Screening Dates
  • December 12, 2017 7:00
Free Admission

Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick’s dynamic exploration of the life and thought of Noam Chomsky, the controversial American author, linguist, political dissident, and critic of the press, was an early primer on the manufacture of fake news. Using an entertaining blend of original material, archival footage, and graphic illustrations, it examines Chomsky’s provocative critique of mainstream media as an instrument of ideological persuasion. Chomsky argues that corporate media was complicit in the first Gulf War, and analyzes how genocides in Cambodia and East Timor were covered (or not covered) by the press in the 1970s. This unlikeliest of hit films—the highest-grossing Canadian documentary to that time—is throughout a compelling, thought-provoking, and sobering call to what Chomsky terms ​“intellectual self-defence.”