The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal is a recurring source in Noam Chomsky’s discussion of the September 11 attacks and their aftermath. Its reporting gives space to pro-American critics of U.S. policy in the Middle East, while its accounts of public opinion, media coverage, and Arab analysts help Chomsky challenge explanations that treat hostility toward the United States as a rejection of Western culture. The newspaper’s role is consequential but not uncomplicated: it reports grievances that are often sidelined, even as Chomsky argues that important parts of the story remain underexamined.

Reporting grievances behind anti-American anger

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the newspaper gathered views from affluent Muslims in the region, including bankers and businesspeople with ties to the United States. They expressed dismay at U.S. support for authoritarian governments and at barriers Washington had erected against independent development and democratization. Chomsky emphasizes that their foremost concerns were more specific: U.S. policy toward Iraq and Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territory. Their criticism came from people who were not simply hostile to the United States; the contrast between their pro-American ties and their condemnation of policy makes their testimony particularly useful to his argument.

The newspaper’s reports also distinguish these relatively privileged critics from the much poorer people in the region. Chomsky argues that similar grievances are more intense among the poor, who see regional wealth directed westward, toward Westernized elites and corrupt, brutal leaders supported by Western power. The paper’s reporting helps establish that anger at U.S. policy extends beyond the networks that carried out the attacks. Chomsky treats those networks as a distinct category: he says their actions had harmed poor and oppressed people, even as they drew support from a wider reservoir of anger, fear, and despair.

In another account, the newspaper described affluent and privileged Egyptians in a McDonald’s, dressed in American-style clothes but sharply critical of the United States for what Chomsky calls concrete political reasons. He rejects the suggestion that their complaints were about globalization, fast food, or jeans. The detail of their setting sharpens the contrast: cultural familiarity with America coexists with opposition to its policies. Chomsky adds that opinion in the street was similar but far more intense, and warns that refusing to examine such grievances increases the likelihood of further crimes.

Public opinion, war, and the limits of coverage

Chomsky cites the newspaper’s reporting on New York opinion to complicate the idea that calls for retaliation dominated public feeling. The paper reported that the drums of war were barely audible in the city and that appeals for peace greatly outnumbered demands for punishment, even at an outdoor memorial for victims. Chomsky acknowledges a broad desire to find and punish those responsible, but distinguishes that desire from support for indiscriminate attacks that would kill many innocent people. The reporting supplies a public voice that, in his account, was less bellicose than the dominant crisis rhetoric.

At the same time, he argues that major media and intellectual circles characteristically rally to power during crises and encourage the public to do likewise. He places the Gulf War and the NATO bombing of Serbia within this pattern, while noting that the tendency has deeper historical precedents. The newspaper’s account of New Yorkers therefore serves as a counterpoint to the wartime consensus Chomsky sees forming elsewhere; it does not, by itself, persuade him that the broader media environment has escaped that pattern.

Chomsky also draws on the paper’s coverage of Arab intellectuals’ response to U.S. pressure on Al Jazeera. The reporting described their reaction as deeply indignant and quoted analysts who argued that Washington’s disregard for human rights in officially pro-American countries such as Saudi Arabia fueled surges of anti-American feeling. He notes that interviews with Osama bin Laden and reporting from Afghanistan available through Al Jazeera received remarkably little attention. The newspaper’s account thus makes a specific grievance visible while also helping identify what Chomsky believes Western audiences were not hearing.

Critique of cultural explanations

Chomsky contrasts policy-based explanations of hostility with commentary that attributes the attacks to hatred of Western values, cultural weakness, or resentment of globalization. He describes such accounts as comforting to Western audiences because they detach U.S. actions from the causes of anger. The newspaper’s reports of pro-American Muslims criticizing Washington’s Middle East policies provide evidence against that cultural framing: their objections concern political decisions, not American consumer culture or democratic ideals.

The argument does not equate those critics with the attackers. Chomsky says the network associated with Osama bin Laden has its own aims and record, while drawing on a broader climate of anger and despair. In his account, the network presents its struggle as a war against corrupt, repressive, non-Islamist governments and their supporters. Reporting that identifies popular grievances therefore matters not as an endorsement of the network, but as evidence about the conditions in which it can recruit support. Chomsky warns that treating the attacks as a clash of cultures obscures those conditions and risks encouraging further violence.

A source within a selective media landscape

The Wall Street Journal’s function in the book is not limited to reporting opinion. Chomsky also invokes its coverage as a measure of what parts of the American press do and do not acknowledge. He says the newspaper deserves credit for publishing the views of affluent Muslims who criticized U.S. policy, and later points to its serious reporting on Arab intellectuals’ reactions to pressure on Al Jazeera. Those examples allow the newspaper to serve as evidence against his own broad criticism of media uniformity: U.S. reporting, he says, was not entirely uniform, and New York opinion differed from the picture conveyed by the newspaper itself.

Yet the newspaper’s presence does not settle Chomsky’s criticism. He argues that media and intellectual institutions tend to align with power in a crisis, and that accounts centered on cultural hostility can leave U.S. actions outside the explanation. His use of the paper is therefore double-edged: its reporting supplies concrete testimony about political grievances, while its omissions and the limits of wider coverage remain part of the problem he describes. The distinction matters to his central warning that ignoring the sources of anger, and answering violence with indiscriminate force, can strengthen the cycle of violence rather than contain it.