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Edward S. Herman

Edward Samuel Herman (April 7, 1925 – November 11, 2017) was an American economist, media scholar and social critic. Herman is known for his media criticism, in particular the propaganda model hypothesis he developed with Noam Chomsky, a frequent co-writer. He held an appointment as Professor Emeritus of finance at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. He also taught at Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.[1]

Edward Samuel Herman
Born
Edward Samuel Herman

(1925-04-07)April 7, 1925
DiedNovember 11, 2017(2017-11-11) (aged 92)
EducationUniversity of Pennsylvania
University of California, Berkeley
Occupations
  • Economist
  • media scholar
  • social critic
Spouses
Mary Woody
(m. 1946; died 2013)
Christine Abbott
(m. 2015)

Ideologically, Herman has been described as a "dedicated radical democrat",[2] an ideology which opposes corporate control in favor of direct democracy while distancing itself from other radical movements.[3] His writings frequently dealt with what he called "Western corporate media reports" on violent regional conflicts, disputing mainstream reports to an extent that he has been criticised for downplaying genocide figures.[4][5]

Early life edit

Herman was born in Philadelphia to a liberal Democratic family, the son of Abraham Lincoln Herman, a pharmacist and Celia Dektor, a homemaker.[6][7]

Herman received a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania. At University of California, Berkeley, from which he received his PhD in 1953, he met economist Robert A. Brady, a student of the economics of fascist regimes who had a significant influence upon him. Herman joined the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania in 1958, where he taught finance and became professor emeritus in 1989.[6]

Political views edit

Vietnam War edit

Following the Vietnam War, Herman and Noam Chomsky challenged the veracity of media accounts of war crimes and repression by the Vietnamese communists, stating: "the basic sources for the larger estimates of killings in the North Vietnamese land reform were persons affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the Saigon Propaganda Ministry" and "the NLF-DRV 'bloodbath' at Hue (in South Vietnam) was constructed on flimsy evidence indeed". Commenting on postwar Vietnam, Chomsky and Herman argued: "[i]n a phenomenon that has few parallels in Western experience, there appear to have been close to zero retribution deaths in postwar Vietnam." This they described as a "miracle of reconciliation and restraint".[8] In discussing the 1977 Congressional testimony of defecting SRV official Nguyen Cong Hoan, on the subjects of mass repression and the abrogation of civic and religious freedoms,[9] Herman and Chomsky pointed to contradictory accounts of post-war Vietnam, concluding that while "some of what Hoan reports is no doubt accurate ... the many visitors and Westerners living in Vietnam who expressly contradict his claims" suggest "Hoan is simply not a reliable commentator."[10]

Chomsky and Herman authored Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda, a book which criticised U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia and highlighted how mainstream media neglected to cover stories about these activities; the publisher Warner Modular initially accepted it, and it was published in 1973. However, Warner Modular's parent company, Warner Communications, disapproved of the book's contents and ordered all copies to be destroyed.[11][12] According to Jim Neilson's book Warring Fictions: Cultural Politics and the Vietnam War Narrative, the publication of Counter-Revolutionary Violence was stopped by an executive of Warner Publications, William Sarnoff, who thought its discussion of American foreign policy "was a pack of lies, a scurrilous attack on respected Americans, undocumented, a publication unworthy of a serious publisher". Because of a binding contract, copies were passed to another publisher rather than destroyed.[13]

In 1967, Herman was among more than 500 writers and editors who signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse to pay the 10% Vietnam War tax surcharge implemented by Congress upon the initiation of President Johnson.[14][15]

Cambodia edit

Herman and Chomsky later collaborated on works about the media treatment of post-war Indochina, Cambodia in particular, beginning with "Distortions at Fourth Hand", an article written for the American left-wing periodical The Nation in June 1977. While they did not "pretend to know [...] the truth" about what was going on in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot, they believed, in reviewing material on the topic then available: "[w]hat filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available". Referring to what they saw as "the extreme unreliablity of refugee reports", they noted: "Refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocutors wish to hear. While these reports must be considered seriously, care and caution are necessary. Specifically, refugees questioned by Westerners or Thais have a vested interest in reporting atrocities on the part of Cambodian revolutionaries, an obvious fact that no serious reporter will fail to take into account". They concluded by stating Khmer Rouge Cambodia might be more closely comparable to "France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months" than to Nazi Germany.[16][17][self-published source?]

In 1979, Chomsky and Herman revised Counter-Revolutionary Violence and published it with South End Press as the two-volume The Political Economy of Human Rights.[18] In this work they compared U.S. media reactions to the Cambodian genocide and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. They argued that because Indonesia was a U.S. ally, U.S. media ignored the East Timorese situation while focusing on that in Cambodia, a U.S. enemy.[19][20][self-published source?] Volume II of the book The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume II: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology (1979), which appeared after the regime had been deposed, has been described by area specialist Sophal Ear as "one of the most supportive books of the Khmer revolution" in which they "perform what amounts to a defense of the Khmer Rouge cloaked in an attack on the media".[21][better source needed] In their book, Chomsky and Herman wrote: "The record of atrocities in Cambodia is substantial and often gruesome" but questioned their scale, which may have been inflated "by a factor of 100". They wrote that the evacuation of Phnom Penh "may actually have saved many lives", that the Khmer Rouge's agricultural policies reportedly produced positive results and there might have been "a significant degree of peasant support for the Khmer Rouge".[22]

Herman replied to critics in 2001: "Chomsky and I found that the very asking of questions about the numerous fabrications, ideological role, and absence of any beneficial effects for the victims in the anti-Khmer Rouge propaganda campaign of 1975–1979 was unacceptable, and was treated almost without exception as 'apologetics for Pol Pot.'"[23]

Todd Gitlin, in an email to The New York Times, wrote that for Herman and Chomsky "the suffering of the Cambodians is less important than their need to pin the damage done to Cambodia in the 1970s primarily on the American bombing that preceded the rise of the Khmer Rouge to power".[6]

The "propaganda model" edit

Herman and Chomsky's best known co-authored book is Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, first published in 1988, and largely written by Herman.[7][24] The book introduced the notion of the "propaganda model" to the debates on the workings of the corporate media. They argued: "market forces, internalized assumptions and self-censorship" motivate newspapers and television networks to stifle dissent.[6] They wrote: "in our model", the Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko (a victim of the Communist state police) "murdered in an enemy state, will be a worthy victim, whereas priests murdered in our client states in Latin America will be unworthy. The former may be expected to elicit a propaganda outburst by the mass media, while the latter will not generate sustained coverage".[25]

Rather than needing direct control over the media as in dictatorships, in the views of Herman and Chomsky, industrial democracies control popular opinion using "filters" which prevent politically controversial ideas from reaching the public. The two men specified five filters, in particular: the concentration of media ownership to a few corporations, the need to please advertisers and funding sources, the reliance on government-provided sources, flak, and anti-communist ideology. These influences combine to prevent politically inconvenient knowledge and ideas from reaching the general public.[26][27][28]

Historian Walter LaFeber, reviewing the original 1988 edition for The New York Times, thought "their argument is sometimes weakened by overstatement" citing Herman and Chomsky's attack on major American news sources for reproducing false government assertions about Nicaragua but failing to note that those same sources quickly attacked the government when the deliberate error was discovered.[29] Derek N. Shearer, also in 1988 for the Los Angeles Times, described the work as "important" and the "case studies" as "required reading" for foreign correspondents but in his view the authors "don't adequately explore the extent to which the mass media fail to manufacture consent, and why this might be so". To support his point, Shearer used the examples of the Contras in Nicaragua and the deposed Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, both supported by the US government and conservatives but not by American public opinion.[30] Shearer also commented Herman and Chomsky "persuasively demonstrate that in countries where the American government is involved—either openly or covertly—the press is frequently less than critical, and sometimes a partner in outright deception of the American public."[30]

"The whole approach of the book is deeply simplistic", according to Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and communications at Columbia University. "If you think that The New York Times is Pravda, which is essentially what they’re saying, then what vocabulary do you have left for Fox News? Their model is so clumsy that it disables you from distinguishing between a straight-out propaganda network and a more complex, hegemonic mainstream news organ".[7]

Writings on Srebrenica edit

Herman wrote about the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in articles such as "The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre".[31] He wrote: "the evidence for a massacre, certainly of one in which 8,000 men and boys were executed, has always been problematic, to say the least" and "the 'Srebrenica massacre' is the greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge from the Balkan wars... the link of this propaganda triumph to truth and justice is non-existent".[31] He criticized the validity of the term genocide in the case of Srebrenica, alleging inconsistencies in the case of organized extermination such as the Bosnian Serb Army's bussing of Muslim women and children out of Srebrenica.[32][33][34] In a 2004 review of Samantha Power's "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, Herman wrote: "It is truly Orwellian to see the [UN] Yugoslavia Tribunal struggling to pin the 'genocide' label on Milosevic and to have done that already against Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic." Krstić was convicted of aiding genocide for his role in the Srebrenica massacre and is serving 35 years for those charges.[35]

Marko Attila Hoare criticized Herman's position on the Srebrenica massacre,[36] claiming the Srebrenica Research Group was formed "to propagate the view that the Srebrenica massacre never happened".[37] Michael F. Bérubé said the SRG is dedicated to overturning the findings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.[38] Herman's writings on the Srebrenica massacre were criticized by John Feffer[39] and Oliver Kamm, who accused him in 2013 of "using bogus statistics for years",[40] Martin Shaw who said he was "mediating denial",[41] and the website Balkan Witness which accused him of "insulting the survivors".[42] Starting from year 2000, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia physically exhumed 8372 bodies of most of the Srebrenica massacre victims, which were then examined and most of identified by DNA analysis, confirming the fact of execution and its scale.[43]

The Politics of Genocide edit

In The Politics of Genocide (co-authored by David Peterson, with a foreword by Noam Chomsky, 2010), Herman and Peterson argue "genocide" has become a politicized notion through analysis of the media and comparative studies of what they title "constructive" and "nefarious" genocides. They argue the Kosovo War, the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and the War in Darfur have been publicized as “genocides” in the West to advance an economic and intellectual agenda. They contrast media coverage of these events with Sanctions against Iraq and the Iraq War, arguing that despite similar casualties to those massacres which receive the label genocide, massacres in which Western powers were directly involved are not labelled “genocides”. By analyzing cases where the term "genocide" has been used, Herman argues the West has leveraged human rights abuses to advance its own agenda. He says this has resulted in a minority controlled government of pro-Western and pro-business Tutsi. "Genocides", such as East Timor, for which the West has some responsibility, have been largely ignored.

Journalists John Pilger[44] and Dan Kowalik,[45] recommended The Politics of Genocide. The book also received negative critical reactions, accusing the authors of denialism, from writers Gerald Caplan,[46] George Monbiot,[44] and James Wizeye, first secretary at the Rwandan High Commission in London.[47] Genocide scholar Adam Jones criticized the account of the Rwandan genocide as "radically revisionist" if not "fantasist".[48]

Private life edit

Herman was married to Mary Woody, who died in 2013, for 67 years.[49] He married long-time friend Christine Abbott in 2015.[6]

Death edit

Herman died from complications of bladder cancer in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, on November 11, 2017, at age 92.[6]

Books edit

  • 1966: America's Vietnam Policy: the Strategy of Deception, Public Affairs Press (with Richard Du Boff)
  • 1968: Principles And Practices Of Money And Banking
  • 1968: The Great Society Dictionary
  • 1970: Atrocities in Vietnam: Myths and Realities ISBN 978-0-82980-188-0
  • 1973: Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda (with Noam Chomsky)
  • 1979: The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume I: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (with Noam Chomsky)
  • 1979: The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume II: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology (with Noam Chomsky)
  • 1981: Corporate Control, Corporate Power: A Twentieth Century Fund Study
  • 1982: The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda, South End Press
  • 1984: Demonstration Elections: U.S.-Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam and El Salvador (with Frank Brodhead) ISBN 978-0-89608-214-4
  • 1986: The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (with Frank Brodhead). ISBN 0-940380-06-4.
  • 1988: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (with Noam Chomsky)
  • 1990: The "Terrorism" Industry: The Experts and Institutions that Shape Our View of Terror ISBN 978-0-679-72559-6
  • 1992: Beyond Hypocrisy: Decoding the News in an Age of Propaganda: Including the Doublespeak Dictionary ISBN 0-89608-436-1
  • 1995: Triumph of the Market: Essays on Economics, Politics, and the Media ISBN 978-0-896-08521-3
  • 1997: The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Global Capitalism (with Robert McChesney) ISBN 0-304-33433-2
  • 1999: The Myth of The Liberal Media: An Edward Herman Reader ISBN 978-0-82044-186-3
  • 2000: Degraded Capability : the Media and the Kosovo Crisis (edited by Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman) ISBN 978-0-74531-631-4
  • 2010: The Politics of Genocide (with David Peterson) ISBN 978-1-58367-212-9
  • 2024: Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System, 20 Years Later (with David Paterson) ISBN 978-1-50075-111-1
  • 2019: Like A Cuttlefish Spurting Out Ink: Studies in the Art of Deceit (with David Peterson) ISBN 978-1-54566-755-2

See also edit

Notes edit

  1. ^ Lent, John A.; Amazeen, Michelle A. (2015). Edward S. Herman (PDF). Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 38–58. doi:10.1057/9781137463418_3. ISBN 978-1-349-56468-2. Retrieved January 6, 2024. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  2. ^ Herman, Edward (1997). Triumph of the Market: Essays on Economics, Politics, and the Media. Black Rose Books Ltd. pp. back cover. ISBN 9781551640624.
  3. ^ Aronowitz, Stanley (2013). Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship and the State. Routledge. p. 99. ISBN 9781136660719.
  4. ^ Monbiot, George (June 13, 2011). "Left and libertarian right cohabit in the weird world of the genocide belittlers". the Guardian. Retrieved July 13, 2021.
  5. ^ "The politics of denialism: The strange case of Rwanda | Pambazuka News". pambazuka. March 4, 2016. Retrieved July 13, 2021.
  6. ^ a b c d e f Roberts, Sam (November 21, 2017). "Edward Herman, 92, Critic of U.S. Media and Foreign Policy, Dies". The New York Times. Retrieved November 22, 2017.
  7. ^ a b c Smith, Harrison (November 16, 2017). "Edward S. Herman, media critic who co-wrote Manufacturing Consent, dies at 92". The Washington Post. Retrieved November 17, 2017.
  8. ^ Chomsky, Noam; Herman, Edward S. (1979). 'The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism. South End Press. pp. 342, 352, 28.
  9. ^ Human rights in Vietnam: hearings before the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, Ninety-fifth Congress, first session, June 16, 21, and July 26, 1977. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off. January 1, 1977. from the original on March 7, 2016. Retrieved September 2, 2016.
  10. ^ Herman, Edward; Chomsky, Noam (1979). After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology. South End Press. pp. 98–101. ISBN 978-0-89608-100-0.
  11. ^ Barsky, Robert F. (1997). Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 160–162. ISBN 978-0-262-02418-1.
  12. ^ Sperlich, Wolfgang B. (2006). Noam Chomsky. London: Reaktion Books. p. 86. ISBN 978-1-86189-269-0.
  13. ^ Neilson, Jim (1998). . University Press of Mississippi. Archived from the original on June 5, 2011.
  14. ^ "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest", January 30, 1968, New York Post.
  15. ^ History of War Tax Resistance October 13, 2011, at the Wayback Machine; NWTRCC; January 18, 2004
  16. ^ Chomsky, Noam; Herman, Edward S. (June 6, 1977). "Distortions at Fourth Hand". The Nation.
  17. ^ For a discussion, see Sharp, Bruce (July 19, 2010). "Averaging Wrong Answers: Noam Chomsky and the Cambodia Controversy". Mekong.
  18. ^ Barsky 1997, p. 187; Sperlich 2006, p. 86.
  19. ^ Barsky 1997, p. 187.
  20. ^ This Chomsky-Herman thesis has been challenged by Sophal Ear, who "argues that concurrent [media] coverage of human rights violations in right-wing regimes in Chile and South Korea exceeded the coverage given to Cambodia" during the genocide: see Sharp, Bruce. "Averaging Wrong Answers: Noam Chomsky and the Cambodia Controversy". Mekong. Retrieved April 27, 2017.
  21. ^ Ear, Sophal (May 1995). (PDF). Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley. pp. 42, 63. Archived from the original (PDF) on January 22, 2012.
  22. ^ Chomsky, Noam; Herman, Edward S. (1979). After the Cataclysm. South End Press. pp. 136, 138–9, 160, 287, 158, 152. ISBN 9780896081000.
  23. ^ Herman, Edward S. (September 2001). "Propaganda System Number One: From Diem and Arbenz to Milosevic". Z magazine. Z communications. Archived from the original on April 16, 2013.
  24. ^ "An Exchange on Manufacturing Consent". chomsky.info. 2002. Retrieved September 5, 2017.
  25. ^ Herman, Edward S.; Chomsky, Noam (2008) [1988]. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. London: The Bodley Head. p. 34. ISBN 9781407054056.
  26. ^ Chomsky, Noam (1989). Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. Pantheon. ISBN 978-0-89608-366-0.
  27. ^ Edward Herman; Noam Chomsky (1988). "A Propaganda Model: excerpted from Manufacturing Consent". Chomsky.info.
  28. ^ Larry E. Sullivan, ed. (2009). The SAGE Glossary of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Sage. p. 411. ISBN 9781412951432.
  29. ^ LaFeber, Walter (November 6, 1988). "Whose News?". The New York Times. Retrieved November 22, 2017. Herman responded to LaFeber's article, see Herman, Edward S.; LaFeber, Walter (December 11, 1988). "News and Propaganda". The New York Times. Retrieved November 22, 2017.
  30. ^ a b Shearer, Derek N. (November 13, 1988). "Citizens or Sheep". Los Angeles Times.
  31. ^ a b Herman, Edward S. (July 7, 2005). "The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre". Znet. Archived from the original on October 1, 2009.
  32. ^ "Genocide Inflation is the Real Human Rights Threat: Yugoslavia and Rwanda". ZNet online ZMagazine. Archived from the original on April 16, 2013. Retrieved November 28, 2007.
  33. ^ "The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre". ZNet online ZMagazine. Archived from the original on October 1, 2009. Retrieved October 22, 2009.
  34. ^ "Genocide Inflation is the Real Human Rights Threat: Yugoslavia and Rwanda". ZNet. ZMagazine. Archived from the original on April 16, 2013. Retrieved October 12, 2009.
  35. ^ Kamm, Oliver (November 23, 2017). "Genocide-denying charlatans have poisoned the Left". CapX. Retrieved November 18, 2020.
  36. ^ Hoare, Marko Attila (2003). "Genocide in the Former Yugoslavia: A Critique of Left Revisionism's Denial". Journal of Genocide Research. 5 (4): 543–563. doi:10.1080/1462352032000149495. S2CID 145169670.
  37. ^ Hoare, Marko Attila (December 17, 2005). "Chomsky's Genocidal Denial". Balkan Witness. Retrieved November 18, 2020. See also Hoare, Marko Attila (2017) [2015]. Bosnia and Herzegovina: Genocide, Justice and Denial (PDF). Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina: Center for Advanced Studies. p. 122. a lobbying group set up to deny the Srebrenica massacre
  38. ^ Bérubé, Michael F. (2009). The Left at War. New York & London: New York University Press. p. 105. ISBN 9780814791479.
  39. ^ Feffer, John (April 6, 2009). "Why Yugoslavia Still Matters". Foreign Policy in Focus. Retrieved July 22, 2010.
  40. ^ Kamm, Oliver (February 6, 2013). "Srebrenica denial just will not die". The Times. Retrieved November 18, 2020. he has indefatigably denied the established facts of the Srebrenica massacre
  41. ^ Shaw, Martin (December 12, 2009). "Review of Hammond and Herman, eds, Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, 2000". Martin Shaw. Retrieved July 13, 2021.
  42. ^ "War-crimes deniers: Edward Herman". balkanwitness.glypx.com. Retrieved July 13, 2021.
  43. ^ "Exhumations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. | International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia". www.icty.org. Retrieved October 7, 2023.
  44. ^ a b Monbiot, George (June 13, 2011). "Left and libertarian right cohabit in the weird world of the genocide belittlers". The Guardian. For a response to Monbiot, see Herman, Edward S.; Peterson, David (July 19, 2011). "We're not genocide deniers. We just want to uncover the truth about Rwanda and Srebrenica". The Guardian. The original versions of their submitted texts are Herman, Edward S. (July 20, 2011). "Reply to George Monbiot on 'Genocide Belittling'". Z. Retrieved December 10, 2023., and Peterson, David (July 19, 2011). "George Monbiot and the Anti-'Genocide Deniers' Brigade". Znet.
  45. ^ Kovalik, Dan (June 22, 2010). "The Politics of Genocide". HuffPost.
  46. ^ Caplan, Gerald (June 16, 2010). "The politics of denialism: The strange case of Rwanda – Review of The Politics of Genocide". Pambazuka News. No. 486.
  47. ^ Wizeye, James (July 25, 2011). "To claim Tutsis caused Rwanda's genocide is pure revisionism". The Guardian.
  48. ^ Jones, Adam (2011). Genocide : a comprehensive introduction (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. pp. 492–493. ISBN 978-0415486194. In 2010, the longtime leftist critic Edward S. Herman joined with a blogger, David Peterson, to produce a book, The Politics of Genocide, for Monthly Review Press. The authors went so far as to contend that the depiction of a Hutu genocide of Tutsis was the reverse of what had actually occurred in 1994; that the principal agent of genocidal killing was the RPF; and that Hutus constituted a majority of victims. As I argued upon the book's appearance, this was "the equivalent of asserting that the Nazis never killed Jews in death camps—indeed, that it was really Jews who killed Germans." I accused the authors of "the most naked denial of the extermination of at least half a million Tutsis by agents of 'Hutu Power' that I have ever read in an ostensibly scholarly source." This radically revisionist—one might say fantasist—stance was based "on 'evidence' that, even on cursory examination, proves to be the sheerest gossamer, when it is not simply hearsay and idle speculation."
  49. ^ Holmey, Olivier (November 21, 2017). "Edward S Herman: Scholar whose radical critiques of US media characterised the fake news caricatured by Trump". The Independent. London. Retrieved November 22, 2017.

References edit

  • Anglo-American Name Authority File, s.v. "Herman, Edward S.", LC Control Number 79135236.[dead link] Accessed July 10, 2008.

External links edit

  • Edward Herman's Znet Homepage at archive.today (archived April 16, 2013)
    • Edward Herman's articles on Znet Middle East Watch at the Library of Congress Web Archives (archived April 21, 2005)
  • Ed Herman August 29, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, The Real News, July 2012
  • A collection of Edward Herman's writings from various sources, including the author himself.
  • Essays by Edward Herman on ColdType.net
  • Archives at FAIR
  • Archives at Swans.com
  • Gerald Caplan's review of 'The Politics of Genocide'

edward, herman, other, people, with, same, name, edward, herman, disambiguation, edward, samuel, herman, april, 1925, november, 2017, american, economist, media, scholar, social, critic, herman, known, media, criticism, particular, propaganda, model, hypothesi. For other people with the same name see Edward Herman disambiguation Edward Samuel Herman April 7 1925 November 11 2017 was an American economist media scholar and social critic Herman is known for his media criticism in particular the propaganda model hypothesis he developed with Noam Chomsky a frequent co writer He held an appointment as Professor Emeritus of finance at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania He also taught at Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania 1 Edward Samuel HermanBornEdward Samuel Herman 1925 04 07 April 7 1925Philadelphia Pennsylvania U S DiedNovember 11 2017 2017 11 11 aged 92 Penn Valley Pennsylvania U S EducationUniversity of PennsylvaniaUniversity of California BerkeleyOccupationsEconomistmedia scholarsocial criticSpousesMary Woody m 1946 died 2013 wbr Christine Abbott m 2015 wbr Ideologically Herman has been described as a dedicated radical democrat 2 an ideology which opposes corporate control in favor of direct democracy while distancing itself from other radical movements 3 His writings frequently dealt with what he called Western corporate media reports on violent regional conflicts disputing mainstream reports to an extent that he has been criticised for downplaying genocide figures 4 5 Contents 1 Early life 2 Political views 2 1 Vietnam War 2 2 Cambodia 2 3 The propaganda model 2 4 Writings on Srebrenica 2 5 The Politics of Genocide 3 Private life 3 1 Death 4 Books 5 See also 6 Notes 7 References 8 External linksEarly life editHerman was born in Philadelphia to a liberal Democratic family the son of Abraham Lincoln Herman a pharmacist and Celia Dektor a homemaker 6 7 Herman received a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania At University of California Berkeley from which he received his PhD in 1953 he met economist Robert A Brady a student of the economics of fascist regimes who had a significant influence upon him Herman joined the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania in 1958 where he taught finance and became professor emeritus in 1989 6 Political views editVietnam War edit Following the Vietnam War Herman and Noam Chomsky challenged the veracity of media accounts of war crimes and repression by the Vietnamese communists stating the basic sources for the larger estimates of killings in the North Vietnamese land reform were persons affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency CIA or the Saigon Propaganda Ministry and the NLF DRV bloodbath at Hue in South Vietnam was constructed on flimsy evidence indeed Commenting on postwar Vietnam Chomsky and Herman argued i n a phenomenon that has few parallels in Western experience there appear to have been close to zero retribution deaths in postwar Vietnam This they described as a miracle of reconciliation and restraint 8 In discussing the 1977 Congressional testimony of defecting SRV official Nguyen Cong Hoan on the subjects of mass repression and the abrogation of civic and religious freedoms 9 Herman and Chomsky pointed to contradictory accounts of post war Vietnam concluding that while some of what Hoan reports is no doubt accurate the many visitors and Westerners living in Vietnam who expressly contradict his claims suggest Hoan is simply not a reliable commentator 10 Chomsky and Herman authored Counter Revolutionary Violence Bloodbaths in Fact amp Propaganda a book which criticised U S military involvement in Southeast Asia and highlighted how mainstream media neglected to cover stories about these activities the publisher Warner Modular initially accepted it and it was published in 1973 However Warner Modular s parent company Warner Communications disapproved of the book s contents and ordered all copies to be destroyed 11 12 According to Jim Neilson s book Warring Fictions Cultural Politics and the Vietnam War Narrative the publication of Counter Revolutionary Violence was stopped by an executive of Warner Publications William Sarnoff who thought its discussion of American foreign policy was a pack of lies a scurrilous attack on respected Americans undocumented a publication unworthy of a serious publisher Because of a binding contract copies were passed to another publisher rather than destroyed 13 In 1967 Herman was among more than 500 writers and editors who signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge vowing to refuse to pay the 10 Vietnam War tax surcharge implemented by Congress upon the initiation of President Johnson 14 15 Cambodia edit See also Cambodian genocide denial Herman and Chomsky later collaborated on works about the media treatment of post war Indochina Cambodia in particular beginning with Distortions at Fourth Hand an article written for the American left wing periodical The Nation in June 1977 While they did not pretend to know the truth about what was going on in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot they believed in reviewing material on the topic then available w hat filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available Referring to what they saw as the extreme unreliablity of refugee reports they noted Refugees are frightened and defenseless at the mercy of alien forces They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocutors wish to hear While these reports must be considered seriously care and caution are necessary Specifically refugees questioned by Westerners or Thais have a vested interest in reporting atrocities on the part of Cambodian revolutionaries an obvious fact that no serious reporter will fail to take into account They concluded by stating Khmer Rouge Cambodia might be more closely comparable to France after liberation where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months than to Nazi Germany 16 17 self published source In 1979 Chomsky and Herman revised Counter Revolutionary Violence and published it with South End Press as the two volume The Political Economy of Human Rights 18 In this work they compared U S media reactions to the Cambodian genocide and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor They argued that because Indonesia was a U S ally U S media ignored the East Timorese situation while focusing on that in Cambodia a U S enemy 19 20 self published source Volume II of the book The Political Economy of Human Rights Volume II After the Cataclysm Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology 1979 which appeared after the regime had been deposed has been described by area specialist Sophal Ear as one of the most supportive books of the Khmer revolution in which they perform what amounts to a defense of the Khmer Rouge cloaked in an attack on the media 21 better source needed In their book Chomsky and Herman wrote The record of atrocities in Cambodia is substantial and often gruesome but questioned their scale which may have been inflated by a factor of 100 They wrote that the evacuation of Phnom Penh may actually have saved many lives that the Khmer Rouge s agricultural policies reportedly produced positive results and there might have been a significant degree of peasant support for the Khmer Rouge 22 Herman replied to critics in 2001 Chomsky and I found that the very asking of questions about the numerous fabrications ideological role and absence of any beneficial effects for the victims in the anti Khmer Rouge propaganda campaign of 1975 1979 was unacceptable and was treated almost without exception as apologetics for Pol Pot 23 Todd Gitlin in an email to The New York Times wrote that for Herman and Chomsky the suffering of the Cambodians is less important than their need to pin the damage done to Cambodia in the 1970s primarily on the American bombing that preceded the rise of the Khmer Rouge to power 6 The propaganda model edit Herman and Chomsky s best known co authored book is Manufacturing Consent The Political Economy of the Mass Media first published in 1988 and largely written by Herman 7 24 The book introduced the notion of the propaganda model to the debates on the workings of the corporate media They argued market forces internalized assumptions and self censorship motivate newspapers and television networks to stifle dissent 6 They wrote in our model the Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko a victim of the Communist state police murdered in an enemy state will be a worthy victim whereas priests murdered in our client states in Latin America will be unworthy The former may be expected to elicit a propaganda outburst by the mass media while the latter will not generate sustained coverage 25 Rather than needing direct control over the media as in dictatorships in the views of Herman and Chomsky industrial democracies control popular opinion using filters which prevent politically controversial ideas from reaching the public The two men specified five filters in particular the concentration of media ownership to a few corporations the need to please advertisers and funding sources the reliance on government provided sources flak and anti communist ideology These influences combine to prevent politically inconvenient knowledge and ideas from reaching the general public 26 27 28 Historian Walter LaFeber reviewing the original 1988 edition for The New York Times thought their argument is sometimes weakened by overstatement citing Herman and Chomsky s attack on major American news sources for reproducing false government assertions about Nicaragua but failing to note that those same sources quickly attacked the government when the deliberate error was discovered 29 Derek N Shearer also in 1988 for the Los Angeles Times described the work as important and the case studies as required reading for foreign correspondents but in his view the authors don t adequately explore the extent to which the mass media fail to manufacture consent and why this might be so To support his point Shearer used the examples of the Contras in Nicaragua and the deposed Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines both supported by the US government and conservatives but not by American public opinion 30 Shearer also commented Herman and Chomsky persuasively demonstrate that in countries where the American government is involved either openly or covertly the press is frequently less than critical and sometimes a partner in outright deception of the American public 30 The whole approach of the book is deeply simplistic according to Todd Gitlin a professor of journalism and communications at Columbia University If you think that The New York Times is Pravda which is essentially what they re saying then what vocabulary do you have left for Fox News Their model is so clumsy that it disables you from distinguishing between a straight out propaganda network and a more complex hegemonic mainstream news organ 7 Writings on Srebrenica edit Herman wrote about the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in articles such as The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre 31 He wrote the evidence for a massacre certainly of one in which 8 000 men and boys were executed has always been problematic to say the least and the Srebrenica massacre is the greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge from the Balkan wars the link of this propaganda triumph to truth and justice is non existent 31 He criticized the validity of the term genocide in the case of Srebrenica alleging inconsistencies in the case of organized extermination such as the Bosnian Serb Army s bussing of Muslim women and children out of Srebrenica 32 33 34 In a 2004 review of Samantha Power s A Problem from Hell America and the Age of Genocide Herman wrote It is truly Orwellian to see the UN Yugoslavia Tribunal struggling to pin the genocide label on Milosevic and to have done that already against Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic Krstic was convicted of aiding genocide for his role in the Srebrenica massacre and is serving 35 years for those charges 35 Marko Attila Hoare criticized Herman s position on the Srebrenica massacre 36 claiming the Srebrenica Research Group was formed to propagate the view that the Srebrenica massacre never happened 37 Michael F Berube said the SRG is dedicated to overturning the findings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia 38 Herman s writings on the Srebrenica massacre were criticized by John Feffer 39 and Oliver Kamm who accused him in 2013 of using bogus statistics for years 40 Martin Shaw who said he was mediating denial 41 and the website Balkan Witness which accused him of insulting the survivors 42 Starting from year 2000 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia physically exhumed 8372 bodies of most of the Srebrenica massacre victims which were then examined and most of identified by DNA analysis confirming the fact of execution and its scale 43 The Politics of Genocide edit See also Rwandan genocide denial In The Politics of Genocide co authored by David Peterson with a foreword by Noam Chomsky 2010 Herman and Peterson argue genocide has become a politicized notion through analysis of the media and comparative studies of what they title constructive and nefarious genocides They argue the Kosovo War the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the War in Darfur have been publicized as genocides in the West to advance an economic and intellectual agenda They contrast media coverage of these events with Sanctions against Iraq and the Iraq War arguing that despite similar casualties to those massacres which receive the label genocide massacres in which Western powers were directly involved are not labelled genocides By analyzing cases where the term genocide has been used Herman argues the West has leveraged human rights abuses to advance its own agenda He says this has resulted in a minority controlled government of pro Western and pro business Tutsi Genocides such as East Timor for which the West has some responsibility have been largely ignored Journalists John Pilger 44 and Dan Kowalik 45 recommended The Politics of Genocide The book also received negative critical reactions accusing the authors of denialism from writers Gerald Caplan 46 George Monbiot 44 and James Wizeye first secretary at the Rwandan High Commission in London 47 Genocide scholar Adam Jones criticized the account of the Rwandan genocide as radically revisionist if not fantasist 48 Private life editHerman was married to Mary Woody who died in 2013 for 67 years 49 He married long time friend Christine Abbott in 2015 6 Death edit Herman died from complications of bladder cancer in Penn Valley Pennsylvania on November 11 2017 at age 92 6 Books edit1966 America s Vietnam Policy the Strategy of Deception Public Affairs Press with Richard Du Boff 1968 Principles And Practices Of Money And Banking 1968 The Great Society Dictionary 1970 Atrocities in Vietnam Myths and Realities ISBN 978 0 82980 188 0 1973 Counter Revolutionary Violence Bloodbaths in Fact amp Propaganda with Noam Chomsky 1979 The Political Economy of Human Rights Volume I The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism with Noam Chomsky 1979 The Political Economy of Human Rights Volume II After the Cataclysm Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology with Noam Chomsky 1981 Corporate Control Corporate Power A Twentieth Century Fund Study 1982 The Real Terror Network Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda South End Press 1984 Demonstration Elections U S Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic Vietnam and El Salvador with Frank Brodhead ISBN 978 0 89608 214 4 1986 The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection with Frank Brodhead ISBN 0 940380 06 4 1988 Manufacturing Consent The Political Economy of the Mass Media with Noam Chomsky 1990 The Terrorism Industry The Experts and Institutions that Shape Our View of Terror ISBN 978 0 679 72559 6 1992 Beyond Hypocrisy Decoding the News in an Age of Propaganda Including the Doublespeak Dictionary ISBN 0 89608 436 1 1995 Triumph of the Market Essays on Economics Politics and the Media ISBN 978 0 896 08521 3 1997 The Global Media The New Missionaries of Global Capitalism with Robert McChesney ISBN 0 304 33433 2 1999 The Myth of The Liberal Media An Edward Herman Reader ISBN 978 0 82044 186 3 2000 Degraded Capability the Media and the Kosovo Crisis edited by Philip Hammond and Edward S Herman ISBN 978 0 74531 631 4 2010 The Politics of Genocide with David Peterson ISBN 978 1 58367 212 9 2024 Enduring Lies The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System 20 Years Later with David Paterson ISBN 978 1 50075 111 1 2019 Like A Cuttlefish Spurting Out Ink Studies in the Art of Deceit with David Peterson ISBN 978 1 54566 755 2See also editZ CommunicationsNotes edit Lent John A Amazeen Michelle A 2015 Edward S Herman PDF Palgrave Macmillan UK pp 38 58 doi 10 1057 9781137463418 3 ISBN 978 1 349 56468 2 Retrieved January 6 2024 a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a website ignored help Herman Edward 1997 Triumph of the Market Essays on Economics Politics and the Media Black Rose Books Ltd pp back cover ISBN 9781551640624 Aronowitz Stanley 2013 Radical Democracy Identity Citizenship and the State Routledge p 99 ISBN 9781136660719 Monbiot George June 13 2011 Left and libertarian right cohabit in the weird world of the genocide belittlers the Guardian Retrieved July 13 2021 The politics of denialism The strange case of Rwanda Pambazuka News pambazuka March 4 2016 Retrieved July 13 2021 a b c d e f Roberts Sam November 21 2017 Edward Herman 92 Critic of U S Media and Foreign Policy Dies The New York Times Retrieved November 22 2017 a b c Smith Harrison November 16 2017 Edward S Herman media critic who co wrote Manufacturing Consent dies at 92 The Washington Post Retrieved November 17 2017 Chomsky Noam Herman Edward S 1979 The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism South End Press pp 342 352 28 Human rights in Vietnam hearings before the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations House of Representatives Ninety fifth Congress first session June 16 21 and July 26 1977 Washington U S Govt Print Off January 1 1977 Archived from the original on March 7 2016 Retrieved September 2 2016 Herman Edward Chomsky Noam 1979 After the Cataclysm Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology South End Press pp 98 101 ISBN 978 0 89608 100 0 Barsky Robert F 1997 Noam Chomsky A Life of Dissent Cambridge MA MIT Press pp 160 162 ISBN 978 0 262 02418 1 Sperlich Wolfgang B 2006 Noam Chomsky London Reaktion Books p 86 ISBN 978 1 86189 269 0 Neilson Jim 1998 Warring Fictions American Literary Culture and the Vietnam War Narrative University Press of Mississippi Archived from the original on June 5 2011 Writers and Editors War Tax Protest January 30 1968 New York Post History of War Tax Resistance Archived October 13 2011 at the Wayback Machine NWTRCC January 18 2004 Chomsky Noam Herman Edward S June 6 1977 Distortions at Fourth Hand The Nation For a discussion see Sharp Bruce July 19 2010 Averaging Wrong Answers Noam Chomsky and the Cambodia Controversy Mekong Barsky 1997 p 187 Sperlich 2006 p 86 Barsky 1997 p 187 This Chomsky Herman thesis has been challenged by Sophal Ear who argues that concurrent media coverage of human rights violations in right wing regimes in Chile and South Korea exceeded the coverage given to Cambodia during the genocide see Sharp Bruce Averaging Wrong Answers Noam Chomsky and the Cambodia Controversy Mekong Retrieved April 27 2017 Ear Sophal May 1995 The Kymer Rouge Canon 1975 1979 The Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia Undergraduate Political Science Honor Thesis PDF Department of Political Science University of California Berkeley pp 42 63 Archived from the original PDF on January 22 2012 Chomsky Noam Herman Edward S 1979 After the Cataclysm South End Press pp 136 138 9 160 287 158 152 ISBN 9780896081000 Herman Edward S September 2001 Propaganda System Number One From Diem and Arbenz to Milosevic Z magazine Z communications Archived from the original on April 16 2013 An Exchange on Manufacturing Consent chomsky info 2002 Retrieved September 5 2017 Herman Edward S Chomsky Noam 2008 1988 Manufacturing Consent The Political Economy of the Mass Media London The Bodley Head p 34 ISBN 9781407054056 Chomsky Noam 1989 Necessary Illusions Thought Control in Democratic Societies Pantheon ISBN 978 0 89608 366 0 Edward Herman Noam Chomsky 1988 A Propaganda Model excerpted from Manufacturing Consent Chomsky info Larry E Sullivan ed 2009 The SAGE Glossary of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Sage p 411 ISBN 9781412951432 LaFeber Walter November 6 1988 Whose News The New York Times Retrieved November 22 2017 Herman responded to LaFeber s article see Herman Edward S LaFeber Walter December 11 1988 News and Propaganda The New York Times Retrieved November 22 2017 a b Shearer Derek N November 13 1988 Citizens or Sheep Los Angeles Times a b Herman Edward S July 7 2005 The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre Znet Archived from the original on October 1 2009 Genocide Inflation is the Real Human Rights Threat Yugoslavia and Rwanda ZNet online ZMagazine Archived from the original on April 16 2013 Retrieved November 28 2007 The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre ZNet online ZMagazine Archived from the original on October 1 2009 Retrieved October 22 2009 Genocide Inflation is the Real Human Rights Threat Yugoslavia and Rwanda ZNet ZMagazine Archived from the original on April 16 2013 Retrieved October 12 2009 Kamm Oliver November 23 2017 Genocide denying charlatans have poisoned the Left CapX Retrieved November 18 2020 Hoare Marko Attila 2003 Genocide in the Former Yugoslavia A Critique of Left Revisionism s Denial Journal of Genocide Research 5 4 543 563 doi 10 1080 1462352032000149495 S2CID 145169670 Hoare Marko Attila December 17 2005 Chomsky s Genocidal Denial Balkan Witness Retrieved November 18 2020 See also Hoare Marko Attila 2017 2015 Bosnia and Herzegovina Genocide Justice and Denial PDF Sarajevo Bosnia and Herzegovina Center for Advanced Studies p 122 a lobbying group set up to deny the Srebrenica massacre Berube Michael F 2009 The Left at War New York amp London New York University Press p 105 ISBN 9780814791479 Feffer John April 6 2009 Why Yugoslavia Still Matters Foreign Policy in Focus Retrieved July 22 2010 Kamm Oliver February 6 2013 Srebrenica denial just will not die The Times Retrieved November 18 2020 he has indefatigably denied the established facts of the Srebrenica massacre Shaw Martin December 12 2009 Review of Hammond and Herman eds Degraded Capability The Media and the Kosovo Crisis 2000 Martin Shaw Retrieved July 13 2021 War crimes deniers Edward Herman balkanwitness glypx com Retrieved July 13 2021 Exhumations in Bosnia and Herzegovina International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia www icty org Retrieved October 7 2023 a b Monbiot George June 13 2011 Left and libertarian right cohabit in the weird world of the genocide belittlers The Guardian For a response to Monbiot see Herman Edward S Peterson David July 19 2011 We re not genocide deniers We just want to uncover the truth about Rwanda and Srebrenica The Guardian The original versions of their submitted texts are Herman Edward S July 20 2011 Reply to George Monbiot on Genocide Belittling Z Retrieved December 10 2023 and Peterson David July 19 2011 George Monbiot and the Anti Genocide Deniers Brigade Znet Kovalik Dan June 22 2010 The Politics of Genocide HuffPost Caplan Gerald June 16 2010 The politics of denialism The strange case of Rwanda Review of The Politics of Genocide Pambazuka News No 486 Wizeye James July 25 2011 To claim Tutsis caused Rwanda s genocide is pure revisionism The Guardian Jones Adam 2011 Genocide a comprehensive introduction 2nd ed London Routledge pp 492 493 ISBN 978 0415486194 In 2010 the longtime leftist critic Edward S Herman joined with a blogger David Peterson to produce a book The Politics of Genocide for Monthly Review Press The authors went so far as to contend that the depiction of a Hutu genocide of Tutsis was the reverse of what had actually occurred in 1994 that the principal agent of genocidal killing was the RPF and that Hutus constituted a majority of victims As I argued upon the book s appearance this was the equivalent of asserting that the Nazis never killed Jews in death camps indeed that it was really Jews who killed Germans I accused the authors of the most naked denial of the extermination of at least half a million Tutsis by agents of Hutu Power that I have ever read in an ostensibly scholarly source This radically revisionist one might say fantasist stance was based on evidence that even on cursory examination proves to be the sheerest gossamer when it is not simply hearsay and idle speculation Holmey Olivier November 21 2017 Edward S Herman Scholar whose radical critiques of US media characterised the fake news caricatured by Trump The Independent London Retrieved November 22 2017 References editAnglo American Name Authority File s v Herman Edward S LC Control Number 79135236 dead link Accessed July 10 2008 External links edit nbsp Wikiquote has quotations related to Edward S Herman Edward Herman s Znet Homepage at archive today archived April 16 2013 Edward Herman s articles on Znet Middle East Watch at the Library of Congress Web Archives archived April 21 2005 Ed Herman Archived August 29 2012 at the Wayback Machine The Real News July 2012 A collection of Edward Herman s writings from various sources including the author himself Essays by Edward Herman on ColdType net Archives at FAIR Archives at Swans com Gerald Caplan s review of The Politics of Genocide Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Edward S Herman amp oldid 1214917883, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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