What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream, by Noam Chomsky
If you’ve read George Orwell’s Animal Farm which he wrote in the mid-1940s, it was a satire on the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state. It was a big hit. Everybody loved it. Turns out he wrote an introduction to Animal Farm which was suppressed. It only appeared 30 years later. Someone had found it in his papers. The introduction to Animal Farm was about “Literary Censorship in England” and what it says is that obviously this book is ridiculing the Soviet Union and its totalitarian structure. But he said England is not all that different. We don’t have the KGB on our neck, but the end result comes out pretty much the same. People who have independent ideas or who think the wrong kind of thoughts are cut out.
I read this essay, by coincidence, on the train on my way to the Newseum, thereby riddling my entire experience of the museum with cynicism. Thanks, Noam. In short, the mainstream media is watered-down because it’s owned by corporations that are interested in promoting their own interests, appealing to a beige majority, and because journalists at respectable papers have spent so much time learning good manners in school that radicals don’t wind up working for the Grey Lady. So much of what Noam Chomsky says I agree with only ambivalently; however, this piece might be the most directly correct thing of his that I’ve come across.
