Journalism
14(1) 96­–110
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1464884912442333
jou.sagepub.com
Journalism, ideology and
linguistics:  The paradox of
Chomsky’s linguistic legacy
and his ‘propaganda model’
Annabelle Lukin
Macquarie University, Australia
Abstract
A central reason why news discourse is an object of academic research is its potential
and actual role in establishing and maintaining ideology. News can do this because it is
made of language and other semiotic modalities (Hasan, 1996a). This article considers
the media coverage of the 2003 ‘Coalition’ invasion of Iraq, in light of the contradictions
between the assumptions about discourse in the ‘propaganda model’ (Herman and
Chomksy, 2002[1988]), and the nature of language in the Chomskyan tradition. The
propaganda model is predicated on language being social and semiotic, two aspects of
language absent in Chomsky’s linguistic theory. Paradoxically, linguistic description in
the Chomskyan tradition cannot be recruited to analysing the news discourse identified
by Chomsky and Herman, over 20 years ago, as the medium for the establishment and
reinforcement of deep and consequential ideologies, which are as powerful today as
they have ever been.
Keywords
Halliday, Hasan, ideology, propaganda model, Saussure, Whorf
Introduction
The effects on Iraqi people, society and culture of the decision by some western powers
to invade Iraq have been unequivocally devastating, and are still unfolding (see e.g.
Otterman et al., 2010). The consequences for the invading countries are not commensurate,
but are hardly insignificant (see e.g. Stiglitz and Bilmes, 2008). For journalism
Corresponding author:
Annabelle Lukin, Centre for Language in Social Life, Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Human Sciences,
Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia
Email: annabelle.lukin@mq.edu.au
442333JOU14110.1177/1464884912442333LukinJournalism
13
Article
Lukin	 97
studies, the invasion of Iraq provides yet one more case study for testing theories of
media–state relations. In an empirical sense, the question is: Was the media’s reporting
of this monumental event determined or at least shaped by the belligerent governments
and/or by those who could profit financially from this invasion? A number of research
studies have sought to consider these questions, or near variants of them (e.g. Aday,
2010; Bennett et al., 2007; Boyd-Barrett, 2004, 2009; Lewis et al., 2006; Miller, 2004;
Robinson et al., 2009), and there is a general consensus across this literature about the
success of the Coalition’s media strategies for shaping media coverage to their own interests.
Boyd-Barrett is particularly forceful in putting this position, arguing that journalists
have been complicit in supporting the ‘agendas of corporate, political and plutocratic
elites’ (2009: 296). The media, he argues ‘provide cover for war fought on false pretexts
and at crippling expense’. He criticizes ‘a press cavalry that invariably and unashamedly
arrives too late to make the difference that is most desperately needed’ (2009: 298).
Boyd-Barrett continues:
Mounted upon white steeds, uniforms pressed, sabers rattling and swords glinting, blackened
boots gleaming, the media charge with grand bravura onto a battlefield now littered with
corpses and the dying, men, women and children in their hundreds of thousands, millions,
whose vain and pitiful cries for help and vengeance have long been extinguished.
Not all scholars are as unequivocal in their criticism of the media coverage of the
invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. For instance, Robinson et al. (2009) report that many
of their findings are consistent with the predictions of ‘the elite-driven model’, a term
they use to encompass theories of media–state relations which position the media as
largely deferential to ‘elite perspectives’ (for example, Bennett’s ‘indexing model’,
1990, as well as Herman and Chomsky’s 2002[1988] ‘propaganda model’). But they
argue that there is evidence to suggest ‘actual patterns of wartime (sic) media performance
in Britain are more nuanced than some might have expected’ (2009: 536). Citing
the coverage by Britain’s Channel 4, a state-owned commercially funded broadcaster,
they argue that in the face of ‘factors such as patriotism, reliance upon official sources
and ideology’ Channel 4 maintained ‘a degree of autonomy and balance that is rarely
expected in wartime (again, sic)’ (2009: 540). Lewis et al. (2006) draw similar conclusions.
They reject the proposition that ‘media folk’ were ‘mainlining uncut propaganda’
(Miller, 2004: 536), arguing instead that, while the embedding programme was ‘the
biggest public relations coup of the war’ ‘many British embeds generally did maintain
their objectivity’ (2006: 197, 196).
Part of the difficulty in researching questions about the function of the media and its
relations to government and industry is that they are complex and multidimensional.
Thus, there is the problem of trying to calibrate even the small sample of research findings
listed above, when central premises remain ill defined, implicit or are not shared across
the various research endeavours. Robinson et al.’s claims to have found ‘balance and
autonomy’at Channel 4, or Lewis et al.’s suggestion that some British embedded journalists
were ‘objective’, are a case of this problem. The terms are treated as self-evident, but
the difficulties of operationalizing such terms make them unsuitable for the evaluation of
news discourse. And further, what assumptions do the researchers themselves bring about
98	 Journalism 14(1)
the events in the news reports which form the data for their research? I have drawn
attention above to Robinson et al.’s use of the term ‘wartime’to specify the scope of their
study, since they assume it is unproblematic to call the events under consideration ‘war’.
But if so, what made it ‘war’, rather than, say, ‘colonial aggression’, as at least some Iraqi
officials were calling it? The term ‘war’comes with many associations (Lukin, forthcoming
a), a function of the fact that words, as Saussure, Whorf, Firth, Halliday, Hasan and
other linguists have argued, do not simply refer to things that exist independently of language.
Rather, as Halliday has argued, words are ‘the product of the intersection of a large
number of classificatory dimensions’ (1966: 149). ‘War’ is part of a lexical set, which
includes items such as ‘combat operations’, ‘conflict’, ‘violence’ and ‘aggression’; it is a
category of which there are subtypes: ‘conventional war’, ‘guerrilla war’, ‘civil war’,
‘holy war’. This is the barest specification of this lexical item. Thus, the basis for choosing
‘war’ as a descriptor is not predetermined in the nature of the events themselves. In the
introduction to their study of the media management and reporting of the invasion of Iraq
(Media at War: The Iraq Crisis), Tumber and Palmer try to make explicit their name for
the thing that is the focus of their study:
To refer to the ‘military phase’ of the crisis (20.3.03–1.5.03), this book uses the term ‘invasion’
on the grounds that it is the least evaluative term available for the process in question, given that
calling it ‘war’, ‘the military phase’, or ‘the combat phase’would not clearly distinguish it from
what followed. President Bush’s own phrase ‘major combat operations’ – which he declared
were at an end in a speech on 1 May 2003 – is arguably even less evaluative, but is clumsy
when repeated. (2004: 1)
The authors have some sense that key terms should be subject to reflection. But none of
the lexical choices they explore are more or less evaluative than any of the others. All
involve prejudgement, Bush’s choice (‘major combat operations’) as much as the others;
and none more precisely delineates the period they refer to than the others. Note too the
circularity of their statement, that to refer to the ‘military phase’ of the war, they will not
use the term ‘the military phase’, an illustration of Saussure’s argument that language
does not merely express a reality to be found equally by every rational being. Rather,
language organizes human experience (Saussure, 1974).
In any environment, language provides speakers with choice, which is the basis of
it being a bearer of ideology (Hasan, 1996a). This fact about language is a driving
force in studies of media discourse, which assume that linguistic choices in news discourse
have consequences for the ways news consumers come to view a certain set of
historical conditions. There is a shared recognition that media institutions or corporations
are producers of text, and that the consequences of the dissemination and consumption
of these texts are forms of consciousness (Bernstein, 1990; Boyd-Barrett and
Rantanen, 1998). This is not to suggest that news audiences are mindless consumers. I
would agree with Philo’s argument that it is crucial to research the ‘potential impact of
text on public understanding’ (2007: 184), a process which requires studies of text
reception. But the reason news discourse is consequential is because, as Hasan argues
(e.g. 2005, 2009, 2010), texts are purveyors of meanings, and meaning moves the mind.
The mind is a function of experience (e.g. Greenfield, 1997). Each individual brain
develops ‘specific ways of being, doing and saying – a mental disposition toward
Lukin	 99
recognising aspects of experience as relevant’ and ‘a large part of the experience of
living is the experience of “language-ing”’ (Hasan, 2010: 269).
In the unfolding of everyday experience, the social process of ‘news’ has been interpolated
for some considerable time (see e.g. ‘News and Empire – the Thought Stream of
the Group Mind’, Chapter 5 of Mitchell’s 2007 History of News). News has been an
everyday commodity for some centuries (e.g. since the early 18th century in England;
Mitchell, 2007: 160). It is part of daily patterns of living, which is why millions of people
could watch the ‘Coalition’ invade Iraq in March 2003 over breakfast, lunch or dinner.
The formalization of public relations as an ‘industry’ in the 20th century (e.g. Cutlip,
1994) was predicted by Lasswell in 1927, but it appears through recorded history that
humans have understood that talking and thinking are two sides of the same coin. If everyday
discourse is key to shaping and/or changing minds, then the ever-present social
process of news must be an important medium in this regard. It is this power of news
texts which have made them an object of academic inquiry. Whatever cognitive scientists
might claim is a priori about the mind, it is its malleability that is central to studies of
news discourse.
The propaganda model: ‘abuse’ but not ‘use’ of language
A concern with the effects of news discourse motivates the ‘propaganda model’ of news
production, elaborated by Herman and Chomsky (hereafter ‘HC’) in their 1988 coauthored
book. HC argued that ‘money and power are able to filter out the news fit to
print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to
get their messages across to the public’ (2002[1988]: 2). They proposed five kinds of
filters at work: 1) media ownership and profit orientation of major media firms; 2) advertising
as the primary source of income; 3) reliance by media on government, business
and ‘expert’ sources provided by ‘agents of power’; 4) ‘flak’ as a means of bringing
media into line; and 5) the ideology of anti-communism as a ‘national religion and control
mechanism’1 (2002[1988]: 2). Their title, Manufacturing Consent, is an echo of the
claims by some sociologists about the function of news. Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen
argue, in relation to studies of the rise of global news agencies, that the business of these
institutions was the production and distribution of forms of consciousness, in ways which
significantly impacted ‘our understanding of time and of space’ (1998: 1). News, they
argue, contributed to processes of ‘the construction of national identity; to imperialism
and the control of colonies’ as well as being ‘an essential lubricant in day-to-day financial
affairs, both within and between domestic markets’ (1998: 1–2). In a similar vein,
although as part of a larger theory of cultural reproduction, Bernstein (1990) has called
media institutions part of the ‘field of symbolic control’. The term denotes agencies and
agents ‘that specialize in discursive codes’. These ‘discursive codes, ways of relating,
thinking, and feeling specialize and distribute forms of consciousness, social relations,
and dispositions’ (1990: 134–135).
In HC’s account, the media ‘manufacture consent’ because they ‘serve, and propagandize
on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them’;
these powerful interests, thus, ‘play a key role in fixing basic principles and the dominant
ideologies’ (Herman and Chomsky, 2002[1988]: xi); ‘the powerful’ are able to ‘fix
100	 Journalism 14(1)
the premises of discourse’, and in so doing they ‘“manage” public opinion’ (p. lix). Such
forces rule out the possibility of ‘mass deliberation and expression’ (p. xli); the media
‘internalize’ ‘industry’s self-legitimizing usage’ (p. xlviii). HC make the case that the
media needs to be understood in structural terms. They outline some details of media
ownership in the USA, and relate these arrangements to, among other factors, deregulation
of media ownership. They argue against conspiracy notions and discount the role
of ‘crude intervention’ in media production processes (e.g. p. xi). They contend their
analysis is closer to a ‘free market’, with ‘the results largely the outcome of the workings
of market forces’ (p. lx). The result, they propose, is a dichotomization, ‘as if a
commissar had instructed the media’ to ‘[c]oncentrate on the victims of enemy powers
and forget about the victims of friends’ (p. 31). This dichotomization is ‘massive and
systematic’ (p. 35).
Given the evidence for direct intervention in the production of news (e.g. Rampton
and Stauber’s 2003 detailed account of the aggressive PR campaign behind the lead up
to and invasion of Iraq; New York Times journalist David Barstow’s investigation into
the links between the Defence Department and a network of retired military officers in
the pay of defence companies; Boyd-Barrett’s 2004 discussion of Judith Miller’s reporting
at the New York Times), the idea that the patterns in news discourse are simply the
workings of market forces needs to be challenged. But, for reasons of space, I will not
pursue this particular problem with HC’s model in this article.2 Instead, the question I
will ask is this: What must discourse be like if it has the power imputed to it by the
propaganda model? While providing tantalizing glimpses into the power of language,
this is not a question the authors of Manufacturing Consent ask, despite one of them
being considered ‘the father of modern linguistics’ (Clarke, 2003), a scholar considered
to have ‘generated a revolution in his discipline’ (Edgley, 2000: 1), and whose contributions
to linguistics are apparently ‘epoch-making’ (Otero, 2004: 3). Indeed, despite the
necessary evidence for the propaganda model being observable effects in news texts,
and despite the authors’ commitment to the close study of news texts themselves,3
Manufacturing Consent does not recruit a linguistic theory or method for its study. The
word ‘linguistics’ appears only once in the whole book, and its location is Chomsky’s
biodata. While language is undoubtedly the carrier of propaganda in HC’s model, their
analysis does not recruit a single conceptual tool from the discipline most directly
engaged in understanding and describing the nature of language.
I am not alone in wondering what the implications of the propaganda model are for
understanding the power of language, and its relationship to notions such as ideology. In
an interview titled ‘Language and Politics’, and reproduced in an extensive collection of
interviews with Chomsky by the same name (Otero, 2004), the first question turned to
this matter: ‘Could you discuss the relationship between language and politics?’ (2004:
471). Chomsky’s answer was that the relation was ‘tenuous’ (see also the first interview
in Chomsky, 1979). The interviewer persisted, with a more specific question: ‘Could you
address the notion that words, language, have inherent power, concepts convey meaning
beyond their words? What is happening mechanically when certain phrases are used,
such as “the free world” or “strategic interests” or “national interests?”’ (2004: 472).
From the ‘father of modern linguistics’, these were not matters pertaining to language.
He acknowledged that it was typical when people were discussing language and politics
to raise these kinds of questions, but dismissed the ‘banality’ of such terms, calling them
Lukin	 101
‘vulgar propaganda exercises’, with which ‘we are inundated’ and which many of us
‘internalize’. Chomsky argued that to defend oneself against this propaganda was ‘not
very hard to do’. He gave the example of America’s involvement in Vietnam being
described as the ‘defense’ of South Vietnam, when America was attacking the South:
‘Here the use of language – really the use of propaganda is what we should call it – …
frames the discussion.’ By such choices, ‘our capacity for thought is destroyed’ and ‘our
possibility for meaningful political action is undermined by very effective systems of
indoctrination and thought control that involve, as all such systems do, abuse of language’(2004:
472–473). Propaganda, for Chomsky, was not the ‘use of language’but the
‘abuse of language’. In this same answer, Chomsky was both arguing that the systems of
indoctrination described in Manufacturing Consent were very powerful, and that it was
not too hard to defend oneself against them. When asked what people can do to ‘cut
through this elaborate and ornamented framework of propaganda and get at what is real,
get at the truth?’ (2004: 478), Chomsky’s response, echoed elsewhere in the book, was:
‘I frankly don’t think that anything more is required than ordinary common sense.’ In a
related question in the same interview about how Americans might see through the ideas
behind their country’s foreign policy, he answered that minimal exposure to ‘the facts’
and a dose of ‘ordinary common sense’ would suffice (2004: 404–405). The title of this
collection of interviews, Language and Politics, might reasonably have carried the
sub-title ‘and never the twain shall meet’.
For those who have delved into Chomsky’s linguistic descriptions, his dismissal of
language as a bearer of ideology is not surprising. In fact, it would be totally unremarkable
except for the fact that Manufacturing Consent constitutes a minimalist kind of
discourse analysis which is predicated on the unspoken assumptions: 1) that language
shapes the mind; 2) that language is implicated in the maintenance of power relations in
society; 3) that power relations in turn shape media discourse; and 4) that the evidence
for this relation is visible within the texts themselves. These kinds of claims suggest that
language is social, i.e. for the purpose of human communication, and semiotic, i.e. a
resource for meaning making. This position has been argued by linguists in a long tradition
which is all but ignored in the hagiography associated with the narrative of the
Chomskyan ‘revolution’ in linguistics. Chomsky himself has contributed to the obfuscation
of other linguistic traditions. Indeed, because of the:
… narrow experiential base motivating Chomsky’s linguistic methods, and the sweeping claims
made on behalf of the promissory note of universal grammar … a whole era of painstaking
fieldwork and inductive inquiry [in linguistics] … was maligned as empiricist, descriptivist and
taxonomic (all terms given new ‘lives’ as negatives in the linguistic forums of key centres in
America). (Butt, 2005: 89)
In the place of this kind of fieldwork, Chomsky made intuition about ‘grammaticality’
the key source of linguistic evidence.
Contradictions and lacunae
Manufacturing Consent was published in the fourth decade of Chomsky’s career as a
linguist. The unuttered assumptions about language, society and the mind that must have
102	 Journalism 14(1)
motivated the authors were up against Chomsky’s own well-established views about
language as abstract formal structures in the mind, conceived in Cartesian terms.4 This is
what best explains the paradox between the arguments presented in Manufacturing
Consent and his rejection of any relationship between language, politics and ideology.
The weirdness of the schism can only be appreciated when the assumptions of the propaganda
model are put beside Chomsky’s linguistic theory. I explore later in the article
some of his key ideas by considering Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.5 The book was
published in 1965, and, before turning to its claims about the nature of language and the
‘actual subject matter of linguistics’ if it is to be ‘a serious discipline’ (1965: 4), it is useful
to contextualize Chomsky’s writings on language at that time by considering, albeit
superficially, the significance of the year 1965 in modern American history. In 1965, for
instance, American troop levels in Vietnam were increased from 23,000 to over 180,000
(Young, 1991: 333), US Secretary for Defense (sic), McNamara, authorized ‘ROLLING
THUNDER’, opening the way for sustained bombing of North Vietnam (1991: 136), and
President Johnson defended this escalation in his well-known speech at Johns Hopkins
University:
Tonight Americans and Asians are dying for a world where each people may choose its own
path to change.This is the principle for which our ancestors fought in the valleys of Pennsylvania.
It is the principle for which our sons fight tonight in the jungles of Viet-Nam …
Historian Marilyn Young also writes of this year:
… the violence of the air war against the South Vietnamese countryside increased once again
at the turn of the new year when General Westmoreland received approval for the regular use
of B-52 bombers. Originally designed to deliver nuclear bombs, the B-52 flew too high to be
heard until the bombs were already falling. A single mission of six B-52s would devastate an
area one-half mile wide by three miles long. The New York Times reported that the number of
armed helicopters had risen from one hundred to three hundred. Ten operations a day were
conducted in which a single helicopter might draw fire and then ‘radio for armed helicopters
and fighter bombers … with heavy fire-power to blast at the positions of the Viet Cong …’.
World War II bombers known as ‘Skyraiders’ were reoutfitted for Vietnam, with four
20-millimeter cannon that together fired over 2,000 rounds per minute; under its wings the
Skyraider could carry a bombload of 7, 500 pounds. (1991: 132)
How was this aggressive intervention, with its substantial human cost, justified? In
answering the question ‘How did we get into Vietnam?’, Young argues it is necessary to
understand the nature of the universe within which the politics of this era played out. She
draws attention to the importance of NSC-68, a classified report from the US National
Security Council, commissioned in 1950 by President Truman. Young argues that from
NSC-68 both political parties derived ‘a set of axioms … as unquestionable as Euclid’s’.
These axioms included that ‘the intentions of the United States are always good’, ‘the
intentions of the enemies of the United States are bad’, and that ‘Communism … is fundamentally
bad’. She draws attention to the advice of NSC-68 that the United States
should essentially feel quite free to adopt any means necessary to frustrate the ‘Kremlin
design’ (1991: 25ff). In the words of the NSC-68:6
Lukin	 103
Our free society, confronted by a threat to its basic values, naturally will take such action,
including the use of military force, as may be required to protect those values. The integrity of
our system will not be jeopardized by any measures, covert or overt, violent or non-violent,
which serve the purposes of frustrating the Kremlin design, nor does the necessity for conducting
ourselves so as to affirm our values in actions as well as words forbid such measures, provided
only they are appropriately calculated to that end and are not so excessive or misdirected as to
make us enemies of the people instead of the evil men who have enslaved them.
In this brief extract, the US government gave itself carte blanche not only to pursue its
foreign policy objectives by any means necessary, but to maintain the high moral
ground while doing so. The extract is but one small window into the kind of discourse,
and the extensive range of actualized text, which established the climate necessary to
naturalizing an aggressive, interventionist American foreign policy, in the process
ensuring that the invasion of Vietnam, and numerous other foreign interventions,
would seem as inexorable as the arrival of summer after spring. And one would be
entirely mistaken to think the meaning-making work which created this climate was
somehow epiphenomenal, as if the real business was the material actions taken, and the
semiotic work to validate those actions just ‘vulgar propagandizing’ which came after.
An ideology about the place of one’s nation in the global scheme of things, of which
the NSC-68 is instance, is very much a semiotic creation, a densely woven fabric,
made out of meanings, and, therefore, out of words-in-structures. In the face of such
ideological work, one needs more than mere ‘common sense’. Note for instance the
abstract quality of the NSC-68 extract above. I would need a separate article to elucidate
the origins of this highly ‘nominalized’ style of discourse, achieved through the
deployment of a specifiable set of grammatical choices. One of its features is to recast
dynamic human process and agency as static and object-like. Just in this brief passage,
we are presented with a world view in which abstract entities (‘our free society’, ‘any
measures’) are given the power to act, for instance in the following formulations: ‘Our
free society … will take such action, including the use of military force, as may be
required … etc.’; ‘the integrity of our system will not be jeopardized by any measures,
covert or overt, violent or non-violent, which serve the purposes of frustrating the
Kremlin design’. One important effect is the absence of identifiable human agency, at
the same time that a rhetorical position of ‘necessity to act’ is being established. Note
also the construal of a putative higher purpose of such action, via both lexical (‘…
serve the purposes of …’) and grammatical choices (‘as may be required [in order] to
protect those values …’). This dimension of meaning functions to put off to some
vague future time the evaluation of an actualized instance of violence, since it is to be
deemed in the service of some yet-to-be-realized complex/abstract state of affairs (viz.
the ‘freedom’ of Vietnamese/Iraqis as a ‘goal’ of the invasions of both countries). It is
one of the most urgent tasks for linguists to provide a coherent, detailed and forensic
account of the layers of this powerful ideology, an ideology which creates a universe
in which a way of conducting affairs does not seem ideological.
The NSC-68 undoubtedly contributed to the ways in which the American invasion of
Vietnam was represented by much of the media, and understood by many Americans,
providing a necessary background to the claims made by HC about the reporting of the
104	 Journalism 14(1)
‘war’ in Vietnam. The basis of their argument is a comparison between the received
wisdom about Soviet invasions in Europe and of Afghanistan, over which there was ‘no
serious controversy’. They argue these invasions are ‘described as aggression’, and that
‘Western reporters cover the war [in Afghanistan] from the standpoint of rebels defending
their country from foreign attack’ (2002[1988]: 176). HC note the contrast with the
reporting of Vietnam where ‘it was the American invaders who were regarded as the
victims of the “aggression” of the Vietnamese’(2002[1988]: 177). The authors argue that
‘from the point of view of the media, or “the culture”, there is no such event in history as
the U.S. attack against South Vietnam and the rest of Indochina’. They continue:
Even at the peak period of peace-movement activism there was virtually no opposition to the
war within the intellectual culture on the grounds that aggression is wrong – the grounds
universally adopted in the case of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 – for a very
simple reason: the fact of U.S. aggression was unrecognized. There was much debate during the
war over whether the North Vietnamese were guilty of aggression in Vietnam, and … even the
South Vietnamese were condemned for ‘internal aggression’ …; but there was no discussion of
whether the United States was guilty of aggression in its direct attack against South Vietnam,
then all of Indochina. (2002[1988]: 184; emphasis in original)
Without disagreeing with the substance of their claims, I note that HC’s account here,
and elsewhere, relies on grand notions like ‘the intellectual culture’, ‘the mainstream
media’, ‘elite consensus’, all of which are expected to be self-explanatory. Also, I note
that they provide virtually no empirical evidence for the claim about the way in which
the American media differentiated Soviet and American aggression. Elsewhere, they do
use empirical evidence, drawing on content analysis as their primary method. Hansen
et al. (1988) note of content analysis that it has ‘nothing to say on what constitutes a
viable unit [of analysis – AL]’, with the consequence that mostly those units available to
the naked eye (e.g. counts of words, numbers of article, column inches) are the typical
measures (Hansen et al., 1998: 96). One problem is the failure to see news texts as texts,
e.g. as ‘clearly, a structured whole’(Burgelin, 1972: 319 cited in Hansen et al., 1998; and
see Lukin forthcoming b). But the unit of text does not enter into the Chomskyan paradigm.
Moreover, syntax is considered ‘autonomous’; that is, its relationship to meaning
is considered peripheral. Therefore, it is not surprising that, as Boyd-Barrett notes, for all
its claims about the role of media texts as carriers of propaganda, HC’s model ‘has little
to say about propaganda in the text itself’(2009: 297). For this, Boyd-Barrett writes, ‘we
depend on rhetoricians, content and textual analysts and on framing theory’ (2009).
Boyd-Barrett does not include linguistics in this list of approaches for understanding
textual patterns, but then the linguist whose ‘influence [from the mid-1960s onwards] on
academic ideas about language has been unrivalled by any living scholar’ (Joseph et al.,
2001: 122) fails to see any role for linguistics. Is it a sign of Chomsky’s long shadow over
linguistics, that my search of the term ‘linguistics’ in this journal (Journalism) returned
only 11 hits, even though there seems to be, as one would expect, a strong preoccupation
with matters of media representation?7 HC do not, because they cannot, entirely ignore
the issue of how language is being used towards these ends. But rather than turn to a
linguistic account to understand how words-in-structures make meaning, they borrow
from Orwell, to claim a simple distinction between ‘normal word usage’ and ‘Orwellian
Lukin	 105
word usage’. They argue, for instance, that the US intervention in Vietnam would, in
‘normal word usage’ be called ‘aggression’ (Herman and Chomsky, 2002[1988]: xxix).
Such claims exhaust the authors’ attempts to explain how language is involved in propaganda
processes.
How to make linguistics irrelevant to the study of news
What kind of theoretical maneuvering is required to see language as something essentially
separate from matters of ideology or propaganda? While living through the kind
of hubris that underpinned the expansion of American involvement in Vietnam in 1965,
Chomsky was busy elaborating his theory of ‘universal grammar’ in publications such
as Aspects of a Theory of Syntax. When he might have turned his towering intellect to
the problem of how language was being recruited to the promulgation of ‘cold war’
axioms, he was turning linguistics away from the study of language in process, from the
study of real people, in all their diversity, using language in the course of living life.
Linguistic theory, Chomsky was arguing, ‘is concerned primarily with an ideal speakerlistener,
in a completely homogenous speech-community’ (1965: 3). If linguistics was
to be ‘a serious discipline’, then ‘observed use of language … surely cannot constitute
the actual subject matter of linguistics’ (1965: 4). A ‘generative grammar’ is concerned
with ‘a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural
descriptions to sentences’ (1965: 8), which should allow the analyst to describe ‘the
intrinsic competence of the idealized native speaker’ (1965: 24). In setting out his
account of ‘the rules’ of ‘the mental reality underlying behaviour’ (‘selectional rules’,
‘categorial rules’, ‘subcategorization rules’), Chomsky turned linguistics into a species
of algebra (see especially Chapter 2 of Aspects). By rejecting the actuality of discourse,
he was free to invent his own data. Consequently, the year when President Johnson was
using the resources of language to recruit support to increase America’s military intervention
in Vietnam – to convince young Americas to kill and die for a set of values –
Chomsky was pondering why ‘sincerity frightens the boy’ is possible, while ‘the boy
frightens sincerity’ is not; or why it is possible to say ‘John solved the problem’ but not
‘John solved the pipe’ (1965). Such questions were considered the essence of linguistic
inquiry, providing the route to understanding the structure of the ‘Universal Grammar’,
considered a genetic endowment of the human brain.
My brief account of Chomsky’s views is by necessity reductive. But the point
remains that one cannot use a Chomskyan paradigm for the analysis of the news discourse
which he and Herman identified over 20 years ago as the medium for the establishment
and reinforcement of deep and consequential ideologies, which remain as
powerful today as they have ever been. The pursuit of an idealized universal grammar
in the brain continues, despite the idea being questioned by neuroscientists8 and rejected
by some typologists (e.g. Evans and Levinson, 2009: 429, who argue that the claims of
universal grammar are ‘either empirically false, unfalsifiable, or misleading’). The
questions dramatized by Chomsky in Aspects could only be made relevant and mysterious
by making meaning peripheral to language, and making the actuality of linguistic
behavior (called ‘performance’), and the social conditions of its production, irrelevant
to understanding language. As Halliday has argued:
106	 Journalism 14(1)
… imaginary problems were created by the whole series of dichotomies that Chomsky
introduced, or took over unproblematized: not only syntax/semantics but also grammar/lexis,
language/thought, competence/performance … Once these dichotomies had been set up, the
problem arose of locating and maintaining the boundaries between them. (2003b[1995]: 236)
The only way Chomsky can reconcile his position on language with his interest in the
role of the media in producing and circulating ideology is to reject any relationship
between language and ideology or propaganda. While Edgely has suggested that
Chomsky is being cautious and modest by conceding only ‘a loose connection’between
his political science work and his work in linguistics (2009: 34), it is neither caution
nor modesty on Chomsky’s part; it is a zealous belief that language structure is best
seen as ‘inorganic’ matter, and that language ‘like most organs’ is ‘non-functional’ and
‘not well-designed for use’ (Chomsky, 1991, in Otero, 2004: 729). Chomsky’s position
contrasts with the linguistic tradition which foregrounds meaning-making in human
society as the function of language, and, therefore, as the point of departure for any
account of linguistic structure and organization.
Ideology as ‘configurative rapport’
There is an irreconcilable contradiction between the assumptions about language that
underpin Manufacturing Consent, and those of its minimalist, feeble accounts of ‘word
usage’. But I am very much in sympathy with its conclusions, particularly those pertaining
to the reporting of the Vietnam War. Indeed, my own research on the reporting
by Australia’s public broadcaster, the ABC, of the 2003 invasion of Iraq provides
empirical evidence for a deep cultural orientation to modes of representing war and
violence. In fact, my findings parallel HC’s claims that the idea of ‘American aggression’
was unthinkable (2002[1988]: 186). In my data, it is idea of ‘Coalition violence’
that is entirely absent. For instance, in a corpus of two weeks of the nightly television
news bulletin on the ABC (consisting of over five hours of news, and around 45,000
words, from 20 March 2003 to 3 April 2003), there is not one news report which refers
to the invasion and bombing of Iraq as ‘violence’. It is not that the word was not used,
but it was largely reserved for the description of actions of anti-war protestors. I have
examined a number of other news or press briefings corpora from the same period, and
got the same result. Like ‘American aggression’ in Vietnam, ‘Coalition violence’ in
Iraq was unthinkable.
Thus, in the corpora I have examined, ‘Coalition’ and ‘violence’ repel each other, like
the positive and negative ends of two magnets. This finding is part of a larger suite of
lexical collocations and configurations which constitute a part of the texturing of an ideology
which enables ‘war’ to be a hallowed cultural practice, in which men, and increasingly
women, of a nation state are involved in ‘service’ and ‘sacrifice’, where they ‘fight
for’ a higher purpose and can be entrusted with ‘a mission’, where their deeds can be
mythologized by Hollywood; and much much more. Even when the brutality of ‘war’
becomes visible to citizens of the belligerent countries (e.g. as in My Lai, orAbu Ghraib),
whatever shock or outrage it generates is read against the ideological naturalization and
validation of ‘war’ by many and varied social and cultural processes. It is not immaterial
Lukin	 107
to this ideology that ‘war’ is an abstract noun, that its verb form has largely fallen out of
usage, that in its verb form it is intransitive, and that it has a meronymic (part-whole)
relationship to the actions which constitute it (see Lukin, forthcoming a, for an analysis
of the meanings of ‘war’, and related terms, such as ‘violence’and ‘aggression’, drawing
on Saussure, Whorf, Firth, Halliday and Hasan). These features permit the phrase ‘going
to war’as in ‘Today Australia has gone to war’, as if the ‘war’already existed, rather than
being brought into being by the actions of the ‘Coalition’countries. ‘War’creates a sense
of unity, both in its rhetorical power to generate the ‘rally around the flag effect’(Mueller,
1973), and in providing an explanation for diverse actions on different scales that must
be often chaotic and incoherent. ‘War’ naturalizes killing, because attacking, bombing,
striking and killing are all just part of what ‘war’means. The meronymic relation permits
the well-worn rhetorical gambit invoked in the face of civilian deaths, to quote the then
Australian Prime Minister: ‘In any war some civilian casualties are unavoidable’ (ABC
TV 7.30 Report, 31 March 2003).
I have set out just a few of the linguistic features of an ideological orientation
which is unquestionably profoundly powerful. If we take ideology to be ‘legitimacy’
which authorizes, sustains and reproduces social relations and organizations (from
Thompson, 1990, cited in Turner, 2006: 279), then attending to the use of words or
phrases here and there in discourse (cf. HC’s discussion of the use of the word ‘genocide’)
is no more than a very small beginning of an understanding of an ideology. As
Whorf has argued, language is not the ‘piling up of lexations’ (1956: 81). Language
creates world views; to see the constructedness of some world view requires a notion
like Whorf’s idea of ‘configurative rapport’, an orchestra of linguistic resources
which leads to the ‘deep persuasion of a principle behind phenomena’ (1956: 81; cf.
Hasan’s 1996a discussion of the ideology of women’s work in the home). The creation
and maintenance of ideology requires that it be played out in everyday communal
activities. To survive, an ideology must be in the fabric of society, and as such it must
recruit the resources of non-verbal semiotic systems (Hasan, 1996a: 145). The consequence
is that ideologies become part of everyday living, as natural as the air we
breathe. ‘War’ is validated by many social practices, of which journalism is only one,
albeit one able to validate a specific instance of something deemed a member of the
category of ‘war’ at the time of its prosecution.
Chomsky argues that in the face of ‘the very effective systems of indoctrination
and thought control’ all one needs is common sense and a few facts (see above),
eschewing any notion that linguistics might provide some expertise for the analysis
or deconstruction of an ideology. Ironically, in 1967, Chomsky published an essay on
the responsibility of intellectuals in the face of the profligate American (and
Australian!) militarism in Vietnam, published in the New York Review of Books,
arguing that academics had the leisure, facilities, and, notably, ‘the training’ enabling
them to expose ‘the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation,
ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are
presented to us’. But Chomsky could not have given a linguistic account of the ideology
enabling the Vietnam War without abandoning the central tenets of his theory.
Compare Chomsky’s views here with those of Hasan’s, who considers language a
‘fearsome resource’, through which we do not only the trivial (e.g. greeting,
108	 Journalism 14(1)
gossiping, buying a load of bread), but also those ‘enormously momentous things’, such
as ‘monopolizing resources, putting others down, cutting them off from the road to personal
fulfillment’. We use language not only to shape reality, but ‘to defend that reality
against anyone whose alternative values might threaten ours’ (Hasan, 1996b: 34). But
deconstructing ‘reality’ requires a ‘disturbance of daily habits and communal beliefs’
(1996b:34). Rather than this being a matter of a bit of common sense and a few facts,
Hasan argues not only that there is a central role for linguistics in the study of ideology,
but that the greatest justification for technical disciplines including linguistics is precisely
to ‘disturb the suspension of disbelief which the everyday linguistic practices of a
community perpetuate’ (1996b:34). But only a linguistic theory capable of explaining
how language is a carrier of ideology will be of any use. Paradoxically, this is a topic on
which Chomsky the linguist has nothing to say.
Notes
1	 Boyd-Barrett (2004: 436) argues that a more contemporary reading of the ‘anti-communism’
filter would be the belief in the ‘supposed benefits of neoliberal global capitalism’.
2	 Boyd-Barrett (2004: 435) proposes a sixth filter for the model, to include ‘the “buying out” of
journalists or their publications by intelligence and related special interest organizations’.
3	 Viz. their comment on the need for ‘macro, alongside a micro- (story-by-story) view of media
operations to see the pattern of manipulation and systematic bias’, Herman and Chomsky,
2002[1988]: 2.
4	 Space prevents a detailed discussion of the intellectual origins of Chomsky’s ‘Cartesian linguistics’,
but see Aarsleff (1970).
5	 This is an arbitrary choice; and Chomsky’s language of description has changed since he
published his book. But while the descriptive architecture has changed, the basic tenets of his
theory and the idealizations on which it is based have not substantially altered since then.
6	 See http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/documents/sectioned.php?pagenumber=1&documentdate=1950-04-12&documentid=10-1
for original
document.
7	 I searched Journalism (search conducted August 2011) with the following results: 271 hits for
‘language’, 301 for ‘discourse’; the combined hits for ‘propaganda’and ‘ideology/ideological’
were 460.
8	 Edelman, for instance, rejects Chomsky’s ‘language acquisition device’ (Edelman, 1992, cited
in Halliday, 2003a[1995]: 396) and Deacon (1997: 35) rejects Chomsky’s account of language
evolution as a ‘hopeful monster’ theory, the ‘evolutionary theorist’s counterpart to divine
intervention’.
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Biographical note
Annabelle Lukin is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, in the Centre for Language in Social Life,
Macquarie University. The centre specializes in the study of language as a social, semiotic system.
Her research interests include media and political discourse, stylistics, and language and education.
She is co-editor of The Development of Language: Functional Perspectives on Species and
Individuals (Continuum, 2004), and has published in discourse studies journals (e.g. Discourse
and Society, Linguistics and the Human Sciences), and in edited volumes (e.g. Appliable
Linguistics: Texts, Contexts and Meanings, Continuum, 2010, and Communicating Conflict:
Multilingual Case Studies of the News Media, Continuum, 2008).