Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

Well, to draw a broad brush-stroke through it, by and large the media love to be attacked from the right—they love it when they’re attacked as being subversive, adversarial, going so far in their passion to undermine power that they’re destroying democracy, and so on. They even love being told that they’re lying in their commitment to undermine power—there are dramatic examples of this. And it’s obvious why they like it so much: then they can come back and say, as Katharine Graham [owner of the Washington Post] did in a commencement address, well yes, it’s true that in our antiestablishment zeal we sometimes go too far, but that’s the price you have to pay in a free society. It makes great copy. On the other hand, if they’re criticized from the opposite side, saying: “Look, you may do your work with a good deal of integrity, but you’re very subordinated to power—indeed servile, often—in the way that you select topics, and shape them, and adopt perspectives,” that they hate. So they don’t like to be told that they’re doing their work honestly but subordinated to power—they much prefer to be told, “You’re dishonest in your efforts to undermine power.”