National Public Radio

National Public Radio appears in Chomsky’s account as both a broadcaster marked as marginal to respectable debate and a venue for asking questions about the powers of the U.S. intelligence services. Its significance lies in this tension: it could air challenges to official policy, while Chomsky argued that major media and intellectual circles characteristically rallied to government in moments of crisis.

Position in the Media Landscape

Chomsky says that National Public Radio was regarded as outside respectable debate. He connects that standing to the Reagan administration’s dismissive nickname for the broadcaster, “Radio Managua on the Potomac,” which cast it as politically suspect rather than mainstream. The phrase illustrates how an outlet’s reputation could be shaped not just by its reporting but by the way political authorities characterized it.

That marginal status is presented alongside a broader qualification about American media. Chomsky rejects the impression that U.S. coverage was entirely uniform, suggesting that European observers might form that view by concentrating on outlets such as The New York Times and national public radio and television. He cites a New York Times report that New York opinion differed from the paper’s own presentation, and says that calls for peace in the city outweighed demands for punishment. National Public Radio thus belongs to a media environment that was neither wholly monolithic nor, in Chomsky’s analysis, immune to institutional alignment with power.

Questions About State Power

On September 17, Noah Adams raised questions on National Public Radio’s program All Things Considered about whether assassinations should be permitted and whether the CIA should receive greater latitude. Chomsky uses those questions to introduce a direct objection: the CIA should not be allowed to carry out assassinations. He then places the issue in a wider history of U.S. policy, asking whether the agency should have been permitted to organize a truck-bomb attack in Beirut, and whether a U.S.-organized force in Nicaragua should have been allowed to target vulnerable civilian institutions such as farming cooperatives and clinics.

The radio questions therefore serve as a point of entry into Chomsky’s comparison of state violence with violence attributed to official enemies. He argues that the same acts can be described differently depending on who commits them, and that the label of terrorism is often reserved for adversaries. National Public Radio’s role in this passage is not to endorse his full argument, but to provide a broadcast setting in which the scope of intelligence authority and the limits on political violence are openly posed.

Crisis, Consensus, and Dissent

Chomsky contrasts public questioning with what he describes as a recurring pattern among major media and intellectual circles: in a crisis, they tend to rally behind government and encourage the population to mobilize around its cause. He points to the Gulf War and the NATO bombing of Serbia as instances of this alignment, saying the latter was accompanied by a response approaching hysteria. Against that pattern, the questions aired on National Public Radio show that challenge was possible, even while the broadcaster itself was treated as outside the bounds of respectable discussion.

This contrast gives the outlet a limited but meaningful place in Chomsky’s account. It is neither presented as the center of public debate nor reduced to a simple instrument of dissent. Rather, its marginal reputation and its willingness to air questions about assassination and intelligence powers sharpen the book’s concern with who gets to define acceptable debate, and how crisis can narrow it.