The following quotes are all from the lectures of Marv Waterstone and Noam Chomsky, which make up Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance. Buy it cheaply at Haymarket Books.
All of the quotes below are taken slightly or more out of context, but the point that I try to make is that the New York Times is unreliable, except in knowing that it can be relied on to cater to the US state and its advertisers, except when those interests could clash (of which no examples can spring to my mind).
Note: the quotes below are from the first 40% of the book; I've not read farther yet. The book is, so far, excellent and radiant, as would be expected when Chomsky has contributed.
MARV WATERSTONE
Do the media companies engage in censorship? Yes. They certainly do. At a minimum, they engage in censorship of this kind, of selection bias. So how many of you know the motto of the New York Times?
Crowd: All the news …
Female: That’s fit to print.
“All the news that’s fit to print,” right, which in fact should be modified to “all the news that fits, it prints.” And how much news fits? It depends on the advertising space that’s taken up in the paper. What’s left over is the news hole, which is how it’s described, and maybe has a kind of negative connotation.
Waterstone Lecture, January 15, 2019.
NOAM CHOMSKY
Let’s take a look at the worst international crime since the Second World War, the US invasion of Vietnam, then all of Indochina, leaving many millions of corpses and three countries in ruins. Sometimes the assault was undertaken with explicit directives reaching to such levels of criminality that they defy words, such as the infamous orders that Kissinger obediently transmitted to the US Air Force calling for “a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves” (Becker)—a call for genocide that is hard to duplicate in the historical record. Orders that were carried out, providing a major stimulus for the creation of the Khmer Rouge, as revealed by scholarship (Ben Kiernan and others) but hardly penetrates to common sense.
The wars ended in 1975, and of course everyone of any significance had to write a comment about it. There were basically two groups. The hawks said that if we’d fought harder, we could have won. Maybe we were stabbed in the back by antiwar protesters. The second group was the doves. At the extreme critical end in the mainstream, perhaps, was Anthony Lewis of the New York Times. Again, it’s always useful to look at the establishment Left, marking the limits of what it is OK to say.
Lewis wrote in New York Times (May 1, 1975) that the war began with “blundering efforts to do good.” How do we know that? Because it’s an axiom, a necessary truth. If the United States did it, it was an effort to do good. You don’t need any evidence for that. That’s hegemonic common sense. Why “blundering efforts”? Because it didn’t work.
So the war began with blundering efforts to do good, “but by 1969 it was clear to most of the world—and most Americans—that the intervention had been a disastrous mistake…. The argument [against the war] was that the United States had misunderstood the cultural and political forces at work in Indochina—that it was in a position where it could not impose a solution except at a price too costly to itself.”
That’s the extreme left criticism expressible in the mainstream.
There was another view expressed at the same time: that the war was “fundamentally wrong and immoral … not a mistake” (Rielly 1987). But that’s of course the kind of anti-American hysteria you expect from the wild men in the wings, so it was quite reasonable to deny it expression.
Except that the wild men in the wings in this case were the large majority of the population.
There are regular studies of US public opinion on international affairs. The major monitor of public opinion on such matters is the respected Chicago Council of International Relations. They had polls in 1975, and, of course, among the questions posed were questions about attitudes toward the war in Vietnam. There were various options available. One of the options was that the war was “not a mistake,” it was “fundamentally wrong and immoral.” That option was selected by 70 percent of the population. The “wings” must be pretty broad to cover all of these wild men. One can sympathize with the contempt of the liberal intellectual elite for “the stupidity of the average man,” who doesn’t even realize what it wouldn’t do to say.
That question continued to be asked in the polls for many years, with about the same result. Roughly two-thirds or more said the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake. You would be hard put to find one comment by left-liberal intellectuals who made it into the mainstream who could express the views of the population.
There is, of course, a lingering question. What did people mean by this?
That question was finally raised by the academic director of the studies, political scientist John Rielly. He wrote that the responses show a “preference to avoid undertaking major burdens in foreign interventions.” Possibly. Or possibly they show that the public thought that the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake. It wouldn’t have been hard to determine the answer, but apparently the inquiry was never undertaken. Perhaps it was considered superfluous since the right conclusion is so obvious.
All of this raises quite interesting questions about the hold that hegemonic common sense exercises over the responsible men as compared with the stupid and ignorant masses. Quite interesting questions. It wouldn’t be too surprising to discover that the experts in legitimation are more deeply indoctrinated than those who are not subjected constantly to streams of propaganda and are not its purveyors. There is some evidence to this effect on a number of issues, but it’s never been investigated systematically, as far as I know.
Chomsky Lecture, January 17, 2019.
One key factor during this period in terms of militarism was the end of the Cold War accompanying the fall of the Soviet Union, beginning with the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989 (at that point, we were against walls), and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Among other things, that factor meant a need to find a replacement enemy to keep the military-industrial complex in business. Once the Soviet Union fell, this was a little bit of a problem. There was even some talk of something like a peace dividend. Once we didn’t really have an enemy, maybe we could start spending these untold millions and billions at home, but that quickly evaporated.
Basically, what we did, we found a new enemy. The global war on terror is the perfect enemy. In fact, it’s better than a state-based adversary. It can never really be defeated, but it can (in fact, must) be continually fought.
This period is what Michael Ignatieff in Prospect Magazine called “Empire Lite.” It’s got a nice ring to it. It sounds good. Says Ignatieff, the new US Empire
'is not like the empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man’s burden. We’re no longer in the era of the United Fruit Company [another interesting choice given what happened in Guatemala in this period], when American corporations needed the Marines to secure their investment overseas. 21st-century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an Empire Lite. A global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known.' (2003)
“Lite” right until you need something heavier, in other words, “the most awesome military power the world has ever known.” In fact, just for the record, and contrary to these claims, Ignatieff’s New York Times colleague, Thomas Friedman, openly proclaimed in his column, March 28, 1999, at the time of the bombing of Yugoslavia, that it takes the military contractor McDonnell Douglas to ensure the safety of McDonald’s around the world. Slightly different view of Empire Lite.
Chomsky Lecture, January 17, 2019.
Elsewhere, it was also necessary to discipline countries that were tempted to “go berserk with fanatical nationalism” by trying to control their own resources. That’s the New York Times editors in 1954 (August 6) praising the CIA coup that overthrew the parliamentary government of Iran and installed the rule of the Shah. Repercussions are right on the front pages until today. Incidentally, the New York Times appears to have a near 100 percent record of supporting military coups that are backed directly or supported by the US.
Chomsky Lecture, January 31, 2019.
One of the good things about the United States is that it’s a pretty open society, more than any other that I know of. We have good access to internal records, not everything, of course, but there’s a reasonably good record of release of documents. In this case we were helped quite a lot by Dan Ellsberg. The Pentagon Papers (PP) revealed a huge amount of material on the war, soon supplemented by government release of many documents once the dam had been breached. That included quite revealing internal discussions on the reasons for the early intervention in Vietnam in support of France, which set the stage for what followed.
This material has mostly been disregarded. In the New York Times edition of the PP, all that most people have seen, you don’t find any of this material. The focus is on the sixties, the failure. But the early reasoning is interesting and instructive. Essentially, our old friend the domino theory. The argument was that if Vietnam carried out successful independent development, it would be what Kissinger later called a “virus” that would “spread contagion.” It would be a model that might be followed by others in the region who had suffered the harsh consequences of imperialism. They might want to follow the same course, and the system of global domination—the Grand Area—might seriously erode.
[...]
Planners were concerned that the contagion might spread not just through mainland Southeast Asia, but all the way to Indonesia. Vietnam didn’t matter much, but Indonesia did. A big country, very rich resources. If the rot spread as far as Indonesia, it might reach Japan—the “super-domino,” in the words of the prominent Asia scholar John Dower. If Southeast and East Asia became independent, what we call communist, Japan would be tempted to “accommodate” this bloc of states and become its technological and industrial center.
There’s a name for that system. It was called the New Order in Asia that Japanese fascists were trying to establish. In the early 1950s, the United States was not ready to lose the Pacific phase of World War II, which was fought to prevent Japan from establishing its new order. Obviously, planners weren’t going to accept that.
How then do you prevent it? When a virus is spreading contagion, you must destroy the virus and inoculate potential targets. That was achieved. Vietnam was virtually destroyed. It’s not a model for anybody, and is by now increasingly integrated into the global system dominated by US-based corporations. In the surrounding countries, harsh, brutal military dictatorships were established, preventing contagion. Indonesia was the most important domino. The contagion was blocked in Indonesia in 1965 by an unusually brutal US-backed military coup that killed hundreds of thousands of people and totally suppressed all dissent. The main political parties were wiped out. The country has yet to recover, even to discover what happened, all effectively concealed.
It was not concealed in the West, which could scarcely contain its euphoria about the “staggering mass slaughter” that was “a gleam of light in Asia” (New York Times), a “boiling bloodbath” that provided “new hope” for the region (the news weeklies).
Chomsky Lecture, January 31, 2019.
The US was even condemned by the World Court for “unlawful use of force”—aka international terrorism—and ordered to pay substantial reparations to Nicaragua and to call off its terrorist war. Of course, that was disregarded, and the terror was escalated. The World Court was dismissed by the New York Times as a “hostile forum,” so we don’t have to pay any attention to it. A few years earlier the same Court was lauded as a noble institution when it ruled in favor of the US in a case involving Iran. It all continues right to the present. I mentioned one case, Honduras. Well, that’s “our little region over here.”
Chomsky Lecture, January 31, 2019.
The State of the Union talk last Tuesday was very well timed for our topic this week. While Marv was discussing the grim effects of the use of fossil fuels, the president declared—I’ll quote him—that “we have unleashed a revolution in American energy. The United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world. For the first time in sixty-five years, we are a net exporter of”—the means to destroy organized human life on Earth. The last few words, after the pause, are my paraphrase of his word “energy,” regrettably, an accurate one.
There were, of course, fact checkers. All the newspapers went through the speech to list all the lies and misleading statements. The New York Times annotated the text with corrections and qualifications. But the remarks I just quoted escaped unscathed. For very good reasons. They are largely correct. Actually, the only qualification is that while the Trump administration has been working overtime to increase the severe threat to organized life, the revolution was actually underway before. Obama had already substantially increased opportunities for fossil fuel extraction. And he wasn’t the first.
Chomsky Lecture, February 7, 2019.
The next item is a front-page story a couple of days ago in the New York Times, considered so important that they ran a special online section on it. The headline is, “Monster Texas field revives US oil fortunes.” The monster field is called the Permian. It’s between New Mexico and Texas. It’s now bursting with production and exploration. And the biggest concern for them is how to create more capacity to get all that oil to market. Its bounty has also empowered the United States diplomatically, allowing it to impose sanctions on Iran and Venezuela without concern that there might be an effect on oil production. So we’re in good shape to attack the rest of the world freely. The Permian generates more oil than any of the 14 members of OPEC except for Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Remember that’s just one of our oil fields. Domestic oil production increased by 2 million barrels a day last year for a record of 12 million barrels a day, making the United States once again the world’s top producer. As many as fifteen oil and gas pipelines serving the Permian are expected to be completed by the middle of 2020, potentially increasing exports from the Gulf of Mexico fourfold to 8 million barrels a day after 2021.
ExxonMobil became the most active driller in the basin. It projects that it will increase production fivefold by 2025, others as well. Shell’s Permian general manager says, “We’re not here through one boom and bust. We are here developing a generational resource.”
There’s one word missing from the report: “climate.” Also missing is the fact that the world’s top producer is also the top per capita polluter. And also missing is a rather crucial fact: if this does go on for a generation as the Shell manager predicts, we’re doomed.
Not mentioned.
The reporter is Clifford Krauss. He’s one of the top senior reporters at the New York Times. Highly qualified, highly experienced, very knowledgeable. He knows all about what is missing in the report, what it means. And, of course, so do the editors. That’s not unusual. In fact, it’s uniform. If you look through the regular and especially the business press, including quite serious journals like the Financial Times, you find exactly the same thing, consistently without a break, as far as I’ve seen. Many euphoric discussions of the great increase in oil production but no mention of the word “climate” or any of the consequences. Sometimes there is mention of environmental damage. So, for example, the New York Times had a long front- and inside-page thousand-word story a couple of days ago about how Trump was opening up vast new areas for oil drilling in Wyoming, Nevada, other areas around there. Euphoric.
The article does mention environmental issues. It says there might be problems for ranchers, they might be running out of water because of the fracking. What about human (and other) life on Earth? Not one word. Again, not ignorance, they all know about it. Everything we’re talking about and much more, they are well aware of.
Chomsky Lecture, January 31, 2019.
One last example. Ryan Zinke, as you probably know, was forced to resign as secretary of the interior because of all kinds of corruption charges, which turns out to be pretty standard. So he left and there’s a new guy appointed, David Bernhardt. According to the report, “While Mr. Zinke had been the public face of some of the largest rollbacks of public land protections in the nation’s history, Mr. Bernhardt was the one who was quietly pulling the levers to carry them out, opening up millions of acres of land and water to oil, gas, and coal companies” (New York Times, February 4, 2019). He’s described by allies and opponents alike as having played a crucial role in advancing what Mr. Trump has described as an energy dominance agenda for the country. One expert on environmental law at the University of Colorado Law School says, “Bernhardt has really been running the show directing the policy shop in a very strong way.”
Well, Bernhardt is a former lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry. The new appointment for the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler, is a former lobbyist for the coal industry. So both of the two offices that deal with environment are in safe hands. You can sleep easily tonight.
Bernhardt’s views on global warming don’t seem to have been reported, at least I can’t find them, although Wheeler’s have. During his Senate confirmation hearing, he was asked by a senator what he thought about global warming. He said that it’s probably happening, but it’s way down on the list of urgent issues. He’d rank it about maybe eighth or ninth, so we can forget about it.
Chomsky Lecture, January 31, 2019.