Factchecking the Factchecker on Chomsky, Russia and Media Access
Millions of people in the Soviet Union, including virtually all intellectuals, had access to and tuned into Western media in the 1970s.
Washington Post Editorial Page, Meet Noam Chomsky
The Washington Post stands firm against Russian aggression, since Putin has violated an “international norm” that is “uncontroversial.” Do those rules apply to the US, though?
The Question of US ‘Democracy Promotion’ in the Newspaper of Record
Today’s New York Times has a piece about whether the Obama administration is as committed to a policy of “democracy promotion” as the Bush administration had been. To anyone familiar with US history of inhibiting and undermining democracies, the whole concept must seem rather absurd.
When Reporters Talk About Iran and ‘the World,’ They Mean Something Else
When US journalists talk about what “the world” thinks of Iran’s nuclear program, it’s important to remember that they’re not usually talking about “the world”– just one very powerful part of it.
New York Times Finds Noam Chomsky Fit to Print
Left-wing activist and author Noam Chomsky is in the New York Times today: The American linguist Noam Chomsky, a prominent source of intellectual inspiration for President Hugo Chavez, made a new appeal on Wednesday for the release of Maria Lourdes Afiuni, a judge arrested two years ago by the secret intelligence police. If you find […]
David Brooks Gets Occupy Wall Street and Al-Qaeda in Same Sentence
New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a tedious column today (10/11/11) about how the real radicals are the centrists, not the Wall Street occupiers. (Read Dean Baker to see what Brooks is getting wrong.) But this jumped out at me: A third believe the U.S. is no better than Al-Qaeda, according to a New […]
Zakaria: All U.S. Presidents Support Democracy (Except When They Don’t)
In the Washington Post (7/7/11), Fareed Zakaria tries to defend Barack Obama against the criticism that he needs a more consistent foreign policy. He writes: All American presidents have supported and should support the spread of democracy. The real question is: Should that support involve active measures to topple undemocratic regimes, especially military force? Since […]
NY Times and the Israel/Palestine ‘Status Quo’
The New York Times has a piece today (5/18/11) previewing Barack Obama’s Israel/Palestine speech, calling it a “chance to reshape the debate,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. One thing to always pay attention to in coverage of this issue is the language used to frame the discussion. The piece mentioned Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’ recent […]
Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now!
Today’s broadcast of Democracy Now! featured an excerpt of Noam Chomsky’s address at FAIR’s 25th anniversary celebration. Watch it: Want to see the whole event–with more of Chomsky, Michael Moore, Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman? Buy the DVD from FAIR today.
Noam Chomsky, Time Magazine (Reader)’s Person of the Year
A letter in the new issue of Time magazine offers an alternate suggestion for Person of the Year (the magazine chose Facebook‘s Mark Zuckerberg):
Why the Biggest Killers See Themselves as Victims
Glenn Greenwald (Salon, 6/3/10), in a compelling blog post on “Victimhood, Aggression and Tribalism,” quotes Noam Chomsky from Imperial Ambitions: In one of his many speeches, to U.S. troops in Vietnam, [Lyndon] Johnson said plaintively, “There are three billion people in the world and we have only two hundred million of them. We are outnumbered […]
NYT, Iran and the ‘International Consensus’
A deal between Iran, Brazil and Turkey to ship some of Iran’s uranium out of the country to be enriched in Turkey and returned for use in a Iranian medical reactor has elicited some elite media panic. An early New York Times Web headline read, “Iran Offers to Ship Uranium, Complicating Sanctions Talks.” The Wall […]
Noam Chomsky on Healthcare and the Media
Via an interview with Raw Story (3/22/10): The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor added that it’s a damning referendum on American democracy that one of the most highly supported components of the effort nationally, the public insurance option, was jettisoned. He partly blamed the media for refusing to stress how favorably it’s viewed by the […]
Noam Chomsky Excavates the George Will Memory Hole
In a blog post about how it must have been “So Much Nicer to Be George Will Before the Internet” (2/17/09), A Tiny Revolution‘s Jonathan Schwarz looks back over how “on Sunday George Will made things up so he can claim global warming isn’t happening” to “a funny story of Noam Chomsky’s from the book […]
Globe Pursues Media’s Corporate Democratic Dreams
Noam Chomsky points out that a Boston Globe analysis (11/9/08) of the Obama victory claims that the president-elect owes nothing to “traditional Democratic constituencies” like labor, women, ethnic minorities and the peace movement, because a “grassroots army of millions”—seemingly unconnected to such constituencies—”propelled” Obama’s win. It’s worth noting, however, that this idea of a Democratic […]
The Journalist From Mars
The proper topic for an occasion like this, I suppose, is pretty obvious: It would be the question of how the media have handled the major story of the past months, the issue of the “war on terrorism,” so-called, specifically in the Islamic world. Incidentally, by media here I intend the term to be understood […]
Ritually Denouncing Chomsky
It’s a rare day when Noam Chomsky’s name surfaces in mainstream media. But Anthony Lewis’ June 23 New York Times column on the reported arrest of Pol Pot took a passing swipe at the MIT linguist and social critic. “A few Western intellectuals, notably Prof. Noam Chomsky, refused to believe what was going on in […]
Double Standard on Press Freedom
Few topics are of greater concern to the US media than freedom of the press. Their treatment of this topic thus provides a useful test of factors that shape the media product. Specifically, by comparing the reaction to abuses by US friends and US enemies, we can determine the relative weight of journalists’ professed values […]
