The New York Times reports special counsel Robert Mueller is scrutinizing President Trump’s tweets as part of Mueller’s expanding probe into Trump’s ties to Russia. This latest revelation in the Mueller investigation is part of a nearly 24-hour stream of headlines about Trump, Russia and the administration’s various scandals. But is the mainstream media missing the real stories amid its obsession with “Russiagate”? For more, we speak with world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author and professor Noam Chomsky on media manipulation in the Trump era.
AMY GOODMAN: We continue our interview with Noam Chomsky, world-renowned
dissident, linguist and author, now in Tucson at the University of Arizona. I
asked him about a recent mix-up on Fox
& Friends, in which the hosts thought they were interviewing
former Democratic congressional candidate, a current one, Ann Kirkpatrick of
Arizona, who supports Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE, but, in
fact, they were actually speaking to a Massachusetts Democratic congressional
candidate, Barbara L’Italien, who opposes ICE. Here is how the interview
started.
SEN. BARBARA L’ITALIEN: Good morning. I’m actually here to
speak directly to Donald Trump. I feel that what’s happening at the border is
wrong. I’m a mother of four. And I believe that separating kids from their
parents is illegal and inhumane. I’m actually Barbara L’Italien. I’m a state
senator representing a large immigrant community. I’m running for Congress in
Massachusetts. I keep thinking about what we’re putting parents through,
imagining how terrifying that must be for those families, imagining how it
would feel not knowing if I’d ever see my kids again. We have to stop abducting
children and ripping them from their parents’ arms—
ROB SCHMITT: OK—
SEN. BARBARA L’ITALIEN: —stop putting kids in cages—
ROB SCHMITT: You want to—
SEN. BARBARA L’ITALIEN: —and stop making 3-year-olds defend
themselves in court.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Barbara L’Italien said a lot there, but she was then cut
off, with the shock of the Fox
& Friends crew in the morning that they had the wrong
Democratic congressional candidate. But this kind of media activism also just
goes to the whole issue of the media, Noam Chomsky, the issue of Fox News
becoming really state media, with—you have the person who supported the sexual
harasser Roger Ailes, Bill Shine, now a top aide to President Trump in the
White House. That’s gotten little attention. So you have Fox being a mouthpiece
for Trump and a place for him to hear what people have to say, and the other
networks very much running counter to Trump, on certain issues, CNN and MSNBC. But your
thoughts?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, my frank opinion is that—I must say I don’t pay much
attention to television, so I don’t know a great deal about it. But, in
general, I think the media—first of all, Fox News is, by now, basically a joke.
It’s, as you said, state media. The other media, I think, are focusing on
issues which are pretty marginal. There are much more serious issues that are
being put to the side. So, the worst of—even on the case of immigration, once
again, I think the real question is dealing with the roots of immigration, our
responsibility for it, and what we can do to overcome that. And that’s almost
never discussed. But I think that’s the crucial issue. And I think we find the
same across the board.
So, of all
Trump’s policies, the one that is the most dangerous and destructive, in fact
poses an existential threat, is his policies on climate change, on global
warming. That’s really destructive. And we’re facing an imminent threat, not
far removed, of enormous damage. The effects are already visible but nothing
like what’s going to come. A sea level rise of a couple of feet will be
massively destructive. It will make today’s immigration issues look like
trivialities. And it’s not that the administration is unaware of this. So,
Donald Trump, for example, is perfectly aware of the dangerous effects, in the
short term, of global warming. So, for example, recently he applied to the
government of Ireland for permission to build a wall to protect his golf course
in Ireland from rising sea levels. And Rex Tillerson, who was supposed to be
the adult in the room before he was thrown out, as CEO of ExxonMobil, was
devoting enormous resources to climate change denial, although he had, sitting
on his desk, the reports of ExxonMobil scientists, who, since the '70s, in
fact, were on the forefront of warning of the dire effects of this accelerating
phenomenon. I don't know what word in the language—I can’t find one—that
applies to people of that kind, who are willing to sacrifice the literal—the
existence of organized human life, not in the distant future, so they can put a
few more dollars in highly overstuffed pockets. The word “evil” doesn’t begin
to approach it. These are the kinds of issues that should be under discussion.
Instead, what’s being—there is a focus on what I believe are marginalia.
So, take,
say, the huge issue of interference in our pristine elections. Did the Russians
interfere in our elections? An issue of overwhelming concern in the media. I
mean, in most of the world, that’s almost a joke. First of all, if you’re interested
in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done
barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state
does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support. Israeli intervention in U.S.
elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done, I mean, even
to the point where the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, goes directly to
Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with
overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president’s policies—what
happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015. Did Putin come to give an address to
the joint sessions of Congress trying to—calling on them to reverse U.S.
policy, without even informing the president? And that’s just a tiny bit of
this overwhelming influence. So if you happen to be interested in influence
of—foreign influence on elections, there are places to look. But even that is a
joke.
I mean, one
of the most elementary principles of a functioning democracy is that elected
representatives should be responsive to those who elected them. There’s nothing
more elementary than that. But we know very well that that is simply not the
case in the United States. There’s ample literature in mainstream academic
political science simply comparing voters’ attitudes with the policies pursued
by their representatives, and it shows that for a large majority of the
population, they’re basically disenfranchised. Their own representatives pay no
attention to their voices. They listen to the voices of the famous 1
percent—the rich and the powerful, the corporate sector. The elections—Tom
Ferguson’s stellar work has demonstrated, very conclusively, that for a long
period, way back, U.S. elections have been pretty much bought. You can predict
the outcome of a presidential or congressional election with remarkable
precision by simply looking at campaign spending. That’s only one part of it.
Lobbyists practically write legislation in congressional offices. In massive
ways, the concentrated private capital, corporate sector, super wealth,
intervene in our elections, massively, overwhelmingly, to the extent that the
most elementary principles of democracy are undermined. Now, of course, all
that is technically legal, but that tells you something about the way the
society functions. So, if you’re concerned with our elections and how they
operate and how they relate to what would happen in a democratic society,
taking a look at Russian hacking is absolutely the wrong place to look. Well,
you see occasionally some attention to these matters in the media, but very
minor as compared with the extremely marginal question of Russian hacking.
And I think
we find this on issue after issue, also on issues on which what Trump says, for
whatever reason, is not unreasonable. So, he’s perfectly right when he says we
should have better relations with Russia. Being dragged through the mud for
that is outlandish, makes—Russia shouldn’t refuse to deal with the United
States because the U.S. carried out the worst crime of the century in the
invasion of Iraq, much worse than anything Russia has done. But they shouldn’t
refuse to deal with us for that reason, and we shouldn’t refuse to deal with
them for whatever infractions they may have carried out, which certainly exist.
This is just absurd. We have to move towards better—right at the Russian
border, there are very extreme tensions, that could blow up anytime and lead to
what would in fact be a terminal nuclear war, terminal for the species and life
on Earth. We’re very close to that. Now, we could ask why. First of all, we
should do things to ameliorate it. Secondly, we should ask why. Well, it’s
because NATO expanded
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in violation of verbal promises to
Mikhail Gorbachev, mostly under Clinton, partly under first Bush, then Clinton
expanded right to the Russian border, expanded further under Obama. The U.S.
has offered to bring Ukraine into NATO.
That’s the kind of a heartland of Russian geostrategic concerns. So, yes,
there’s tensions at the Russian border—and not, notice, at the Mexican border.
Well, those are all issues that should be of primary concern. The fate of—the
fate of organized human society, even of the survival of the species, depends
on this. How much attention is given to these things as compared with, you
know, whether Trump lied about something? I think those seem to me the
fundamental criticisms of the media.
Please go here to continue the transcript or to watch the full video interview: https://www.democracynow.org/2018/7/27/noam_chomsky_on_mass_media_obsession
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