Necessary Illusions by Noam Chomsky

Author:Noam Chomsky
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: FIC000000
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc.
Published: 1995-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

3. The Summits38

In preparation for the Reagan-Gorbachev meetings at the Washington summit of December 1987, the news was carefully shaped to ensure that only proper thoughts would reach the public. Excluded were the overwhelming votes at the United Nations opposing the escalated arms race advocated by the United States in virtual isolation, definitely not a useful message at the moment when all attention was to be focused on Reagan’s achievements in bringing about world peace. It was not only world opinion that had to be scrupulously censored from the independent media. The domestic peace movement is no less unworthy. In a summary of media coverage, the monitoring organization FAIR observed that “only rightwing critics of the INF Treaty were considered newsworthy.” A sharp critique of the Reagan administration for reckless nuclear deployment by Republican Senator Mark Hatfield was “blacked out of the national media,” as was SANE/Freeze, America’s largest peace group. Its press conference on the peace movement’s role in laying the basis for the INF agreement was ignored, but another the same day called by the Anti-Appeasement Alliance, where Reagan was denounced as a “Kremlin idiot,” “became a big news story.” Secretary of State George Shultz’s denunciation of the peace movement and his call for them “to admit that they were wrong” was reported, but, SANE/Freeze peace secretary Brigid Shea comments, “We aren’t even given one inch to tell our side of the story.” Soviet charges about U.S. attempts to undermine the ABM treaty in its pursuit of Star Wars were dis-missed as “doctrinaire” and “hostile” in TV news reports, which offered a “summit wrap-up” featuring Richard Perle, criticizing the INF Treaty from the hard right, and the hawkish Democrat Sam Nunn playing dove (Tom Brokaw, NBC). As usual, there is a debate, but within proper limits.39

The official agenda for the summit included Reagan’s role as a peacemaker and his passion for human rights. The task for the media, then, was to emphasize these two notable features of the president’s achievements. Proper filtering enabled the first requirement to be satisfied. The second was met with no less aplomb. As Gorbachev stepped onto American soil at the Washington airport before the TV cameras, CBS anchorman Dan Rather commented that Gorbachev will focus on arms reduction, but “Reagan will press the Soviet Union on broader issues such as human rights, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua.”40 Few were so gauche as to raise questions about Reagan’s stellar human rights record (in Central America, for example), though not everyone went as far as Dan Rather, often denounced for his “ultraliberalism,” in interpreting what has happened to Nicaragua as a Soviet transgression.41

In a front-page news story in the New York Times, Philip Taubman observed from Moscow that despite his promise, Gorbachev still has a good deal to learn. He continues to “articulate the orthodox Soviet view of life in the United States: A ruling class, dominated by a military-industrial complex, controls the Government and exploits the vast majority of Americans, creating a society of economic inequity and injustice.

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