Noam Chomsky — "It is not the function of the media to tell us what is true. It is the function …"
It is not the function of the media to tell us what is true. It is the function of the media to tell us what the government wants us to believe.
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More from Noam Chomsky
"There are two problems for a society: to create wealth and to create justice. The second is more important."
"Terrorism is the weapon of the weak."
"Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state."
"The idea that you can have a democracy when the means of communication are controlled by private tyrannies is absurd."
"The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people who are different, but by people who are the same."
About Noam Chomsky (born 1928)
American linguist whose generative-grammar revolution (Syntactic Structures, 1957) reshaped linguistics, and whose Manufacturing Consent (1988, with Edward Herman) reshaped media criticism. Closely associated with Edward S. Herman (media-criticism co-author) and Howard Zinn (left historian peer and friend). For an intellectual contrast, see B.F. Skinner, Harvard behaviorist psychologist (1904-1990) — Chomsky's 1959 review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior is the most-cited demolition in 20th-century psychology — the moment behaviorism's dominance ended and the cognitive-science era began. Skinner's stimulus-response account of language and Chomsky's innate-faculty account are the cleanest 'environment vs nature' linguistic poles.
The standard scholarly entry points to Noam Chomsky's work: Robert F. Barsky (Vanderbilt, Chomsky biographer) — Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (1997); James McGilvray (McGill, philosophy of language) — The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky (ed., 2005). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Noam Chomsky.