Parties and Media far to the right of the public. Media refuses to report it.

In a recent interview Noam Chomsky, a professor at MIT and social critic, responded to the statement that the United States has moved to the political right:

"Though the press systematically refuses to report it, public opinion studies show ... that both political parties and the media are far to the right of the public on issue after issue.

"In February 2005 just after last year's budget came out the most prestigious institute that studies public opinion in the world, based in the University of Maryland, carried out a study of what people thought the budget ought to be. And it was very striking. It was the exact inverse of the budget. Where federal spending was going up, the public wanted to go down: military spending, supplemental for Iraq and Afghanistan; where spending was going down, the public wanted to go up: social spending, health, education, veteran's benefits, renewable energy, support of the United Nations peacekeeping missions, on and on.

"The reason the results of this study is not better known is that it was not published in a single newspaper in the United States, at least a single newspaper that's accessed by the standard database.

"So it just isn't true, I mean there is case after case like this, it's just not true that the population has swung to the right. The government has, the parties have, the media have, the public hasn't."