I read an article in the Guardian on Chomsky a little while ago. I was surprised that an article that was commissioned on the back of his being judged the world's top intellectual, this Guardian reporter chose to do a hatchet job.
It was an extraordinary piece of immature point scoring.
The Guardian has now apologised and upheld several complaints about her writing.
I no longer subscribe to the Guardian. I don't want to pay for rubbish like that.
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Corrections and clarifications: "The readers' editor has considered a number of complaints from Noam Chomsky concerning an interview with him by Emma Brockes published in G2, the second section of the Guardian, on October 31. He has found in favour of Professor Chomsky on three significant complaints."
1 comment:
It is telling that Chomsky has declined to accuse Brockes of inventing any of his actual quotes. He opts only for making the inspecific and unfalsifiable charge that she "[invents their] contexts". The Guardian's retraction says nothing about the fidelity with which Chomsky's statements were rendered. Therefore, the ones that stand alone should be considered accurate until Chomsky specifically and credibly disputes them.
The Srebrenica controversy has eclipsed the fact that Chomsky minimizes another set of atrocities in a different part of the interview: those of the European pogroms against the Jews. Chomsky refers to them as "not very bad, by contemporary standards". This is outrageously false, as an examination of the historical record shows. Chomsky's minimization of the pogroms, which (from the 16th to the 20th Centuries) claimed an estimated 300,000 Jewish lives, cannot be vindicated by an appeal to "invented contexts".
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