@@title@@

Summer 2002

Last | Contents | Next

Issue 43

Feedback

From Edward Herman

I was taken aback by the review of Russell Kick's book, You Are Being Lied To, by Phil Edwards, in Lobster 42. It contains a venomous and completely idiotic attack on Noam Chomsky (and indirectly on me as a co-author of the propaganda model), and it has other deficiencies as well. Let me elaborate.

Edwards quotes Kick on the meaning of a lie, which Kick says is 'elastic', encompassing deliberate falsehoods, lies of omission, an untruth 'that the speaker thinks is true', lies that are simply universally believed, etc. Then Edwards quotes Kick on undermining a lie by finding a 'white crow'. Edwards says, 'In other words, you don't need to have the whole picture when to know when its being distorted', then quoting Kick again that people may be getting lies because those lies serve somebody's self-interest.

Edwards then translates Kick into saying that 'if someone else believes things which you don't...You Are Being Lied To...And how do you know this...? Because of that white crow.' But Kick includes in lies things that are universally believed but which may be false, deliberate lies, and other things, some of which are not disprovable simply by a 'white crow' but call for other methods.

There is not the slightest basis in what Kick says for Edwards to impute to him the view that you NEVER 'need to have the whole picture', and there is no basis for suggesting that Kick's view is that lies are merely what other people believe but which I don't believe. This is dishonest caricature.

Edwards then says:

'You know you can recognise the truth when you see it; you know you've seen the evidence; so you know that what you believe is the truth, and anyone saying otherwise is lying to you.

Spelt out like this, this is a bizarre world view, but it's surprisingly common. Its best know exemplar is probably Noam Chomsky's 'propaganda model' of the media, which has the dubious merit of supplementing its critique of individual journalists with such a range of economic, political, institutional and cultural forces as to put it effectively beyond disproof ('the predictions are well confirmed', Chomsky writes here). Its great virtue is to divide the world into two parts: those who lie and those who tell the truth. Lies (meaning statements, omissions and received opinions that you don't agree with) are spread by liars.'

Edwards is a lazy, as well as irresponsible man, and these sentences amount to charlatanry. He can't even give his one quote from Chomsky with any accuracy and integrity. His quote on 'the predictions are well confirmed' has nothing to do with the propaganda model, but is made by Chomsky toward the end of the paper in Kick, referring to the lessons of political propaganda, on how people's thoughts could be controlled by political parties through political warfare including government propaganda. Edwards is obviously completely unfamiliar with the propaganda model or how it has been used, as spelled out in Manufacturing Consent and other writings by me and Chomsky, and he can't go to the trouble of looking at this extensive evidence, but he knows Chomsky divides the world into liars and truth-tellers.

In fact, we repeatedly explain that journalists rarely lie, and usually behave with complete integrity, operating within complex constraints and on the basis of internalised belief systems. Furthermore, the model does not try to 'predict' anything, but establishes a framework of the forces that are likely to powerfully influence media choices and media work. It suggests hypotheses that can then be tested, and we have done that on many topics. But our method is essentially the comparative method -- to see how the media treat, for example, the crushing of the Turkish trade union movement under the military regime in 1981 versus their treatment of Solidarity's repression by the Communist regime in Poland in the same year. Or how they treat the Polish Communist government's killing of the Catholic priest Jerzy Popieluszko in 1984 versus the murder of church people in U.S. client states in Latin America. Or how they treat elections in friendly client states like El Salvador in the 1980s or Mexico and Russia in the 1990s, versus elections in states on the U.S. hit list, like Nicaragua under the Sandinistas.

This method has proved very fruitful. It is possible to show that in the case of Popieluszko versus the U.S. client state murders, or the different elections, that the media follow an official party line, using different frames, featuring different facts, ignoring others, that have the effect of allowing them to support the official position. In the case of Popieluszko we showed how the media focused with indignation on his pains, the nature of his injuries, and constantly asked how high up responsibility for this crime went. With four U.S. nuns raped and murdered in El Salvador -- inconvenient to the U.S. government supporting that military regime -- we showed that the U.S. media treated this very antiseptically and with brevity, with philosophical mean-derings, and never pursued how high up knowledge of these events went.

Over the years Chomsky and I have produced a great deal of evidence that the propaganda model and comparative method work well, on domestic as well as foreign policy issues (some discussed in a just-issued revised edition of Manufacturing Consent). I have even discussed its application to conspiracy theories, some the media treating as legitimate (the alleged KGB plot to murder the Pope in 1981), others dismissed as mere 'conspiracy theories' (the assassination of John F. Kennedy), according to political criteria easy to understand in our framework. Edwards doesn't know about this -- or about anything.

In short, the notion that Chomsky says that 'what you believe is the truth and anyone saying otherwise is lying to you', is imbecile nonsense. The idea that the propaganda model represents a 'critique of individual journalists', is complete horseshit. That it divides the world into truth-tellers and liars, and that it focuses on lies is also unmitigated nonsense. Edwards hasn't the vaguest notion of what the propaganda model is designed to do, or how it is used in practice, but that hasn't interfered at all with his making these ignorant and stupid claims -- in fact, engaging in genuine lying about Chomsky and his work -- based on an animus of unknown source, doled out in just a couple of paragraphs.

Edwards even talks nonsense about his beloved conspiracy theory. He says that, in contrast with 'the white crow world view which Kick espouses....Conspiracy theory...however green the ink.....is based on critical thinking.' Note the absence of any qualification: All conspiracy theory is so based, no cranks or nuts ever penetrate its hallowed ranks. But if this effusion by Edwards on Kick and Chomsky is a manifestation of the critical thinking of approved conspiracy thinkers, God save us from conspiracy theory.

From Russ Kick

Editor's note: I received a huge e-mail from Russ Kick in response to Phil Edwards' review of his anthology You Are Being Lied To. Here are extracts. Anyone who wants to read the whole thing, contact me and I will e-mail it to you. I have set the extracts from Edwards' review quoted by Kick in another typeface.

Edwards:'....More prosaically Russ Kick identifies differences between successive versions of stories on the Associated Press news wire, announcing in one case that "there can be absolutely no doubt that a story was changed to protect the powerful" (by changing one sentence between two versions)'

Here, Edwards manipulatively down-plays one of my examples of how the Associated Press changes its articles. I must be overreacting because all that happened was that one sentence was changed. Interestingly, Edwards neglects to show this powerful example, since this might let Lobster's readers judge for themselves. Here's the relevant excerpt from my article:

'It involves a fairly short article headlined, "House Bill Targets Those Involved in International Sex Trade." Published in two versions on May 9, 2000, the article notes that the House of Representatives passed a bill increasing penalties on people who bring foreign women and children into the US and force them into the sex trade.

The article first appeared at 6:49 PM. The whitewashed version appeared at 8:00 PM. Both versions are exactly the same except for one portion of a sentence. First, read the eighth paragraph from the original version:

"Smith said he and Rep. Sam Gejdenson, D-Conn., a co-sponsor, recently talked to several women who had been held as 'virtual slaves' in the Washington area by foreign diplomats and employees of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund.'

Pretty shocking, eh? This article appeared soon after the big meeting of the IMF and the World Bank in DC in mid-April 2000. According to two US congressmen, women were held against their will and used as sex slaves by the attendees. But that's not what you found out if you read the final version of the article. Here is the complete eight paragraph from the 8:00 PM version:

"Smith said he and Rep. Sam Gejdenson, D-Conn., a co-sponsor, recently talked to several women who had been held as 'virtual slaves' in the Washington area.'

The phrase 'by foreign diplomats and employees of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund', was deleted, flushed down the memory hole. That is the one and only change made to the entire article.

I think most people would sense that something rotten is afoot. But not Edwards.

'...and asking 'Who called the AP in the intervening hour and got them to yank those fourteen words? 'The trouble is, there's no reason to suppose that anyone did.'

Really? The world's largest newswire releases a story in which two Congress-men say that diplomats and World Bank representatives hold sex slaves hostage in the US; one hour and eleven minutes later, that information -- but only that information -- is stripped out of the article. Yet no one asked for that to happen?

Edwards:'(A Chomskyan analysis would sail over this hurdle - self-censorship is central to the propaganda model - but at the cost of stretching the concept of "lie" (or "propaganda") to breaking point.)'

Again, this is a fascinating proposition. The AP reporter filed a story with damning information from a Congressman. Just over an hour later, with no prompting from anyone, he thinks to himself, 'Hmm, I better cut out the last two prepositional phrases from the sentence where I relate what Rep. Smith told me. I won't cut the whole sentence, just the last fourteen words. Then I'll put this new version out on the wire.'

Edwards: 'Kick doesn't even suggest that some kinds of change are being made more than others: "Overall, the changes are usually made for legitimate reasons. But a few of the changes are highly suspicious and certainly are of benefit to those in power.'

Is this a typo? Edwards quotes me saying exactly what he claims I didn't say. He says I don't 'even suggest that some kinds of change are being made more than others', and then he quotes me unequivocally saying the most changes are for legitimate reasons (corrections, space, etc.), while a minority are made to protect powerful interests.......

Edwards: 'On the other side of the fence, there are the people who expose these anomalies, discrepancies and revisions, providing glimpses of the truth - yourself included, of course. Entirely different standards of evidence apply here. As long as you're challenging received wisdom, it seems, you can say pretty much what you like.Richard Metzger, interviewing someone called Howard Bloom, asks why it is that all Arabs want to kill Jews; Bloom explains that it's not all Arabs - it's all Moslems.'

Again, Edwards is being startlingly dishonest. Metzger's question never mentions 'killing Jews'. It is about -- and I quote -- 'anti-Semitism'. He asks Bloom why anti-Semitism seems so ubiquitous among Arabs. Bloom replies that it has nothing to do with being Arab; rather, it's Islam that inculcates an extreme dislike toward Jews. This point seems hard to argue with. Of course, thanks to Edwards, Lobster's readers would never know that that was Bloom's point....

.....Given that Edwards' review is comprised almost exclusively of distortions and outright falsehoods, readers should follow his advice and choose not to trust what he says about my book. Read it and decide for yourself. I'm not saying this to increase sales of my book. It's fine with me if you check it out from a library or get a copy from a used bookstore....You should be your own judge of what any book says, rather than taking the word of a reviewer who completely misrepresents a book at almost every step.

Last | Contents | Next