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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 1994 21:44:30 EDT
From: Harel Barzilai <harelb@math.cornell.edu>
Subject: Alternative Media & Boston Globe's "Ban" on Chomsky

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Alternative Media & Boston Globe "Ban" on Chomsky
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>From _Chronicles of Dissent_, pp 240-243
Transcribed by Eric Schissel
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February 2, 1990 interview of Noam Chomsky by David Barsamian
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DB:  In a 1986 interview that we did, you were fairly negative
about the possibilities of an alternative media developing.  Since
then, however, we have the establishment of Z magazine, the growth
of community radio, cable TV, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting,
I understand a Canadian film crew is doing a documentary on you,
there's been a lot of developments.  Do you see that as a positive
thing? Are you surprised by it?


NC:  I don't remember what I said in that interview, but I've always
felt it would be a very positive thing and it should be pushed as far
as it can go.  I think it's going to have a very hard time.  There's
such a concentration of resources and power that alternative media,
while extremely important, are going to have quite a battle.  It's
true, there are things which are small successes, but it's because
people have been willing to put in an incredible effort.  Take Z
magazine.  That's a national magazine which literally has a staff of
two and no resources, none, except for what some friends give.
Putting out a magazine with no resources is backbreaking labor.

     South End Press has sort of made it, that is, they're surviving.
It's a small collective with again no resources, and they put out a lot
of books, including quite a lot of good ones.  But for a South End book
to get reviewed is almost impossible.  Take the *Boston Globe*, for
example.  By the standards of American journalism it's a very liberal
newspaper.  Their book review editor a couple of years ago said
publicly that she would never allow a South End book to be reviewed.
The reason that she gave was that I was a South End author, and
as long as I was a South End author she'd never allow a South End
book to be reviewed.  My books are not only not reviewed in the
*Boston Globe*, but they won't even list them.  There's a section
on Sunday where they list things by local authors.  Like some local
author wrote a chapter in a cookbook.  They won't even list my
books under listings by local authors.

     In fact, sometimes it's kind of comical.  For example, the
National Council of Teachers of English every year gives out
what they call an "Orwell Award" for exposure of doublespeak.
It was awarded to me for *On Power and Ideology* two years ago.
This year it was awarded to the book that Edward Herman and I
did, *Manufacturing Consent*.  Just at the time when that award
was given, a *Boston Globe* columnist, a rather left-liberal
columnist, incidentally, wrote a column interviewing the guy who is
in charge of this award.  It was a very upbeat column about what
a terrific idea this is to give an award for exposure of doublespeak.
She listed some of the people who had gotten it in the past,
Ted Koppel, etc.  There was a very striking omission: This year's
award was not mentioned.  It happened to go to a local person, which
usually is mentioned.  It also happened to be the first time, I think,
that anybody had gotten it for the second time.  Furthermore, both
of the books in question were books about the media.  It's not
what Ted Koppel does.  It was critique of the media.  None of that
could be mentioned.  South End has a very hard time getting a book
reviewed.  It's been written up in *Publisher's Weekly*, in
fact, which has discussed this.

     If you don't have access to capital resources, advertisers,
the powerful modes of public articulation, your outreach is going to be
extremely limited.  You can make up for it to some extent with just
hard work.  There are ways of compensating.  Some of these ways are
important.  For example, dissidents in lots of societies cooperate.
I spend an awful lot of time, for example, just xeroxing stuff,
copying stuff for friends in other countries who are, in their
countries, in roughly the situation I'm in here.  They do the same
for me.  That means that although I don't get a research grant to work
on this kind of stuff or time off or whatever, I do have access to
resources that mainstream scholars or for that matter the CIA don't
have.  The CIA or mainstream scholars don't have a very smart and
perceptive guy in Israel scanning the Hebrew journals for them
picking out the things that are important, doing an interpretation
and analysis of them and sending reams of this material to me.


DB: You're talking about Israel Shahak.

NC:  Yes.  That is a big difference.  That means I've got resources.
Shahak is the main one and there are others.  I've got other friends
that do the same thing.  I and others do the same for them.  The same
is true in Australia and England and other places.  So there are kind
of networks of cooperation developed.  Here on my desk, for example,
is a collection of stuff from a friend of mine who does careful
monitoring of the whole press in Los Angeles and a lot of the British
press, which he reads, a selection so I don't have to read the movie
reviews and the gossip and the rest of it.  I get the occasional
nugget that sneaks through that you maybe find if you're carefully
and intelligently and critically reviewing a wide range of press.
There are a fair number of people that do this, and we exchange
information.  The end result is that you do have access to
resources in a way I doubt that any national intelligence agency
can duplicate.

     So there are ways of compensating for the absence of resources.
People can do things.  This happens all over.  A couple of years ago
I gave a talk in Manhattan, Kansas, and they asked me to meet
beforehand with the local Central America solidarity group, so I
thought, OK, four people will be in someone's living room.  To my
surprise it wasn't four people in a living room but a couple of
hundred people in a church.  It was a town of 30,000 or so.
There was a lot of literature, including literature I'd never seen,
information I'd never seen, and people who were up and back from
Central America, who'd been living there doing solidarity work,
dragging their congressional representatives down there.  Very
informed people.  I'm sure they know more about Central America
than you'd find at the Central America desk of an American newspaper
or many Latin American departments.  That's the kind of thing you can
find all over the country.  People have just found other ways of
getting information and educating themselves and each other and
figuring things out.  There are ways of getting around the constraints,
but it's not simple.  To try to make it reach any scale that would
have an impact is difficult.
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--Harel Barzilai
Co-founder, Co-moderator, misc.activism.progressive (MAP) & ACTIV-L
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