From -- http://www.projectcensored.org/stories/2001/intro.html

Introduction: Project Censored 25th Anniversary

By Noam Chomsky

A review of the stories that have been selected by Project Censored over 25 
years reveals several clear patterns. The stories are of considerable 
interest to the media constituencies: the corporate sector, the state 
authorities, and the general public. They fall in a domain in which 
corporate-state interests are rather different from those of the public. 
That such stories would tend to be downplayed, reshaped, and obscured 
- "censored," in the terminology of the project—is only to be expected on the 
basis of even the most rudimentary inspection of the institutional structure 
of the media and their place in the broader society.

Media service to the corporate sector is reflexive: the media are major 
corporations. Like others, they sell a product to a market: the product is 
audiences and the market is other businesses (advertisers). It would be 
surprising indeed if the choice and shaping of media content did not reflect 
the interests and preferences of the sellers and buyers, and the business 
world generally. Even apart from the natural tendency to support state 
power, the linkage of the corporate sector and the state is so close that 
convergence of interests on major issues is the norm. The status of 
audiences is more ambiguous. The product must be available for sale; people 
must be induced to look at the advertisements. But beyond this common 
ground, divisions arise.

We can make a rough distinction between the managerial class and the rest. 
The managers take part in decision-making in the state, the private economy, 
and the doctrinal institutions. The rest are to cede authority to state and 
private elites, to accept what they are told, and to occupy themselves 
elsewhere. There is a corresponding rough distinction between elite and mass 
media, the former aiming to be instructive, though in ways that reflect 
dominant interests; the latter primarily to shape attitudes and beliefs, and 
to divert "the great beast," as Alexander Hamilton termed the annoying public.

The managers must have a tolerably realistic picture of the world if they 
are to advance "the permanent interests of the country," to borrow the 
phrase of James Madison, the leading framer of the constitutional order, 
referring to the rights of men of property. The world view of planners and 
decision makers should conform to the permanent interests, not just 
parochially but more broadly. The great beast, in contrast, must be caged. 
The public must have faith in the leaders who pursue "America's mission," 
perhaps subject to personal flaws, or making errors in an excess of good 
will or naivete, but dedicated to the path of righteousness. Firm in this 
conviction, the public is to keep to pursuits that do not interfere with the 
permanent interests. It must accept subordination as normal and proper; 
better still, it should be invisible, the way life is and must be.

The political order is largely an expression of these goals, and the 
doctrinal institutions—the media prominent among them—serve to reinforce and 
legitimate them. These are tendencies that one would be inclined to expect 
on elementary assumptions, and there is ample evidence to support such 
natural conjectures.

The realities are commonly revealed during the electoral extravaganzas. The 
year 2000 was no exception. As usual, almost half the electorate did not 
participate and voting correlated with income. Voter turnout remained "among 
the lowest and most decisively class-skewed in the industrial world."[1] 
This feature of so-called "American exceptionalism," reflecting the unusual 
dominance and class consciousness of concentrated private power, has been 
plausibly attributed to "the total absence of a socialist or laborite mass 
party as an organized competitor in the electoral market."[2] The same is 
true of the "media market": it is virtually 100 percent corporate, with a 
"total absence of socialist or laborite" mass media. In both respects, "the 
system works."

Control of the media market by private capital is no more a law of nature 
than its control of the electoral market. In earlier days, there was a 
vibrant labor-based and popular press that reached a mass audience of 
concerned and committed readers, on the scale of the commercial press. As in 
England, it was undermined by concentration of capital and advertiser 
funding; one should not succumb to myths about markets fostering 
competition. Unlike in most of the world, business interests are so powerful 
in the United States that they quickly took control of radio and television, 
and are now seeking to do the same with the new electronic media that were 
developed primarily in the state sector over many years—a terrain of 
struggle today with considerable long-term implications.

Most of the population did not take the year 2000 presidential elections 
very seriously. Three-fourths of the population regarded the process as a 
game played by large contributors (overwhelmingly corporations), party 
leaders, and the PR industry, which crafted candidates to say "almost 
anything to get themselves elected," so that one could believe little that 
they said even when their stand on issues was intelligible. On most issues 
citizens could not identify the stands of the candidates—not because of 
ignorance or lack of concern; again, the system is working. Public opinion 
studies found that among voters concerned more with policy issues than 
"qualities," the Democrats won handily. But issues were displaced in the 
political-media system in favor of style, personality, and other marginalia 
that are of little concern to the concentrated private power centers that 
largely finance campaigns and run the government. Their shared interests 
remained safely off the agenda, independently of the public will.[3]

Crucially, questions of economic policy must be deflected. These are of 
great concern both to the general population and to private power and its 
political representatives, but commonly with opposing preferences. The 
business world and its media overwhelmingly support "neoliberal reforms": 
corporate-led versions of globalization, the investor-rights agreements 
called "free trade agreements," and other devices that concentrate wealth 
and power. The public tends to oppose these measures, despite near-uniform 
media celebration. And unless care is taken, people might find ways to 
articulate and even implement their concerns. Opponents of the international 
economic arrangements favored by the business-government-media complex have 
an "ultimate weapon," the Wall Street Journal observed ruefully: the general 
public, which must therefore be marginalized.[4]

For the public, the trade deficit had become the most important economic 
issue facing the country by 1998, outranking taxes or the budget deficit—the 
latter a concern for business, but not the public, so that lack of public 
interest must be portrayed as the public’s "balanced-budget obsession."[5] 
People understand that the trade deficit translates into loss of jobs; for 
example, when U.S. corporations establish plants abroad that export to the 
domestic market. But free capital mobility is a high priority for the 
business world: it increases profit and also provides a powerful weapon to 
undermine labor organizing by threat of job transfer—technically illegal, 
but highly effective, as labor historian Kate Bronfenbrenner has 
demonstrated in important work.[6] Such threats contribute to the "growing 
worker insecurity" that has been hailed by Alan Greenspan and others as a 
significant factor in creating a "fairy-tale economy" by limiting wages and 
benefits, thus increasing profit and reducing inflationary pressures that 
would be unwelcome to financial interests. 

Another useful effect of these measures is to undermine democracy. Unions 
have traditionally offered people ways to pool limited resources, to think 
through problems that concern them collectively, to struggle for their 
rights, and to challenge the monopoly of the electoral and media markets. 
Capital mobility provides a new way to avert these threats, one of several 
that are cleaner than the resort to violence to crush working people that 
was another feature of "American exceptionalism" over a long period.

No such matters are to intrude into the electoral process: the general 
population is induced to vote (if at all) on the basis of peripheral concerns.

Higher-income voters favor Republicans, so that the class-skewed voting 
pattern benefits the more openly pro-business party. But more revealing than 
the abstention of those who are left effectively voiceless is the way they 
vote when they do participate. The voting bloc that provided Bush with his 
greatest electoral success was middle-to-lower income white working class 
voters, particularly men, but women as well. By large margins they favored 
Gore on major policy issues, insofar as these arose in some meaningful way 
during the campaign. But they were diverted to safer preoccupations.

The public is well aware of its marginalization. In the early years of 
Project Censored, about half the population felt that the government is run 
by "a few big interests looking out for themselves." During the Reagan 
years, as "neoliberal reforms" were more firmly instituted, the figure rose 
to over 80 percent. In 2000, the director of Harvard’s Vanishing Voter 
Project reported that "Americans’ feeling of powerlessness has reached an 
alarming high," with 53 percent responding "only a little" or "none" to the 
question: "How much influence do you think people like you have on what 
government does?" The previous peak, 30 years ago, was 41 percent. During 
the campaign, over 60 percent of regular voters regarded politics in America 
as "generally pretty disgusting." In each weekly survey, more people found 
the campaign boring than exciting, by a margin of 5 to 3 in the final week.

The election was a virtual statistical tie, with estimated differences 
within the expected error range. A victor had to be chosen, and a great deal 
of attention was devoted to the process and what it reveals about the state 
of American democracy. But the major and most revealing issues were largely 
ignored in favor of dimpled chads and other technicalities. Among the 
crucial issues sidelined was the fact that most of the population felt that 
no election took place in any serious sense, at least as far as their 
interests were concerned.

A leading theme of modern history is the conflict between elite sectors, who 
are dedicated to securing "the permanent interests," and the unwashed 
masses, who have a different conception of their role in determining their 
fate and the course of public affairs. Over the centuries, rights have been 
won by constant and often bitter popular struggle, including rights of 
workers, women, and victims of a variety of other forms of discrimination 
and oppression; and the rights of future generations, the core concern of 
the environmental movements. The last 40 years have seen notable advances in 
this regard. But progress is by no means uniform. New mechanisms are 
constantly devised to restrict the rights that have been gained to formal 
exercises with little content.

The political order was consciously designed to defend the "permanent 
interests" against the "levelling spirit" of the growing masses of people 
who will "labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a 
more equal distribution of its blessings," Madison feared, that they may 
seek to improve their conditions by such measures as agrarian reform (and 
today, far more). The political system must "protect the minority of the 
opulent against the majority," Madison advised his colleagues at the 
Constitutional Convention. Power was therefore to be in the hands of "the 
wealth of the nation," not the great masses of people "without property, or 
the hope of acquiring it," and who "cannot be expected to sympathize 
sufficiently with [the rights of the propertied minority or] to be safe 
depositories of power" over these rights, Madison observed 40 years later, 
reflecting on the course and prospects of the system of which he was the 
most influential designer.

The problems and conflicts persist, though their nature has radically 
changed over time. A particularly important shift took place with the 
"corporatization of America" a century ago, which sharply concentrated 
power, creating "a very different America from the old" in which "most men 
are servants of corporations," Woodrow Wilson observed. This "different 
America," he continued, is "no longer a scene of individual 
enterprise,…individual opportunity and individual achievement" but a society 
in which "small groups of men in control of great corporations wield a power 
and control over the wealth and business opportunities of the country," 
administering markets and becoming "rivals of the government itself"; more 
accurately, becoming barely distinguishable from "the government itself." 
Wilsonian progressivism also gave a new cast to the traditional vision of 
the political order. 

In his "progressive essays on democracy," Walter Lippmann, the most 
influential figure in American journalism in the 20th century, described the 
public as "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders" who should be mere "spectators 
of action," not participants; their role is limited to periodic choice among 
the "responsible men," who are to function in "technocratic insulation," in 
World Bank lingo, "securing the permanent interests."

The doctrine, labelled "polyarchy" by democratic political theorist Robert 
Dahl, is conventional in elite opinion. It has been given still firmer 
institutional grounds by the reduction of the public arena under the 
"neoliberal reforms" of the past 20 years, which shift authority even more 
than before to unaccountable private concentrations of power, under the 
cynical slogan "trust the people." Democracy is to be construed as the right 
to choose among commodities. Business leaders explain the need to impose on 
the population a "philosophy of futility" and "lack of purpose in life," to 
"concentrate human attention on the more superficial things that comprise 
much of fashionable consumption." People may then accept and even welcome 
their meaningless and subordinate lives, and forget ridiculous ideas about 
managing their own affairs. They will abandon their fate to the responsible 
men, the self-described "intelligent minorities" who serve and administer 
power—which lies elsewhere, a hidden but crucial premise. It is within this 
general framework that the media function.


Like other major sectors of the economy, the corporate media are tending 
toward oligopoly. The process reduces still more the limited possibility 
that public concerns might come to the fore when they interfere with 
state-corporate interests, or that state policies might be seriously 
challenged.

On loyalty to state power, the common understanding is sometimes articulated 
with refreshing candor. For example, the leading political commentator of 
The New York Times opened the new year by hailing Clinton’s "creative 
compromise" for the Middle East. Since the President has spoken, we "now 
know what the only realistic final deal looks like," and "now that we know 
what the deal looks like, the only question left is: Will either side be 
able to take it?"[7] How could there be a different question?

Not appropriate for discussion, and kept in the shadows, are the terms of 
the President’s statesmanlike plan. Anyone with access to the Israeli press 
and a map, or the alternative media here, could have discovered throughout 
the recent negotiations and the seven-year "peace process" that Clinton’s 
"creative compromise," like its predecessors, is designed to imprison the 
Palestinian population in isolated enclaves in the territories that Israel 
conquered in 1967, separated from one another, and from the vastly expanded 
region called "Jerusalem," by Israeli settlements and infrastructure 
projects, and also separated from the Arab world; one well-known Middle East 
specialist estimates that "25 percent of West Bank territory has been 
arbitrarily absorbed into Jerusalem" alone, with U.S. authorization and 
support.[8] In "Jerusalem," we learn from the press, Arab neighborhoods are 
to be administered by Arabs and Jewish neighborhoods by Jews. What could be 
more fair? 

At least, until we look a little further and find that the Arab 
neighborhoods are isolated sections of the tiny former East Jerusalem, while 
the Jewish "neighborhoods" that are to be integrated within Israel include 
"settlements like Ma’ale Adumim"[9]—a city that was established well to the 
east in order to bisect the West Bank—along with other "neighborhoods" 
extending far to the north and south. Like other major settlement projects 
of the Oslo period, Ma’ale Adumim has flourished thanks to the Labor doves 
whose magnanimity we are called upon to admire for their "concessions" in 
the territories they conquered in 1967. Another part of the "compromise" is 
an Israeli salient that partially bisects the remaining territories to the 
north, and other mechanisms to ensure that the resources and usable land of 
the occupied territories will be in the hands of the leading U.S. client 
state, long a pillar of U.S. policy in the strategic Middle East region.[10]

Without proceeding, the outcome conforms very well to the rejectionist stand 
that the United States has upheld in international isolation for more than 
25 years, effectively denying the national rights of one of the two 
contending parties in the former Palestine. The record has been dispatched 
to the depths of the memory hole with a degree of efficiency and uniformity 
that is rather impressive in a free society. Without substantial independent 
research, readers of the U.S. media could scarcely have even a limited grasp 
of one of the major stories of the year 2000.

Even the most elementary facts are not proper media fare if they interfere 
with the image of impartial benevolence. Consider just a single 
illustration: the role of U.S. helicopters, very important to the Israeli 
army because "it is impractical to think that we can manufacture helicopters 
or major weapons systems of this type in Israel," the Ministry of Defense 
director-general General Amos Yaron reported. The late 2000 confrontations 
began on September 29, when Israeli troops killed several people and wounded 
over 100 as they left the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem after Friday prayers. 

On October 1, U.S. helicopters with Israeli pilots killed two Palestinians. 
The next day, helicopters killed 10 and wounded 35 at Netzarim, the scene of 
a great deal of fighting: the small Israeli settlement there is hardly more 
than an excuse for a military base and roads that cut the Gaza Strip in two, 
isolating Gaza City and separating it from Egypt as well (with other 
barriers to the south). On October 3, the defense correspondent of Israel’s 
leading journal, Ha’aretz, reported the largest purchase of U.S. military 
helicopters in a decade: Blackhawks and parts for Apache attack helicopters 
sent a few weeks earlier. 

On October 4, Jane's Defence Weekly, the world’s most prominent military 
journal, reported that the Clinton Administration had approved a request for 
new Apache attack helicopters, the most advanced in the U.S. arsenal, having 
decided, apparently, that the upgrades were not sufficient for the current 
needs of attacking the civilian population. The same day, the U.S. press 
reported that Apaches were attacking apartment complexes with rockets at 
Netzarim. The German press agency quoted Pentagon officials who said that 
"U.S. weapons sales do not carry a stipulation that the weapons can’t be 
used against civilians. We cannot second-guess an Israeli commander who 
calls in helicopter gunships." So matters continued. A few weeks later, the 
local Palestinian leader Hussein Abayat was killed by a missile launched 
from an Apache helicopter (along with two women standing nearby), as the 
assassination campaign against the indigenous leadership was initiated.[11]

Rushing new military helicopters under these circumstances was surely 
newsworthy, and it was reported: in an opinion piece in Raleigh, North 
Carolina, on October 12. An Amnesty International condemnation of the sale 
of U.S. helicopters on October 19 also passed in virtual silence.[12] Such 
facts will not do. Rather, we must join in praise for our leaders, 
recognizing that their words stipulate the "only realistic final deal," 
while we ponder the strange character flaws of the intended beneficiaries of 
their solicitude.

The examples are selected virtually at random. In fact, even the valuable 
record of 25 years provided by Project Censored can do no more than barely 
skim the surface. What it has been investigating is a major phenomenon of 
"really existing democracy," which we ignore at our peril.