Chomsky. Transcript. TheBigIdea. AndrewMarr. BBC2. 14feb1996.

A series of stupidquestions otherwise noted.

1.      Do you believe what you read inMedia? I’m nottalking aboutDianeFergie, but important stuff, Politics and Economics. Has it ever occured to you that it could be a system of propaganda designed to limit how you imagine the world? Well, that’s the view ofNoamChomsky who’s been teaching here inBoston for the past thirtyyears. Described as the America’s leading dissident, he’s based at [theMIT], where although it is verycold, it isn’t exactly theGulagArchipelago [byAlexandrR-SolzHenITSyn]. [What a dumbass.] As a working journalist myself, I’ve come toBoston to talk toChomsky about bias in theMedia.

2.      [Scene from1948.1956.MichaelAnderson.] Orwell’snightmare, the place where propaganda rules and thought is controlled. It’s now a familiar chilling ColdWarfable, most of us would say it’s an old hat, but is it? (TheThoughtPolice are joining you.)

3.      For decades, FreedomsOfThoughtAndExpression has been central to westernDemocracy. TheMedia sees itself as free, fearless, [“]stroppy[“]. The familial part of the press are toostrong, so their idea ofOrwell’s idea still may be still relevant may seem bizarre, but not toNoamChomsky, who thinks the image of trueseekingMedia is a sham. Chomsky’s devoted his life to questioning westernStatepower. [ForWhatIt’sWorth byBuffaloSpringfields, Start.]

4.      Having virtuallyinvented modernLinguistics by the age of thirty, Chomsky joined the gathering swell of protest in the sixties.

5.      [Footage.] I’m NoamChomsky, I’m a faculty ofMIT. I’m getting moreheavilyinvolved in antiwaractivity in the last few years.

6.      [ForWhatIt’sWorth byBuffaloSpringfields, Start.] Since then, Chomsky has championed the brand ofAnarchism, becoming deeplyhostile to the established power and privilege. In recent years, he’s refined what he calls propagandamodel of theMedia. [On a brighter note. Static sound. Commercial break.] He claims that the massMedia brainwashed under freedom. Although theMedia systematicallysuppress-and-distort, when they do present facts, the context obscure their real meanings. InvasionOfEastTimor by the indonesianArmy caused an indescribable slaughter, hundreds of thousands died, but it was more or less ignored by the mainstream westernMedia, because, Chomsky argues, we were sending arms to the aggressors. But wars where theWest are interested and directlyinvolved get a different treatment. ToChomsky, coverage for theGulfWar was servile, trivial criticisms were add[ed], fundamental ones were ignored.

7.      Hello, I’m AndrewMarr. Nice to see you. Hi.

8.      Naturally, Chomsky has numerous critics.

9.      I’m over here? Okay.

10.   Is theMedia so influential? Have the dissident views really been excluded in the age of relativeMediadiversity, in the age of Internet? What about Chomsky’s own access? [Shot of a cameraman adjusting a lens.] What about this very program?

11.   ProfessorChomsky, could we start by listening to you explain what the propagandamodel, as you call it, is. For many people, the idea that propaganda is used by democratic, rather than merelyauthoritarianGovernments, will be a strange one.

12.   Well, the term propaganda fell into disfavour around theSecondWorldWar, but in the1920’s and 1930’s, it was commonlyused, and in fact advocated, by leading intellectuals, by the founders of modernPoliticalScience, by Wilsonianprogressives and of course, by the publicrelationsindustry, as a necessary technique to overcome the danger ofDemocracy. The institutional structure of the media is quitestraightforward. We’re talking about theUnitedStates, it’s notverydifferent elsewhere. There are sectors, but the agendasettingMedia, the ones that set the framework for everyone else, like theNewYorkTimes and theWashingtonPost, and so on. These are the major corporations, parts of evenbigger conglomerates. Like other corporateinstitutions, they have a product and a market; their market is advertisers, that is, other businesses; their product is relativelyprivileged audiences, more or less.

13.   So they’re selling audiences to.

14.   They’re selling privileged audiences, these are big corporations selling privileged audiences to other corporations. Now the question is, What picture of the world would a rational person expect to come out of this structure? Then we draw some conclusions about what you would expect, and then we check, and yes, that’s the picture of the world that comes out.

15.   And is this anything more than the idea that, basically, the press is relativelyrightwing, with some exceptions, because it’s owned by big business, which is a truism, it’s wellknown?

16.   Well, I would call the press relativelyliberal. Here I agree with the rightwingcritics. So, especially theNewYorkTimes and theWashingtonPost, which are called, without a trace of irony. TheNewYorkTimes is called the establishmentleft in say, major ForeignPolicyjournals. And that’s correct, but what’s notrecognised is that the role of the liberal intellectualestablishment is to set verysharp bounds on how far you can go. This far, and no further.

17.   Give me some examples of that.

18.   Well, let’s take say, theVietnamWar. Probably the leading critic, and in fact one of the leading dissident intellectuals in the mainstream, is AnthonyLewis of theNewYorkTimes, who did finallycome around to opposing the Vietnam War about1969, about a year and a half after corporateAmerica had more or less orderedWashington to [stop it] [“]call it off[“], and his picture from then on is that the war, as he put it, "began with blundering efforts to doGood", but it ended up by1969 being a disaster and costing us toomuch. And that’s the criticism.

19.   So, what would the "nonpropagandamodel" have told Americans about theVietnamWar at thesametime?

20.   Samething that the mainstream press was telling them aboutAfghanistan. TheUnitedStates invaded south[Vietnam]. Had first of all in the1950s set up a standard latinamericanstyle terrorState, which had massacred tens of thousands of people, but was unable to control local uprising. And everyone knows, at least every specialist knows that’s what it was. And when Kennedy came in, in1961, they had to make a decision, because the south[vietnamese]Government was collapsing under local attack, so theUS justinvaded the country. In1961, theUSAirForce started bombing southvietnamese civilians, authorised napalmcropdestruction. Then in1965, januaryfebruary1965, the next major escalation took place against southVietnam. Not against northVietnam, that was a sideshow. That’s what an honest press would be saying, but you can’t find a trace of it.

21.   Now, if the press is a censoring organisation, tell me how that works. You’re not suggesting that proprietors phone one another up, or that many journalists get their copy ["]spiked["], as we say?

22.   It’s actually. Orwell, you may recall, has an essay called, LiteraryCensorshipInEngland, which was supposed to be the introduction toAnimalFarm, except that it never appeared, in which he points out, Look, I’m writing about a totalitarian society, but in free democraticEngland, it’s not all that different, and then he says unpopular ideas can be silenced without any force, and then he gives a twosentencesresponse which is notveryprofound, but captures it. [Accurate] He says, Tworeasons. First, the press is owned by wealthymen who have every interest in not having certain things appear, but second, the whole educationalsystem from the beginning on through gets you to understand that there are certain things you just don’t say. Well, spelling these things out, that’s perfectlycorrect. I mean, thefirstsentence is what we expanded.

23.   This is what I don’t get, because it suggests. I mean, I’m a journalist. People like me are selfcensoring.

24.   No, notselfcensoring. There’s a filtering system that starts in kindergarten and goes all the way through and. It doesn’t work onehundredpercent, but it’s prettyeffective. It selects for obedience and subordination, and especially.

25.   So, [“]stroppy[“] people won’t make it to positions of influence.

26.   There’ll be behaviour problems or. If you read applications to a graduateschool, you see that people will tell you, He doesn’t get along toowell with his colleagues. You know how to interpret those things.

27.   I’m just interested in this because I was brought up, like a lot of people, probably postWatergatefilm and so on, to believe that Journalism was a crusading craft, and that there were a lot of disputatious, ["]stroppy["], difficult people inJournalism, and I have to say, I think I know some of them.

28.   Well, I know some of thebest, bestknown investigativereporters in theUnitedStates, I won’t mention names, whose attitude towards  theMedia is muchmorecynical than mine. [That ofChomsky’s] In fact, they regard theMedia as a sham. And they know, and they constantlytalk about how they try to [“]play it like a violin[“]. If they see a little opening, they’ll try to [“]squeeze[“] something in that ordinarily wouldn’t make it through. [Accurate.] And it’s perfectlytrue that this is a crusading profession, adversarial, we stand up against power, veryselfserving view. [e.g. Soderbergh, AaronSorkin] On the other hand, in my opinion, I hate to make a valuejudgement but, the betterjournalists, and in fact, the ones who are oftenregarded as thebestjournalists, have quite a different picture and, I think, a veryrealistic one.

29.   How can you know that I’m selfcensoring? How can you know that journalists are. [Theonlyquestion worth consideration.]

30.   I don’t say you’re selfcensoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying, but what I’m saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.

31.   We [theUK] have a press which has, it seems to me a relativelywide range of views. There is a pretty["]schmaltzy["] conservative majority but there are leftwingpapers, and there is a prettylarge offering of views running from the farright to the farleft, for those who want them. I don’t see how a propagandamodel.

32.   That’s not quite true. I mean, there have been good studies of the british press and you could look at them, JamesCurran is the major one, which point out that, up until the1960s there was indeed a kind of a socialdemocratic press, which sort of represented much of the interests of workingpeople, and ordinarypeople and so on, and it was verysuccessful. I mean, theDailyHerald for example had not only more, it had far higher circulation than other newspapers, but also a dedicated circulation. Furthermore, the tabloids at that time, theMirror and theSun, were kind of labourbased. By the[19]60s, that was all gone, and it disappeared under the pressure of capitalresources. What was left was overwhelmingly the sort of centre to right press with some dissidence. It’s true, I mean.

33.   We’ve got, I would say, a couple of large circulation newspapers, which are left of centre and which are putting in neoKeynesianviews which you call them elites are strongly hostile to.

34.   It’s interesting that you call neoKeynesian left of centre. I’d just call it straight centre. Left of centre is a valueterm.

35.   Sure.

36.   There are extremelygood journalists inEngland, a number of them, they writeveryhonestly, and verygood material. A lot of what they write wouldn’t appear here [theUS]. On the other hand, if you look at the question overall, I don’t think you’re going to find a big difference, and the few, there aren’t many studies of the british press, but the few that there are have found prettymuch thesameresults, and I think the better journalists will tell you that. In fact, what you have to do is check it out in cases. So let’s take what I just mentioned, theVietnamWar. The british press did not have the kind of stake in theVietnamWar that the american press did, because they weren’t fighting it. Just check sometime, and find out how many times you can find the american war inVietnam described as aUSattack against southVietnam, beginningclearly with outright aggression in1961, and escalating to massive aggression in[19]65. If you can find pontohohonepercent of the coverage saying that, you’ll surprise me. And in a free press, onehundredpercent of it would have been saying that. Now that’s just a matter of fact, it has nothing to do with left and right.

37.   Let me come up to a moremodern war, which was theGulfWar, which, again, looking at the press in Britain and watching Television, I was veryverywell aware of antiGulfWardissidence.

38.   Were you?

39.   The No blood for oil campaigns, and I have the.

40.   That’s not the dissidence.

41.   No blood for oil isn’t the dissidence?

42.   No, SaddamHussein’sAttackOnKuwait took place on august second. Within a few days, the great fear in Washington[DC] was that SaddamHussein was going to withdraw and leave a puppetGovernment, which would be prettymuch what theUS had done inPanama. TheUS and Britain, therefore, movedveryquickly to try to undercut the danger of withdrawal. By lateaugust, negotiationoffers were coming fromIraq, calling for a negotiated iraqi withdrawal. The press wouldn’t publish them here, they never publish them inEngland. It did leak however.

43.   There was a great debate about whether there should have been a negotiated settlement.

44.   No, sorry, no, there was not a debate. There was a debate about whether you should continue with sanctions, which is a different question. Because the fact of the matter is, we have good evidence that, by mid-or-late-august, the sanctions had already worked, because these stories were coming from high americanofficials in theStateDepartment, former american officials likeRichardHelm, they couldn’t get the mainstreampress to cover them, but they did manage to get onejournal to cover them, Newsday. That’s a suburbanjournal inLongIsland[NY]. The purpose obviously being to spook out theNewYorkTimes, because that’s theonlything that matters. It came out inNewsday and this continued, I won’t go through the details, but this continued until january second. At that time, the offers that were coming were apparently so meaningful to theStateDepartment, that StateDepartmentofficials were saying that, Look, this is negotiable, meaningful, maybe wedon’taccepteverything, but it’s certainly a basis for a negotiated withdrawal. The press would not cover it. Newsday did. A few other people did. I have a couple of op-eds on it. And to my knowledge, you can check this, thefirstreference to any of this inEngland is actually in an article I wrote in theGuardian, which was in earlyjanuary. You can check and see if there’s an earlier reference.

45.   Okay, let’s look at one of the other key examples, which you’ve looked at too, which would appear to go against your idea, which is theWatergateaffair.

46.   Watergate is a perfect example. We’ve discussed it at length in our book in fact, and elsewhere. It’s a perfect example of the way the press was subordinated to power. In fact.

47.   But this brought down a President.

48.   Just a minute, let’s take a look. What happened there. Here it’s kind of interesting, because you can’t do experiments onHistory, but here History was kind enough to set one up for us. TheWatergateexposures happened to take place at exactlythesametime as another set of exposures. They were the exposures ofCoIntelPro.

49.   Sorry, you’ll have to explain that.

50.   It’s interesting that I have to explain it, because it’s vastlymoresignificant thanWatergate, that alreadymakes my point. CoIntelPro was a program of subversion carried out, not by a couple of pettycrooks, but by the national political police, theFBI, under fouradministrations. It began in the lateEisenhoweradministration, ran up until.

51.   This is the end of theSocialistWorkersParty inAmerica?

52.   TheSocialistWorkersParty was one tiny fragment of it. It began. By the time it got through, I won’t run through the whole story, it was aimed at the entireNewLeft, at theWomen’sMovement, at the wholeBlackmovement; it was extremelybroad. Its actions went as far as politicalassassination. Now what’s the difference between the two? Veryclear. InWatergate, RichardNixon went after half ofUSprivatepower, namely theDemocraticParty, and power can defend itself, so therefore that’s a scandal. He didn’t do anything. Nothing happened. Look, I was onNixon’senemieslist. I didn’t even know, nothing ever happened. But.

53.   Nonetheless, you wouldn’t say it was an insignificant event, to bring down aPresident.

54.   No, it was a case where half ofUSpower defended itself against a person who had obviouslystepped out of the line. And the fact that the press thought that was important shows that they think powerful people ought to be able to defend themselves. [AlanJPakula. RobertRedford. HalAshby.] Now, whether there was a question of principle involved happens to be easilychecked in this case. One tiny part of theCoIntelProprogram was itself farmoresignificant in principle than all ofWatergate. And if you look at the whole program, I mean, it’s not even a discussion. But you have to ask me what CoIntelPro is. You know what Watergate is. There couldn’t be a moredramatic example of the subordination of educated opinion toPower, here inEngland, as well as theUnitedStates.

55.   I know you’ve concentrated on foreign affairs, and some of these key areas.

56.   I’ve talked a lot about domestic problems.

57.   Well, I’d like to come onto that, because it stillseems to me that, on a range of prettyimportant issues for the establishment, there is serious dissent.

58.   That’s right.

59.   Gingrich and his neoconservative agenda inAmerica has been prettysavagelylampooned. The apparentlyfixed succession for the republican candidacy at the presidential election has come apart. Clinton, who is a powerful figure, is having great difficulty withWhitewater. Everywhere one looks, one sees disjunctions, openings. [Fuck are you talking about? Soderbergh&Clooney.]

60.   Within a spectrum so narrow that you really have to look hard to find it. Let me give you.

61.   Can I just stop you there, because you say that the spectrum is narrow, but on the one hand.

62.   Let me illustrate.

63.   We’ve got flattax.

64.   Can I illustrate?

65.   Flattax pepublicans, right the way through to relativelybigStatedemocrats.

66.   Find one. Find a bigStatedemocrat. The position now is exactly what Clinton said, The year of bigGovernment is over, bigGovernment has failed, theWarOnPoverty has failed, we have to get rid of this entitlementbusiness. That was Clinton’scampaignmessage in1992. That’s the democrats. What you have now is a difference between sort of moderaterepublicans and extremerepublicans. Actually, it’s wellknown that there’s been a long standing. Sort of split in the american businesscommunity. It’s not precise, but it’s sort of general. Between highTech., capitalintensive, internationallyoriented business, which tends to be what’s called liberal, and lowerTech., morenationallyoriented, morelabourintensive industry, which is what’s called conservative. Now, between those sectors, there have been differences and in fact, if you take a look at americanPolitics, it oscillates prettymuch between those limits. There’s good work on this incidentally. The person who’s done themostextensive work is ThomasFerguson, he’s a politicalscientist.

67.   Onemoreexample, which will have some resonance in-Britain and -Europe, is the great argument over theNorthAmericanFreeTradeAssociation, theNAFTAargument, where.

68.   This is an interesting one.

69.   If there is something which one could describe as a global opposition movement, that is, tradeunion-, environmental-, community-based, then it was certainlypresent in the antiNAFTA.

70.   Shall I tell you what happened?

71.   Well.

72.   Shall I tell you what happened?

73.   What I was going to say is that.

74.   Neverreported.

75.   Those arguments were well. We were well aware of those arguments.

76.   No, that is flatlyfalse. They were notpermitted into the press, and I documented this. I’ll give you references if you like.

77.   We read all about it inBritain is all I will say.

78.   No, you did not. For example.

79.   I’m sorry, but we did.

80.   Well, let me ask you. Did you read the report of theOfficeOfTechnologyAssociationOfCongress?

81.   Well.

82.   Sorry, did you read the report of theLabourAdvisoryCommittee?

83.   Well, I don’t get these reports, but I read.

84.   Sorry, that’s.

85.   I read many articles about the antiNAFTAargument that’s very.

86.   I’m sorry. If you’re interested in facts, I’ll tell you what they are, and I’ll evengive you sources. TheNAFTAagreement was signed more or less in secret by the threePresidents, in midaugust, right in the middle of the presidentialcampaign. Now, there’s aLaw in theUnitedStates, the1974TradeAct, which requires that any traderelated issue be submitted to theLabourAdvisoryCommittee, which is unionbased, for assessment and analysis. It was neversubmitted to them. Oneday before they were supposed to give their finalreport, in midseptember, it was finallysubmitted to them. The unions are prettyrightwing, but they were infuriated. They had never been shown this. Even at the time that they had to write the. They were given twentyhourhours to write the report. They didn’t evenhave time to look at the text. Nevertheless, they wrote a veryvigorous analysis of it with alternatives presented, saying, Look, we’re not againstNAFTA, we’re against this version of it. They gave a good analysis, happened to be verysimilar to one that had been given by theCongressionalResearchService, theOfficeOfTechnologyAssessment. None of this ever entered the press. Theonlything that entered the press was the kind of critique that they were willing to deal with, Mexicobashing, rightwingnationalists, you know, and so on. That entered the press. But not the critical analysis of theLabourMovement. Now.

87.   But somehow, by a process of osmosis or something, I picked up quite a lot of antiNAFTAarguments, on the basis of workerprotection, environmentaldegradation.

88.   May I continue? This goes on in the press, right until the end. There were big popular movements opposing it. It was extremelyhard to suppress all of this, to suppress everything coming out of the labour movement, out of the popular movements, and so on, but they did. At the very end, it had reached such a point that there was concern that they might not be able to ["]ram this through["]. Now, take a look at theNewYorkTimes and theWashingtonPost, say the liberalMedia and the national ones in the last couple of weeks. I’ve written about it, and I’ll tell you what you find. What you find is onehundredpercentsupport forNAFTA, refusal to allow any of the popular arguments, tremendous labourbashing.

89.   Can I come back, to make sure that I understand the point about the liberal press as against the conservative press because, inBritain over thelasttwoyears, politicians I come across are deeplyirritated, ranging on furious, about attacks on them in the press, day after day, on issues which have come to be known as sleaze. They feel that they are harassed, that they are misunderstood and that the press has got above itself, is ["]uppity["] and is destructive. That’s the message that they are giving to us. Now, are you saying that that whole process doesn’t matter, because it’s all part of the same.

90.   It’s marginal. Samething is true here. When the press focuses on the sexlives of politicians, reach for your pocket, and see who’s pulling out your wallet, because those are not the issues that matter to people. I mean, they’re verymarginal interest. The issues that matter to people are somewhere else, so as soon as you hear, you know, the press and presidential candidates and so on, talking about values, as I say, put your hand on your wallet. You know that something else is happening.

91.   But it’s been muchmore than. Certainly with us, it’s been much more than ["]bedhopping["], it’s also been about taking money, it’s been about the corporations paying for political parties.

92.   Corruption, sure. Corrupt judges, fine topic.

93.   Corrupt parties?

94.   Yeah, corrupt parties. Big business is not in favour of corruption, and if the press focuses on corruption, FortuneMagazine will be quite happy [that it happens and quite happy to report it], they don’t care about that. They don’t want the society to be corrupt, they want it to be run in their interest, that’s a different thing. [GeorgeClooney, StevenSoderbergh, ScottZBurns. KurtEichenwald. MichaelMann. MartinScorsese.] Corruption interferes with that. So, for example, when I was, let’s say. I justhappened to have come back fromIndia. TheBankOfIndia released an estimate. Eonomists there tell me it’s low, that a third of theEconomy is ["]black["], meaning mostlyrichbusinessmen not paying their taxes. Well, that makes the press, because, in fact, certainly transnationals don’t like it. They want the system to be run without corruption, robbery, bribes, and so on. Just pouring money into their pockets. So yes, that’s a fine topic for the press. On the other hand, the topics I’ve talked about are not fine topics, because they’re muchtoosignificant.

95.   What would a press be like, do you think, without the propagandamodel? What would we be reading in the papers that we don’t read about now?

96.   I’ve just given a dozen examples. On every example, it’s only you’ve picked, I haven’t picked, I mean I could pick my own, but I’m happy to let you pick them. On every one of those examples, I think you can demonstrate that there’s been a severe distortion of what the facts of the matter are. This has nothing to do with left and right as I’ve been stressing, and it has left the population prettyconfused and marginalised. A free press would just tell you the truth. This has nothing to do with left and right.

97.   And given the power of big business, the power of the press, what can people do about this?

98.   They can do exactly what people do in the haitian slums and hills, Organise. And Haiti, which is thepoorestcountry in the hemisphere, they created a veryvibrant, lively civil society, in the slums, in the hills, in conditions that most of us couldn’t even imagine. We can do the same, muchmoreeasily.

99.   You’ve got communityactivists inAmerica.

100.                    Yes, we do.

101.                    I’m nottalking about the socalledCommunitarianMovements, but I’m talking about the local community-activists and -writers, all over the place.

102.                    All over the place, all over the place. Take say, a city likeBoston, with all sorts of people. They don’t even know of each other’s existence. There’s a verylarge number of them. One of the things I’ll doconsistently is run around [travel within] the country giving talks. One of my main purposes, and the purpose of the people who invite me is to bring the people together, people in that area, who are working on thesamethings and don’t know of each other’s existence, because the resources are so scattered, and the means ofCommunication are so marginal, there isn’t just much they can do about it. Now, there are plenty of things that are happening. So take say, communitybasedRadio, which is sort of outside the system.

103.                    I was going to ask you about that, and about theInternet, which has certainly got prettyopen access at the moment.

104.                    Well, theInternet, like mostTechnology, is a very doubleedgedsword. Like anyTechnology, includingPrinting, it has a liberatory potential, but it also has a repressive potential, and there’s a battle going on about which way it’s going to go, as there was forRadio, and Television, and so on.

105.                    About ownership and advertising.

106.                    Right, and about just what’s going to be in it, and who’s going to have access to it. Remember, incidentally, that theInternet is an eliteoperation. Most of the population [on this planet] of the world has never even made a phonecall, you know, so that’s certainly not on theInternet. Nevertheless, it does have democratising potential, and there’s a struggle going on right now as to whether that’s going to be realised, or whether it’ll turn into something like a homemarketingservice, and a way of marginalising people even further. That discussion went on in the1920s, it was Radio, that’s interesting how it turned out. It went on overTelevision, it’s now going on over theInternet. And, that’s a matter of popular struggle. Look, we don’t live the way we did twohundredsyears ago,  or even thirtyyears ago. There’s been a lot of progress. It hasn’t been gifts from above. It’s been the result of people getting together, and refusing to accept the dictates of authoritarian institutions. And, there’s no reason to think that that’s over.

107.                    You’ve been portrayed, and some would say, occasionally portrayed yourself, as a kind of lonely dissident voice. You clearly don’t feel lonely at all.

108.                    I say nothing like that. I certainly do not portray myself that way. I can’t begin to accept a fraction of the invitations from around the country. I’m scheduled twoyears in advance. And at that, I’m only selecting a fraction.

109.                    And you’re speaking to big audiences.

110.                    Huge audiences. And these are not eliteintellectuals, either. These are mostlypopular audiences. I probablyspend twentyorthirtyhours a week just answering letters from people all over the country and the world. I wish I felt a little morelonely. I don’t. Of course, I’m not inPR, you know, I wouldn’t be in the mainstreamMedia, but I wouldn’t expect that. Why should they offer space to somebody who’s trying to undermine their power and to expose what they do? But that’s not loneliness.

111.                    ProfessorChomsky, thank you verymuch.