Noam Chomsky
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This article analyzes the British government’s controversial September 2002 Dossier on alleged Iraqi WMD and addresses the question of whether the dossier was part of what it refers to as a campaign of “organized political persuasion” and the extent to which deception was involved. It argues that the available evidence is consistent with the dossier being part of an organized political persuasion campaign, coordinated with the US, and aimed at mobilizing both domestic and international audiences. It shows that the dossier was fundamentally misleading about the intelligence and that deliberate deception through omission and distortion was involved. These findings deal a significant blow to the “intelligence failure” thesis and raise serious questions regarding the use of intelligence in the run up to the Iraq War, as well as the deleterious consequences of organized political persuasion for democratic accountability.
Journalists Under Fire: Information War and Journalistic Practices is the first book to combine a conceptually audacious analysis of the changing nature of war with an empirically rich critical analysis of journalists who cover conflict. In this book, authors Howard Tumber and Frank Webster explore questions about Information War and journalistic practices. In the era of multi-national journalism, of the Internet and satellite videophone, the book highlights central features of media reporting in contemporary conflict. Drawing on more than fifty lengthy interviews with frontline correspondents, the authors shed light on the motivations, fears, and practices of those who work under conditions of journalism under fire. is the first book to combine a conceptually audacious analysis of the changing nature of war with an empirically rich critical analysis of journalists who cover conflict. In this book, authors Howard Tumber and Frank Webster explore questions about Information War and journalistic practices. In the era of multi-national journalism, of the Internet and satellite videophone, the book highlights central features of media reporting in contemporary conflict. Drawing on more than fifty lengthy interviews with frontline correspondents, the authors shed light on the motivations, fears, and practices of those who work under conditions of journalism under fire.
From the Korean War to the current conflict in Iraq,Paying the Human Costs of Warexamines the ways in which the American public decides whether to support the use of military force. Contrary to the conventional view, the authors demonstrate that the public does not respond reflexively and solely to the number of casualties in a conflict. Instead, the book argues that the public makes reasoned and reasonable cost-benefit calculations for their continued support of a war based on the justifications for it and the likelihood it will succeed, along with the costs that have been suffered in casualties. Of these factors, the book finds that the most important consideration for the public is the expectation of success. If the public believes that a mission will succeed, the public will support it even if the costs are high. When the public does not expect the mission to succeed, even small costs will cause the withdrawal of support.Providing a wealth of new evidence about American attitudes toward military conflict,Paying the Human Costs of Waroffers insights into a controversial, timely, and ongoing national discussion.
NATO'S Poorly planned adventure in Kosovo has brought a critical question to the fore: just how should Americans define their national interest in the information age? The Soviet Union is gone, and an information revolution has transformed the nature of power. Few "A list" threats to American security loom large today. Global telecommunications have made humanitarian crises in far-flung places impossible to ignore. But before the United States embarks on another costly human rights crusade, Americans should recognize that moral values are only part of a foreign policy. Other essential priorities remain. If Washington neglects to handle the "A list," the consequences for global peace and prosperity will be dire.
October 2008 marked the 20th anniversary of the publication of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. Their Propaganda Model (PM), which attempted to explain the behaviour of the media in the United States, found that it consistently served the interests of corporate and state power. Furthermore, they anticipated that the PM would be generally ignored within academia, which, all too often, also served the interests of corporate and state power. This commentary breaks new ground by focusing upon their second-order prediction, concerning the reception of the PM within academia; it demonstrates that the PM has been systematically marginalized within the field of media and communication studies, just as Herman and Chomsky forecast it would. The commentary is divided into six sections. The first section highlights the contrast between the liberal pluralist perspective and the Marxist-radical critique of how political and media systems function in capitalist, liberal-democratic societies. The second section situates the PM within the Marxist-radical tradition of media and communication studies. The third section provides an overview of the PM, more specifically its three hypotheses, its five operative principles and the evidence presented by Herman and Chomsky in support of the PM. The fourth section, which assesses how the PM has been received within the field of media and communication studies since 1988, is concerned with the second-order prediction that the PM would be neglected. More specifically, it surveys the way in which scholars have engaged with the PM; it provides data on the proportion of media and communication journal articles that have attended to the PM; and it submits data on the number of media and communication texts that refer to the PM. The fifth section suggests a number of reasons to explain why the PM has been generally dismissed, while the sixth section makes the case for the continued relevance of the PM.
This article provides a framework for the study of visual securitization, that is, when images constitute something or someone as threatened and in need of immediate defense or when securitizing actors argue that images ‘speak security’. To study security politics is to focus on the public constitution of threats and dangers; to study visual securitization, therefore, requires an analysis not just of the image as a free-standing entity, but of the ways it is constituted through spoken and written discourse. To analyze the process of visual securitization, this article advances an inter-visual/intertextual model consisting of four components: the visual itself, its immediate intertextual context, the wider policy discourse, and the constitutions of the image. Three additional sets of theoretical arguments deepen this model by pointing to the specificity of the image as comprised through immediacy, circulability, and ambiguity, the strategies of depiction that images employ, and the genres through which images are brought to the audience. The applicability of the theoretical framework is illustrated through a case study of one of the most conspicuous cases of visual securitization: the Muhammad Cartoon Crisis.