Edward S. Herman (image: Real News)
One of the greatest and sweetest media critics ever, Edward S. Herman, has passed away. Ed was the main author of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, written with Noam Chomsky—the 1980s masterwork that exposed how elite US media typically function as propaganda organs for US empire and militarism.
In 1984, when I was part of a lawyers’ delegation monitoring an “election” in death squad-run El Salvador, I remember a gaggle of progressive attorneys at the Salvador Sheraton tussling with each other to get their hands on a shipment of hot-off-the-press copies of Demonstration Elections, Ed’s devastating book (with Frank Brodhead) on the US “staging” elections as PR shows to prop up repressive puppet regimes, from the Dominican Republic to Vietnam to Salvador.
He also wrote or co-wrote such classic works of political and media criticism as The Political Economy of Human Rights (with Chomsky); The Real Terror Network; Beyond Hypocrisy: Decoding the News in an Age of Propaganda; and The Global Media (with Robert McChesney).
A longtime friend and supporter of FAIR, he wrote “By Any Means Necessary: The Ultra-Relativism of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page” (9–10/95) and “Good and Bad Genocide: Double Standards in Coverage of Suharto and Pol Pot” (9–10/98) for FAIR’s magazine Extra!.
A highpoint of my life was flying with Ed across the Atlantic to Brussels to speak alongside him before the European Parliament on the problem of media conglomeration, a hearing organized by the European Greens.
As happened too often, Ed’s name went unmentioned in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting; when Will (Matt Damon) says to his therapist (Robin Williams) that Howard Zinn’s People’s History is a book that will “fuckin’ knock you on your ass,” the therapist responds: “Better than Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent?”
I asked Ed if he felt left out. Not at all—the movie “will bring our book more attention, more readers.” Pure Ed.
Sad news – he was a great thinker. A sane voice during the Cold War and Post-Cold War Eras.
How come people with the moral stature of Edward Herman leave us and we, survivors, are left with the likes of Trump and look-alikes? Something is definetely not just in this world!
Sad news but he deserves a place in history with his part in Manufacturing Consent. It is interesting to read in Jeff Cohen’s obituary that Ed was the books primary author, especially since Noam took up many of its characteristic themes of comparing media coverage between allies and adversaries in the book Noam publish in 1989, Necessary Illusions. Thought Control in Democratic Societies.
Either way, deep insights and a realism far removed from the pitiful lucubrations of ‘mainstream’ intellectuals in those days who remained bound to the elites they served.
Ed, I am grateful.
Long may his memory and his work endure.
Do you think the victims of genocide in Srebrenica and Rwanda will miss him? Honestly asking. It seemed like he didn’t care about them.
To quote professor Adam Jones (author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction):
“Ed Herman’s shift from unmasking atrocities, as with Vietnam, to denying and concealing them in the cases of Srebrenica and Rwanda, is one of the most depressing things I have witnessed on the left.”
Character assassination never gets old. Next time try to come up with some quotes from the man and then decontextualize them to an extent that makes them look offensive to a layman’s eye. Quoting some random idiot smearing a legend is no good. My own opinion is that it’s people like you that make way for genocide by, possibly inadvertently, lending credibility to self-serving PR ruses instead of the actual thing. Ever wonder why proud-son-of-holocaust-survivors Norman Finkelstein is frequently called a Holocaust denier? Hint: it may have something to do with politics.
Sad to hear about EH’s death. Unlike JC’s characterization of him as ‘sweet'(?), I always liked reading his books and columns because he WAS’T sweet. — he could be direct and devastatingly critical. He was more plain-spoken and ‘gritty’ than Chomsky, whom I also greatly enjoy reading. They’re both SO refreshing to read because they cut through so much of the bullshit that the MSM puts out, and they get down to political truths that the MSM just dances around.
I think the man can be sweet ‘and’ blunt. (Matt Taibbi calls him sweet too.) I am reading Edward’s “The Real Terror Network” right now and in it he makes the point explicitly that he isn’t interested in polite language about the joint venture (which sounds like Corporatocracy to me) of the United States with the Condor states that other journos were using. I started reading The Real Terror Network after having read John Dinges’s “The Condor Years,” in which he makes the claim that the U.S.’s 9/11 involved enemies of the U.S., failing to mention that Saudi Arabia (where 14 of the attackers, some whom apparently got support from the Saudi gov for their crime, came from) is a staunch ally of the U.S.. That was my first big hint that something was amiss in Dinges’s treatment of his subject. He gets a passing mention in Herman’s (above) book. But I would be surprised if Herman did not also find Dinges’s book to be ‘damage control’. I am writing a blog post about it right now.
How does Jeff feel about Edward Herman’s book, co-written with David Peterson, “Enduring Lies – The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System, 20 Years Later”?