Hacker News Reader

Comment by csallen | Hacker News Reader

Chomsky has written quite a bit about how this is the norm, and about how the media (including the New York Times) is usually complicit. I recommend his book Manufacturing Consent.

It paints a vivid picture of the media consistently doing the government's* bidding by painting our mass murdering allies as heroes, while massively amplifying minor crimes committed by those we consider enemies (e.g. Communists). And they do this knowingly, too, by ignoring or outright silencing dissenting voices (like Chomsky's).

Really opened my eyes to how propaganda actually works.

It's not the overt stuff you see from the early 20th century. Instead it's subtle but pervasive omission and exaggeration of facts.

* They do the same for advertisers, too, not just the government. Which is why people like Harvey Weinstein can call up the NYT and get a disparaging story erased.

View on HN

The New York Times actually covered up the holodomor, and were incredibly supportive of Stalin in the 1930's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty]

Further, The NYT had favorably reviewed books that denied the Khmer Rouge, and as late as 1990 published editorials denying that governments human rights abuses as being statistically insignificant[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial].

I think that this has less to do with manufacturing consent and instead realizing that the New York times isn't a bastion of truth but rather a flawed human organization that often makes terrible mistakes.

Not a great example:

"American-made imports reached a high point in 1930, when approximately 25 percent of Soviet imported goods came from the United States. (..) By 1931, there were 134 signed technical aid agreements, the vast majority of them with American companies, servicing virtually every branch of the economy (...) General Electric had been eager to reenter the Russian market as early as 1922 to prevent German competitors from preempting it. Their granting of credits for up to five years, credits which were not guaranteed by the United States government, caused a sensation in the United States and signaled greater willingness by capitalist firms to take risks in the Soviet market (...) In 1913, there had been only some 600 tractors in all of Russia, mostly of German make; by 1930, there were 60,000, three quarters of them manufactured in the United States."

https://sci-hub.cc/https://www.jstor.org/stable/178483

And of course, 1933 was when Roosevelt officially recognized the USSR.

In 1933 The United States recognized the Soviet Union, however Walter Duranty wrote his work defending Stalin in 1931. Further, it has been argued that his work and the New York Time's work played an important part in the United State's formal recognition of the Soviet Union [1]

Additionally, the United States had joined a military Intervention in the Russian Revolution against the Bolsheviks (we sent almost 11,000 troops). As such relations between the two countries could not reasonably be considered friendly before recognition. [2]

Finally, The United States had gone through the First red scare just 10 years prior to the articles being written. As such it's unlikely that the U.S. Populace had an overwhelmingly positive view of the country. [3]

Whereas the two had a strong trade relation as you pointed out, the countries were very adversarial and as such I believe it is incorrect to imagine that the NYT's strings were pulled to show the USSR in a positive light.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty#Reporting_the_1...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Rus...

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare

The recognition was just a side note, my main point is that by 1930, the big American businesses were investing heavily in the USSR, therefore the idea that the media was suppressing stories that might jeopardize those deals is completely consistent with Manufacturing Consent. Especially if the US populace was already hostile to the USSR in the first place - they would want to diffuse that, not provoke a reaction.

In any case, the model described by Chomsky applies mostly to post-WW2 media, as the newspapers and radio channels really began to grow and concentrate, fueled by the flourishing advertising industry. Whether the NYT in 1930 fit the model is not very relevant.

The factors needed to gauge cause-and-effect between media coverage and nation-level politics are so diffuse and broad that I feel it would be impossible to distinguish a world in which the tail wags the dog versus vice versa. Publishing stories favorable to the USSR is not a binary or discrete action. Neither is giving them the Pulitzer award. NYT's positive/whitewashing coverage of USSR could have been a result of the NYT reporters and editors being sympathetic towards Communists. And the government and business eagerness to have a relationship was made possible from Soviet sympathies being normalized.

Why do Chomsky and his fellow believers point to such massive hard-to-prove examples like the Vietnam War to argue systemic and planned bias between media, business, and government? Why not more everyday examples, such as news outlets' ubiquitous coverage of violent crime. As someone who's worked to procure crime data from local jurisdictions to publish for the newspaper, I can tell you that bureaucrats and businessfolks most definitely do not like publicizing this information, or emphasizing crime events, because it's bad for business, particularly real estate.

News organizations most likely have killed stories/beats for not wanting to anger real estate developers, especially developers who happen to rub elbows with the publishers and top editors. Yet if this is a systematic issue, why is the media at a local level so incompetent when it comes to managing the happiness of the local business community when it comes to crime and corruption stories? Many reporters at top-tier institutions like NYT started at local/regional outlets. Do they all have a come-to-Jesus talk with the publisher as part of joining the elite, nationally powerful outlets?

Your link about Cambodian genocide denial seems to be much more critical of Chomsky than the New York Times.

Chomsky's position was basically that we must discount reports of genocide because they are coming from a biased western media.

Oh I completely agree, Chomsky has a terrible track record when it comes to being critical of Communist/Socialist regimes. He is very intellectually dishonest in that regard.

> It paints a vivid picture of the media consistently doing the government's* bidding by painting our mass murdering allies as heroes, while massively amplifying minor crimes committed by those we consider enemies

Not to normalize the atrocities but I think you can generalize and say that we should expect any government to be doing the same. The issue with the US is purely the hypocrisy.

No, the issue with the US (and other western countries) is not an absolute one (the level of hypocrisy). It's a more personal one: we are the targets of their propaganda, and we believe at least some of it.

Looking at a distant country denying its crimes when they're denounced daily from the pages of our newspapers might be unnerving, but doesn't affect us. Knowing that part of what we actually believe, or our own news sources tell us, is propaganda, is much more enraging.

Do you actually consider the crimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol-Pot, Castro and Mugabe to be minor?

Absolutely not. But those are not the examples I would point to to show that the media exaggerates our enemy's crimes.

BUT those are what you just did. You are just as guilty of what you were excusing of others. You just made MAJOR hundreds of millions of people's deaths and called all of these little.

You might want to re-read the post you're criticizing.

Don't delude yourself about Chomsky's objectivity. As late as 1969 in debate with William F. Buckley he refused to believe that the Chinese Communists were killing people with failed economic policies and authoritarian crackdowns.[0]

[0] https://youtu.be/vaR-T_hqRSM?t=2793

That doesn't make him wrong about the criticisms he does make.

Right. It calls into question his intellectual honesty and the morality of his intellectual preoccupations. Not to mention the pension he pulls from the MIT endowment which is heavily invested in the military industrial complex he supposedly despises, but not to my knowledge has ever used his clout among the MIT faculty to protest in formal petition.

Must be a nice life.

I don't think that's what he is implying. But it's also pretty clear that a lot of people died in questionable anti-communist conflicts like Vietnam or in Central America.

It's a moot point considering that in a slightly different world we'd be talking about the crimes of Raegan and some other US presidents in exactly the same way.

It's only a crime because a victor chose to label it so, a different victor would have labeled a different thing the crime, it's all quite arbitrary in the end.

Phillip K. Dicks The Man in the High Castle is a very interesting thought experiment in that regard.

As enjoyable and gripping as the Amazon show might be, having the same show set in our reality would mean you'd be rooting for a couple of Neo-Nazis trying to revive the Third Reich. Would such a show still be as enjoyable to us? I doubt it.

Somewhat related, from Chomsky:

"My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that: namely, I can do something about it. So even if the US was responsible for 2% of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2% I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences.

"It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century."

If it were so easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else, then you'd expect to have fewer people willing to stand by and cover up for Harvey Weinstein and all the similar cases. It seems more correct to say that it is easy to denounce the atrocities of someone you already dislike, or somehow see as 'other'.

This misses the point, because the people standing up for Weinstein would be more like people in his own state in Chomsky's example. They were close enough to do something about it.

People didn't stay quiet about HW because of some general difficulty of denouncing atrocities, they did so because he wielded significant influence and they didn't want their careers to suffer. This is sadly true of the victims as well: more than one of them has said that they wanted to go loud and public with it but were afraid that it would completely wreck their career through being blackballed, etc (and some of them have said that this _is_ what happened as a result of coming out with allegations).

That doesn't apply at all to the US failing to denounce e.g. Indonesia.

Ah, the other side was evil too- helping to get away with it ever since you hit Tommy with the shovel in the sandbox.

If Hitler murders 5 Million and Stalin murder 5 Million, we substract Hitler vom Stalin and End up with zero million. Nothing ever happened! So all we need, is enough crimes to substract from our owns, and we get away with clean hands.

And there i was muder was bad, when all i had to do, was get my muder victims family to shoot back in the general direction and hit somebody.

PS: Mugabe, Pol-Pot, Mao, Stalin are all crimes, where the US did not intervene.

This comment breaks the HN guideline which asks: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." There's a plausible (indeed obvious) interpretation of csallen's comment that doesn't say anything like that.

I know this is a highly charged topic, but that makes it more important to follow the guidelines, not less.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Well constantly putting leaders who resulted in deaths into one basket, and naming one political ideology as an assimilated "source of evil" or "axis of evil" is one problem.

I mean by that logic people will believe Marx belongs to the realm of evil thinkers because history proves that a political theory is "dangerous".

History and politics is built on nuance and precise facts, not some broad idea of how to define an ideology. Ideology can be shaped in any form and is subject to interpretation, that's why it belongs to the realm of propaganda.

I'm not defending communism nor those leaders, but saying "communism is evil because mao and stalin were murderers" is just poor argumentation.

To be fair, the exceptions are growing as media is less and less beholden to e.g. government sources for major stories. I can't recall seeing even a single tweet in favor of America's involvement in Yemen, journalists or no. It's not the world, but it's something.

There's still a lie by omission with the Yemen story though. You don't hear news outlets saying the truth which is that the Saudis are bombing Yemen with U.S weapons that we sold them knowing full well what they would be used to do.

Are you kidding me? They might not report on it a lot, but that's almost _all_ I hear about it. I'd like to know more, because I'm aware it has to do with the Arab Spring but I'm not clear on who is involved (aside from the US and the Saudi governments) or what the ideas behind the political factions are.

[Edit: It's worth noting that those used to be only details we'd hear: who's a communist, who's a radical and who's a moderate, which individual people are monsters or the best hope for the country. To say the Chomsky critiques apply here is... a stretch. We got one story either essentially right or are making new mistakes.]

It took me less than a minute to find this: http://time.com/4787797/donald-trump-yemen-saudi-arabia-arms...

"When President Donald Trump closed a nearly $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia on Saturday, his deputies’ spirits soared...The weapons sale was one of the largest in history, totaling close to $110 billion worth of tanks, artillery, radar systems, armored personnel carriers, and Blackhawk helicopters. The package also included ships, patrol boats, Patriot missiles, and THAAD missile defense systems. Much of that military hardware will likely be pressed into service in the Saudi fight against its neighbor Yemen, where more than 10,000 people have been killed over more than two years of heavy airstrikes and fighting."

...but the only they ran this story was to target Trump. ...and even still, what's happening in Yemen is barely mentioned. Obama was just as complicit with what was happening and no one published anything about it.

s/government/major wealthy-corporate interest/

It's for sale, but increasingly the buyers are not the USG anymore.

So do we fear the devil we know or the one we don't see yet?

Why stop there? There's tons of progressive bias as well. I don't know if it's a matter of progressive influence from the inside or fear of becoming the newest target of a progressive revolt that causes the major media outlets to toe the progressive line, but progressive bias seems at least as strong as pro-USG or pro-corporate bias. Maybe my vantage point is distorted/limited?

What do you mean by progressive bias? corporate vs. normal people is orthogonal the progressive vs. conservative.

Think of it as a separate axis.

> corporate vs. normal people is orthogonal the progressive vs. conservative.

No, it's not. Both are about flattening of power distribution vs. concentration of power distribution.

Progressive and conservative are an odd nomenclature nowadays. Both "sides" have large populist elements that share a hatred (and conspiratorial paranoia) of globalism and "the elites".

In this respect, ANTIFA and alt-right white-nationalists have a lot more in common than they'll admit.

That white nationalists (at the grassroots, even before considering what ends they might be being manipulated to serve) are about concentrating power in a specific subgroup rather than distributing it in an egalitarian manner is, well, painfully obvious from their overt label.

It's true that just as both those seeking a broader distribution of power and those seeking to move it from the aristocracy to the mercantile class shared a small degree of common interest in the downfall of feudalism, the anarchocommunists and other leftists at the heart of Antifa and the White Nationalists in Trump's base might have something of a common opponent in at least some segment of the current cosmopolitan corporate elite, but that is a weak and transitory common interest, and their general interests are fundamentally in near-polar opposition.

There is no contradiction between the desire to achieve a flatter distribution of power, while also concentrate it in a specific subgroup. It's exactly these things that are the goals of Steve Bannon's wing of the right.

The commonality between the anti-fascists (or whatever they want to call themselves) and white-nationalists is neither weak nor transitory. Their common enemy is liberal democracy, and their preferred strongmen will not always necessarily be different. Take a glance at places like Serbia and Russia to see this in action.

Back to the original point though, I think progressive vs conservative is not a useful basis with which to analyze these movements.

Progressives are at war with everyone rather equally; so I don't see the utility in insisting on a unidimensional axis. They claim to be opposed to white nationalists specifically, but then they go on to categorize literally everything to their right (including liberalism) as white supremacy. And I say "equally" because progressives spend more time criticizing moderates than the extreme right.

Further, I question the sincerity of the progressive commitment to equality, since the mob comes after anyone who points to data that don't support their apocalyptic narrative.

Well, we were naming axes, weren't we? Government bias is a different axis from corporate bias from left/right political bias. It's odd to classify the first two as valid but not the last. If the problem is media distortion, it seems to me that progressive distortion is far greater than pro-business or pro-government distortion. I think we can agree that this much is true regardless of our opinions about how harmful each of these biases are.

> it seems to me that progressive distortion is far greater than pro-business or pro-government distortion

i don't know that these are directly comparable. it's like comparing a car's length to a truck's height. there may be some correlation, but they are distinct things.

You can compare a car's length to a truck's height; the units work out--whether or not its useful to do so is a different story (if you're playing tetris with cars and trucks, it might be very useful!). In particular, we can (and probably do) measure the magnitudes of the media's biases (pro-business, pro-government, progressive) and compare them, and it's very useful, for example, if you care about media bias and want to know what kind of pressure to apply to get the most bang for your finite political capital.

I think you're seeing competition in action. Before the Internet, there were 3 major broadcasting companies (4 after FOX gathered steam in the 80s) and one major newspaper per metro area. Ensuring the media's silence was as simple as making sure that all of the heads of these organizations knew that if they published, they would be the one organization that was shut out of all future news from the government.

Now, if the major news organizations don't publish something newsworthy but inconvenient for powerful people, they can be sure that it's going to show up on Twitter, or Facebook, or Wikileaks, or Reddit, or Breitbart, or HuffPo, or Gawker, or Hacker News, or somewhere. And if it's outrageous enough, it'll spread virally and the consequence will be that the media companies that missed it will look stupid, not that the information won't get out there.

> Which is why people like Harvey Weinstein can call up the NYT and get a disparaging story erased.

I thought the NYT was the outlet that broke the Weinstein scandal?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/insider/sexual-harassment...

After it became absolutely impossible to ignore, and therefore no longer profitable to support him. But what about when it was brought to their attention before?[1]

  The story I reported never ran.

  After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included
  having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to
  vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my
  head at the Times, the story was gutted.

  I was told at the time that Weinstein had visited the
  newsroom in person to make his displeasure known. I knew
  he was a major advertiser in the Times, and that he was
  a powerful person overall.

  But I had the facts, and this was the Times. Right?

  Wrong. The story was stripped of any reference to sexual
  favors or coercion and buried on the inside of the Culture
  section, an obscure story about Miramax firing an Italian
  executive. Who cared?

[1] https://www.thewrap.com/media-enablers-harvey-weinstein-new-...

It's only fair to point out the Waxman's former editor's response:

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/09/harvey-weinstein-sh...

To summarize: He doesn't remember the conversation in which he allegedly argued that Weinstein wasn't a worthy public topic. And he never met with Weinstein at the Times, as Waxman claims. So it's her word against his. But we can as outsiders consider these assertions:

> Landman also questioned why “if the Times had been intent on protecting Weinstein, wouldn’t it be odd to send a reporter to pursue this story on two continents, at considerable time and expense?’

From the NYT's response (from the current exec editor, who wasn't at the NYT in 2004):

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/reader-center/dean-baquet...

> I’m sure Ms. Waxman believes she had a story. But if you read her own description, she did not have anything near what was revealed in our story. Mainly, she had an off-the-record account from one woman.

That's not to say that Waxman isn't right on a certain principle: stories don't need to face direct opposition to be "killed". If the NYT had been more open to the idea of Weinstein being a serial abuser, they would have given her more time and resources to pursue evidence that would eventually lead to on-the-record testimony and other hard evidence.

But that's not what you said. You simplified all of the NYT's (and others') inaction to an evil villain picking up a phone and making a threat. What do you mean that the current story came about because "it became absolutely impossible to ignore"? Do you think that it all started with tweetstorms from recent victims? The first story in NYT's investigation involved incidents that were decades old. Meaning that nothing became "impossible to ignore" -- ignoring was the status quo for decades. It's very difficult to square your assertion with the fact that the NYT would've needed to throw considerable money at this investigation to even get it off the grounds.

Sorry to be an apologist for the NYT, but your simplification does a bit of injustice to what the victims faced in the Weinstein scandal, as if they had been complaining on-the-record and openly for decades and they were ignored because of an elite conspiracy. It appears that what they faced was even worse, threats from their own industry and massive personal shame to the point that it was just easier to keep quiet and sign non-disclosure agreements than to speak out about injustice. And Waxman herself would probably agree to this, as she left the NYT to found her own media outlet, which until the NYT's investigation, seems to have completely ignored Weinstein's scandalous history.

In the case of the Indonesia massacre, it's very possible/likely that it was a story that news organizations didn't push hard enough to investigate. That's not at all inconceivable, especially as we see media organizations outright shutting down because of lack of money. But giving your argument the benefit of the doubt, that the media is "consistently doing the government's bidding", then why was it the media that rooted out the Pentagon Papers and the My Lai massacre (the NYT and Sy Hersh specifically for the latter) and published photos that contributed heavily to the public's disillusionment with the war?

But to the greater point: it seems ironic to simplify things into a media conspiracy because of something you read from a Chomsky book, in a thread about an article that hints (based on a recently declassified document) at how perversely/tragically complicated world politics is, even in the face of a massacre. To the smaller issue of media complicity, I'd completely agree that that media organizations have the capacity to act maliciously, or at least be too slow/unprepared to respond to injustice. But that's a result of media organizations -- similar to governments -- being complicated. To reduce the factors of a worldwide tragedy to the consequences of a S.P.E.C.T.R.E. caricature pulling all the strings, ultimately does not help in helping people remember history in order to avoid repeating it.

edit: I gave Waxman more benefit of the doubt before she recently came to the defense of Matt Damon, who was getting criticized as being complicit to the alleged killing of Waxman's story:

https://twitter.com/sharonwaxman/status/917821882556022786

And yet Waxman, an experienced reporter who was writing for her website (i.e. no constraints from ink/paper limits, or overreaching editors), wrote this about Damon:

> The story I reported never ran.

> After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my head at the Times, the story was gutted.

There is no way you intentionally write that about Damon and Crowe, without adding a caveat (e.g. "to vouch for Lambardo as a colleague, though I never asked them about the sexual abuse allegations"), unless you intend to amplify the drama of your own story, i.e. Hollywood's pressure on Waxman. That she only absolves Damon after he gives his side of the story makes me think that she might exaggerate the amount of real evidence she had on Weinstein in 2004 (evidence, again, that she sat on for 12+ years, as someone whose entire livelihood is reporting on Hollywood). But I do agree that the NYT columnist she wrote in response to is "sanctimonious" [0]. Even if that columnist, and his editors, were unaware of Waxman's 2004efforts, they do have current colleagues who cover Hollywood and who most definitely had heard the open secret. I don't agree with you that if the NYT suppressed news about Weinstein out of profit-motive, but I can believe that the NYT could have done more earlier to question someone who happens to be cozy with New York media and media reporters.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/business/media/harvey-wei...

You should read Manufacturing Consent. I'm merely parroting its arguments, and so will necessarily do a poor job compared to the original. But the claim is not that there's a nefarious conspiracy underfoot. Rather, it's that the simple physics of the system — the incentives and the economics — lead to a sort of de facto propaganda.

No conspiracy necessary.

He investigates a number of "filters," or ways in which reporting is distorted. For example there's a massive disparity in sources. The US military and corporate America spend vast sums of money and manpower contributing stories and source information that media companies depend on. Another is advertising: newspapers that are not advertiser-funded are much less profitable, and therefore more expensive, and therefore suffer in distribution. Etc.

I think there are five in total. Then for each filter, he'll go through countless examples. It's actually quite fascinating.

With regard to specific events, I believe he talks about both the Pentagon Papers and the My Lai massacre. IIRC he builds a compelling case for how the powers that be were themselves incentivized to see the end of the Vietnam war.

As for Waxman, I don't recall reading in her story that she said her editor was the one who met with Weinstein, so it doesn't surprise me that he denies it was him. It also doesn't seem inconsistent with her story that they'd fund her, a reporter, to do reporting, given that (according to her) they weren't against the story until after it was done.

Of course it's entirely possible that she's lying and she made the whole thing up. I'm not a mind reader. But that's missing the point. Chomsky's case doesn't rest on a single story any more than it rests on a conspiracy theory. It doesn't require there to be airtight 100% successful manipulation of the news.

Rather, it's a case built on the back of consistent and sustained bias in favor of the government, advertisers, and sources, with hundreds of examples and troves of data.

A point which I think illustrates my strongest disagreement:

> It also doesn't seem inconsistent with her story that they'd fund her, a reporter, to do reporting, given that (according to her) they weren't against the story until after it was done.

That's the wrong, simplistic way to think about things. Like startups and software, stories are not "done" until they are published or put on market. Waxman had a single off-the-record source. That is not a story, that is the beginning of an investigation (as it likely was for the current NYT-Weinstein investigation). Maybe the editors were at fault for not aggressively suspecting fire where there seemed to be smoke, but Waxman had nothing of the sort that the current NYT reporters had -- neither in notes nor draft form -- and for her to suggest so is dishonest, since she would be presenting that evidence in her critique.

Again, not having read "Manufacturing Consent", I can't address its specific evidence. But I would love to see what datasets and hypotheses Chomsky uses as proxies to empirically show the ties that you say. Because while data is the plural of anecdote, I'm inclined to believe the inherent nature of data and the politics of its collection means that many of the necessary datasets needed to make those conclusion do not exist in a comprehensive form.

To argue that the powers-that-be, including the media, were "incentivized" to see the end of the Vietnam War may be the actual objective reality. Or it may be a conclusion easy to reach in retrospect of history (i.e. the Vietnam War being a political disaster) by cherry-picking the "data". What would be the evidence/data that could conclusively show the null hypothesis here? And for that matter, why don't the "powers-that-be" include the U.S. presidents (and all of their corporate overloads) at the time whose careers were devastated by the negative perception of the Vietnam War?

I agree that Chomsky's hypothesis doesn't require 100% successful manipulation of the news. So what's the accepted success rate? 75%? 50%? When is the success rate so small that it's indistinguishable from coincidences in a random universe, or one in which the actors or much more independent and the factors much more complicated?

Maybe the answer -- like the hypothesis "Because God made it like so" -- is truly impossible to discern. But the hypothesis is still harmful because in a universe in which the hypothesis is false, it causes us to overlook the more mundane events and systemic factors that precipitate terrible things. Instead, we unconsciously absolve ourselves of action by assigning blame to conspiracy and collusion at a scale too great for us to act upon.

I think all the questions you ask about Chomsky's methods and arguments Manufacturing Consent are reasonable concerns, and nearly every one of them is addressed in the book. The manipulation he found is nowhere near comparable to what you'd expect from random chance.

As for Waxman, I make no claim that she had evidence equivalent to what the current reporters had, nor does she make that claim. In fact, I claimed just the opposite: if the evidence had been that substantial, they would've had no choice but to run it. Besides, the only disincentive to do so — losing Weinstein's company's advertising dollars — would've been nullified by Weinstein's impending doom and loss of control over how that budget is spent, anyway.

We can speculate as to just how solid her piece was, but it never ran. She claims to have "had evidence of a payoff," and also claims that she was told directly why the story was killed. So you can say you don't believe her, and I don't fault you for that, but her reasoning is not unsound. And again, this is just a red herring.

Her story did run, it was "gutted", not "killed":

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/13/business/media/miramax-sue...

If you meant, "the story that proved Weinstein was a sexual predator didn't run", sure, but that begs the question. That story didn't run because that story didn't exist -- inasmuch stories "exist" when reporters find the supporting evidence.

But the story that did run is the kind of story that feels like the kind that Weinstein, if he had strong influence over the NYT's editorial desk, would kill. Because it was, as you say, the kind of story that is not too important to ignore. It's the opposite, it spotlights an otherwise obscure lawsuit about a minor Hollywood figure who is basically accused of embezzling from Miramax/Disney, a theft made possible by Weinstein's favoritism. If the NYT killed it, no one would really know or care because scandals about insignificant foreign film companies (Mirimax Italy) aren't the bread-and-butter for NYT's investigative team or Culture section.

But Waxman herself says that her foreign-reporting trip was green-lighted even before she knew the extent of the allegations, or the possibility/difficulty of gathering evidence:

> In 2004, I was still a fairly new reporter at The New York Times when I got the green light to look into oft-repeated allegations of sexual misconduct by Weinstein. It was believed that many occurred in Europe during festivals and other business trips there.

I haven't worked at the Times, but I do feel comfortable saying that a "fairly new reporter" whose beat is Hollywood would not have the easiest time to convince bosses to fund a trip to Italy on an enterprise story that lacks hard evidence. But now we're supposed to believe that the NYT editors would approve such a project, during a time of falling revenue, in which the initial premise is that rumors of sexual scandal about their friend/secret-boss Weinstein are true? Even when it would be completely easy to just say No? To what end?

I realize I'm writing a lot of words for your side note tangent, unrelated to Indonesia. But like I said, I haven't read Chomksy's book. But I would bet that the universe of facts and connections for arguing NYT/Weinstein complicity are far more accessible and direct than what Chomsky would use to argue for media+U.S+Indonesian massacres. But if Chomsky's hypothesis is so permissive/vague that a reader like yourself (whom I assume to be reasonable and thoughtful) could argue that it applies to NYT+Weinstein, despite the published evidence (including the facts in of Waxman's own accusatory essay) and reasonable application of Hanlon's and Occam's Razor, then I feel justified in thinking that Chomsky's hypothesis may not apply to the much more complicated situation of U.S.Gov+media+Indonesia. Or that it's not much of a useful hypothesis period for assessing world events/media fuckups in general.

Again, nobody is claiming that Waxman had a story that "proved" Weinstein was a sexual predator. But she does claim to have a story that was much more significant than the one that ran, and for you to say that didn't exist is simply your word versus hers.

You have your reasons for believing that she's lying, including that "she would not have the easiest time" convincing her bosses to fund a trip, that her editor claimed not to remember a conversation, that she injected Damon and Crowe into the story to add drama, etc. I do not find these reasons at all persuasive enough to conclude that she is lying. But it doesn't matter, because it's speculation on both of our parts anyway.

If you're trying to use this particular instance to in any way judge Chomsky's book, then you're at a loss. At one extreme, Waxman made up her entire story and I was duped, in which case the conclusion is merely that this is not an example of an advertiser manipulating the media, and says nothing of Chomsky's evidence. At the other extreme, Waxman was telling the truth and Weinstein's role as an advertiser did allow him to get the story gutted. In that case, it's still insufficient to prove Chomsky's thesis. Which it was never meant to do in the first place, as it was merely presented as an illustrative example.

A pointless discussion either way.

You could probably read the relevant parts of Chomsky's book in the time we've spent here going back and forth on Waxman's believability.

Just to be clear, I don't accuse Waxman of being a liar. She has a good reputation as a reporter and editor. Her recollection may be biased, but that's not malicious dishonesty. She has the same limits of memory and perspective as every other human being, her story should not be taken at face value, nor is it an all-for-nothing proposition in which her being fuzzy on one detail invalidates her entire story. The same applies to all the other players and witnesses.

I agree that is futile for me to apply this topic to a book I haven't read, though I did just get a copy and have had time to skim things. I'm not sure what to argue against. I think Chomsky is absolutely right to point out that American news outlets focus on American issues from an American perspective, and that news outlets, being for-profit companies, live-and-die by advertisers. It's not at all a coincidence -- nor does it require a conspiracy -- that a news outlet's focus and coverage reflect that of its staff and publishers. You get a college-educated mostly white staff, you'll get a lot of stories that are relevant/understandable by that demographic, which may be an OK thing if that's the news outlet's entire readership, even as it skimps on a greater moral mission to represent society's minority.

That's a valid critique, and the underlying incentives would seem to produce results that showed a consistent adherence to maintaining the status quo. I don't believe that Chomsky is the first to point this out (nor the first to do so in an empirical way), but if he's spreading the news about the realities of the news business, that's worthy enough work.

But skimming down to things in which Chomsky attempts to point out their fit in his model is less convincing. He acknowledges the "shining moments' of journalism, such as reporting the My Lai Massacre and Watergate. Chomksy says in the conclusion:

> In short, the very examples offered in praise of the media for their independence, or criticism of their excessive zeal, illustrate exactly the opposite. Contrary to the usual image of an "adversary press" boldly attacking a pitiful executive giant, the media's lack of interest, investigative zeal, and basic news reporting on the accumulating illegalities of the executive branch have regularly permitted and even encouraged ever larger violations of law

But the media's action on My Lai and Watergate don't really seem to demonstrate the "exactly the opposite" of an adversarial media. The exact opposite would seem to be a media that doesn't report on these things at all. But the fact is that they did and Chomsky's explanation seems to boil down to:

- The media didn't act as fast as it could (e.g. it didn't cover the My Lai massacre the day of or after it happened)

- The supposed scandals weren't even that big of a deal, e.g. My Lai was just one of many atrocities committed by the U.S. The Watergate break-in was nothing compared to what the FBI was doing to the Socialist Workers party.

- And the media didn't go far enough in its investigative reporting, e.g. if the media really cared about My Lai, then military officers higher than a Lieutenant would have been court-martialed.

I think there is value in critiquing the lesser-celebrated details of media action/inaction, including lionized narratives of media's finest moments. But as something that purports to point out how media/government/industry complicity can explain all or even most of media's self-interested behavior? Chomsky's arguments seem virtually unfalsifiable. There is no possible unselfish/noble/independent media action that could not be waved away with his logic. But his logic is inherently self-defeating. My Lai and Watergate weren't a big deal, and the media were slow as fuck to finally cover them...OK, then that leaves completely explained why news outlets wasted considerable resources on stories that were not only inherently hostile to the U.S. government, but boring and stupid and not even significant compared to all the shit that was really happening. That argument is pretty airtight!

> I think Chomsky is absolutely right to point out that American news outlets focus on American issues from an American perspective…

If by "American perspective" you mean that the news is complicit in spreading propaganda on behalf of advertisers and sources like the government, then sure, I agree. That's what Chomsky means. But I don't think you mean that, because that is not the American perspective.

Most Americans do not believe that they're being propagandized to the extent that they are, and would take issue with it if they knew the facts. If what the news reported was a simple extension of Americans' natural positions and perspectives, then there'd be no need for the propaganda in the first place.

For example, most Americans do not believe that the Vietnam war was an invasion, because it is instead reported as aiding an ally during a civil war. If we began reporting on Vietnam as an invasion and highlighting the relevant facts that made that case, do you think the natural American perspective would remain unchanged? I don't. It didn't take the German people long to feel shame for their actions in the second world war.

I think you're letting journalists off the hook here.

> But the media's action on My Lai and Watergate don't really seem to demonstrate the "exactly the opposite" of an adversarial media. The exact opposite would seem to be a media that doesn't report on these things at all.

That's an extreme standard. You're taking Chomsky's words "exact opposite" as literally as possible, when they are clearly meant to be hyperbole. He's not saying the machine is 100% effective. This isn't 1984. But it's still bad if it's even much less than that.

The media didn't cover My Lai the day after? It occurred in March 1968 and didn't gain extensive media coverage until a year and a half later in November 1969, despite extensive efforts by numerous people to publicize the story. By that time, there were already massive demonstrations in Washington and media attention was focused on antiwar protest. The cat was out of the bag, and needed to be reigned in.

Chomsky argues, convincingly, that massacres like in My Lai weren't particularly out of place, but in fact were part of a larger strategy that made such events more routine and normal than they ever should have been. In public scandal cases like these, the defense's strategy is always "scapegoat," and so you would expect the other atrocities and overall strategy to be downplayed while My Lai is highlighted and treated as exceptional, and some peon's head is offered up on a plate. And that's exactly what happened.

Rule #1 in every playbook is to offer a sacrificial lamb to the masses before they start demanding that more important heads roll. This is basic stuff. You see it in every company in crisis mode. What makes it nefarious here is that the media is complicit. The facts aren't difficult to dig up, and the American people by and large expect news outlets to report on this stuff accurately.

But they don't. They systematically filter out the stories, the facts, and even the journalists who push the wrong buttons and ask the wrong questions at inconvenient times.

It's not 100% fail proof. But it's systemic.

They killed a story which would have exposed him much earlier, around 2007[1] if mem serves.

[1]http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/journalist-says-new-york-tim...

Ed: 2004

When was Chomsky ever silenced?

I don't know about any actual silencing myself (I'm not well-read), but the efforts to impeach Chomsky's mental stability and character [1] unquestionably have that as the goal

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/23/noam-c...

Unquestionably? Really?

Look, I agree with a great deal of Chomsky's claims but doesn't prevent me from thinking that he's got faults of his own. Given his enormous stature as a linguistic scholar, those are more than mere shortcomings. He wouldn't accept his own style of political argument from one of his students.

Unlike the current TV pundits, which are all Socrates reborn.

The question is not whether he has faults (of course he does), but whether there is a double standard.

I'll take your word for it as I watch little or no television. I think you know perfectly well what I'm saying.

I know what you're saying. I disagree that it is relevant.

There's no shortage of TV pundits saying the same sort of stuff as Chomsky so why he's being held up as some sort of martyr is beyond me.

That's interesting, can you point me one out?

Ignored or silently blacklisted is probably a more apt description.

Oh come on, he's a tenured professor at an elite university and very, very widely known. I ignore most of his output because a) he's inconsistent and engages in apologetics, b) I have a big problem with how he constructs his arguments - basically he never looks at things from the side of the people he's criticizing, and thus leaves his readers poorly equipped to field counter-arguments, and c) there are lots of other writers who I think do a better job.

Maybe I'm judging him harshly, and if I'd encountered him at a younger age his writings would have been a worthwhile on-ramp into the same field of knowledge. But as an adult I find his writing like pouring gasoline or kerosene on a campfire: it flares up satisfyingly for a few seconds, but that's no way to build a fire that will burn steadily for hours and sustain people through a cold night.

I don't think anything you said contradicts what I said though. He's more known outside the US than inside. His writings only appear in book format or in marginal media outlets. NYT and WaPo crowd would rarely, if ever, have him write an op-ed. The only TV appearances he can manage are on Democracy Now.

I don't know or care to measure his relative popularity, and living in the Bay Area it's quite difficult to asses his popularity in the US at large, but Chomsky has struck me as one of the most well-known writers on the left for >20 years now. So what if he's mainly published in book form? I don't think of op-eds as good for anything more than cocktail party chat, I've certainly never heard of anyone taking any kind of meaningful political action in response to one. Sometimes they help to draw attention to an obscure issue or influence people a bit at election time, but his absence from op-ed pages bothers me not one whit.

It can be convenient for a political establishment to have some popular, attractive, but ultimately ineffective figures (often unconsciously - please don't overlook this) for others to cluster around. Such persons are referred to as Judas Goats, from ranching where the idea originates. This is why it bothers me that Chomsky gets his readers all fired up over injustice but never seems to equip them with the intellectual tools to do very much about it. Given his manifest intellectual talents, it's strange that he opts for the role of a preacher railing against sin rather than delving into the root causes.

I'm not saying don't read him or take him seriously, he has a lot of valuable things to say. But if you just rely on Chomsky and want to get into radical politics, it's like going into battle with a nerf gun. He's very moralistic, but as his arguments often never address things from the point of view he's railing against they're very easy to deflect. Of course Chomsky would argue that the The Establishment has a whole body of media arguing on its behalf and he sees no reason to do their work for them, but that doesn't really equip his readers to argue the case, which is where the rubber meets the road.

Also (and I know I'm not the first to say this) Chomsky is really good at saying what he thinks is wrong with the world but not at equipping his readers with tactical responses to do anything about it, other than shouting into a megaphone. This a problem with left activism in general, which has been lacking in the tactics and strategy department. That's not Chomsky's fault, but agitation without organization leads to futility and demoralization.

Alinsky's Rules for Radicals remains a standard primer of activist organizing methods but at times it seems to have been almost forgotten about by people on the left. I only heard about it because people in the Tea Party took up using it and shared its contents widely while pretending to be very outraged by their existence. (As a general rule, your opponents are often far better teachers than your friends, in any context, not just politics.) I could name a large pro-Democratic political forum that I've read for 10 years where I've only seen it mentioned once or twice, and then only in passing rather than as a repository of useful techniques. So if you're dissatisfied with the state of the world, the best thing you could do would be donate your Chomsky books to a thrift store and pick that up instead. Sun Tzu wouldn't hurt either.

I don't agree with your assessment of his writing as "preaching", because that would be the most boring and dullest preaching I've ever read. Most of my Chomsky reading experience seems like reading academic writing in tone and substance, with copious facts, footnotes, and endless pages of references in the back.

This also addresses your point of "never addressing things from point of view he's arguing against", unless those points of view have different facts.

Maybe you can cite a few examples of what you mean for me to understand your argument better.

As far as root cause analysis, again, can you explain what you mean? Chomsky is a well known anarchist and frequently discusses issues of capital, power, etc. "Understanding Power" is a title of one of most popular books, for example.

Of course, in the real world the media played down the major crimes of Communists (cf. Walter Duranty, whose Pulitzer Prize has never been revoked), while massively amplifying the minor crimes of anti-Communists (e.g. South Vietnam, a nasty little republic significantly less nasty than the victorious North Vietnam).

Yes, the anti-Communists have their hundreds of thousands, but the Communists have their hundreds of millions. The death tolls aren't even comparable.

> And they do this knowingly, too, by ignoring or outright silencing dissenting voices (like Chomsky's).

There are many adjectives one can apply to Noam Chomsky, but 'silenced' is not among them.

> South Vietnam, a nasty little republic significantly less nasty than the victorious North Vietnam

That's... debatable, to say the least.

> Yes, the anti-Communists have their hundreds of thousands, but the Communists have their hundreds of millions. The death tolls aren't even comparable.

If you were a demonstrator abducted and killed by a CIA-backed & trained task force in Latin America in the 70s, these silly "death toll" comparisons would hardly matter. Evil is not necessarily measured in numbers. Had the Nazis "only" killed "hundreds of thousands" of Jews instead of millions, the crime would have been just as horrible.

> I recommend his book Manufacturing Consent.

This Wikipedia article is a good quick overview and introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

Killing a cumulative 100,000,000 hardly constitutes "minor crimes".

Leaving aside uncharitable readings of the parent comment, I don't think that killing 100,000,000 is included in the minor crimes that he claims are emphasized.

Or to put it another way, he's claiming that minor crimes are emphasized for enemies, which doesn't preclude major crimes being committed as well.

>subtle but pervasive omission and exaggeration of facts

Deciding what to omit/include and what to emphasize/downplay is a very subjective task.

Right, so I can forgive the occasional mistake or slight bent. But the point Chomsky makes in his book is that the omissions and exaggerations are consistently in line with the desires of the government and with advertisers, much more so than can be explained by random chance.

I would be careful about calling the crimes committed by Communists and their fellow travelers "minor".

I think what csminor is saying that they amplified even the minor ones, not that they were all minor.

Yes, I'm sure Chomsky would say Pol Pot's genocide was overblown and Pinochet's was undercounted, because he's no better than those he rails against.

We don't need to speculate, let's see what Chomsky himself has to say on the subject of communist regimes.

> "Would you describe the authoritarian result of the Bolshevik's actions as an honest mistake, a "historical accident" maybe-or was it just the natural outgrowth of the Leninist Worldview: the idea that only a few people are smart and knowledgeable enough to be the leaders, and they should run the show?"

> Chomsky: Yeah, in my opinion the heart of the problem is Marxism-Leninism itself-the very idea that a "vanguard party" can, or has any right to, or has any capacity to lead the stupid masses towards some future they're too dumb to understand for themselves. I think what it's going to lead them towards is "I rule you with a whip." Institutions of domination have a nice way of reproducing themselves-I think that's kind of like an obvious sociological truism. [1]

Yep, we definitely found the holodomor apologist, there.

Edit: It's entirely possible that he spent plenty of time and words on whitewashing crimes against humanity. His views have changed since then.

[1] Undestanding power, p226.

>Yep, we definitely found the holodomor apologist, there.

You're dodging the question: no one mentioned the Holodomor. The parent mentioned Pol Pot for a reason:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...

But... from the article you just cited:

> In 1993, Chomsky acknowledged the massive scale of the Cambodian genocide in the documentary film Manufacturing Consent. He said, "I mean the great act of genocide in the modern period is Pol Pot, 1975 through 1978 - that atrocity - I think it would be hard to find any example of a comparable outrage and outpouring of fury."

>the media consistently doing the government's* bidding by painting our mass murdering allies as heroes, while massively amplifying the minor crimes committed by those we consider enemies

I agree with your general thesis governments downplay their own murder but Communist regimes have killed millions of people[1]. Those are not "minor crimes". Both Capitalist (e.g. Native American population), Communist (Mao's purge), Socialism (Nazis' genocide)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...

NAZIs were not socialists. They just co-opted the word.

http://www.snopes.com/2017/09/05/were-nazis-socialists/

NAZI = Nationalist

Kind of why McCain used the word in a negative manner this week.

Really depends on what one's definition of Socialism.

>Nazism rejected the Marxist concept of class conflict, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism and sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good" and accept political interests as the main priority of economic organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism

Take a look at Sweden when their policies were more Socialist skewed, the government in order to manage the P/L sheet for social welfare programs compelled political out groups to be sterilized[1]. Roma people were considered a "drain" on Swedish society and attempts to exterminate them were done much more quietly.

If any government starts to make value judgements about who is more valuable than whom, they will repeat these same errors.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_Sw...

If you read your own link you will realize that the highest rate of sterilization for eugenic reasons where during the second world war.

This point is _unusual_ in Swedish 20th century history as a time when the socialists where _not_ ruling by them self but instead ruled in coalition with the right wing. The minister of justice was for example _not_ socialist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansson_III_Cabinet

And the peak, some where around 1500 sterilizations a year, for eugenic reasons (if I read your diagram correctly) is _damn ugly_, but it is not extermination. It does not compare to Soviet, Chinese or American killing of their own populations (which is hard to call exterminations either even if we are talking about millions; genocide I guess is better term).

Ugly things happens in socialist democratic countries like Sweden. In general they get much uglier in powerful communist (Soviet, China) or powerful right wing countries (USA). The killing of native Indians in America by non-socialists is strikingly bad for your argument.

I hear that again and again as the reason we needed to oppose the fall of countries to communism, but it never seemed to me that communism was the root cause, but Soviet instigated revolutions and power plays that was more the issue.

It paints a vivid picture of the media consistently doing the government's bidding by painting our mass murdering allies as heroes, while massively amplifying minor crimes committed by those we consider enemies (e.g. Communists).*

We don't have one media. It's more accurate to say that we have leftist media (Jacobin, Chomsky), establishment liberal media (NY Times), generic for profit media (NBC nightly news, etc ), conservative populist media (Fox, Breitbert), conservative high-brow media )(City Journal, Commentary) and that all of them will at times exaggerate the crimes of their enemies and whitewash the crimes of their allies or ideological compatriots. Chomsky for example was himself guilty of whitewashing the Khemer Rouge back in the mid-1970s when he should have known better (see http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm )

Or read this New York Times obituary about Mao which totally whitewashes him -- http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1226.... The NY Times is hardly amplifying the crimes of communism!

Or going back further consider how the liberal mainstream press whitewashed the horrors of communist Russia (see this review of Malcolm Muggeridge's memoirs for example -- http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-... )

At this point I have come to the belief that it is very hard to trust any media source unless you personally know something about the subject and can figure out which sources are credible about that topic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com