Noam Chomsky: ‘In a couple of generations, organized human society may not survive.’  

 The elegant simplicity of his campus office — a small round table with several straight-backed chairs, a laptop on an uncluttered desk — contrasts with his reputation as one of the world’s leading public intellectuals. Now aged 90, Noam Chomsky continues to write, and is co-teaching a course on politics and global crises at the University of Arizona.

Apart from his paradigm-creating work in linguistics, Chomsky has been an outspoken and cogent critic of American foreign policy and its connection with human rights violations and military aggression around the world. With his colleague, the late Ed Herman, Chomsky developed a “propaganda model” of the corporate mass media to help explain the economic and political elite’s ability to maintain ideological legitimacy. A range of “filters” — corporate ownership, advertising dependence, establishment-oriented sourcing practices, flak from right-wing critics, and ideological anti-Communism — cause news media to function as a propaganda system reinforcing elite power.

Noam Chomsky: ‘In a couple of generations, organized human society may not survive. That has to be drilled into people’s heads constantly.’

In recent years, Chomsky has turned his prodigious mind to the existential threat of global warming, a “threat to the perpetuation of organized human life,” on par with nuclear war. Now, in an exclusive interview with National Observer on Jan. 22, Chomsky directly addresses the specific relationship between media and the climate crisis. Read More

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