In this post, we put forth our understanding of Chomsky’s opinion on journalistic ethics from an interview with Andrew Marr. In the following clip of an interview with Marr (full interview on archive.org):
Chomsky critiques the journalistic ethics by saying that Marr would not be placed where he is unless he believed in certain ideas that the institutions he was affiliated with filter for. This can be seen in another way, like we have discussed in another post, on how groups exert power: all institutions exert power on individuals by setting a context within which the members operate, just as Nature sets context via the forces of gravity, electromagnetism, etc., and exerts forces that lead to laws which we call the laws of Nature. Living beings that are a part of Nature must abide by these laws in order to survive.
So, institutions have rules, stated or unstated, which must be followed by the members. If someone identifies these unspoken rules from the context and starts questioning or defying them, they soon start being seen as not part of the group, and their ideas are ignored. They are seen as a rogue agent and are often mocked first, at least lightly, to conform. If they don’t conform, they are punished if there are laws of punishment within the group; if not, they are evicted from the group. We can see the same phenomenon in Nature: if someone does not conform to the laws of Nature, they either die or don’t procreate, similar to what happens in a group.
What Chomsky is saying is that in order to propagate their ideas without too much trouble, many institutions nip this problem in the bud and don’t let in members who have traits that might lead to questioning or defying the values that institutions would like to propagate.
Furthermore, we believe that if an institution tries to imitate Nature as closely as possible, the acceptance criteria would be derived from the laws of Nature, and eviction from that group would coincide with eviction from Nature, i.e., with death.