Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky - Essay Example

Introduction For Noam Chomsky, the world is a highly censored place. He believes that the elites that control the media only allow for the general public to see what they want it to see and he is right about that fact. The world is based on money and if a publisher is receiving government grants, then it is in that publisher’s best interest to do whatever it can do to keep the current regime in power. Chomsky believes that the media is very corrupt because, like everything else, it is big business for those involved. The consumer does not have much choice as far as mainstream news goes, and even less choice in finding an unbiased news source. Also, it is in the best interest of the media to vilify someone because that will cause people to want more information. Chomsky discusses all of these problems, but he does leave out specific problems that are occurring worldwide. This is not purely an American issue, but rather is something that runs deep in different cultures all over the world. Through the use of various sources, it is possible to see how the United States government has allowed for the media to be censored, since there is so much information that it does not wish for the public to hear. This manipulation is very similar to how the population is manipulated in 1984, by George Orwell, as the government in this novel gives the population someone to hate so that it will be held less accountable for anything that goes wrong in society. By building up a scapegoat, through the use of media, the government was able to keep its control of the population. The truth is a very dangerous thing for the government, so it is in their best interest to keep things a secret for as long as possible, through the manipulation of the media. I. Understanding Power The book Understanding Power, by Noam Chomsky, gives a great deal of information on things that the mainstream consumer does not know about the media. We are in a constant state of censorship because those who are in control of the media do not wish for us to know everything that is going on, since it is not in their best financial interests. This study begins by exploring anti-free speech rulings that occurred in the Supreme Court in the beginning, as he reminds the audience that the United States is the only country in the world with safeguards that protect its citizens’ freedom of speech. He then continues on by saying despite this, the system of journalism is very censored in the United States. This is because, according to Chomsky, the media is an indoctrination of the elites. The elites in society are very often heavily involved in politics and they help the public’s decision making process by making the information known to the reader. If the owner of a newspaper has a particular political view, however, he or she will not allow information that is harmful to his or her cause reach the public because “after all, the mainstream media are part of the corporate sector that dominates the economy and social life”.1 This sort of censorship is very common in the media, as the publisher has the right to print what he or she wishes the public to see. Secondly, the media can be used to eliminate the rest of the population from the decision making process. Since the media has control over how the campaigns and elections are covered, it has control over how the public perceives it as well. The media can either make the public aware of what is happening, or neglect to do so if a certain political ideology is deemed to be unacceptable to the publisher. The media is so highly filtered because of who the elites who run the media hire as journalist. This system has been in place for a number of years, so those at the top of these media conglomerates will only hire people who they believe will report was is meant to be reported. What is meant to be reported, according to these elites, is the news that will not rile anyone up and will keep the status quo. The less the general population knows, the better, since the status quo is what has made these elites rich and powerful. When a journalist writes an assignment, he or she will often have to internalise the values of the story to meet up with the values that their employer wishes them to have. This is a form of censorship because the true story is not told. This happens quite frequently, as even though the journalists are not told what to write, they know that there are certain things within the code that they cannot write about. This is particularly true when it comes to foreign policy, as this is a particularly touchy subject for journalists and publishers. Hiring in this industry is based on the writer’s willingness to conform to this system. In book What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Chomsky says that “the major media are large corporations, owned by and interlinked with even larger conglomerates. Like other corporations, they sell a product to a market. The market is advertisers - that is, other businesses. The product is audiences. For the elite media that set the basic agenda to which others adapt, the product is, furthermore, relatively privileged audiences”.2 II. 1984 Chomsky goes on to compare our current society with the society that is present in the novel 1984, by George Orwell.3 This contains some interesting parallels to the Soviet Union in the way that a particular individual was used, in order to create fear and hate among the people of these countries. Emmanuel Goldstein gave the government a convenient scapegoat on which to place all of its negativity, much the same way that Trotsky was treated by the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. Creating a common public enemy is a very clever political trick because it clouds the judgment of the citizens. If the people believe that there is an external force to fear and hate, they will, in turn, give the government more power with which to eliminate this fear. It does not matter if the fear is real or fabricated because it is the idea of that person or idea that is causing the fear. This is a way for a government to stop any sort of revolutionary movements because it paints these movements in a very negative light. They are no longer seen as desirable because the government has manipulated the people into believing otherwise. Both of these situations are relevant to this because the governments picked a particular individual and created them into a villain, even though no real proof is given that they were in fact evil. Information is never given as to whether or not Goldstein actually ever existed in this book, but that is not even relevant. It is what Goldstein is symbolic of that is important to the story. Goldstein is symbolic of the power of creating someone to hate and fear. The general public does not even know if he exists, but he is subjected a 2 Minutes of Hate everyday. This is and example of the power that a government can hold over the people. The government in this book uses Goldstein’s ideas to create a fear in the people of something other than reality. The people will not question what is happening if they believe that the alternative is much, much worse. Also, they will give their leaders unconditional support, due to the fact that they wish to keep these other ideologies out of the country. Goldstein is accused of being the leader of a rebel movement called “The Brotherhood”, which is a movement that is supposed to be trying to overthrow the government in some sort of way. While we never learn for sure if Goldstein exists or not, we do learn that the government is using fear to manipulate the people and keep their minds off of what is actually going on both inside and outside of the country. This is shown to be true when Orwell writes, “And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested”.4 The importance of the message in this book is what it says about the nature of politics. It was meant to be a commentary on the Communist movement, but it can be applied to governments on all level. When people are scared, they will look to the government for protection. This is a perfectly natural reaction to this problem. However, what the people must do is look beyond what the government says, and look at their actual actions. Both of these situations are examples of what can happen when you simply believe everything that you are told and to not question those in power. Vasily Grossman made this point when he said, “This fear that millions of people find insurmountable, this fear written up in crimson letters over the leaden sky of Moscow - this terrible fear of the state”.5 In 1984, the government used the threat of a possibly fictitious man named Goldstein to further its own political cause and obtain some sort of immunity from and repercussion from the general public. In the case of the Soviet Union, Stalin used Trotsky as the scapegoat, which gave his own political ideologies more power. This could have been one of the downfalls of the Soviet Union in the future, as Trotsky’s ideas were seen as negatives and never touched upon again. Trotsky was vilified in his own country and Stalin was given control of the government. In the end, a hate campaign against a particular individual or idea can go a long way for a government in attainting its goals. It can make people believe that everything negative comes from an outside source, which can severely cloud everyone’s judgments on reality. The United States media has done an excellent job of creating villains with Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, which have allowed for the American public to have someone to both fear and hate. This gives the government more control over the population, as it will look to its leadership to fight what is causing this fear. III. Critique of Chomsky Although Chomsky some very good points in his texts, he fails for point out what is happening on a global scale, as the censorship of media is not only an American problem. With so many cultures all over the world, it is easy to see why there could be problems regarding the globalisation of media, since different cultures will interpret events differently. For example, the ongoing War in Iraq will be covered differently by various news outlets in different countries, depending on those countries’ cultural beliefs. In Muslim culture, an individual would be labelled as a hero for committing a martyr attack, while North American Christian culture would label such an event in a negative manner. Since it is a culture issue, there really is no right or wrong, as everything is based on interpretation. The problem with the globalisation of media is that one of the cultures would have to sacrifice hearing the events in the manner that it would be accustomed to hearing it in. If Muslim countries no longer had local news coverage, and were only exposed to only American media coverage of events, they would not be getting the same culturally relevant information that they do now. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union relied heavily on the media in order to influence its people, which is also very symbolic of the country’s culture. In South Africa, the media is also a very important tool for keeping the people, especially white people, informed and the country would change greatly if a globalise media was formed. There are so many different cultures around and each one of them has its own unique and distinct ideas and, therefore, it is very important that each of them is provided with a voice to reach its own people. If media is ever completely globalise, we could see cultures beginning to fade from existence because they will no longer have their own voices in the world. If this was to happen, we could see American culture dominate the world even more than it already does, so it is essential that cultural identities be included in any discussions of the globalisation media in the present day world. It has been said that “the phenomenon of homogenisation in world media systems was first emphasized as a scholarly issue in the cultural imperialism literature of the 1960s and 1970s. Cultural imperialism theory was obviously a theory of external influence”.6 IV. Global Issues Since many part of the world are constantly in a volatile state, it is necessary for many news stories to be kept from them. This is done to keep violent uprisings from occurring during times when there are already multiple problems present. In these violent cultures, the people are not told everything because government-run news organizations do not wish for panic to take hold of the population. An example of this occurred in Russia, “while politicians overseas spoke of bringing democracy to Russia, corrupt Mafia-type business barons strip-mined state-owned assets in one of the biggest grand larceny sprees in history and built media monopolies to give themselves political influence. A system that claimed to serve the people was soon crudely serving the financial and political interests of the new mogul-dominated power structure”.7 While to North Americans this would be seen as a negative, we do not understand the culture of this part of the world and this cover up could have been necessary to prevent a major national crisis in Russia. Basically, since the new providers in certain countries do not understand the dynamics of other cultures, then it is very difficult for them to provide media coverage on a global basis. Understanding the audience is a very important part of providing information to a group of people and those within a certain culture would know better about what the rest of the population within that culture can handle at any given time. There are also incidences of the media providing material for an audience that contains content that is entirely unsuitable because events that are happening in that culture. South Africa South Africa has an AIDS epidemic, as “21.5%” of the population or “5.3 million”8 people are currently living with the virus, but outside media sources in that country have not always acted in a sympathetic manner. A televised AIDS conference in South Africa “opened with a TV extravaganza that couldn't have been less appropriate for a conference dealing with the impending deaths of tens of millions of people. It featured musical numbers fit for the Broadway stage, including the anthemic: "The future isn't what it used to be." There were splashy dance routines and a presidential speech, interspersed with toothpaste commercials. It cost a small fortune to stage, and even though one of the cameras embarrassingly broke down, forcing a blackout, it was representative of the ways in which entertainment values suffuse and suffocate information programming on South African television. Patrick Bond claims government policies encouraged the ‘Americanisation’ of South African television. He also cites the case of Marcel Golding, a former trade-union activist turned investment banker who took over ETV, a new private TV company already 20 percent owned by Warner Brothers, and then further commercialised it rather than integrating programs supportive of the needs of workers whose pension funds financed the takeover”.9 The reason why this were done this way is because people find American television entertaining and those in charge did not think about any problems that could arise as a result of this insensitivity. Just like anything else to do with globalisation, globalisation of the media leads to greed. The producers of this conference probably wished to drawn in the largest audience possible, so they stacked it with musical numbers, instead of focusing on the real issue that should have been at hand. This was an opportunity to educate people about the risks of AIDS, but it turned into a money making venture because the culture of the people that it was broadcast to was not taken into effect. Rather than being a benefit to raise the awareness of the AIDS virus, this event was turned into a capitalist forum, which is something that most of South Africa might not understand. In South Africa, the question must be asked: “will the media in eastern Africa survive the onslaught of globalisation”.10 Conclusion The work of Noam Chomsky goes a long way in explaining why thing are as they are in the media, but it is not the only source of information on the subject. Since the elites control the media on a worldwide scale, there is more to this issue than just the American media being censored. The “Americanisation” of the world’s media has been a major influence on stories being censored in other countries, since American interests are looked after before the interests of the country that the story originates from. The American and international medias have been censored by people who do not wish for the public to know the truth, since it would be detrimental to their political power, so they only hire journalists who fit under a certain journalistic code. The code dictates what is print worthy and what is not and is very influential in the world’s media. References Chomsky, N, 2006, Imperial Ambitions: Coversations with Noam Chomsky on the Post 9/11 World, New York: Penguin. Chomsky, N. et al., 2003, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, New York: Vintage. Chomsky, N., 2000, What Uncle Sam Really Wants. Tucson: Odonian Press. CIA World FactBook, November 14, 2006. “South Africa”, Viewed March 2, 2007.. https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/sf.html Conquest, Robert, 1990, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Oxford: Oxford University Press. “East African Journalists Deliberate on Media and Globalisation”. viewed March 2, 2007,. http://www.addistribune.com/Archives/2001/11/30-11-01/East.htm Hallin, Daniel C. and Mancini, Paolo. “Americanisation, Globalisation and Secularization: Understanding the Convergence of Media Systems and Political Communication in the U.S. and Western Europe”. viewed March 2, 2007. http://communication.ucsd.edu/people/f_hallin_homogenization.htm Orwell, George, 1977, 1984, New York: Signet Classic. Schechter, Danny, July 26, 2000, “Globalisation Limits Media Change”. Media Channel, Viewed March 2, 2007, http://www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/mediachange.shtml Read More