Intellectual Cleansing: Part 3

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

october 15, 2008
INTELLECTUAL CLEANSING: PART 3


In Part 1 of this alert, we noted how journalists who threaten their employers' interests - and the interests of their key political and corporate allies - tend to be unceremoniously dumped. We also described how the force of the law can be deployed to silence dissidents seeking to expose chronic media bias.

In Part 2, we hosted journalist Jonathan Cook's splendid analysis in response. Cook's main point was that media managers rarely have to take such extreme measures because few journalists "make it to senior positions unless they have already learnt how to toe the line."

An interesting question arises, then, in the age of the internet: To what extent will these same ultra-sensitive media companies tolerate public criticism? For example, will they allow visitors to their websites to post material that is critical of their journalism, and perhaps even damaging to their interests? Last month, we tested the limits of dissent on the Guardian's Comment Is Free (CiF) website.

On September 20, we posted a message on CiF in response to an article written by Guardian journalist Emma Brockes. Brockes had commented wryly on Tania Head, a 9/11 survivor, "of whom it has been alleged that she was not on the 78th floor of the South Tower on September 11th as she claimed, but may have been in Spain at the time..."

Brockes added:

"But well below the level of mental illness a lot of low-level fakery is actively embraced and rewarded." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ 2008/sep/20/uselections2008.usa?commentpage= 1&commentposted=1)

We posted the following comment:

"This is from the same journalist [Brockes] who wrote in October 2005:

"'[Noam] Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things he disagrees with and, in print at least, it can come across less as academic than as witheringly teenage; like, Srebrenica was so not a massacre.'"

In our post, we described Chomsky's outrage at the suggestion that he had denied that the Serb killings of Bosnians at Srebrenica in 1995 constituted a massacre. In 2005, Chomsky wrote to us of Brockes's article:

"Even when the words attributed to me have some resemblance to accuracy, I take no responsibility for them, because of the invented contexts in which they appear... her piece de resistance, the claim that I put the word 'massacre' in quotes. Sheer fabrication."

Chomsky described his treatment by Brockes and the Guardian as "one of the most dishonest and cowardly performances I recall ever having seen in the media." (See our media alerts: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/051104_ smearing_chomsky_the_guardian.php and http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/051121_ smearing_chomsky_the_guardian.php)

We were interested to see how these comments would be received by the Guardian website. In the event, our message remained in place for 48 hours but was then deleted. The site moderator explained in an email:
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