naturally turned to narco-traffickers—like Noriega (he w as our
great friend, remember, until he became too independent). None of
this is a secret or a surprise.
W here I differ from a lot of other people is, I don’t think the CIA
has been involved as an independent agency: I think it does w hat it’s
told to do by the W hite House. It’s used as an instrument of state
policy, to carry out operations the government w ants to be able to
“plausibly deny.”
The media
In Manufacturing Consent, the book you w rote w ith Ed Herman in
1988, you described five filters that new s goes through before w e
see it. Would you revise that list? One of the filters,
anticommunism, probably needs to be changed.
Temporarily, at least. I thought at the time it w as put too
narrow ly. More broadly, it’s the idea that grave enemies are about
to attack us and w e need to huddle under the protection of domestic
pow er.
You need something to frighten people w ith, to prevent them
from paying attention to w hat’s really happening to them. You have
to somehow engender fear and hatred, to channel the kind of rage—
or even just discontent—that’s being aroused by social and economic
conditions.
By the early 1980s, it w as clear that Communism w asn’t going to
remain usable as a threat for much longer, so w hen the Reagan
administration came in, they immediately focussed on “international
terrorism.” Right from the start, they used Libya as a punching bag.
T hen every time they had to rally support for aid to the Contras
or something, they’d engineer a confrontation w ith Libya. It got so
ludicrous that, at one point, the W hite House w as sur - rounded w ith
tanks to protect poor President Reagan from Libyan hit squads. It
became an international joke.
By the late 1980s, Hispanic drug traffickers became the enemy;
by now, they’ve been joined by immigrants, black criminals, w elfare
mothers and a w hole host of other attackers on every side.