Chomsky es un pensador, -periodista, militante, activista, agitador…-, sin duda controvertido. Su posicionamiento radical contra las políticas militares de los EEUU y sus extraordinarios análisis diseccionando la realidad del poder en EEUU no dejan indiferente a nadie. Sus análisis sobre las intervenciones en Panamá, El Salvador o Nicaragua el pasado siglo son estremecedores y demasiado elocuentes para ser aceptados con gusto….la versión oficial es más digerible.
Sus grandes aportaciones para el acercamiento a la descomunicación que pretendo en este blog son: (i) el método de análisis o disección de la realidad; (ii) y haber desenmascarado el «modelo de propaganda» que practican los medios de comunicación, todos y cada uno de ellos, como verdadero obstáculo a la comunicación.
«Well, essentially in Manufacturing Consent what we were doing was contrasting two models: how the media ought to function, and how they do function. The former model is the more or less conventional one: it’s what the New York Times recently referred to in a book review as the “traditional Jeffersonian role of the media as a counter-weight to government”—in other words, a cantankerous, obstinate, ubiquitous press, which must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the right of the people to know, and to help the population assert meaningful control over the political process. That’s the standard conception of the media in the United States, and it’s what most of the people in the media themselves take for granted. The alternative conception is that the media will present a picture of the world which defends and inculcates the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate the domestic economy, and who therefore also largely control the government. According to this “Propaganda Model,” the media serve their societal purpose by things like the way they select topics, distribute their concerns, frame issues, filter information, focus their analyses, through emphasis, tone, and a whole range of other techniques like that.
Now, I should point out that none of this should suggest that the media always will agree with state policy at any given moment. Because control over the government shifts back and forth between various elite groupings in our society, whichever segment of the business community happens to control the government at a particular time reflects only part of an elite political spectrum, within which there are sometimes tactical disagreements. What the “Propaganda Model” in fact predicts is that this entire range of elite perspectives will be reflected in the media—it’s just there will be essentially nothing that goes beyond it.
Alright, how do you prove this? It’s a big, complex topic, but let me just point out four basic observations to start with, then we can go into more detail if you like. The first point is that the “Propaganda Model” actually has a fair amount of elite advocacy. In fact, there’s a very significant tradition among elite democratic thinkers in the West which claims that the media and the intellectual class in general ought to carry out a propaganda function—they’re supposed to marginalize the general population by controlling what’s called “the public mind.”
This view has probably been the dominant theme in Anglo-American democratic thought for over three hundred years, and it remains so right until the present. You can trace the thinking on this back to the first major popular-democratic revolution in the West, the English Civil War in the 1640s [an armed conflict between supporters of the King and the Parliament for sovereignty over England from 1642 to 1648].»
Noam Chomsky. Understanding Power. 2002