Noam Chomsky's Media Control: Spectatorship versus Participation

By Gabrielle Guz

(Written in December 2020 for my Film and Media Theory class at Columbia University.)

In his groundbreaking back-pocket book, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (1991), Noam Chomsky elicits a specific anecdote that provokes questions on curious underpinnings for people’s dependence on mainstream authority figures. He invokes an image in which spectators sit “alone in front of the TV” whilst having a message “drilled” into their heads: “the only value in life is to have more commodities” and to have “harmony.” What exactly does that mean? The spectators, then and there, can raise their brows and think that, certainly, there must be more to life than that. But being as glued to the “tube” as they are, they assume, in Chomsky’s words, that their thoughts “must be crazy” (10). Why is it that in order to stay informed, there is such a reliance on mainstream media anchors and other industry leaders? Purely psychologically, what is the reason?

That query supposedly answers itself. People lean on those institutions precisely because they want to stay informed. But Chomsky’s anecdote suggests that more so, people want to fit in. After all, “belonging” ranks high even on Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. And anyone who has ever studied social psychology, knows the findings derived from Solomon Asch's conformity experiments in the 1950s, too. Having Swarthmore College students participate in a “vision test” along with his own carefully selected “stooges,” Asch found that in the twelve critical trials, seventy-five percent of the real participants conformed to the incorrect answers the majority (the stooges) gave, although they knew the answers were false.

The fear, therefore, of ridicule for thinking differently overrides that of being wrong. Unfortunately, that fear stirs in most citizens of the world, including Americans who usually appreciate the democracy into which they were born or into which they immigrated. Though, regardless of how much democracy is a blessing, as opposed to the “bludgeon” of totalitarian states, it doesn’t live up to its idealistic concept. The key to “escape” from oppression isn’t indulging in distractions that entertainment-media provide. To take fuller advantage of democracy, people must become more active as spectators by participating in the world they might “see” on-screen; and if that doesn’t garner practical results, then the least one could do is to question the legitimacy not of media-messengers (journalists) but of the corporations (media-owners) that decide which information is most valuable to promulgate.

Chomsky’s objective isn’t to contrive solutions for the public to rummage out of subordination to media conglomerates. Instead, his aim is to enlighten his readers with an overarching idea: they, the American people, have the potential to be in power. But to grasp that, they first should recognize the origins of their power and why leaders have been so hard-pressed about minimizing them.

During a lecture that Chomsky gave at Harvard University regarding his aforementioned book, he mentions a detail that he actually circumvents in the text itself. As one of the most fundamental framers of the American Constitution, James Madison's intentions for the “free world” were encapsulated in the following words: to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. Given that at the time when he said it, in the 1780’s, the prime example of a democratic state was England (whose citizens weren’t allowed to vote yet), Madison anticipated that if democracy were established in America in its ideal sense, then the people, when voting, would request something like agrarian reform, or a redistribution of land, or other policies that would directly meet their economic needs, instead of the government’s.

In order to quell those urges, Madison thought that there should be an alternative democracy, the kind that Chomsky still considers to be prevailing in operation and in theory, though not in the dictionary. That is, instead of allowing the public to participate in some meaningful way in the management of their own affairs, they must be barred from doing so because they are too “incompetent” to understand true “common interests”; and in lieu of having open and free information, it must be narrowed and controlled to channel not spectators’ rationality, but their emotional impulses.

After all, as Chomsky points out, even foreign policy critic and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr asserts that those specialized media and public relations groups (working for the state-corporations) have to create “necessary illusions” and emotional “oversimplifications” to compel most people to do what they don’t want. There are only a few people who wholly submit to their rationality; others, when provoked, act on emotional impulses (3-5). Going along with Chomsky’s claim that in the 20th-century, when he wrote his book, the mass media and public relations still maintained propagandistic pursuits, his perspective becomes evidenced when he offers a pertinent example of how Woodrow Wilson’s administration turned a pacifistic American population into a war-mongering one through their Creel Commission.

What did that look like? Specifically then, the British Propaganda Ministry, which was fixed on “directing the thought of most of the world,” fabricated images and stories “of atrocities by the Huns, Belgian babies with their arms torn off,” and so on. The goal was to create a “mood” of outrage that intellectuals, like John Dewey, would disseminate by instilling pride in those Americans who thought that joining war would mean saving the world (Chomsky, 4).

The embellished worlds that propaganda-media construct aren’t much different in terms of their affective form from “cinematic worlds” that filmmakers strive to achieve to engage their audience. “Mood” in cinema orients the spectators in an imagined world that is intangible; “mood” in state propaganda forces the people to distance themselves from the real issues of a tangible world.

Presidential campaign slogans also, like the one on which Wilson ran, “Peace Without Victory,” and other ones that are difficult to dispute, like “Support for Our Troops,” promote a distanciation. Whilst the people try to figure out what those slogans essentially mean, and according to Chomsky, they “don’t mean anything,” the attention from what actually matters is diverted (18-20). What matters? In regards to politicians, questions on policy. In regards to the media, questions on why they feel so very much elusive, like a monopoly, interested only in marginalizing the people, for fear that the people could think for themselves, and distracting them with shows like the Superbowl, lest real issues start to worry them.

If the majority of the people only knew who have really been in charge of the mass media and public relations — respectively, like dean of American journalists, Walter Lippman, who considered the common people a “bewildered herd” and Edward Bernays, who thought manufactured consent was the “essence of democracy” (24-25) — there would be less partisan polarization and more organization against the corporate world. Chomsky suggests that when conservatives say that the mainstream media is “too” liberal, or liberals say the opposite, the criticism shouldn’t go to journalists.

After all, no matter their political persuasion, mainstream journalists don’t choose which images to show or which stories to broadcast. They are supposed to support the “status quo” of the multi-billion dollar conglomerates (which have conflicts of interest) that own them. In other words, what the conventional spectator oft-“sees” on-screen are not news about “common interests” but, as Chomsky put it, “representation as (not of) reality” (28). Chomsky brings up, for instance, the ways in which the American media, nodding to the government, tried to sway the public opinion towards military use, for the Vietnam War, for national glory, all while downplaying how many casualties then were caused. Not merely 100,000, but 3 to 4 million.

Good reportage has been hinged on two general conditions: credibility and captivation. The mainstream media are considered credible because they have access to government and corporate sources. By getting those sources on-air, they captivate audiences with “exclusive” quotes, images, and videos. And if one considers the trends of “good” television journalism, for example, two factors arise: fragmented yet shocking developments with good visuals (focused on events rather than in-depth analyses on systemic causes) and a constant competition for “breaking news.” Institutionally, even if some journalists don’t wholly realize it, those techniques had been established to stall people’s “sickly inhibitions,” or an alertness towards true reality versus sensationalism (32).

To these corporations, owning the media, the biggest failure would be to lose their greatest commodity: the people, their audience. The media procures their targeted audience and “sells” them to advertisers, of which conglomerates are beneficiaries. That is why, in recent developments, real democracy has been on its way to positive progress, and the prevailing democracy has been at a loss, trying to determine how to maintain their so-called “bewildered herd,” how to make sure that the people think that their biggest commodity is their “harmony,” and that those who strike against are wrong-doers. Dissident culture, since the 1960’s, hasn’t let down its guard. That culture’s organization is more threatening than the media control because it invokes appropriate skepticism in visuals and stories people see. Dissidents are not spectators any more; they are participants who effect change.

One could say that Chomsky’s Media Control invokes unmediated fear and promotes distrust in the mainstream establishment. But it’s not fear that he proposes; rather, it’s level-headed wariness. The ideal of the media is to hold powerful figures accountable for what they say and do, so why shouldn’t the people hold the media accountable for what they show and tell? People who are promised democracy shouldn’t merely live under “conditions” of freedom, as Chomsky put it, that discreetly deter the “threat of democracy” (32). Instead of having corporations tell them how to orient themselves in “sensationalistic worlds,” the people can become their own directors.