Media Example of Damage Control?

[Ruth]

I think this is quite a nice example, but its just my opinion.

In this article Noam Chomsky 'cops a serve' from a Peter Beaumont. I think he was trying to call Noam Chomsky a thug.... among other things, perhaps for daring to critisise American Foreign policy in his new book Failed States

Maybe the Professor's life is about to get more 'interesting' as they say when somebody publicly 'thumbs their nose' at the power structure in the US.

The article also contains a link to 'join the debate' with Peter Beaumont. I'm not sure what that's really all about.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1799901,00.html

A noxious form of argument

Noam Chomsky has allowed bile and rhetoric to replace intellectual rigour in his latest diatribe against the present United States administration, says Peter Beaumont

Sunday June 18, 2006
The Observer


I will admit one thing from the start. When I read Noam Chomsky, the voice I hear is that of Chloe, the terrier-like computer geek in 24. This is not without reason. I met Chomsky once at a New Statesman lunch and that nagging, bullying, wheedling voice has stuck with me since. It is a voice that brooks no dissent from his dissident view. 'You'll know ... ' was his opening line on being introduced to two of us who covered the war in Kosovo, before launching into one of his favourite rants - that it really wasn't the poor Serbs what done it, but nasty Nato.

What is most troubling about all this is that there is much that Chomsky and I should agree on. Like him, I was opposed to what I believed was an illegal war in Iraq. In my travels in that country, I, too, have been troubled by the consequences of occupation. Where I differ from him, however, is that I reject Chomsky's view that American misdeeds are printed through history like the lettering in a stick of rock. Instead, the conclusions I have drawn from more than a decade of reporting wars on the ground is that motivations are complex, messy and contradictory, that the best intentions can spawn the worst outcomes and, occasionally, vice versa.

But you've got to admire him for the verbal speed with which he comes out from his corner, if not for his grasp on reality. He hits you with five facts before you have had time to digest the first. Chomsky is an intellectual bruiser. Bang, bang, bang, he goes, and all that is left for slower-witted mortals is to hang on, 'rope-a-dope', like Muhammad Ali and try to survive until the round is over. Except it doesn't work quite so well in his written prose.

Reading Failed States, I had an epiphany: that by applying a Chomskian analysis to his own writing, you discover exactly the same subtle textual biases, evasions and elisions of meaning as used by those he calls 'the doctrinal managers' of the 'powerful elites'. The mighty Chomsky, the world's greatest public intellectual, is prone to playing fast and loose.

It is important to recognise this fact because the Chomskian analysis has become the defining dissident voice of the blogosphere and a certain kind of far-left academia. So a sense of its integrity is crucial. It is obsessively well-read, but rather famished in original research, except when it is counting how often the liberal media say this or that in their search for hidden, and sometimes not-so-hidden, bias. Crucially, it is not interested in debate, because balance is a ruse of the liberal media elites used to con the dumb masses. Chomsky is essential to save you, dear reader, from the lies we peddle.

And, boy, is it a big lie this time. What Chomsky is taking on now is America's claim to be the world's greatest democracy. Failed States posits, tendentiously, that the US has become the ultimate 'failed state', a term usually reserved for places like Somalia. It is a terrorist state and a rogue state, a country that has brought us to the brink of annihilating darkness. These big claims are bolstered by his familiar arsenal of exaggeration, sarcasm and allusion.

This is a shame, because the issues Chomsky addresses in this book are crucial. The present US administration has presided over one of the most venal periods in the country's recent history at home and abroad. Through a tricksy application of laws never intended for those purposes, George W Bush's lawyers have dismantled constitutional balances between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of US governance to accumulate the exclusive power to interpret law in the presidential office, while on the international stage, citing the same necessity of protecting the homeland, American officials have stormed their way around the globe, kidnapping, torturing and killing.

These are all serious matters, but Chomsky chooses to deal with America's growing democratic deficit not by putting it under a microscope, but by reaching for hyperbole. He suggests an America in the grip of a 'demonic messianism' comparable to that of Hitler's National Socialism. Except that it isn't. Conveniently missing from Chomsky's account is the fact that the failure and overreach of George W Bush's policies, both on the domestic and the international front, has had serious consequences for his brand of neo-conservatism: disastrously collapsing public-approval ratings.

But then there is an awful lot conveniently missing from Chomsky's account of the crimes of his own country. In attempting to create a consistent argument for America as murderous bully, going back to the Seminole Wars, he edits out anything that could be put on the other side of the balance sheet. I could find no mention of the Marshall Plan, although there is enough about American crimes in Guatemala, to which he returns repeatedly. He can find enough to say about America's misdemeanours during the Cold War; but nothing about the genuine fear of the Soviet Union, one of the most brutally efficient human-rights-abusing states in history.

These are small matters in comparison with some of Chomsky's other rhetorical stunts. There are the long riffs on ideas extracted out of single sentences from journalistic articles or academic papers, sometimes by now-discredited figures, employed to explain whole policies and strands of history to his satisfaction. At other times, he elides rumour with quotes taken out of context, for example where he refers to: 'A Jordanian journalist [who] was informed by officials in charge of the Jordanian-Iraqi border after US and UK forces took over that radioactive materials were detected in one of every eight trucks crossing into Jordan destination unknown. "Stuff happens," in Rumsfeld's words.'

That's all pretty puzzling - as four pages earlier, Chomsky gives the impression that the weapons of mass destruction thing was all a deception. It is not only that his desire to wallop the US at any cost has allowed inconsistencies to creep in; there is also plain sloppiness. Between pages 60 and 62, for instance, he cannot decide whether an alleged bribe paid to UN official is $150,000 or $160,000. Maybe it's a typo. Maybe not.

If all this sounds entirely negative, I do concede that there are areas where Chomsky lands some crunching punches. His analysis of US double standards on issues from the promotion of democracy abroad, to the World Court, Kyoto, US support for Israel, nuclear proliferation and trade is spot-on - but far from novel areas of concern, and Chomsky doesn't like to settle on them. In themselves, they are not enough for the professor. The case that he wants to make is that the US is uniquely awful.

In setting about this task quite so selectively, he allies himself with some obnoxious characters. While Chomsky was righteously indignant over suggestions in a recent Guardian interview that he defended Srebrenica, he does portray a certain sympathy for Slobodan Milosevic. Kosovo, in his reading, began in 1999 with Nato bombers, not in 1998 with Serbian police actions that cleared villages, towns and valleys of their populations. (I know this, Mr Chomsky, because I saw them do it.)

But what I find most noxious about Chomsky's argument is his desire to create a moral - or rather immoral - equivalence between the US and the greatest criminals in history. Thus on page 129, comparing a somewhat belated US conversion to the case for democracy in Iraq after the failure to find WMD, Chomsky claims: 'Professions of benign intent by leaders should be dismissed by any rational observer. They are near universal and predictable, and hence carry virtually no information. The worst monsters - Hitler, Stalin, Japanese fascists, Suharto, Saddam Hussein and many others - have produced moving flights of rhetoric about their nobility of purpose.'

Which leads to a question: is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky, from the window of your library at MIT? Is it the stench of the gulag wafting over the Charles River? Do you walk in fear of persecution and murder for expressing your dissident views? Or do you make a damn good living out of it? The faults of the Bush administration will not be changed by books such as Failed States. They will be swept away by ordinary, decent Americans in the world's greatest - if flawed and selfish - democracy going to the polls.

Join the debate

Peter Beaumont, the Observer's foreign affairs editor, has also written a commentary about his review of Failed States, which you can read here. And you can join the debate on the Observer blog.

Noam alone

Born: 7 December 1928, Philadelphia.

Education: Philadelphia, Harvard.

Career: Currently professor emeritus of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Key political works: Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War and US Political Culture (1993); 9/11 (2001); Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (2003).

In his own words: 'I've written about terrorism, and I think you can show without much difficulty that terrorism pretty much corresponds to power. I don't think that's very surprising. The more powerful states are involved in more terrorism, by and large. The United States is the most powerful, so it's involved in massive terrorism by its own definition of terrorism.'

From an interview with Harry Kreisler at University of California

 

[Ruth]

Found another example of media manipulation and control, this time the oneline type.
Its probably indicative of many current examples of how 'trolls' manipulate blogs towards their own agenda. You gotta love it when they get found out. This is how the Huffington Post supports its very own 'troll'....

http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1803833,00.html

Huffington Post blogger blocked

Stephen Brook, press correspondent
Thursday June 22, 2006


Influential website the Huffington Post tried to ban one of its bloggers after he discovered an anonymous heckler on his blog was actually the Post's technology manager.
In his Huffington Post blog, Peter Rost exposed the identity of the heckler - known as a "troll" in blogging parlance - which prompted the Post to temporarily block his access.

He recounted the incident on a new blog site he created separately to the one co-founded by journalist Arianna Huffington.

"This is a sad day for online journalism," Dr Rost wrote on his new site. "I was terminated without any investigation of the statements in my blog post, all of which were referenced using independent sources.

"I presented facts and made no allegations. Arianna Huffington's newspaper decided to shut down the whistleblower and proved that her online magazine is no more ethical than the people and organisations she criticises on a daily basis."

Dr Rost, a former vice-president of drug company Pfizer, became suspicious after his blogs were persistently attacked by a poster called yacomink.

One comment by yacomink - "This thing reads like a sixth grader's first attempt at a research paper" - was voted a "readers' favourite comment" within half an hour of its posting, the speed of which aroused Dr Rost's suspicions.

Dr Rost had blogged at the Huffington Post for about three months and written over 60 blogs.

He was also suspicious of the incident because, out of 1,278 responses, only 18 comments had ever been popular enough to be voted a "readers' favourite".

He found yacomink's IP address and, after a further search, found a web page for Andy Yaco-Mink, which included the following: "Andy Yaco-Mink is the Huffington Post's technology manager. He lives in Brooklyn."

Dr Rost wrote a Huffington Post blog exposing Andy Yaco-Mink as the troll, suggesting that he had probably manipulated the Post's systems to get his comments placed in the readers' favourite comments.

He wrote: "In order for the Huffington Post to maintain its credibility, the site needs to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest or rigged rankings."

This prompted the Post to block his access to the site.

"You have not been 'fired' but rather asked to refrain from posting as our editorial staff felt that your recent blogs were not in line with the mission of our site," the Huffington Post wrote in a letter to Dr Rost.

"This was not an Arianna call. Ultimately, the decision was an editorial one - not one person to be held responsible - really," concluded the letter.

Dr Rost was later reinstated to the Huffington Post (click here to see his blog), but the incident has occurred shortly after another Huffington Post controversy - when it was forced to admit faking a blog by actor George Clooney.

The Oscar-winner Clooney forced the site to retract a blog it had passed off as his own work, when his comments had been collated from an interview.

Clooney released a statement calling Huffington's methods "purposefully misleading," and she acknowledged that his so-called blog was actually compiled from Clooney's recent interviews with the Guardian and CNN's Larry King.