Q: What are your thoughts on how the media covers these issues? even your local paper, the New York Times you’ve been highly critical of it.

A: Do you want me to read my paragraph about my local paper?

…

“My feeling of superiority, and the sense of well-being that comes from that, increases with the number of poor people on the planet, whose lives are dominated by me or my proxies and who I nonetheless can completely ignore. I like to be reminded of those poor people, those unobstrusives. And then I like to be reminded of my lack of interest in them. For example while I eat my breakfast each morning I absolutely love to read my morning newspaper, because on the first few pages the newspaper tells me how my country treated the unobstrusives on the day before, deaths, beatings, torture, what have you… Then as I keep turning the pages, the newspaper reminds me how unimportant the unobstrusives are to me. And it tries to tempt me on its articles on shirts, to consider different shirts I would like to wear. Then it goes on as I turn the pages, to coax me to sample different forms of cooking, and then to experience different plays, films, different types of vacations.”

[Puts the book down]

In other words, the stories in the newspaper about Afghanistan are… partly true and partly false, but they are presented in a context that basically makes me feel alright about treating the people there as non-equals. Which obviously we do if we send an unmanned drone, and we are thinking of killing some person who we think is an enemy and we kill 15 members of his family. We wouldn’t do that to people who we thought were our equals, for example: friends.

Even if there was someone that we despised, or who wanted to kill us, in the middle of their family, we wouldnt kill the whole family, we just wouldn’t.

And the New York times helps me to take that as… totally normal!

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Transcribed from Interview