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From: George Gundrey - IGC News Desk <newsdesk@igc.apc.org>

/* Written  8:10 PM  Jul 26, 1994 by harelb in igc:chomsky.views */
/* ---------- "The "Concision" Technique of U.S. M" ---------- */
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The "Concision" Technique of U.S. Media
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>From _Chronicles of Dissent_
Transcribed by Eric Schissel
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February 2, 1990
interview of Noam Chomsky by David Barsamian
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DS: I'm interested that you've said that commercial radio is less
ideological than public radio.

NC: That's been my experience.  Here I'd want to be a little more
cautious.  Public radio out in the sticks, in my experience, is
pretty open.  So when I go to Wyoming or Iowa I'm on public radio,
for longer discussions.  That would be very hard to imagine in
Boston or Washington.  Occasionally you might get on with somebody
else to balance you for three minutes, in which there are three
sentences for each person.  But anything that would be more in
depth would be very difficult.  It's worth bearing in mind that
the U.S. communications system has devised a very effective
structural technique to prevent dissidence.  This comes out very
clearly sometimes.  The United States is about the only country
I know where anywhere near the mainstream you've got to be extremely
concise in what you say, because if you ever get access, it's two
minutes between commercials.  That's not true in other countries.
It's not true outside of the mainstream either. You can get maybe
ten or fifteen minutes, you can develop a thought.  If you can get
on a U.S. mainstream program, NPR, Ted Koppel, it's a couple of
sentences. They're very well aware of it.  Do you know Jeff
Hansen?


DB: He's at WORT, Madison.

NC: Last time I was out there, he wanted to arrange an interview
when I was in the area giving some talks on the media.  He started by
playing a tape that he had that you've probably heard where he had
interviewed Jeff Greenfield, some mucky-muck with *Nightline*.
He asked Greenfield, How come you never have Chomsky on?
Greenfield starts with a kind of tirade about how this guy's a
wacko from Neptune.  After he calmed down and stopped foaming
at the mouth, he then said something which was quite right:
Look, he probably "lacks concision." We need the kind of people who
can say something in a few brief sentences.  Maybe the best expert
on some topic is from Turkey and speaks only Turkish. That's no good
for us.  We've got to get somebody who can say something with
concision, and this guy Chomsky just rants on and on.  There's
something to that.
   Take a look at the February/March 1990 *Mother Jones*.  There's
an interesting article by Marc Cooper in which he does an analysis
of the main people who appear as experts on shows.  Of course, they're
all skewed to the right, and the same people appear over and over.  But
the commentary is interesting.  He talks to media people about this
and they say, These are people who know how to make their thoughts
concise and simple and straightforward and they can make those brief
two-sentence statements between commercials.  That's quite significant.
Because if you're constrained to producing two sentences between
commercials, or 700 words in an op-ed piece, you can do nothing
but express conventional thoughts.  If you express conventional
thoughts, you don't need any basis for it or any background, or any
arguments.  If you try to express something that's somewhat
unconventional, people will rightly ask why you're saying that.
They're right.  If I refer to the United States invasion of
South Vietnam, people will ask, "What are you talking about? I
never heard of that." And they're right. They've never heard about
it.  So I'd have to explain what I mean.

   Or suppose I'm talking about international terrorism, and I say
that we ought to stop it in Washington, which is a major center of
it.  People back off, "What do you mean, Washington's a major
center of it?"  Then you have to explain.  You have to give some
background.  That's exactly what Jeff Greenfield is talking about.
You don't want people who have to give background, because that would
allow critical thought.  What you want is completely conformist
ideas.  You want just repetition of the propaganda line, the party
line.  For that you need "concision".  I could do it too.  I
could say what I think in three sentences, too.  But it
would just sound as if it was off the wall, because there's no
basis laid for it.  If you come from the American Enterprise
Institute and you say it in three sentences, yes, people hear it
every day, so what's the big deal? Yeah, sure, Qaddafi's the biggest
monster in the world, and the Russians are conquering the world,
and this and that, Noriega's the worst gangster since so-and-so.
For that kind of thing you don't need any background.  You just
rehash the thoughts that everybody's always expressed and that
you hear from Dan Rather and everyone else.  That's a structural
technique that's very valuable.  In fact, if people like Ted Koppel
were smarter, they would allow more dissidents on, because they
would just make fools of themselves.  Either you would sell out
and repeat what everybody else is saying because it's the only way
to sound sane, or else you would say what you think, in which case
you'd sound like a madman, even if what you think is absolutely true
and easily supportable.  The reason is that the whole system so
completely excludes it.  It'll sound crazy, rightly, from their point
of view.  And since you have to have concision, as Jeff Greenfield
says, you don't have time to explain it.  That's a marvelous structural
technique of propaganda.  They do the same thing in Japan, I'm
told.  Most of the world still hasn't reached that level of
sophistication.  You can go on Belgian national radio or the BBC
and actually say what you mean.  That's very hard in the
United States.