Chomsky and Democracy

Political activist Noam Chomsky spoke to a packed house at the University of Tennessee

Chomsky opened the lecture by telling the audience "The guiding principle [for American government] is that as long as the public is under control, everything is fine," he said. "[The traditional argument is] the powerful should gain ends by any possible means. As long as the public is kept under control, public will doesn't matter." Chomsky said this "guiding principle" is not a recent thing, though "Throughout American history, there has been a constant struggle over who should control and who should obey," he said. "The Founding Fathers were ambivalent about democracy." Chomsky added that James Madison, one of the framers of the Constitution, was concerned that if voters could determine policy, it would challenge the privileged. "This is why he put the power in the hands of the Senate, whose primary task is to protect the opulent minority against the majority," he said.

He also discussed how history plays a role in today's public relations and marketing industries. "By World War I, the business class realized that because of new freedoms, it was impossible to control the public by force, so they need new means," he said. "They tried to control of opinion and attitude to divert people from the public arena. This is why the public relations industry was started." Chomsky called elections today "public relations extravaganzas." "You don't want to provide information about the candidates; that's the last thing you want to do," he said. "So you delude people with slogans."

Chomsky ended his lecture with a question for the audience. "Will we subject ourselves to the guiding principle?" he said.

Meanwhile, SOYMB reads that other than in a handful of pockets across the U.S. - including Ohio, Vermont and Washington, D.C. - cable carriers do not give viewers the choice of watching Al Jazeera. That corporate censorship comes as American diplomats harshly criticize the Egyptian government for blocking Internet communication inside the country and as Egypt attempts to block Al Jazeera from broadcasting. Al Jazeera English launched in the fall of 2006, opening a large bureau on K Street in downtown Washington, but has made little progress in persuading cable companies to offer the channel to its customers. Paige Austin, a student at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a former associate producer for Al Jazeera English in Doha, wrote about U.S. cable's refusal to carry the station in a 2010 paper. Austin argues that AJE's willingness to show graphic suffering in the developed world is at odds with the U.S. networks' practice. It's not that American viewers are unaccustomed to seeing violent imagery on the television, but the selection of which mangled corpses to show -- civilians killed by U.S. bombs in Afghanistan is what makes the difference.