

In 1980 the owners of La Prensa decided to convert the journal into a- into a journal dedicated to the overthrow of the government. At that point they fired the editor — the brother of the editor who had been murdered under Somoza — and there was a split in the staff. Eighty percent of the staff left with the editor and formed a new journal, El Nuevo Diario, which is the successor of the old La Prensa, at least if a newspaper is defined by its editor and its staff, not- of course if it’s defined by the money that’s behind it supplied by the CIA, then you have a different answer to what’s the old La Prensa. That, incidentally, is also something that’s never discussed.

But suppose that’s true, let’s suppose it’s just a CIA journal, and in fact that there’s no parallel to it in the history of the West, all of that being true, calling for the overthrow of the government, funded by the outside power- superpower that is trying to overthrow the government. Well, nevertheless a true civil libertarian would defend La Prensa from harassment. I think that somebody who really believes in civil liberties should say, yes, England should have permitted the press to be dominated by Nazi Germany in 1942, and if they didn’t do it, that shows they don’t believe in freedom. That’s the position of a real civil libertarian. And that’s the position of the American intellectual community with regard to La Prensa.

And now at this point we ask the obvious question: is this passionate commitment to freedom of the press based on libertarian enthusiasms and passions, or is it based on service to the State?

Well, there’s a way of answering that question. In fact we all know the way of answering that question. It’s a question that we regularly ask — or don’t even bother asking because the answer’s so obvious — when we look at propaganda of our enemies. So you take a look at productions of, say, the World Peace Council, which is a communist front peace organization, or the East German Peace Committee, you know, the Government Peace Committee. You read that material, and youÕll find that there’s all sorts of descriptions there, generally valid descriptions, of crimes and atrocities and repression in the United States or committed by the United States and its agents, and so on, and great outrage over these horrors. Often that material is accurate, and often in fact it’s material that’s not reported here. Well, do we praise them for their, you know, libertarian passions? No, we first ask a question. We ask, how do they deal with repression and atrocities carried out by the Soviet Union and its clients, where they are, the ones they’re responsible for? Well, as soon as we get the answer to that question we dismiss the whole story with contempt and ridicule, properly, even if their charges are accurate. That’s a fair test, and we ought to have the honesty to apply the same test to ourselves. So let’s do it.

We now ask the same question about the defenders of liberty of the press in the case of La Prensa — New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Review of Books, the educated community, and so on, the Nieman Fellows, and so on. How do we test that? Well we look at- same test, we look at cases of repression of freedom of the press in our domains, and we ask how they reacted, and there are many such cases, very close by in fact.

So take El Salvador. El Salvador had independent newspapers at one time. It doesn’t have them any longer. These were not newspapers funded by a foreign power trying to overthrow the government in El Salvador. They were not newspapers supporting the guerillas. In fact, they were mildly liberal newspapers calling for mild reforms, like, land reform and things like that, raising questions about the concentration of land, and so on. Those newspapers don’t exist anymore. They were not censored. They were not harassed. Rather, another technique was used by the government that we installed, trained, directed, and armed. The technique was, in the case of one newspaper, the security forces picked up an editor and a photojournalist in a San Salvador restaurant, took them outside and cut them to pieces with machetes, and left them in a ditch. The owner then fled. That took care of one newspaper without censorship.

The second newspaper, it took a couple of bombing attempts, three assassination attempts, finally the military that we train support and arm surrounded the premises of the newspaper, entered it, smashed the place up. At that point the editor then fled. That took care of the second newspaper.

So that’s the end of the free press in El Salvador.

Well, now we ask the question. Where- how would- did the American press respond to this? Well, that was actually investigated by F.A.I.R., Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting — media monitoring organization — they checked eight- I guess it was eight years of The New York Times to see what there had been- what had been said about this. Well it turns out there was not one word in the news columns of The New York Times about this. I checked the editorials. There was not one phrase in the editorials about this. In fact the only reference to these two things in The New York Times was that the editor of one of the journals who’d fled was allowed an op-ed, in which he described what had happened. And that’s important, because it means all the civil libertarians knew about it — the ones that read The New York Times, like the Nieman Fellows, and the editors of the New York Review, and the editors of The New York Times — they all knew about it, it just wasn’t important enough to report or to comment on. Well, that tells you where the commitment to the freedom of the press is.

Turn to the neighboring country of Guatemala. There, too, there was no censorship. They took care of freedom of the press by simply murdering about fifty journalists in the early eighties, including people, you know, journalists murdered right when they were on radio and television announcing. Somehow that took care of freedom of the press without any censorship. Virtually no discussion — a few words here and there. Well now this- but this was the government that we supported- that we supported, remember. Supported enthusiastically. That government is supposed to now be a democracy. They had an election that we all proudly hail and so on. And after the democracy was established, one of the editors who had fled returned, this was last year, just a year ago, to try to open a small newspaper. Again, wasn’t funded by a foreign power, you know, wasn’t calling for the overthrow of the government, nothing like that, just a small, very small, limited capital, sort of left liberal newspaper. La Epoca, it was called.

He- as soon as he came back to the country, the death squads, which are just adjuncts of the security forces, threatened him with death if he didn’t leave the country. But he continued, he started up the newspaper. It ran a couple of issues. Then, fifteen armed men, surely from the security services, broke into the offices, fire bombed them, destroyed the premises, kidnapped the night watchman. The editor called a press conference the next day in which he announced that this shows that there can’t be any freedom of the press in the so-called democracy of Guatemala. Some members of the European press came, I don’t think any American reporter came. There was- he then received another death threat warning him to leave the country or be killed. He did flee the country. He was taken to the airport by a Western ambassador so that he wouldn’t be killed along the way, and he went back into exile in Mexico.

Well, how much coverage did that one get? In The New York Times and the Washington Post, which are the two that I checked, the amount of coverage was zero. Not a word about it. And it’s not that they didn’t know it. They did know it. And you can prove that they knew it, because if you look in the small print you’ll find oblique references to it. So for example, in the culture section of The New York Times a couple of weeks later, there’s a report — somebody went down to some, you know, meeting in Mexico, and met this guy, and he sort of refers to the facts. So they knew about it, it just wasn’t important enough to report.

Let’s take the other major client of the United States, in fact, the major client of the United States, the State of Israel. That’s the major subsidized country of the United States, so you want to find out what American elites think about freedom of the press, let’s take a look at the way they react to freedom of the press in Israel.

Now, here history was kind enough to set up some controlled experiments for us. Literally. The week- let’s go back to the week when La Prensa was suspended — remember, right after the United States had declared war against Nicaragua, as the administration said, in violation of the World Court ruling and they suspended this newspaper funded by the United States and calling for the overthrow of the government. Well, that- just- right then Israel closed two newspapers in Jerusalem, two newspapers in Jerusalem were closed, permanently. That’s not the first time that had happened. The case went to the Supreme Court, the Israeli Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court ruled that it was legitimate to close the two newspapers, because the security services had claimed, without providing any evidence, because they don’t have to, that these newspapers were funded by hostile elements, which presumably means the PLO. And the court declared, high court declared that no government would ever permit a business to function, however legitimate it may be, that’s funded and supported by a hostile power. Freedom of press, they said, exists in Israel, but it’s limited, and is not permitted to undermine the security of the State. That’s the high court.

Well, how much coverage was there of those two things while everybody was hysterical about La Prensa? Answer: zero. Or, to be precise, there was a reference. In a letter to The Boston Globe, in which I was commenting on the total hypocrisy of Harvard University and the Nieman Fellows, I mentioned it. But that, as far as I know, is the total- is the total references in the United States.

Now, the week after the Central American peace accords went into operation, October 1987, La Prensa was opened again, and it returned to its task of calling for the overthrow of the government, and so on, and identifying itself with the Contras, and so on. The week that La Prensa was reopened, history again ran a nice experiment for us. That week, the State of Israel closed a newspaper in Nazareth — that’s inside Israel — and closed a news office in Nablus. The newspaper in Nazareth was closed because the State had again alleged, without providing any evidence, that it was associated with a hostile group. And the courts went- again, went to the courts, and the courts declared that this was legitimate, even though the editor had stated — which, of course, was true — that everything that appeared in the newspaper had gone through censorship, because they have heavy censorship. Didn’t matter. The news office in Nablus was closed on the same pretext, you know, some connection with a hostile group. As far as I know it never went to the courts.

So how much coverage was there of those two things? Well, the usual answer: zero.

I could go on, but these facts show very clearly, they answer very clearly the first question. The concern over freedom of the press in Nicaragua is a total fraud. It does not have anything to do with concern for freedom of the press, it simply has to do with concern for serving the State. In fact, the number of people in the United States who believe in freedom of the press, and who, I don’t mean ordinary- of the people who write about such topics or speak about them, the number who believe in freedom of the press, I think they could easily fit in somebody’s living room, or maybe in a telephone booth in fact. And they would include virtually nobody who’s gotten hysterical on this topic, or even mentioned it.

Well that’s the kind of thing you’ll discover if you look closely. I’ll just give you one final example.

When I talk about this topic I like to use this morning’s New York Times, and you can always find a perfectly good example there on the front page, but today, unfortunately, I didn’t have- I got up at five o’clock in the morning in Eau Claire in a snow storm and had to drive here, and I didn’t have time to find the Times, so I’ll have to use yesterday’s. I apologize. Last one I’ve looked at.

The lead story in The New York Times yesterday, you know, major story on the left- right hand side of the front page is a story entitled: U.S. Envoy Urges Hondurans To Let The Contras Stay. And then comes, as the Bush administration is trying to convince Honduras to let the Contras stay there, and it goes on, and you get down to the middle of the second page, you know, the continuation page, and you find the following sentence: on its face, the administration proposal to keep the Contras in place would seem to be inconsistent with the spirit of the regional peace agreement which calls for their relocation, but administration officials say there’s no inconsistency. Ok. There’s a forthright critique of the government. Let’s look at the facts that lie behind that.

It’s not that the proposal seems to be inconsistent with the spirit of the regional peace agreement, it’s that it’s flatly inconsistent with the wording of the regional peace agreement. And it doesn’t matter which regional peace agreement you’re referring to. If you’re referring to the Central American Peace Accords of August 1987, they identify one indispensable element, they call it, for bringing peace to the region, and that’s the termination of any aid — logistical, technical, propagandistic — any aid whatsoever to the irregular forces, meaning the Contras, attacking from another country. There was a more recent agreement, just a couple of weeks ago, in which the Central American Presidents committed themselves, all five of them, to remove the Contras within- to work out plans for removing the Contras within ninety days. So, this is not- does not seem to be inconsistent with the spirit of the agreements, it’s flatly inconsistent with their precise wording.

And it goes on, the point goes on. There’s going to be a vote in Congress about humanitarian aid to the Contras, who we’re convincing Nicaragua to leave in- to Honduras to leave in Nicaragua, and the press is going to refer to this as humanitarian aid, as they’ve been doing all along. Well, the term humanitarian aid has a meaning. In fact the meaning was made very precise by the World Court, the highest authority on such issues, in the very same judgment in which it condemned the United States for its aggression in Nicaragua. They defined humanitarian aid as aid which meets- it says, to qualify as humanitarian aid, aid must meet the hallowed purposes of the Red Cross, that is, must serve civilians in need and suffering. And furthermore, to qualify as humanitarian aid, aid must be given to civilians on both sides of the conflict without discrimination, otherwise it just doesn’t qualify as humanitarian aid. So, by the ruling of the World Court — in fact that’s the standard definition — what the media call humanitarian aid isn’t humanitarian aid at all, it’s just military aid. It’s aid to keep the military force in- present in a- so that they can continue to pose a threat to Nicaragua.

I should add, incidentally, that it’s very likely that the United States is sending military aid to Contras inside Nicaragua, illegally, from the Ilopango air base in San Salvador, exactly as they’ve been doing all along. That was- that’s what’s called the Hasenfus Group, because it was exposed when the American mercenary Eugene Hasenfus was shot down.

Now that had been going on for years, and the media knew about it for years and they weren’t reporting it. The scandal came when they were forced to report what they’d always known. And then some of the more honest of them admitted, yeah, we knew it all along, we weren’t reporting it. In fact, they were being informed all along, by Nicaraguan intelligence, that these flights were coming, they were told how many there were, where they were, you know, they got radar sightings, it just wasn’t the kind of story you report if you’re a good commissar. So none of it was reported until the plane was shot down with the American mercenary, and then, you know, you can’t stop reporting.

Well the same Nicaraguan sources that were ignored before, and were accurate, as everyone concedes, are once again reporting that Nicaraguan radar is starting to pick up Contra flights from Ilopango air force base into Nicaragua. And there’s no particular reason to doubt that those reports are accurate now, but I don’t think there’s a single reference to these reports in the media, at least, I haven’t been able to find one. And it’s not because they don’t know it. They came across the AP wire, which means that everybody knows it. And it’s not that it’s an obscure fact, after all that’s all the Iran-Contra hearings were about. It’s just that a disciplined press doesn’t report things like that.

Now this is a free country, so you can find out about it. All the readers of Barricada Internacional, the Sandinista newspaper that’s put out in, you know, that’s distributed from San Francisco, so that’s about fifteen-hundred people, and so on, they could find out. So fortunately, you know, nice not to be in a totalitarian country, but the readers of the news — or people who happen to have access to the AP wires and read them all day, you know, they could find out — but people who are looking at the tube, or reading their newspaper are not going to find out, though it’s pretty important.

Well, continuing with humanitarian aid, there’s going to be a vote on it in a couple of weeks, and probably they’ll vote it. The so-called humanitarian aid that’s been given is in violation of the Central American agreements. It’s actually even in violation of the very Congressional legislation that legislated the aid. In other words, there’s- it’s internal self-contradiction, which nobody will point out in the media. How’s that work? It works as follows.

The congressional legislation last year to give humanitarian aid stipulated that that aid must be in accord with the Central American agreements, and with the cease-fire agreement that had been just settled between the Contras and the government of Nicaragua. That’s the legislation. Well, that cease-fire agreement is quite explicit about the point. It says, aid may be given to Contras in designated cease-fire zones, inside Nicaragua, for the purpose of relocating them and reintegrating them into Nicaraguan society. Now that’s what the- so that means the Congressional- the- according to the Congressional legislation, that’s the only aid we can give. Furthermore, it says that the aid has to be given by a neutral carrier. Well, Congress immediately voted to violate its own legislation that it had just passed, by designating US Aid as the carrier. By no stretch of the imagination is that neutral, in fact — I don’t have to bother talking about that, that’s a State department affiliate which has often functioned as a front for the CIA. Furthermore the aid was to go to Contras in Honduras, not cease-fire zones inside Nicaragua, and to maintain them, not to assist in their relocation and reintegration into Nicaraguan society.

So Congress at once voted to violate its own legislation. Furthermore, the same cease-fire agreements designated a responsible authority to determine how the agreements should be met. The authority was the Secretary-General of the Organization of American States, Secretary-General Suarez of the Organization of the American States. As soon as this happened, he wrote a letter to George Shultz, condemning the United States for carrying out this violation of the cease-fire agreement. In fact, we even violated the Congressional legislation. None of this has ever been reported as far as I know. Try to find it somewhere.

So, even the fact that the responsible authority at once said the aid was illegal, even the fact that the Congressional aid that- is violating even its own stipulations, let alone the cease-fire agreement of the regional peace accord, none of this is reported, and I’ll make a prediction, when the issue comes up in a couple of weeks about renewing it, you’re not going to find any of this reported again.

Well, that’s the kind of thing you find when you look, and you find it all over the place, in fact I think you find it near universally. I mean, it would be hard to find an exception to it. It’s to be expected. That’s the way you’d expect the media to function on pretty plausible assumptions.

Let me return finally to the prediction of the propaganda model that I mentioned.

However well confirmed it may be, it’s not going to be part of the discussion, it’s going to be outside the spectrum of discussion, it’s very validity guarantees that for the reasons that I mentioned. And that conclusion, again, is quite well confirmed, and one can assume with reasonable confidence that that will continue to be the case.

[Discussion follows below.]

NOAM CHOMSKY: Is there somebody standing at the mike? Why don’t we- let’s just make it mechanical. Start over there, then go over there, and then go up there. Ok? And then we’ll go around. Ok. Because I can’t see-

QUESTIONER: Professor Chomsky?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah.

QUESTIONER: I have listened with great interest to many of your theories considering political systems and the ideologies behind them. However, a number of statements which you have made in the past are of great concern to me. First and foremost among them is your claim that the Soviet Union is, in fact, a dungeon. And to my way of thinking, such blanket condemnation of an entire society can only be regarded, to say the least, as inappropriate. Moreover, I believe that these kinds of statements can become quite destructive in serving to propagate inadequate and outdated notions of the communist enemy, and I- I just wonder if your- if these ideas- I’ve been waiting three years to respond to that statement of yours, and I wondered if in the light of the changes that have- that have come about with glasnost and perestroika, openness and restructuring — arguable- it’s arguable how significant they are — but if you- I don’t know if you still maintain that strict view on the subject.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah. Well, first of all I didn’t say that the society is, I said that the State is, the government, and the, you know maybe people living in their homes are not. But, I said it because I think it’s true. I mean, I think that the Soviet Union is a dungeon, and I also don’t think it has anything to do with communism or anything to do with socialism. As to the changes, I think, you know they’re, one hopes that they’ll work. What’s happened is that the jailers have decided to relax it a little bit. Notice that those changes are coming from the top. Which is good, you know, better than having no changes. But, in fact, Gorbachev has concentrated more power into his hands than the leadership had in the past, and he’s using that power in something like the manner of Peter the Great, to try to liberalize the society from above, which means to cut back the restrictions, to open it up a bit, and I think that’s all to the good. I mean, I have a feeling that those changes will — they have already set forth lots of, you know, they have- when you introduce changes like that, lots of things begin to happen. Popular forces do begin to develop, and you get all kind of conflicts, and interesting things happen, and it remains to be seen where it will lead. So I’m glad to see that the, what I- as I see it, if you want to continue with the metaphor, that the jailers have decided to open the cells a little bit, and to allow a little more freedom in the society, I think that’s very good, and I hope that other forces get them to continue to do it. But as to- I mean we could discuss whether this is an accurate perception of the society or not. I guess you think it isn’t. I think it is — I’ll explain why if you like — but to get to your- to the point you raised, suppose I think that it is. I think I should say it. I don’t see any reason not to say it if I think it’s true.

QUESTIONER: I guess my only real question is, there’s political repression in the United States too

NOAM CHOMSKY: Sure

QUESTIONER: does that make the United States a dungeon?

NOAM CHOMSKY: No,

QUESTIONER: Oh.

NOAM CHOMSKY: because the United States is a much freer- in fact the- what I’ve said about the United States, and I’ll say it again, it’s in many ways the freest society in the world. Sure there’s repression here, but it’s also a, by comparative standards, a very free society. In fact I think that’s one of the reasons it has such sophisticated thought control, as I tried to explain.

The capacity of the- the capacity of the State to coerce in the United States is relatively limited. You’re quite right that there’s plenty of oppression. I mentioned the FBI, which is the national political police, which is dedicated to oppression. That’s its job. It’s been doing it ever since it was founded. Well, you know, that’s inconsistent with the free society. But, again, by comparative standards, remember I’m talking about comparative standards, the United States is quite a free society. The capacity of the State to coerce, I think, is limited, probably- more so than any other society I know at least. So I don’t think that it would be correct to call it a dungeon.

QUESTIONER: Well thank you.

QUESTIONER: Yes, Professor Chomsky,

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah.

QUESTIONER: if you walked two blocks back from where you’re standing right now, you’d come across a marvelous example of what I’ve described on various- various occasions as an excellent example of above-ground bunker neo-fascist

NOAM CHOMSKY: Of a what?

QUESTIONER: of above-ground bunker neo-fascist architecture, called Vilas Hall. Vilas Hall is the school of communications, the com-arts building, the school of journalism. I imagine there are a number of journalism students in the audience tonight. I imagine there are a good number of people who, well, they filter in, they become middle-echelon apparatchiki for the media empire that you discussed. They come out imbued with the ideology of value-free objective reporting. It’s the major ideological offensive against the kind of model that you want to pose as an alternative. I wonder if you could talk to the audience here about the ideology of objectivity and value-free reporting within this system.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, there is such an ideology, and it’s interesting to see how it’s interpreted. Objectivity means, you take what people in power say and you report it accurately without distorting their quotes, and then, sort of down at the bottom of the column, you know, down at the bottom of the column you may say things like what I quoted, if you’re really an intrepid reporter, you say, well this may seem to be inconsistent with the spirit of the peace agreement. That’s, you know, that’s objective reporting. If the State department announces that Nicaragua has called for a revolution without borders, then even if you know it happens to be a lie, an objective reporter just reports it, because they said it after all, it’s true that they said it. And it wouldn’t be objective- it would be introducing opinions to say it’s a lie, I suppose.

So there is an ideology of objectivity, and I wouldn’t just scoff at it, incidentally. The fact of the matter is that, by and large, American reporters- if you had two, you know, a bunch of reporters describing something they saw, I would tend, by and large, to trust the American reporter at least as much, maybe more, than those who come out of other traditions, because this business of objectivity is not completely to be scoffed at. The effort to try to keep your reporting to the facts and not to introduce opinion is a worthy effort, and sometimes it shows up in accurate description. And there are some reporters, I should say, who do it extremely well, and have a very good record of it. And in fact this even includes reporters who work for the journals that, in my view, are right at the core of the propaganda system.

So take, say, John Kifner of The New York Times. I think you can tell when The New York Times editors want some story to be reported accurately for their own purposes. That’s when they send John Kifner to report it, because he’s going to report it accurately. Now when they don’t want it reported accurately anymore they take him off and put him back at the metro desk. That’s one test as to what the editors have in mind. And there are times when they want stories reported accurately, and there are some journalists who really do it.

On the other hand when they send Thom Friedman out, their current chief diplomatic correspondent, you know what they want is propaganda. You want somebody who’s going to say, as he just said after he was advanced to this august post, that the United States is now, you know, sort of, under the Bush administration, planning to support the Central American peace accords which were introduced and proposed and advanced by Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Omission there, but that’s part of the game. That’s what happens when you send Thomas Friedman to report a story. And I presume that the editors understand these things. That’s incidentally, I presume, why Thomas Friedman is chief diplomatic correspondent and John Kifner isn’t. But you’d have to ask the editors about that.

The- so, to get back to your point, the objectivity- it’s a good thing, it’s a good value, to be objective in reporting, and the people who do it honestly do very good journalism. But, as you’re implying, that ideology can be used to be a distorting mechanism, and quite commonly is.

QUESTIONER: Is George Bush’s hands-off policy just a cover, and all the action of the executive branch will be handled covertly? Or is it an opportunity for the legislative branch and the American people to take back the reins of power?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Oh, I don’t- first of all, what makes you think George Bush has a hands-off policy?

QUESTIONER: That’s how it’s reported. That’s what I,

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, ok. But.

QUESTIONER: that perception of

NOAM CHOMSKY: Right, but that’s,

QUESTIONER: a hands-off policy

NOAM CHOMSKY: that’s not very good evidence

QUESTIONER: I think the perception isn’t-

NOAM CHOMSKY: The fact- the fact of the matter is, Ronald Reagan had a hands-off policy. In fact, Ronald Reagan didn’t- probably didn’t even know what the policies were. This is an interesting fact about the last eight years, which, again, should not be laughed at. The fact of the matter is, for the last- I mean the media had to put on a big pretense about this, but everybody knew, you know, everybody with their eyes open knew, and most of the population knew, that for the last eight years the country hasn’t had a chief executive. Now, that’s an important fact. In fact, I think that’s a step forward in manufacture of consent, and in fact it’s maybe a sign of the future of political democracy. I think the United States made a leap into the future in the last eight years. If you- they have sort of retracted a little, but I think they’ll go on, and I think other industrial democracies will follow us.

If you could get to the point where voting is simply the matter- a matter of selecting purely symbolic figures, then you would have gone a long way towards marginalizing the public. And that pretty well happened in the last eight years. You know, you had somebody who probably didn’t know what the policies were. His job was to read the lines rich- written for him by the rich folk — what he’s been doing for the last thirty or forty years. And he seems to enjoy it and he gets well paid for it, and everybody seems happy, but to vote for Ronald Reagan is like voting for the Queen of England. And that’s an advance.

I don’t really mean this as a joke, I think that’s an advance, you know, it’s progress in marginalizing the public. Part of marginalizing the public is, taking the formal mechanisms of participation which exist, and ensuring that they don’t lead to a crisis of democracy by being substantive. And what better method can you think of that simply reducing them to the selection of symbolic figures. I think that happened, and I think the press hasn’t covered it, though they doubtless know it.

But as for George Bush, I think you’ve got to return to a, you know, to a sort of more normal situation. I don’t have any reason to believe that there’s any hands-off policy. If- there will be the same kind of resort to covert activities that there’s been in the past.

When does the government resort to covert activities? Well, typically, when the domestic enemy doesn’t allow it to carry out the activities in public. That’s when a government resorts to clandestine activities. Clandestine activities are difficult, complex, expensive, they carry the danger of being exposed. It’s much easier and more efficient to carry out violent activities overtly. And a government typically, our government in particular, when it resorts to clandestine activities, it’s usually because it’s afraid of the public.

Those activities are not much of a secret from anybody else. They’re certainly not a secret from the victims. They’re not a secret from other- from the various mercenary States that we have involved in it, like the whole stuff in the Iran-Contra hearings. That wasn’t a secret to Nicaragua, it wasn’t a secret to Israel, it wasn’t a secret to Taiwan, or Saudi Arabia, or Brunei, you know, nobody- it wasn’t a secret to anybody out there. It wasn’t a secret to the whole array of shady businessmen who were in it to make a buck, like Richard Secord and Albert Hakim and so on. Fact of the matter is, it wasn’t even a secret to Congress and the media. As I said, they knew about the Contra flights, they just weren’t reporting it. They also knew about the arms sales to Iran through Israel, and they weren’t reporting it. They couldn’t suppress any of that any longer after a plane was shot down with an American mercenary, and after the Iranian government revealed the fact that the national security advisor was wandering around Teheran giving out bibles and chocolate cakes. At that point you couldn’t suppress it any longer so it became public, and then comes a cover-up operation.

But the point is, it wasn’t really secret to anybody much, and I think you can easily document that. I was, for example, writing about it from public sources throughout this whole period. But the point is, you can keep it secret from the public. It was at a low enough level so you could keep it secret from the public, and that means the domestic enemy didn’t get too outraged over it. Remember that you’ve got to control enemy territory, and that’s what covert operations are for. If the government happens to be committed to activities — to violent or terroristic or subversive or other activities — that the domestic public, the domestic enemy will not tolerate, it’ll move to covert actions. That’s what they’re for, and there’s no reason to believe that the Bush administration will be any different from others in this respect. Especially, you know, in fact less reason, after all what’s Bush’s background?

QUESTIONER: Dr. Chomsky, you- a statement in the recent [inaudible] interview regarding the feminist movement, that it has had- been the most important in the actual effects it’s had on social life and cultural patterns. You’re quoted accurately, it’s been a lasting important movement [inaudible] impact on everything. Why is it that not only the left has trouble with, you know, in some ways, working with the feminist movement, but perhaps tolerates, to what I feel is an unacceptable degree, anti-feminist individuals and perspectives within its mix? That’s one question, and the second question,

NOAM CHOMSKY: Did- could you be more specific about what you had in mind? I mean,

QUESTIONER: Well, I- I don’t know, that’s a tough thing, because I’d rather not go on,

NOAM CHOMSKY: Ok.

QUESTIONER: but, another one I’d like to throw out for you is that you are a world-class linguist, and I’m wondering how this kind of blends in or interfaces with your political work.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, well, I mean the- actually the issues of feminism- the context of that remark was my expression, if I recall correctly, was my- was an answer to a question of what happened to the movements of the ’60s. And there is a propaganda story about this. The story is that movements of the ’60s had all this idealism, and so on and so forth, it all faded, and after that everybody’s just interested in themselves, and it all just disappeared. And I think that’s nonsense. I think that’s propaganda, and it’s, in fact, an attempt to make people feel that they ought to give up.

But the fact of the matter, if you look objectively, at least as I look, it seems to me that the movements of the ’60s just expanded and grew in the 1970s, and expanded and grew even more in the ’80s, and they now reach into much wider areas of the society than ever before. Groups like this, for example, would not have been around, and certainly wouldn’t have listened to a talk like this twenty years ago. But now they do all over the country, and not just in universities, also in, you know, small towns, and churches, and so on and so forth. I think the movements just expanded. That’s why the Reagan administration was forced into clandestine activities, in fact. Enemy territory was out of control.

But as for the- the reason I mentioned the feminist movement specifically is because that’s a product of the ’70s. And in my view, as you quoted, accurate, I think it- in terms of its overall impact, it’s probably the one that had the greatest impact on cultural patterns, and relations, and structures of authority, and so on and so forth, of any of them, and that’s the ’70s and the ’80s.

Now to get back to your point about the left. A large part of the origins of the contemporary feminist movement were in the left, and they were in reaction to the sexism inside the left. That was a big issue in the late ’60s, you know, big issue, and a very emotional and complicated issue. And that was one of the roots of the modern feminist movement. Of course, you know, feminist movements go way back. And it could be that the left still tolerates sexism and sexist individuals, I’m sure it does. If- to the extent that it does, that’s just something to be overcome. Not just on the left, everywhere else as well. I don’t see that it has anything special to do with the left.

QUESTIONER: My name is Nancy, and I work with the international socialist organization, and I just want to start by saying I, like I’m sure many, many, many, other people who are here tonight are deeply indebted to your work. It’s been absolutely essential in helping us cut through the kind of garbage that we’re faced with every day when we try to figure out what’s going on in the world. But I think

NOAM CHOMSKY: Here comes the but.

QUESTIONER: But I think there’s also, if I could continue, I think there is also a problem in the analysis that I’ve seen in your works, and that you presented tonight, in the sense that, I think we can tend to lose the forest for the trees — that you present so many, you know, astonishing details about what is wrong with the system, and about what is wrong with the media, that we can tend to lose sight of what I think the really key question is, which is, why is this control necessary in the first place. And I would submit, at least, that I think it’s because there’s — I’ve got a minute and a half, I swear to God it’s no longer — it’s because there’s antagonistic interests involved. They didn’t talk about milkmaids and dairy- whatever it was, dairymaids, and spinsters, and laborers in the seventeenth century for no reason, it was because they were the working class. And what we see today in this country, I think, is quite frankly, let’s speak bluntly, a ruling class which tries to control a working class population. And that’s what it’s about, is holding on to that power.

If that’s the case, then it seems like to me the question that we face is how to organize to change that system, to challenge capitalism. And I think in that effort you do a disservice to your listeners, and to the people who respect your work, when you equate Lenin with Stalinism as blithely as you did tonight. I say that, and I think it’s also important to point out that that is an unquestioned assumption, and also an easy applause-getter, we saw, that you share with the mainstream media. And I think if it were actually that simple, the horrific kinds of measures that even bourgeois historians describe as a counterrevolution under Stalin would not have been necessary if they were all the same to begin with.

Now, in short, to sum up, the situation that you have outlined tonight I think is extremely serious, and I think it’s important that we all take it seriously. What we’re talking about is literally the fate of millions of lives around the world, as particularly in the international politics that you describe. That being the case, then I think we need a full, and a serious, and a fair discussion of various different alternatives, not just talking about the horrors of capitalism, but actually how to change it to end the stuff once and for all.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well I think you made, yeah, I think- well, there’s several questions there. One is about the discussion of the United States, and I think what I said is approximately what you said, except I didn’t use some of that rhetoric. The- I, you know, which I don’t particularly think is particularly helpful, to tell you the truth, either analytically or to understand or whatever. But it’s the same picture. John Jay had it straight, the people who own the country ought to govern it — and the people who own the country have, basically, now are a network of corporations and conglomerates, banks, and so on — they ought to govern it, and the way they do it is by the methods we’ve described.

Now as far as the Soviet Union is concerned, I didn’t happen to talk about it tonight, but I’ve written about this topic. I haven’t just made the charge, I’ve written about it, and explained why I think it’s true. And it doesn’t bother me if I happen to agree with the mainstream media on this. Trotsky, to pick somebody who you remember, once- he was charged in the 1930s with agreeing with the fascists in his condemnation of the Soviet Union. And he pointed out that his critique was- to be true, he didn’t- wasn’t going to abandon it if somebody else happened to say it for different reasons. So the question is about the Soviet Union, and particularly about Lenin.

So, what was Leninism?

Well, in my- here we have to look at the facts. Now, you know, you look at the facts, I think here’s what you find. Lenin was a right wing deviation of the Socialist movement, and he was so regarded. He was regarded as that by the Marxists, by the mainstream Marxists. We’ve forgotten who the mainstream Marxists were because they lost, and you only remember the guys who won. But, if you go back to the- to that period, the mainstream Marxists were people like, for example, Anton Pannekoek, who was head of education for the Marxist movement. And a serious- he’s the one- one of the people who Lenin later denounced as an infantile leftist. But he was one of the leading intellectuals of the actual Marxist movement. Rosa Luxembourg was another mainstream Marxist, and there were others. And they were very critical — in fact Trotsky was one, up until 1917 — they were all very critical of Leninism, because of this, what they regarded, as this opportunistic vanguardism. The idea that the radical intelligentsia were going to exploit popular movements to seize State power, and then to use that State power to whip the population into the society that they chose.

Now that was quite inconsistent with Marxism as understood by the mainstream, sort of, I’d say left Marxists. From this point of view, Bolshevism was a right-wing deviation. Trotsky made the same points up until 1917.

Now, when Lenin came back to Russia, in April 1917, he took a different line, quite a different line from the one he’d had in the past. You take a look at Lenin’s work, it shifted character in April ’17. In April 1917 it became kind of libertarian. That’s when he came out with the April Theses, and that’s when he wrote State and Democracy, it came out- it came out a year later, but that’s when it was written, and these were — State and Revolution — these were basically libertarian works. They were very much more in the mainstream of, sort of left, libertarian-socialism, from sort of, you know, this range that goes from Anarchism over to left Marxism of the Pannekoek/Luxembourg variety. And he talked about Soviets, and the need for, you know, workers organization and so on, and in fact came really closer to what the essence of socialism was always understood to be, after all the core of socialism was understood to be workers control over production. That was the core. That’s where you begin with. Then you go on to other things. But the beginning is control by the workers over production. That’s where it begins.

Then Lenin took power in October 1917 in what’s called a revolution, but in my view ought to be called a coup. And the- then- and things followed that coup, or revolution, if you want to call it that.

One of the things that followed it was the immediate moves to destroy the soviets and the factory councils. Those were some of the first moves of Lenin and Trotsky after they took — Trotsky joined at that point — after they took State power.

In fact if you look at what Lenin wrote after that period, or did, you’ll find it’s a reversion to the earlier position. This sort of left deviation, is that, a deviation. You could ask why. In my view it was 