This is wonderful. This is exactly what I wanted the Internet to be. I love that I can come up with obscure convoluted ideas about a complex issue and have meaningful conversations about it.

3) I want to clarify something: I don't mean radical / marginal as derogatory.  I hope I didn't come across as saying he should be sidelined because his ideas are marginal; I'm mostly saying this is the anatomy of the margin: the lived reality, the public presentation, etc.

Thanks for not lambasting me for citing reddit as reference, lol.  I don't mind the nitpicky nature, because that's academic history as I understand it.  High school might make you memorize official versions of events; college level history (IME) is heavy on emphasizing uncertainty and legitimacy etc.

I won't say that Chomsky had been discredited, but there had been a lot of criticisms about his interpretations of geopolitical events (such as his interpretation of the Stalin Note) and also about labor right movement.  Again, it's not that he didn't research and cite numbers and evidences etc, but his interpretation is highly unusual. 

It's not necessarily that he's wrong, but does he get to decide everybody else got it wrong?  More importantly, is there such thing as a universally acceptable version of real objective truth, or are all versions similarly constructed and flawed and questionable?

5) is where I get really weird.  It's not so much that we have a functional unoppressive government that is usually, legitimately respectful of our freedom and self-determination, but sometimes let things go haywire and needs some recalibrating.  

In my experience, every faucet of our civilization (at least in modernity) is tightly controlled, manipulated.  It's not just the media, it's images, it's language, it's education, it's institution of sciences, especially neurosciences, it's advertising, it's imagery, it's commerce, it's economics.  Attempts to construct and elicit and induce experience and desire and expectations are every where, they aren't measuring what you want and deliver fulfillment, they tell you want to want and expect and count on you to behave in expected way to sustain society and economy.

When I put it like that I sound more anarchist than Chomsky, LOL.

6) I was just saying my original post / critique was chomsky's direct claim that the public does not discuss it.  It had not been my personal experience.   I'm not dismissing your point, it's just not relevant to my original objection (that the media issues are undiscussed.)

7) OTOH, unregulated media allow ISIS to florish through naked propaganda that attract endless stream of fighters.  I don't want to give the impression that I'm condoning US media's failure to give coverage to drones attack casualties etc, I'm not.  I also don't think it's abstract to say that disagreements about legitimacy of institutions always boils down to how much regulation is "maximal," "efficient," "data-proven" to yield "optimal result," and not "what's ethical."