Media Matters with Bob McChesney
Sundays at 1 pm Central on AM580
Media Matters features host Bob McChesney in conversation with a variety of guests. Listeners may call with comments or questions.
Bob McChesney is a research professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Information and Library Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "The media are central to all our lives," he says. "Yet the media are the most frequently misunderstood parts of our lives. We want to help people understand the role of media in society."
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Sunday, June 08, 2008
Noam Chomsky, linguist, philosopher, political activist, author and lecturer
This week our guest is Noam Chomsky, the linguist, philosopher, political activist, author and lecturer. Chomsky is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The originator of the Theory of Generative Grammar, which revolutionized the study of linguistics, Chomsky is equally - if not more - well known for his work as a social activist and critic. His work with Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent, provides an analysis of news media coverage of international affairs, resulting in a five-filter model to explain the deficienices and shortcomings of the US news media.
Among his political writings are American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Peace in the Middle East? (1974, Profit over People (1998), and Rogue States (2000). Chomsky’s bestseller 9-11 (2002) is an analysis of the World Trade Center attack that, while denouncing the atrocity of the event, traces its origins to the actions and power of the United States, which he calls “a leading terrorist state.”
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It’s great to hear from people like Noam who are not reluctant to speak about both sides of an issue, especially when both sides are in the wrong. Seems to me that his political views are more fact than opinion. I can certainly understand why the mainstream press doesn’t report on anything he says. It’s a good thing that the few independent media outlets we still have will allow him to “tell it like it is”.
You might like http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/noamchomsky which most of Chomsky’s text, also http://chomsky.info/.
For “why the mainstream press doesn’t report on anything he says” read his ‘Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media’ co-written with Edward S. Herman.
Thanks for all the work (& fun) Bob!
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