At many points during the film, interviews and lectures given by Chomsky appear on televisions screens, which are one of mass media's main mediums of influence on the public. The screens on which these segments are broadcasted (they appear to actually be on the screens, not digitally inserted) are all presumed to be in Canada, where the film was released (one of the screens is on the "jumbotron" in the West Edmonton Mall), reinforcing Chomsky's belief that if his lectures and interviews were to be broadcast on American television screens, they'd be taken off the air because of their controversial content.
The use of old newsreel footage to educate people on how various branches of the media, mainly the press, operate harkens back to a time when the media was presumed to be honorable. The filmmakers use this footage as an ironic promotion of the media as an honorable, truthful force when it was the same greedy and powerful organization as it has always been. Also, it calls back to one of the earliest forms of motion picture media, which could be interpreted as the point at which the media branched out into a new medium and broadened and strengthened its sphere of influence over the public.
These two instances reinforce Chomsky's "Propaganda Model" of the antidemocratic ends of the American media from the perspectives of the denial of freedom of speech and freedom of expression of ideas and the media’s promotion of its own "totalitarian regime" while the people are not aware of its existence, respectively.
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