Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky, in full Avram Noam Chomsky,

(born December 7, 1928, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, U.S.), American theoretical linguist
whose work from the 1950s revolutionized the
eld of linguistics by treating language as a
Noam Chomsky uniquely human, biologically based cognitive
capacity. Through his contributions to linguistics
and related elds, including cognitive psychology and the philosophies of mind and
language, Chomsky helped to initiate and sustain what came to be known as the
“cognitive revolution.” Chomsky also gained a worldwide following as a political
dissident for his analyses of the pernicious in uence of economic elites on U.S.
domestic politics, foreign policy, and intellectual culture.
Life and basic ideas
Born into a middle-class Jewish family, Chomsky attended an experimental
elementa school in which he was encouraged to develop his own interests and
talents through self-directed learning. When he was 10 years old, he wrote an
editorial for his school newspaper lamenting the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish
Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe. His research then and during the next
few years was thorough enough to se e decades later as the basis of “Objectivity
and Liberal Scholarship” (1969), Chomsky’s critical review of a study of the period
by the historian Gabriel Jackson.
When he was 13 years old, Chomsky began taking trips by himself to New York
City, where he found books for his voracious reading habit and made contact with
a thriving working-class Jewish intellectual community. Discussion enriched and
con rmed the beliefs that would underlie his political views throughout his life: that
all people are capable of comprehending political and economic issues and making
their own decisions on that basis; that all people need and derive satisfaction from
acting freely and creatively and from associating with others; and that authority—
whether political, economic, or religious—that cannot meet a strong test of rational
justi cation is illegitimate. According to Chomsky’s anarchosyndicalism, or
libe arian socialism, the best form of political organization is one in which all
people have a maximal oppo unity to engage in cooperative activity with others
and to take pa in all decisions of the community that a ect them.
In 1945, at the age of 16, Chomsky entered the University of Pennsylvania but
found little to interest him. After two years he considered leaving the university to
pursue his political interests, perhaps by living on a kibbutz. He changed his mind,
however, after meeting the linguist Zellig S. Harris, one of the American founders of
structural linguistics, whose political convictions were similar to Chomsky’s.
Chomsky took graduate courses with Harris and, at Harris’s recommendation,
studied philosophy with Nelson Goodman and Nathan Salmon and mathematics
with Nathan Fine, who was then teaching at Ha ard University. In his 1951
master’s thesis, The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew, and especially in The
Logical Structure of Linguistic Theo (LSLT), written while he was a junior fellow at
Ha ard (1951–55) and published in pa in 1975, Chomsky adopted aspects of
Harris’s approach to the study of language and of Goodman’s views on formal
systems and the philosophy of science and transformed them into something
novel.
Whereas Goodman assumed that the mind at bi h is largely a tabula rasa (blank
slate) and that language learning in children is essentially a conditioned response
to linguistic stimuli, Chomsky held that the basic principles of all languages, as well
as the basic range of concepts they are used to express, are innately represented in
the human mind and that language learning consists of the unconscious
construction of a grammar from these principles in accordance with cues drawn
from the child’s linguistic environment. Whereas Harris thought of the study of
language as the taxonomic classi cation of “data,” Chomsky held that it is the
discove , through the application of formal systems, of the innate principles that
make possible the swift acquisition of language by children and the ordina use of
language by children and adults alike. And whereas Goodman believed that
linguistic behaviour is regular and caused (in the sense of being a speci c response
to speci c stimuli), Chomsky argued that it is incited by social context and
discourse context but essentially uncaused—enabled by a distinct set of innate
principles but innovative, or “creative.” It is for this reason that Chomsky believed
that it is unlikely that there will ever be a full- edged science of linguistic
behaviour. As in the view of the 17th-centu French philosopher Réne Desca es,
according to Chomsky, the use of language is due to a “creative principle,” not a
causal one.
Harris ignored Chomsky’s work, and Goodman—when he realized that Chomsky
would not accept his behaviourism—denounced it. Their reactions, with some
variations, were shared by a large majority of linguists, philosophers, and
psychologists. Although some linguists and psychologists eventually came to
accept Chomsky’s basic assumptions regarding language and the mind, most
philosophers continued to resist them.
Chomsky received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955
after submitting one chapter of LSLT as a doctoral disse ation (Transformational
Analysis). In 1956 he was appointed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) to a teaching position that required him to spend half his time on a machine
translation project, though he was openly skeptical of its prospects for success (he
told the director of the translation laborato that the project was of “no
intellectual interest and was also pointless”). Impressed with his book Syntactic
Structures (1957), a revised version of a series of lectures he gave to MIT
undergraduates, the university asked Chomsky and his colleague Morris Halle to
establish a new graduate program in linguistics, which soon attracted several
outstanding scholars, including Robe Lees, Jer Fodor, Jerold Katz, and Paul
Postal.
Chomsky’s 1959 review of Verbal Behavior, by B.F. Skinner, the dean of American
behaviourism, came to be regarded as the de nitive refutation of behaviourist
accounts of language learning. Sta ing in the mid-1960s, with the publication of
Aspects of the Theo of Syntax (1965) and Ca esian Linguistics (1966), Chomsky’s
approach to the study of language and mind gained wider acceptance within
linguistics, though there were many theoretical variations within the paradigm.
Chomsky was appointed full professor at MIT in 1961, Ferrari P. Ward Professor of
Modern Languages and Linguistics in 1966, and Institute Professor in 1976. He
retired as professor emeritus in 2002.
Linguistics
“Plato’s problem”
A fundamental insight of philosophical rationalism is that human creativity crucially
depends on an innate system of concept generation and combination. According to
Chomsky, children display “ordina ” creativity—appropriate and innovative use of
complexes of concepts—from vi ually their rst words. With language, they bring
to bear thousands of rich and a iculate concepts when they play, invent, and
speak to and understand each other. They seem to know much more than they
have been taught—or even could be taught. Such knowledge, therefore, must be
innate in some sense. To say it is innate, however, is not to say that the child is
conscious of it or even that it exists, fully formed, at bi h. It is only to say that it is
produced by the child’s system of concept generation and combination, in
accordance with the system’s courses of biological and physical development,
upon their exposure to ce ain kinds of environmental input.
It has frequently been obse ed that children acquire both concepts and language
with amazing facility and speed, despite the paucity or even absence of meaningful
evidence and instruction in their early years. The inference to the conclusion that
much of what they acquire must be innate is known as the argument from the
“pove y of the stimulus.” Specifying precisely what children acquire and how they
acquire it are aspects of what Chomsky called in LSLT the “fundamental problem”
of linguistics. In later work he referred to this as “Plato’s problem,” a reference to
Plato’s attempt (in his dialogue the Meno) to explain how it is possible for an
uneducated child to solve geometrical problems with appropriate prompting but
without any speci c training or background in mathematics. Unlike Plato, however,
Chomsky held that solving Plato’s problem is a task for natural science, speci cally
cognitive science and linguistics.
Principles and parameters
Chomsky’s early attempts to solve the linguistic version of Plato’s problem were
presented in the “standard theo ” of Aspects of the Theo of Syntax and the
subsequent “extended standard theo ,” which was developed and revised through
the late 1970s. These theories proposed that the mind of the human infant is
endowed with a “format” of a possible grammar (a theo of linguistic data), a
method of constructing grammars based on the linguistic data to which the child is
exposed, and a device that evaluates the relative simplicity of constructed
grammars. The child’s mind constructs a number of possible grammars that are
consistent with the linguistic data and then selects the grammar with the fewest
rules or primitives. Although ingenious, this approach was cumbersome in
comparison with later theories, in pa because it was not clear exactly what
procedures would have to be involved in the construction and evaluation of
grammars.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s Chomsky and others developed a better solution
using a theoretical framework known as “principles and parameters” (P&P), which
Chomsky introduced in Lectures on Government and Binding (1981) and elaborated
in Knowledge of Language (1986). Principles are linguistic universals, or structural
features that are common to all natural languages; hence, they are pa of the
child’s native endowment. Parameters, also native (though not necessarily speci c
to language, perhaps guring elsewhere too), are options that allow for variation in
linguistic structure. The P&P approach assumed that these options are readily set
upon the child’s exposure to a minimal amount of linguistic data, a hypothesis that
has been suppo ed by empirical evidence. One proposed principle, for example, is
that phrase structure must consist of a head, such as a noun or a verb, and a
complement, which can be a phrase of any form. The order of head and
complement, however, is not xed: languages may have a head-initial structure, as
in the English verb phrase (VP) “wash the clothes,” or a “head- nal” structure, as
in the corresponding Japanese VP “the clothes wash.” Thus, one parameter that is
set through the child’s exposure to linguistic data is “head-initial/head- nal.” The
setting of what was thought, during the early development of P&P, to be a small
number of parametric options within the constraints provided by a su ciently rich
set of linguistic principles would, according to this approach, yield a grammar of
the speci c language to which the child is exposed. Later the introduction of
“microparameters” and ce ain nonlinguistic constraints on development
complicated this simple sto , but the basic P&P approach remained in place,
o ering what appears to be the best solution to Plato’s problem yet proposed.
The phonological, or sound-yielding, features of languages are also parameterized,
according to the P&P approach. They are usually set early in development—
apparently within a few days—and they must be set before the child becomes too
old if he is to be able to pronounce the language without an accent. This time limit
on phonological parameter setting would explain why second-language learners
rarely, if ever, sound like native speakers. In contrast, young children exposed to
any number of additional languages before the time limit is reached have no
trouble producing the relevant sounds.
In contrast to the syntactic and phonological features of language, the basic
features out of which lexically expressed concepts (and larger units of linguistic
meaning) are constructed do not appear to be parameterized: di erent natural
languages seem to rely on the same set. Even if semantic features were
parameterized, however, a set of features detailed enough to provide (in principle)
for hundreds of thousands of root, or basic, concepts would have to be a pa of
the child’s innate, speci cally linguistic endowment—what Chomsky calls Universal
Grammar, or UG—or of his nonlinguistic endowment—the innate controls on
growth, development, and the nal states of other systems in the mind or brain.
This is indicated, as noted above, by the extraordina rate at which children
acquire lexical concepts (about one per waking hour between the ages of two and
eight) and the rich knowledge that each concept and its verbal, nominal, adverbial,
and other variants provide. No training or conscious inte ention plays a role;
lexical acquisition seems to be as automatic as parameter setting.
Of course, people di er in the words contained in their vocabularies and in the
pa icular sounds they happen to associate with di erent concepts. Early in the
20th centu , the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure noted that there is nothing
natural or necessa about the speci c sounds with which a concept may be
associated in a given language. According to Chomsky, this “Saussurean
arbitrariness” is of no interest to the natural scientist of language, because sound-
concept associations in this sense are not a pa of UG or of other nonlinguistic
systems that contribute to concept (and sound) development.
A developed theo of UG and of relevant nonlinguistic systems would in principle
account for all possible linguistic sounds and all possible lexical concepts and
linguistic meanings, for it would contain all possible phonological and semantic
features and all the rules and constraints for combining phonological and semantic
features into words and for combining words into a potentially in nite number of
phrases and sentences. Of course, such a complete theo may never be fully
achieved, but in this respect linguistics is no worse o than physics, chemist , or
any other science. They too are incomplete.
It is impo ant to notice that the semantic features that constitute lexical concepts,
and the rules and constraints governing their combination, seem to be vi ually
designed for use by human beings—i.e., designed to se e human interests and to
solve human problems. For example, concepts such as “give” and “village” have
features that re ect human actions and interests: transfer of ownership (and much
more) is pa of the meaning of give, and polity (both abstract and concrete) is pa
of the meaning of village. Linguists and philosophers sympathetic to empiricism
will object that these features are created when a community “invents” a language
to do the jobs it needs to do—no wonder, then, that linguistic meanings re ect
human interests and problems. The rationalist, in contrast, argues that humans
could not even conceive of these interests and problems unless the necessa
conceptual machine were available beforehand. In Chomsky’s view, the speed
and facility with which children learn “give” and “village” and many thousands of
other concepts show that the empiricist approach is incorrect—though it may be
correct in the case of scienti c concepts, such as “muon,” which apparently are not
innate and do not re ect human concerns.
The overall architecture of the language faculty also helps to explain how
conceptual and linguistic creativity is possible. In the P&P framework in its later
“minimalist” forms (see below Rule systems in Chomskyan theories of language),
the language faculty has “inte aces” that allow it to communicate with other pa s
of the mind. The information it provides through “sensorimotor” inte aces enables
humans to produce and perceive speech and sign language, and the information it
provides through “conceptual-intentional” inte aces enables humans to pe orm
numerous cognitive tasks, ranging from categorization (“that’s a lynx”) to
understanding and producing stories and poet .
Rule systems in Chomskyan theories of language
Chomsky’s theories of grammar and language are often referred to as
“generative,” “transformational,” or “transformational-generative.” In a
mathematical sense, “generative” simply means “formally explicit.” In the case of
language, however, the meaning of the term typically also includes the notion of
“productivity”—i.e., the capacity to produce an in nite number of grammatical
phrases and sentences using only nite means (e.g., a nite number of principles
and parameters and a nite vocabula ). In order for a theo of language to be
productive in this sense, at least some of its principles or rules must be recursive. A
rule or series of rules is recursive if it is such that it can be applied to its own
output an inde nite number of times, yielding a total output that is potentially
in nite. A simple example of a recursive rule is the successor function in
mathematics, which takes a number as input and yields that number plus 1 as
output. If one were to sta at 0 and apply the successor function inde nitely, the
result would be the in nite set of natural numbers. In grammars of natural
languages, recursion appears in various forms, including in rules that allow for
concatenation, relativization, and complementization, among other operations.
Chomsky’s theories are “transformational” in the sense that they account for the
syntactic and semantic prope ies of sentences by means of modi cations of the
structure of a phrase in the course of its generation. The standard theo of
Syntactic Structures and especially of Aspects of the Theo of Syntax employed a
phrase-structure grammar—a grammar in which the syntactic elements of a
language are de ned by means of rewrite rules that specify their smaller
constituents (e.g., “S → NP + VP,” or “a sentence may be rewritten as a noun
phrase and a verb phrase”)—a large number of “obligato ” and “optional”
transformations, and two levels of structure: a “deep structure,” where semantic
interpretation takes place, and a “su ace structure,” where phonetic interpretation
takes place. These early grammars were di cult to contrive, and their complexity
and language-speci city made it ve di cult to see how they could constitute a
solution to Plato’s problem.
In Chomsky’s later theories, deep structure ceased to be the locus of semantic
interpretation. Phrase-structure grammars too were vi ually eliminated by the end
of the 1970s; the task they pe ormed was taken over by the operation of
“projecting” individual lexical items and their prope ies into more complex
structures by means of “X-bar theo .” Transformations during this transitional
period were reduced to a single operation, “Move α” (“Move alpha”), which
amounted to “move any element in a derivation anywhere”—albeit within a system
of robust constraints. Following the introduction of the “minimalist program” (MP)
in the early 1990s, deep structure (and su ace structure) disappeared altogether.
Move α, and thus modi cation of structure from one derivational step to another,
was replaced by “Move” and later by “internal Merge,” a variant of “external
Merge,” itself a crucial basic operation that takes two elements (such as words)
and makes of them a set. In the early 21st centu , internal and external Merge,
along with parameters and microparameters, remained at the core of Chomsky’s
e o s to construct grammars.
Throughout the development of these approaches to the science of language,
there were continual improvements in simplicity and formal elegance in the
theories on o er; the early phrase-structure components, transformational
components, and deep and su ace structures were all eliminated, replaced by
much simpler systems. Indeed, an MP grammar for a speci c language could in
principle consist entirely of Merge (internal and external) together with some
parametric settings. MP aims to achieve both of the major original goals that
Chomsky set for a theo of language in Aspects of the Theo of Syntax: that it be
descriptively adequate, in the sense that the grammars it provides generate all and
only the grammatical expressions of the language in question, and that it be
explanatorily adequate, in the sense that it provides a descriptively adequate
grammar for any natural language as represented in the mind of a given individual.
MP grammars thus provide a solution to Plato’s problem, explaining how any
individual readily acquires what Chomsky calls an “I-language”—“I” for internal,
individual, and intensional (that is, described by a grammar). But they also speak to
other desiderata of a natural science: they are much simpler, and they are much
more easily accommodated to another science, namely biology.
Philosophy of mind and human nature
Human conceptual and linguistic creativity involves several mental faculties and
entails the existence of some kind of mental organization. It depends on
perceptual-a iculato systems and conceptual-intentional systems, of course, but
on many others too, such as vision. According to Chomsky, the mind comprises an
extensive cluster of innate “modules,” one of which is language. Each module
operates automatically, independently of individual control, on the basis of a
distinct, domain-speci c set of rules that take determinate inputs from some
modules and yield determinate outputs for others. In earlier work these operations
were called “derivations”; more recently they have been called “computations.” The
various modules interact in complex ways to yield perception, thought, and a large
number of other cognitive products.
The language module seems to play a role in coordinating the products of other
modules. The generative—speci cally, recursive—prope ies of language enable
humans to combine arbitra concepts together in inde nitely many ways, thereby
making the range of human thought vi ually unlimited. When concepts are paired
with sounds in lexical items (words), humans can say vi ually anything and
cooperate and make plans with each other. The fact that the language faculty
yields this kind of exibility suggests that the emergence of language in human
evolutiona histo coincided with the appearance of other cognitive capacities
based on recursion, including quanti cation.
In a 2002 a icle, “The Language Faculty,” Chomsky and his coauthors Marc Hauser
and W. Tecumseh Fitch divided the language faculty in a way that re ected what
had been Chomsky’s earlier distinction between competence and pe ormance.
The faculty of language in the “narrow” sense (FLN) amounts to the recursive
computational system alone, whereas the faculty in the broad sense (FLB) includes
perceptual-a iculato systems (for sound and sign) and conceptual-intentional
systems (for meaning). These are the systems with which the computational system
interacts at its inte aces. Regarding evolution, the authors point out that, although
there are homologues and analogs in other species for the perceptual-a iculato
and conceptual-intentional systems, there are none for the computational system,
or FLN. Conceivably, some cognitive systems of animals, such as the navigational
systems of birds, might involve recursion, but there is no computational system
comparable to FLN, in pa icular none that links sound and meaning and yields
unbounded sentential “output.” FLN is arguably what makes human beings
cognitively distinct from other creatures.
As suggested earlier, UG, or the language faculty narrowly understood (FLN), may
consist entirely of Merge and perhaps some parameters speci c to language. This
raises the question of what the biological basis of FLN must be. What distinctive
fact of human biology, or the human genome, makes FLN unique to humans? In a
2005 a icle, “Three Factors in Language Design,” Chomsky pointed out that there
is more to organic development and growth than biological (genomic) speci cation
and environmental input. A third factor is general conditions on growth resulting
from restrictions on possible physical structures and restrictions on data analysis,
including those that might gure in computational systems (such as language). For
example, a bee’s genome does not have to direct it to build hives in a hexagonal
lattice. The lattice is a requirement imposed by physics, since this structure is the
most stable and e cient of the relevant so . Analogous points can be made about
the growth, structure, and operation of the human brain. If the parameters of UG
are not speci ed by the language-speci c pa s of the human genome but are
instead the result of third factors, the only language-speci c information that the
genome would need to car is an instruction set for producing a single principle,
Merge (which takes external and internal forms). And if this is the case, then the
appearance of language could have been brought about by a single genetic
mutation in a single individual, so long as that mutation were transmissible to
progeny. Obviously, the relevant genes would provide great advantages to any
human who possessed them. A saltational account such as this has some evidence
behind it: 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, humans began to obse e the heavens, to
draw and paint, to wonder, and to develop explanations of natural phenomena—
and the migration from Africa began. Plausibly, the introduction of the
computational system of language led to this remarkable cognitive awakening.
Politics
Chomsky’s political views seem to be suppo ed to some extent by his approach to
the study of language and mind, which implies that the capacity for creativity is an
impo ant element of human nature. Chomsky often notes, however, that there is
only an “abstract” connection between his theories of language and his politics. A
close connection would have to be based on a fully developed science of human
nature, through which fundamental human needs could be identi ed or deduced.
But there is nothing like such a science. Even if there were, the connection would
additionally depend on the assumption that the best form of political organization
is one that maximizes the satisfaction of human needs. And then there would
remain the question of what practical measures should be implemented to satisfy
those needs. Clearly, questions such as this cannot be settled by scienti c means.
Although Chomsky was always interested in politics, he did not become publicly
involved in it until 1964, when he felt compelled to lend his voice to protests
against the U.S. role in the Vietnam War (or, as he prefers to say, the U.S. invasion
of Vietnam), at no small risk to his career and his personal safety. He has argued
that the Vietnam War was only one in a series of cases in which the United States
used its milita power to gain or consolidate economic control over increasingly
larger areas of the developing world. In the same vein, he regards the domestic
political scene of the United States and other major capitalist countries as theatres
in which major corporations and their elite managers strive to protect and enhance
their economic privileges and political power.
In democracies like the United States, in which the compliance of ordina citizens
cannot be guaranteed by force, this e o requires a form of “propaganda”: the
powe ul must make ordina citizens believe that vesting economic control of
society in the hands of a tiny minority of the population is to their bene t. Pa of
this project involves enlisting the help of “intellectuals”—the class of individuals
(primarily journalists and academics) who collect, disseminate, and interpret
political and economic information for the public. Regrettably, Chomsky argues,
this task has proved remarkably easy.
As a responsible (rather than mercena ) member of the intellectual class, Chomsky
believes that it is his obligation to provide ordina citizens with the information
they needed to draw their own conclusions and to make their own decisions about
vital political and economic issues. As he wrote in Powers and Prospects (1996),
The responsibility of the writer as a moral agent is to t to bring the truth about
matters of human signi cance to an audience that can do something about them.

In one of his rst political essays, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” (1967),

Chomsky presented case after case in which intellectuals in positions of power,
including prominent journalists, failed to tell the truth or deliberately lied to the
public in order to conceal the aims and consequences of the United States’
involvement in the Vietnam War. In their two-volume work The Political Economy of
Human Rights (1979) and later in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of
the Mass Media (1988), Chomsky and the economist Edward Herman analyzed the
repo ing of journalists in the mainstream (i.e., corporate-owned) media on the
basis of statistically careful studies of historical and contempora examples. Their
work provided striking evidence of selection, skewing of data, ltering of
information, and outright invention in suppo of assumptions that helped to justify
the controlling in uence of corporations in U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics.
The studies in these and other works made use of paired examples to show how
ve similar events can be repo ed in ve di erent ways, depending upon
whether and how state and corporate interests may be a ected. In The Political
Economy of Human Rights, for example, Chomsky and Herman compared repo ing
on Indonesia’s milita invasion and occupation of East Timor with repo ing on the
behaviour of the communist Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. The events in the
two cases took place in approximately the same pa of the world and at
approximately the same time (the mid- to late 1970s). As a propo ion of
population, the number of East Timorese to ured and murdered by the Indonesian
milita was approximately the same as the number of Cambodians to ured and
murdered by the Khmer Rouge. And yet the mainstream media in the United States
devoted much more attention to the second case (more than 1,000 column inches
in the New York Times) than to the rst (about 70 column inches). Moreover,
repo ing on the actions of the Khmer Rouge contained many clear cases of
exaggeration and fabrication, whereas repo ing on the actions of Indonesia
po rayed them as essentially benign. In the case of the Khmer Rouge, however,
exaggerated repo s of atrocities aided e o s by the United States to maintain the
Cold War and to protect and expand its access to the region’s natural resources
(including East Timorese oil deposits) through client states. Indonesia, on the other
hand, was just such a state, heavily suppo ed by U.S. milita and economic aid.
Although ordina Americans were not in a position to do anything about the
Khmer Rouge, they were capable of doing something about their count ’s suppo
for Indonesia, in pa icular by voting their government out of o ce. But the
media’s benign treatment of the invasion made it extremely unlikely that they
would be motivated to do so. According to Chomsky, this and many other examples
demonstrate that prominent journalists and other intellectuals in the United States
function essentially as “commissars” on behalf of elite interests. As he wrote in
Necessa Illusions (1988):

The media se e the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely
interlinked, framing their repo ing and analysis in a manner suppo ive of established
privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.
Some of Chomsky’s critics have claimed that his political and media studies po ray
journalists as actively engaged in a kind of conspiracy—an extremely unlikely
conspiracy, of course, given the degree of coordination and control it would
require. Chomsky’s response is simply that the assumption of conspiracy is
unnecessa . The behaviour of journalists in the mainstream media is exactly what
one would expect, on average, given the power structure of the institutions in
which they are employed, and it is predictable in the same sense and for the same
reasons that the behaviour of the president of General Motors is predictable. In
order to succeed—in order to be hired and promoted—media personnel must
avoid questioning the interests of the corporations they work for or the interests of
the elite minority who run those corporations. Because journalists naturally do not
wish to think of themselves as mercenaries (no one does), they engage in what
amounts to a form of self-deception. They typically think of themselves as stalwa
defenders of the truth (as suggested by the slogan of the New York Times, “All the
news that’s t to print”), but when state or corporate interests are at stake they act
otherwise, in crucially impo ant ways. In sho , ve few of them are willing or even
able to live up to their responsibility as intellectuals to bring the truth about
matters of human signi cance to an audience that can do something about them.
James A. McGilvray
Citation Information
A icle Title: Noam Chomsky
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 15 May 2022
URL: [Link]
Access Date: November 28, 2022