Chomsky madness

The media ignored Iran whilst they went into overdrive about Naom Chomsky.

In this ageist age, isn't it great to see men in their 70s making the news for something other than dying? To be sure, the coverage of the priapic priest, the bouncing-back bishop and the American intellectual was frequently absurd – my personal fave being the tabloid page-one "exclusive" pic of Father Mossy's woman-friend, a super-enlargement that was more or less recognisable as a human being. So it could have been her.

Nowadays everyone affects boredom about clerical sexuality. Fine: I'm sick of boasting about being a priest's kid ("Satan-spawn", like my sis says), and this month no one asked me on-air or into print to talk about it. The media's treatment of Noam Chomsky, on the other hand, never ceases to fascinate this column.

The MIT prof can hardly complain of his direct encounters with Irish media: good, long, positive interviews in the Trib, Irish Times and with Eamon Dunphy on NewsTalk balanced a hostile, tightly edited session with Mark Little on Prime Time. But ooh, the way the hacks talked about him behind his back was another story.

The basic smartarse instant-expert line (you know, Philip Boucher-Hayes stuff) was that Chomsky and his sheep-like hero-worshippers monomaniacally blame the US for the world's ills – "It's the Americans, stupid!" was Donagh Diamond's Prime Time caricature. The Irish Times sub-editor who came up with the headline "Chomsky blames US for Iran crisis" probably laughed all the way to the pub, even if it was a stretch of the lecture report below it. (That report mysteriously called him an "anti-war lobbyist", conjuring an image of backhanders to warmongering politicians to get them to withdraw from Iraq.)

The further approach, starting with Shane Hegarty's pre-visit profile in the Irish Times, was to achieve "balance" by making up negative stuff. Thus Hegarty accused Chomsky of saying reflexively after 9/11 that the atrocity "didn't really compare with Bill Clinton's 1998 bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant", an asinine assertion nowhere to be seen in Chomsky's writings, where he compares the events precisely.

Hegarty said Chomsky was disingenuous when he denied accusing Christopher Hitchens of (using Hitchens' phrase) a "propensity to racist contempt"; but actually Chomsky had expressed shock at one observation by his old friend that he hoped was uncharacteristic – the opposite of a "propensity".

And so it went. Much of Prime Time's profile accused him of ignoring Serb atrocities in Kosovo such as the massacre at Racak, quoting Chomsky's book, Hegemony or Survival – with a quote that appears a page before Chomsky's discussion of, you guessed it, the massacre at Racak. To top things off, Prime Time had Mark Doorley on, pre-recorded, saying that, having waged a "40-year campaign in favour of Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic, Osama bin Laden", Chomsky is "an apologist for terror and tyranny without rival". RTÉ apparently sees such shamelessly inaccurate and hysterical defamation as the normal give-and-take of "balanced" political debate, as least when assessing the work of a leading leftist.

Even while the media swung hither and yon on Chomsky, it was illustrating his views on media with appalling coverage of Iran: biased, ill-informed and largely lacking in historic and strategic context.

Journalism's historical amnesia is especially frustrating when the memory hole is only three years deep. You'd have been forgiven for thinking you'd misplaced the last 36 months when reading and hearing stories about Iran's "suspect nuclear weapons programme", especially when "leading western countries have made it clear in recent days that their patience with Tehran is wearing thin". (Both quotes are from the Irish Times.)

No, all-out war on Iran is not likely. Yes, Iran's leaders have played a role in the manufacture of this "crisis". But the media has spun a horror story where Meejit sees the usual power play: a set of nuclear-armed countries telling an explicitly threatened but treaty-compliant Iran that, despite being surrounded by Israeli, US, Russian, Pakistani and Indian nukes, it cannot even begin to think about having one of its own.