Noam Chomsky on Mass Media Obsession With Russia and the Stories Not Being
Covered in the Trump Era
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! Published July 27, 2018
TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: We continue our interview with Noam Chomsky, world-renowned
dissident, linguist and author, now in Tucson at the University of Arizona.
I asked him about a recent mix-up on Fox & Friends, in which the hosts
thought they were interviewing former Democratic congressional candidate, a
current one, Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona, who supports Immigration and
Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE, but, in fact, they were actually
speaking to a Massachusetts Democratic congressional candidate, Barbara
L'Italien, who opposes ICE. Here is how the interview started.
SEN. BARBARA L'ITALIEN: Good morning. I'm actually here to speak directly to
Donald Trump. I feel that what's happening at the border is wrong. I'm a
mother of four. And I believe that separating kids from their parents is
illegal and inhumane. I'm actually Barbara L'Italien. I'm a state senator
representing a large immigrant community. I'm running for Congress in
Massachusetts. I keep thinking about what we're putting parents through,
imagining how terrifying that must be for those families, imagining how it
would feel not knowing if I'd ever see my kids again. We have to stop
abducting children and ripping them from their parents' arms -
ROB SCHMITT: OK -
SEN. BARBARA L'ITALIEN: - stop putting kids in cages -
ROB SCHMITT: You want to -
SEN. BARBARA L'ITALIEN: - and stop making 3-year-olds defend themselves in
court.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Barbara L'Italien said a lot there, but she was then cut
off, with the shock of the Fox & Friends crew in the morning that they had
the wrong Democratic congressional candidate. But this kind of media
activism also just goes to the whole issue of the media, Noam Chomsky, the
issue of Fox News becoming really state media, with - you have the person
who supported the sexual harasser Roger Ailes, Bill Shine, now a top aide to
President Trump in the White House. That's gotten little attention. So you
have Fox being a mouthpiece for Trump and a place for him to hear what
people have to say, and the other networks very much running counter to
Trump, on certain issues, CNNand MSNBC. But your thoughts?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, my frank opinion is that - I must say I don't pay much
attention to television, so I don't know a great deal about it. But, in
general, I think the media - first of all, Fox News is, by now, basically a
joke. It's, as you said, state media. The other media, I think, are focusing
on issues which are pretty marginal. There are much more serious issues that
are being put to the side. So, the worst of - even on the case of
immigration, once again, I think the real question is dealing with the roots
of immigration, our responsibility for it, and what we can do to overcome
that. And that's almost never discussed. But I think that's the crucial
issue. And I think we find the same across the board.
So, of all Trump's policies, the one that is the most dangerous and
destructive, in fact poses an existential threat, is his policies on climate
change, on global warming. That's really destructive. And we're facing an
imminent threat, not far removed, of enormous damage. The effects are
already visible but nothing like what's going to come. A sea level rise of a
couple of feet will be massively destructive. It will make today's
immigration issues look like trivialities. And it's not that the
administration is unaware of this. So, Donald Trump, for example, is
perfectly aware of the dangerous effects, in the short term, of global
warming. So, for example, recently he applied to the government of Ireland
for permission to build a wall to protect his golf course in Ireland from
rising sea levels. And Rex Tillerson, who was supposed to be the adult in
the room before he was thrown out, as CEO of ExxonMobil, was devoting
enormous resources to climate change denial, although he had, sitting on his
desk, the reports of ExxonMobil scientists, who, since the '70s, in fact,
were on the forefront of warning of the dire effects of this accelerating
phenomenon. I don't know what word in the language - I can't find one - that
applies to people of that kind, who are willing to sacrifice the literal -
the existence of organized human life, not in the distant future, so they
can put a few more dollars in highly overstuffed pockets. The word "evil"
doesn't begin to approach it. These are the kinds of issues that should be
under discussion. Instead, what's being - there is a focus on what I believe
are marginalia.
So, take, say, the huge issue of interference in our pristine elections. Did
the Russians interfere in our elections? An issue of overwhelming concern in
the media. I mean, in most of the world, that's almost a joke. First of all,
if you're interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the
Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared
with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support.
Israeli intervention in US elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians
may have done, I mean, even to the point where the prime minister of Israel,
Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president,
and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the
president's policies - what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015. Did
Putin come to give an address to the joint sessions of Congress trying to -
calling on them to reverse US policy, without even informing the president?
And that's just a tiny bit of this overwhelming influence. So if you happen
to be interested in influence of - foreign influence on elections, there are
places to look. But even that is a joke.
I mean, one of the most elementary principles of a functioning democracy is
that elected representatives should be responsive to those who elected them.
There's nothing more elementary than that. But we know very well that that
is simply not the case in the United States. There's ample literature in
mainstream academic political science simply comparing voters' attitudes
with the policies pursued by their representatives, and it shows that for a
large majority of the population, they're basically disenfranchised. Their
own representatives pay no attention to their voices. They listen to the
voices of the famous 1 percent - the rich and the powerful, the corporate
sector. The elections - Tom Ferguson's stellar work has demonstrated, very
conclusively, that for a long period, way back, US elections have been
pretty much bought. You can predict the outcome of a presidential or
congressional election with remarkable precision by simply looking at
campaign spending. That's only one part of it. Lobbyists practically write
legislation in congressional offices. In massive ways, the concentrated
private capital, corporate sector, super wealth, intervene in our elections,
massively, overwhelmingly, to the extent that the most elementary principles
of democracy are undermined. Now, of course, all that is technically legal,
but that tells you something about the way the society functions. So, if
you're concerned with our elections and how they operate and how they relate
to what would happen in a democratic society, taking a look at Russian
hacking is absolutely the wrong place to look. Well, you see occasionally
some attention to these matters in the media, but very minor as compared
with the extremely marginal question of Russian hacking.
And I think we find this on issue after issue, also on issues on which what
Trump says, for whatever reason, is not unreasonable. So, he's perfectly
right when he says we should have better relations with Russia. Being
dragged through the mud for that is outlandish, makes - Russia shouldn't
refuse to deal with the United States because the US carried out the worst
crime of the century in the invasion of Iraq, much worse than anything
Russia has done. But they shouldn't refuse to deal with us for that reason,
and we shouldn't refuse to deal with them for whatever infractions they may
have carried out, which certainly exist. This is just absurd. We have to
move towards better - right at the Russian border, there are very extreme
tensions, that could blow up anytime and lead to what would in fact be a
terminal nuclear war, terminal for the species and life on Earth. We're very
close to that. Now, we could ask why. First of all, we should do things to
ameliorate it. Secondly, we should ask why. Well, it's because NATO expanded
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in violation of verbal promises to
Mikhail Gorbachev, mostly under Clinton, partly under first Bush, then
Clinton expanded right to the Russian border, expanded further under Obama.
The US has offered to bring Ukraine into NATO. That's the kind of a
heartland of Russian geostrategic concerns. So, yes, there's tensions at the
Russian border - and not, notice, at the Mexican border. Well, those are all
issues that should be of primary concern. The fate of - the fate of
organized human society, even of the survival of the species, depends on
this. How much attention is given to these things as compared with, you
know, whether Trump lied about something? I think those seem to me the
fundamental criticisms of the media.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident, author and
linguist, now a laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the
University of Arizona, Tucson. He taught for 50 years at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tune in next week when
we continue our conversation with Noam Chomsky about Gaza, Israel's new
nationality law, the recent Trump-Putin summit, Iran, North Kora, the war in
Yemen and more. In December, Noam Chomsky will be celebrating his 90th
birthday.
Oh, and happy birthday to Rob Young here at Democracy Now! And Democracy
Now! has a job opening for a broadcast engineer in our New York studio. Find
out more at democracynow.org.
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