Chomsky interview: Deterring democracy in Italy
"I don't know about Italy, but here the population is polled very extensively, so we have a pretty good grasp of public attitudes. There is, in fact, at Harvard a project called 'The Vanishing Voter Project', which I hope tells you something. It does extensive polling analysis to try to determine why the voters have been losing interest in elections over the past twenty years. One of the things they measure is the sense of helplessness, that is, that you feel you cannot do anything that will affect the political process. It hit a new high this year, far beyond anything before. Right before the election about 75 per cent of the population felt that there was no election at all, that it was just some kind of game being played by rich contributors, party bosses and the media. The whole public relations, or advertising, industry was crafting candidates, training them to use certain gestures and produce certain words that the research industry showed might increase the number of votes. But they didn't mean what they said and you weren't supposed to be able to understand what they said and it was all meaningless, just some kind of public relations game".

Chomsky interview: Deterring democracy in Italy
"I don't know about Italy, but here the population is polled very extensively, so we have a pretty good grasp of public attitudes. There is, in fact, at Harvard a project called 'The Vanishing Voter Project', which I hope tells you something. It does extensive polling analysis to try to determine why the voters have been losing interest in elections over the past twenty years. One of the things they measure is the sense of helplessness, that is, that you feel you cannot do anything that will affect the political process. It hit a new high this year, far beyond anything before. Right before the election about 75 per cent of the population felt that there was no election at all, that it was just some kind of game being played by rich contributors, party bosses and the media. The whole public relations, or advertising, industry was crafting candidates, training them to use certain gestures and produce certain words that the research industry showed might increase the number of votes. But they didn't mean what they said and you weren't supposed to be able to understand what they said and it was all meaningless, just some kind of public relations game".