Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

In fact, it’s only in the United States and the old Soviet Empire that I haven’t had any real access to the major media over the years. And it’s not just me, of course: the major media in the U.S., as was the case in the former Soviet Empire, pretty much exclude anybody with a dissident voice. So I can have interviews and articles in major journals and newspapers in Western Europe, and in Australia, and all up and down the Western Hemisphere. And often I get invitations from leading journals in other countries to write for them—like, recently I had an article in Israel’s most important newspaper, Ha’aretz, which is kind of the equivalent of the New York Times: it was an invited critique of their foreign policy, and of the so-called “peace process.”29 Or in Australia, I gave a talk at the National Press Club in the Parliament Building, which was nationally televised twice on Australian World Services, their version of the B.B.C.—they wanted me to speak about Australia’s foreign policy, so I gave a very critical talk to a national audience, and I spoke to Parliamentarians and journalists and so on, and was all over the press and papers there. And the same thing is true in Europe; I’m often on the C.B.C. nationally in Canada; and so on. Well, as you say, that’s all unheard of in the United States—and the main reason, I think, is just that what people think, and are allowed to think, is much more important here, so the controls are much greater.30