After hearing from FAIR activists (Action Alert, 11/25/17), the New York Times has corrected its obituary of media critic Edward Herman (11/21/17):
An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to Dr. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s arguments about genocide in Rwanda and, during the Bosnia war, Srebrenica. Those arguments did not appear in their book Manufacturing Consent, which was published several years before those genocides.
FAIR thanks the activists who contacted the Times, and the Times for correcting the record.
Bravo, FAIR and Jeanine, and Jim. You speak for me, and I appreciate it so much, whenever you leap to thoughtful comment and insights.
Keep it up. We count on you to “object” for us, when we can’t.
Thanks Fair, again. One question, however: is it plausible that a mistake this glaringly obvious was really unintentional? This misrepresentation of the book is too absurd, too oblivious to the most elementary factcheck of the historical timeline, to accept that it wasn’t consciously executed. Perhaps it was not consciously executed, but the question of whether it was would be one to put to the Times, especially because of its longstanding dislike of Chomsky and interest in continuing to pan his and Herman’s book, which it did in 1988.