[Marxism] Cockburn on the Guardian smear job on Chomsky

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Counterpunch November 5 / 6, 2005
Guardian Fabricates Chomsky Quotes in Bid to Smear World's Number One
Intellectual
Storm Over Brockes' Fakery

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

After Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines issued their poll last month of
the top intellectuals in the world I broached to Noam Chomsky the notion
that CounterPunch might compile an alternative list. The plan was to
dismiss FP/Prospect readers' pick of mostly lumpen non-thinkers in favor of
real intellectuals like Levi-Strauss, or Baudrillard, or Laura Nader or
Barbara Fields, or the Anderson Bros or Boris Kagarlitsky.

Chomsky who featured in the poll as top intellectual, (with twice as many
votes as the runner-up, Umberto Eco, to the evident consternation of much
of the north-eastern US press which has mostly kept silent on the matter)
wrote back in good humor, ridiculing the idea of such lists and putting
forward as candidates his granddaughter in Nicaragua, or his
granddaughter's cat. The subject soon grew wearisome and I went back to
important matters such as how to keep the temperature in my pit under 80
degrees F, vital in the correct preparation of cold-smoked Coho salmon
caught in Gray's Harbor, WA.

But the pre-eminence of a genuinely radical thinker like Chomsky plainly
irked New Labour types at the British daily, The Guardian. So they sent off
an interviewer to do a razor job on the professor of linguistics at MIT.

In recent years, the "interview" as a showcase for the interviewer's
inquisitorial chutzpa has been more a feature of English than of American
daily journalism. The Guardian's current showcase performer in what is
essentially a game of self promotion, (displaying the interviewer as more
than a match for the interviewee) is a woman named Emma Brockes, fairly new
to the game but already feted as a high-flier.

Last year Brockes interviewed the black British poet, Benjamin Zephaniah
after he refused an OBE. Towards the end of the piece, Brockes asked
Zephaniah about what he was reading:

    "I ask him what he is reading at the moment. 'Chomsky', he says. 'I am
always reading Chomsky.'

    "I tell him I find Chomsky hard work. 'Really?' he says. 'Really?
That's cos you ain't got a Birmingham accent.' And he throws back his head
and brays like a donkey.'

This is a good illustration of a characteristic of many of these showcase
interviews, where the interviewer sneaks in a kidney punch after the
interview is over, when she's safely back in the office. So the readers are
left to warm their hands over the rancid and somehow racist snap of "brays
like a donkey".

full: http://www.counterpunch.com/


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