The New York Times

The New York Times serves as a recurring witness and object of criticism in Noam Chomsky’s examination of media coverage after the September 11 attacks. Chomsky draws on its reporting to show that public opinion was less uniformly hawkish than dominant narratives suggested, while also arguing that the paper’s omissions and editorial framing could make U.S. policy appear detached from its consequences.

Reporting public opinion and wartime consensus

In September 2001, Chomsky cautioned that American media coverage was not as uniform as some European observers believed, in part because they relied on prominent outlets such as The New York Times and national public broadcasters. He noted that the paper itself had acknowledged a divergence between positions heard in New York and those conveyed in its pages. Its report that the “drums of war” were barely audible in city streets, and that calls for peace greatly outnumbered demands for punishment, offered a counterpoint to the assumption that the public broadly favored retaliation. Chomsky distinguished the widespread desire to find and punish those responsible from opposition to an indiscriminate attack that would kill many innocents.

He nevertheless placed the paper within a broader pattern in which major media organizations and intellectual classes rally to state power during crises and encourage the public to do likewise. Chomsky compared the response after September 11 with coverage during the Gulf War and the bombing of Serbia, where, in his account, media support for official action had reached near-hysterical intensity. The Times’s report of peace sentiment therefore mattered not as proof that media conformity had disappeared, but as evidence of a tension between public attitudes and the dominant presentation of them.

Editorial framing and the causes of hostility

Chomsky challenged explanations that attributed anti-American hostility chiefly to globalization or cultural influence. He argued that such accounts relieved Western intellectuals of responsibility for the policies that shaped the choice of the World Trade Center as a target. As a counterexample to the cultural explanation, he pointed to a Times editorial published on September 16 that described the perpetrators as driven by hatred of Western values, including freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism, and universal suffrage. In Chomsky’s reading, that account rendered U.S. actions irrelevant to the problem and offered a self-congratulatory explanation aligned with support for power.

The danger, he argued, was not only analytical. If policy causes were excluded from public discussion, the resulting complacency could help increase the risk of further atrocities, including attacks against Americans. Chomsky also stressed that the wealthy and privileged Middle Eastern critics quoted in the press objected to U.S. policy for reasons distinct from consumer culture; popular criticism, he said, was more intense still. The Times thus appears in his argument both as a source that could document dissent and as a venue for a framework that, in his view, displaced discussion of policy.

Afghanistan, civilian consequences, and what goes unreported

The paper’s reporting also provided Chomsky with evidence about the humanitarian effects of measures taken as the United States prepared for war in Afghanistan. He cited a September 16 report that Washington had asked Pakistan to halt fuel supplies and the truck convoys carrying much of the food and other goods to Afghan civilians. Chomsky observed that the report produced no perceptible reaction in the West. In the following days, Pakistan closed its 2,300-kilometer border with Afghanistan, saying it sought to prevent Osama bin Laden’s men from hiding among the large flow of refugees.

A September 30 report described how the threat of military strikes had forced international relief organizations to evacuate, paralyzing aid programs, while Afghans arriving in Pakistan recounted desperation and fear at home. Chomsky also cited an aid volunteer’s description of the country as having been sustained by an intravenous drip that had just been pulled away. These details sharpened his objection to calling the U.S. response measured: the Times’s own reporting recorded the threatened interruption of food and humanitarian assistance, yet, in his account, that reporting did not generate public scrutiny proportionate to the consequences.

Coverage, access, and institutional pressure

Chomsky distinguished constraints on information inside the United States from efforts to restrict reporting abroad. He described domestic limits as usually arising less from government intervention than from conventional self-censorship, and judged coverage at the time better than normal. The sharper example of pressure, in his account, concerned Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite broadcaster that reached a large Arabic-speaking audience, aired live debates and a broad range of opinion, and maintained reporters in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

The New York Times later praised Al Jazeera’s continuous news service and its willingness to address topics treated as subversive in much of the Arab world, including the absence of democratic institutions, persecution of political dissidents, and gender inequality. Yet the same coverage noted that American politicians were troubled by the network’s interviews with Osama bin Laden and by criticism of U.S. policy from analysts, guests, and callers. Chomsky emphasized the contrast between this attention and the limited use he believed Western media made of the interviews and reporting from Afghanistan. The Times could make Al Jazeera’s reach and editorial character visible while, in his view, leaving the political significance of that information underexamined.

Strategic claims and the paper as evidence

The Times also appears in Chomsky’s account of U.S. power and the strategic purposes he attributed to the war. He connected the establishment of major American military bases in Central Asia to access to the region’s resources and to the wider effort to surround the energy reserves of the Persian Gulf. In discussing U.S. policy toward allies, he invoked a longstanding formula, stated by the Clinton administration in 1993 and later repeated by officials: act multilaterally when possible, but unilaterally when necessary. The formation of a coalition, he argued, might soften the rhetoric without changing the underlying policy, since partners were expected to support Washington rather than participate in its decisions.

In his interpretation, the Times’s reporting on comments to Saudi Prince Abdullah conveyed the message that the United States intended to demonstrate its military capacity and expected others to respect its resolve. Chomsky further proposed—while acknowledging that confidential documents were unavailable—that the Afghanistan bombings may have been intended chiefly as a warning about the consequences of defying U.S. rules. He compared this possible purpose with the NATO bombing of Serbia, which Tony Blair and Bill Clinton had explained in terms of preserving the alliance’s credibility. Across these arguments, the paper is more than a citation source: its reports supply details that Chomsky assembles against official accounts, while its omissions and framing become part of his critique of how wartime consensus is produced.