# Quote — Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power

> Remember that the media have two basic functions. One is to indoctrinate the elites, to make sure they have the right ideas and know how to serve power. In fact, typically the elites are the most indoctrinated segment of a society, because they are the ones who are exposed to the most propaganda and actually take part in the decision-making process. For them you have the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and so on. But there’s also a mass media, whose main function is just to get rid of the rest of the population—to marginalize and eliminate them, so they don’t interfere with decision-making. And the press that’s designed for that purpose isn’t the New York Times and the Washington Post, it’s sitcoms on television, and the National Enquirer, and sex and violence, and babies with three heads, and football, all that kind of stuff.

- Author: [Noam Chomsky](https://www.leafyquotes.com/noam-chomsky.md)
- Book: [Understanding Power](https://www.leafyquotes.com/noam-chomsky/understanding-power.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Understanding_Power#Quotes) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/noam-chomsky/understanding-power/remember-that-the

## More from this book

> The real lesson of Nixon's fall is that the President shouldn't call Thomas Watson and McGeorge Bundy bad names—that means the Republic's collapsing. And the press prides itself on having exposed this fact. On the other hand, if you want to send the FBI to organize the assassination of a Black Panther leader, that's fine by us; it's fine by the Washington Post too.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/noam-chomsky/understanding-power/the-real-lesson.md)

> See, the "science" [of political economy] happens to be a very flexible one: you can change it to do whatever you feel like, it's that kind of "science."

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/noam-chomsky/understanding-power/see-the-science.md)

> … there are no two points of view more antithetical than classical liberalism and capitalism—and that's why when the University of Chicago publishes a bicentennial edition of Smith, they have to distort the text (which they did): because as a true classical liberal, Smith was strongly opposed to all of the idiocy they now sprout in his name.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/noam-chomsky/understanding-power/there-are-no-two.md)