Chomsky Eric Herring Piers Robinson

https://web.archive.org/web/20060825202028/http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/200310--.pdf Too polemical or too critical? Chomsky on the study of the news 
media and US foreign policy ERIC HERRING AND PIERS ROBINSON*
Review of International Studies (2003), 29, 553–568 Copyright © British International Studies Association
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210503005539
553
* Thanks to Lance Bennett, Noam Chomsky, Christine Dann, Daniel Hallin, Edward Herman,
Anthony McKeown, Adam Morton, Patricia Owens, Jeff Schmidt, Anna Stavrianakis, Peter Wilkins,
Gadi Wolfsfeld, John Zaller, the International Politics Research Group at Bristol University and the
editorial reviewers for feedback on earlier drafts.
1
Noam Chomsky, ‘On the Bombings’, no date. <http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm>
2
Quoted in Nick Cohen, ‘Why It is Right to be Anti-American’,
The New Statesman
, 14 January 2002,
p. 10.
3
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky,
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass
Media
(New York: Pantheon, 1988), p. xii. See also the edited interviews in Peter R. Mitchell and
John Schoeffel (eds.),
Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
(New York: The New Press,
2002), pp. 348–51.
Too polemical or too critical? 
Chomsky on the study of the news 
media and US foreign policy
ERIC HERRING AND PIERS ROBINSON*
Abstract. Noam Chomsky argues that, while the US news media are adversarial towards the
US government on foreign policy, institutional filters operate to ensure that the criticisms made
generally stay within narrow bounds set by the US political elite. Chomsky’s research in this area
is largely ignored even by academics who agree with this conclusion. The institutional tendency
to filter out anti-elite perspectives applies not only to the news media but also to academia.
Consequently, Chomsky’s work is marginalised due to its emphasis on corporate power,
principled opposition to US foreign policy and the role of academia in buttressing elite power.
Over the last forty years, Noam Chomsky’s views on US foreign policy and the role
of the US news media in manufacturing consent for it have earned him a minority
following among the public, journalists and academics within and beyond the
United States. However, sometimes the comments on his actual or alleged views are
vitriolic. For example, following Chomsky’s posting on the internet of his assessment
of the meaning of the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington,
1
Mackrubin T. Owens, Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College in Newport,
Rhode Island stated that:
it is not an exaggeration to say that the terrorists who planned and executed the attacks of 11
September were merely expressing in more refined form the same anti-Americanism that has
been a staple of the American university for three decades. The ravings of Osama Bin Laden
and those of Noam Chomsky are interchangeable.
2
Often the criticism is of views that he does not actually hold. For example, he is
routinely labelled a conspiracy theorist despite the fact that he explicitly rejects that
mode of analysis.
3
The inapplicability of that label will become apparent below. It
also tends to be assumed that his view is that the news media have a right-wing bias
and are non-adversarial.
4
His view is actually that it is nothing to do with right- or
left-wing bias: instead, there tends to be a liberal and adversarial bias in the media
which serves the crucial function of setting the boundary of critical thought, with
the truth about US foreign policy actually being located outside of that boundary.
The more that the media appear liberal and adversarial, the better they will function
in setting the boundaries of the thinkable. While misinterpretation of anyone’s work
can occur, the misinterpretations of Chomsky’s work show a systematic pattern of
being driven by the ideological frame of reference of those doing the misinterpret-
ing. Even when misinterpretations are pointed out, that frame of reference can make
it impossible for the interlocutor to grasp what Chomsky is saying.
Most commonly, Chomsky is not denounced, misinterpreted or engaged with. He
is simply ignored. In this article we illustrate this in relation to Edward Herman and
Noam Chomsky’s work published in 1988 on the media and US foreign policy titled
Manufacturing Consent.
5
It is important to note at the outset that this article is not
about the rights or wrongs of either Chomsky’s media-foreign policy analysis or his
broader critique of US foreign policy. Rather the article critiques the marginalisation
of a legitimate research agenda that deserves scholarly attention and debate. Chomsky’s
analysis of the media-foreign policy relationship represents a central plank of his
broader critique of power in Western society and the way in which key institutions,
such as the media, reinforce elite interests in society. Whilst the work is co-authored
with a major communications scholar, Chomsky’s views on the US media, as
expressed in 
Manufacturing Consent,
are a regular feature of his work: he often
critiques the US media in his written texts and has been the subject of television
documentaries and interviews on this subject. However,
Manufacturing Consent
represents his formal statement on US media-elite relations. It contains a well-
developed theory of media-elite relations and a large quantity of empirical case-
study testing. Also the media-foreign policy relationship is a subject area that has
commanded significant attention from political communications scholars. As such
Chomsky’s media-foreign policy analysis provides a specific and clearly defined
reference point against which to assess responses to his work.
In this article we show that 
Manufacturing Consent 
has been ignored by leading
US academics working on the relationship between the media and US foreign policy.
We argue that it cannot be the case that this work has been ignored by them because
they disagree with the general thrust of its analysis of media-political elite relations.
Their understanding of news media and its relationship to US foreign policy is in
many ways the same as that of Herman and Chomsky. The standard liberal myth of
the news media in the West – that it is independent of elite interests and provides the
people with the information necessary to ensure that they can hold elites and in
particular governments to democratic account – is rejected widely by academics who
study the news media and US foreign policy, although this self-image is routine
amongst most journalists. In contrast, the most common and empirically substanti-
ated perspective is that, with respect to coverage of US foreign policy, on balance,
554
Eric Herring and Piers Robinson
4
For this misinterpretation of Chomsky, see Andrew Marr’s comments in his televised BBC interview
with Chomsky
, The Big Idea
, British Broadcasting Corporation, February 1996. Unofficial transcript
at <http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/interviews/9602–big-idea.html>
5
Herman, Chomsky,
Manufacturing Consent
.
the US media serve elite interests and undermine democracy. The media do this by
portraying the world in a way that tends to shape the perspective of those entering
the political elite, generate public consent for or at least acquiescence to US foreign
policy and make it difficult for the public to have access to information necessary to
challenge the interests of the elite. This is seen to operate less through censorship
than through a recruitment process that selects and rewards those who see the world
in a way congenial and unchallenging to those elite interests. Uncongenial facts and
framings usually do not have to be censored because they are mostly not even per-
ceived to exist. Herman and Chomsky point out that the title 
Manufacturing
Consent
is actually a quote from mainstream author Walter Lippmann who saw this
relationship as natural and proper.
6
Having outlined the general issues, our article now proceeds in the following steps
to explain the marginalisation of the work of Herman and Chomsky and why it
matters. First, we outline Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model. Second, we
demonstrate its overlap with that of two influential critical analyses of the relation-
ship between the media and US foreign policy by Lance Bennett and Daniel Hallin.
Bennett provides an analysis of the everyday operation of journalism while Hallin
considers what might be an exception to that pattern. Third, we show that, subse-
quently, eight significant studies in the same field and written from a similar per-
spective draw on Bennett and Hallin but not Herman and Chomsky. Fourth, we
consider but reject a personal explanation of this marginalisation and offer instead an
institutional explanation. We argue that the model used by US academia to explain
the media’s subservience to the perspective of the US political elite is broadly
applicable to the operation of US academia itself. It has internalised a myth of
objective academia while remaining silent on the role of the media in serving not
merely political elite interests but also corporate elite interests in the shaping of coverage of US foreign policy. Furthermore, it has failed to provide space for
questioning the legitimacy of US foreign policy. In what is an unusual but necessary move, we show that our own previous work suffered from many of the flaws we have
identified in the work of others. Finally, through a consideration of Chomsky’s
critique, we discuss what is necessary to remedy those flaws.
Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model
In 
Manufacturing Consent
, Herman and Chomsky set out their propaganda model.
It explains why the agenda and framing of news reports on US foreign policy rarely
deviate from those set by US corporate and political elites. Five filters function to
shape news media output, which we label in turn the corporate, advertising,
sourcing, flak and ideological filter. First, the ‘size, ownership and profit orientation
of mass media’ and their shared ‘common interests . . . with other major corpor-
ations, banks, and government’ creates a clash of interest between the media’s
supposed role as a watchdog of the elite and the interests of that elite.
7
Conse-
The news media and US foreign policy
555
6
Ibid., p. xi; Walter Lippman,
Public Opinion
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1921); Noam Chomsky,
Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies
(London: Pluto Press, 1989), p. 16.
7
Herman, Chomsky,
Manufacturing Consent
, pp. 3, 14.
quently, news stories that run contrary to those vested interests are, on balance, less
likely to surface than those consistent with the world view of major corporate
conglomerates. Second, media reliance on advertising revenue introduces a further
constraining link between the news media and the interests of commerce. This
reliance shapes media output in order to appeal to affluent audiences, in whom the
advertisers are most interested. It also limits the amount of critical and controversial
programming because advertisers generally want ‘to avoid programs with serious
complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the “buying mood” ’.
8
Hence, money does not only talk: it also silences. Third, journalists rely over-
whelmingly on elite sources when constructing the news. The need to supply a steady
and rapid flow of ‘important’ news stories combined with the vast public relations
apparatus of government and powerful interests more broadly means that journalists
tend to become heavily reliant on public officials and corporate representatives when
defining and framing the news agenda. Fourth, whenever controversial material is
actually aired it generates a disproportionate degree of ‘flak’ from individuals
connected with powerful interests including ‘corporate community sponsored . . .
institutions’
9
such as the Center for Media and Public Affairs, and Accuracy in
Media (AIM) and government ‘spin doctors’.
10
Such criticism serves to caution
editors and journalists against putting out news stories that are ‘too’ controversial.
Finally, Herman and Chomsky highlight the importance of an ideology of ‘anti-
communism as a control mechanism’ that provided journalists, at least during the
Cold War, with a ready made template with which to ‘understand’ global events, and
provided the political elite with a powerful rhetorical tool with which to criticise as
unpatriotic anyone who questioned US foreign policy.
11
Whilst there may be grounds
for questioning the specific content of this filter following the collapse of most
Communist states and the internal transformation in the direction of capitalism of
many of those that remain, alternative ideological mechanisms, such as the current
‘war on terrorism’ have broadly the same effect upon news output. Moreover,
Herman and Chomsky make clear in the second edition of
Manufacturing Consent
that ‘anti-communism’ was part of a broader agenda of free market rhetoric, US
economic access and massive state subsidies to private corporations.
12
It involved a
much more general opposition to any challenge to elite interests and US economic
penetration of any state be it of the left or right. Hence this ideological filter con-
tinues to be relevant to US foreign policy in the post-Cold War era.
The marginalisation of Herman and Chomsky
As we indicated earlier, the propaganda model shares many similarities with the
influential analyses of the media and US foreign policy by Bennett and Hallin.
13
We
556
Eric Herring and Piers Robinson
8
Ibid., p. 17.
9
Ibid., p. 27.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid., p. 29.
12
Herman, Chomsky,
Manufacturing Consent
, 2001, pp. vii-viii.
13
Daniel C. Hallin,
The ‘Uncensored War’: The Media and Vietnam
(London: University of California
Press, 1986); Lance W. Bennett, ‘Toward a Theory of Press-State Relations in the United States’,
Journal of Communication
, 40:2 (1990), pp.103–25.
now map out those similarities and then examine the divergent attitudes in subse-
quent scholarship to these studies. Bennett uses the label ‘indexing norm’ to refer to
the journalistic routine of relying upon political elites when defining and framing the
news agenda. He argues that:
the presence of an ‘indexing norm’ shared at all levels of the news industry would keep the
news compatible with the shifting political and economic interests of the state while enabling
managers and directors to think and communicate in a relatively benign vocabulary of press
responsibility and balanced journalism.
14
He concentrates on what is effectively the sourcing filter of the propaganda model in
maintaining that journalists fall back on the vast volume of public relations material
disseminated by government in order to generate a steady and rapid supply of
stories.
15
According to Bennett, the indexing hypothesis ‘constitutes a quick and
easy guide for editors and reporters to use in deciding how to cover a story. It is a rule
of thumb that can be defended against questions from uneasy corporate managers
and concerned citizens alike’.
16
In applying the indexing hypothesis to media cover-
age of US policy on Nicaragua during the 1980s, when Congress investigated covert
Central Intelligence Agency operations against that country’s Sandinista government,
Bennett finds that news coverage failed to present criticisms of official viewpoints.
17
He concludes:
the media have helped create a political world that is, culturally speaking, upside-down. It is a
world in which governments are able to define their own publics and where ‘democracy’
becomes whatever the government ends up doing.
18
The belief is widespread that US media coverage during the Vietnam War departed
from the picture painted by Bennett and was oppositional to the US political elite
during the war. However, Hallin’s central finding in 
The ‘Uncensored War’
is that
media coverage initially reflected the consensus among the US political elite and
then reflected the debates within it when it was divided over whether or not the war
could be won at a cost it was prepared to pay. Hence the event probably most cited
as a case of news media influence on government actually turns out to be a case of
political elites becoming divided over policy with critical news coverage merely being
a reflection of this. Hallin concludes, consistent with Herman and Chomsky, that the
US media rarely produce coverage deviating from the range of views expressed in
Washington.
The deference of US journalists to the US political elite is seen by Hallin to have
been driven by two factors. The first was the ideology of the Cold War (that is, the
ideological filter of the propaganda model). The second was the notion of ‘objective’
journalism (which is treated by Herman and Chomsky as a product of the operation
of the five filters of the propaganda model).
19
According to Hallin, the ‘ideological
system’ and ‘myth’ of ‘objective’ journalism developed as a way of legitimising the
The news media and US foreign policy
557
14
Bennett, ‘Press-State Relations’, p. 109.
15
Ibid., p. 103.
16
Ibid., pp. 108–9.
17
Ibid., p. 113.
18
Ibid., p. 125.
19
Herman, Chomsky,
Manufacturing Consent
,p.2.
those who are organising to end that subservience. This does mean that there is no
space whatsoever for scholarship which critiques corporate power, opposes much of
US foreign policy on grounds of principle or is predicated on challenging the liberal
myth of objective academia. As can be seen in 
New Political Science
, the journal of
the American Political Science Association’s 
Caucus for a New Political Science
, neo-
Marxist scholars in particular work from this perspective, and Chomsky is a
Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Herman an Emeritus
Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Chomsky challenges what he calls the dominant ‘commissar culture’ of academia
more broadly rather than simply of scholars of the news media and US foreign
policy. For Chomsky, academics in capitalist societies tend to be ideological managers
who – usually unwittingly – shield the elite of which they are a part from serious
scrutiny by diverting attention from, or generating ideological rationales for, their
actions.
65
Those with power will try to keep it, and those with power in capitalist
societies are primarily political elites and corporate conglomerates. Existing
institutions – including the universities and governments as well as the media –
function mainly to protect the interests of society’s elite. This does not require
conspiratorial coordination, simply rational pursuit of perceived self-interest. In
protecting those interests, many millions of people are killed through repressive
violence and denial of the means necessary for survival despite the fact that the
world has more than enough resources to meet the basic needs of all. Through the
social sciences and humanities and related careers such as journalism, people often
learn to be obedient and then to produce obedience in others. This is rewarded with
inclusion and advancement deeper into the elite. The greater the internalisation of
the elite perspective, the more that obedience will feel like freedom and lack of
constraint.
66
On the whole, social science research gravitates towards innocuous
work or directly anti-democratic work, that is, research which assists elite control of
society.
67
In a comment that applies to some of our own earlier work as well the
work of others surveyed in this article, ‘part of the genius . . . of the higher
education system is that it can get people to sell out even while they think they’re
doing exactly the right thing’.
68
The academics surveyed in this article are very
committed to what they see as critical work. However, they operate without question-
ing or even acknowledging the existence of elite power or their own role in
buttressing it, never mind assisting those who are organising efforts to challenge it.
Such academics are neutralised and serve to mark the boundary of legitimate
The news media and US foreign policy
567
65
In addition to the items in notes 41 and 59, see Mitchell, Schoeffel,
Understanding Power
,ch.7.
66
Ibid., pp. 247–8. For a brilliant exploration of how all forms of professional training (including
academic training) inculcate not only skills but also ideological discipline, and also how professionals
can survive professional training with their values intact, see Jeff Schmidt,
Disciplined Minds: A
Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives
(New
York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002) and Schmidt’s website <http://disciplined-minds.com/>
67
Mitchell, Schoeffel,
Understanding Power
, p. 239.
68
Ibid., p. 242. Although Chomsky discusses explicit efforts at censorship, his main concern is with a
tendency towards internalisation of an elite perspective which makes conscious censorship or even
self-censorship unnecessary. For a survey of claims of censorship across the political spectrum in US
academic institutions in relation to commenting on the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the
United States, see John K. Wilson,
The State of Academic Freedom, 2001–2002: A Report 
(2001)
<http://www.collegefreedom.org/report2002.htm> 
critique. For example, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, amongst academics we can
expect vast amounts of support for enquiry into terrorist threats to the United
States and relatively little for enquiry into US support for terrorism. Chomsky’s
work facilitates the consideration of these important issues which most academics
neglect.
It is not that academics are uncritical: that is the opposite of Chomsky’s position.
Like journalists, it is vitally important that academics are critical because that
criticism makes it look as if there is a serious debate. However, the boundaries of the
debate are drawn in such a way that more fundamental challenges to corporate as
well as political elites are rarely considered and rejected but made invisible or made
to seem completely out of touch with reality. Chomsky focuses primarily on the
repression promoted by the United States, although he also writes about repression
by its official enemies. This is often treated by his critics such as Owens quoted at the
beginning of this article as particularly damning, and proof that he is not interested
in opposing repression but in indulging anti-American self-flagellation. However, his
position is based on what he sees as moral truisms which have been obscured by
indoctrination, namely, that people have responsibility for the foreseeable conse-
quences of their actions and that they should concentrate their efforts where they
will help the most people. On the whole, that is likely to be within their own state,
and this is especially the case with the United States which he sees as a relatively
open society.
69
Chomsky interprets the marginalisation of his work within academia
as reassuring evidence that he is indeed challenging elite power while acknowledging
that work aimed at producing more political space for analyses which contribute to
effective challenges to elite power is valuable. His central (and hence least addressed)
point is that being an academic while doing at best nothing to assist those who are
opposing the exploitation of the ordinary people who pay your wages is morally
reprehensible and yet is made normal and acceptable by the class structure of
society.
70
Chomsky gets immense numbers of invitations to speak at universities and
sells many books, and so one might conclude from this that he is not marginalised.
However, we have shown that he is marginalised by the academic specialists in his
area. More importantly, in the end this is not about Chomsky, but about the overall
marginalisation of the perspective which he represents. Analysis of Chomsky’s
marginalisation by academia is worthwhile only to the extent that it contributes to
academia facing up to its responsibility to acknowledge and end its active and
passive participation in supporting elite interests.
568
Eric Herring and Piers Robinson
69
Ibid., pp. 286–8.
70
In Mitchell, Schoeffel,
Understanding Power
, pp. 351–5.
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