I recall reading him making a similar statement in an interview published in _Film Threat_ or some other magazine devoted to independent film (I know that seems nuts, but I think the same interview must have appeared somewhere else first, and the article recycled for the release of the _Manufacturing Consent_ documentary on VHS.) He expanded on the statement by claiming that there was no where else in the world that he could conduct his research and speak as freely as he can here: he felt the formal and actual freedom of expression in the US couldn't be beat. When the interviewer brought up other countries, he dismissed her/him; he said that while he had a higher profile in other nations, he found that his criticisms of other nations as complicit in the crimes of the US were generally elided or omitted when his writings appeared elsewhere. He didn't give examples.
FWIW, Curtiss
> It's fine with me to find good things about U.S. life and culture. I
> do myself, and I've taken some shit here for it. But the "best
> country in the world"? What does that mean? Noam himself is one of
> the great chroniclers of its crimes - should that enter into some
> accounting of good and bad? We have mass poverty, immature politics,
> an often idiotic public culture. Calling in the "best" should be
> something for know-nothings, not well-educated cosmopolitans.