Im not demonizing, I am offering my considered opinion of his work. He is quite fond of insisting that the media only reports what fits the dominant ideology, and yet he himself only comes to conclusions that fits with Leftist ideology. He should take some of his own advice and a pill for consistency.
Second, he cites sources that only support his conclusions, and sometimes, doesnt cite a source at all. Take for example his 1994 book the Prosperous Few and the Restless Many when he asserts, "Most of the deep starvation and malnutrition in the US had pretty well been eliminated by the Great Society programs in the 1960s. But by the early 1980s it was beginning to creep up again and now the latest estimates are thirty million or so in deep hunger.It gets much worse over the winter because parents have to make an agonizing decision between heat and food, and children die because they're not getting water with some rice in it." Another example of Chomskian broad assertions that are unsupported. By my little investigation, quoting figures from the US Dept. of Agriculture 1985, those living below the poverty line in the US eat as well as middle class Americans, and the examples of death from starvation are due to abuse and deliberate deprivation. It is typical of Mr. Chomsky to make broad, vague assertions that can be defended easily by making furthur broad assertions.
I would go on, but I am sure you can do some footwork and look up some of the considerable body of criticism of Chomsky available at your local public library. |
