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 the classic pieces “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 at the time if he felt left out. Not at all, he said—the movie “will bring our book more attention, more readers.” Pure Ed.
‘Ludicrous’ Accusation in NYT’s Herman Obit
The New York Times‘ obituary (11/21/17) for pioneering media critic Edward Herman was not entirely unsympathetic; it ended, after all, with a quote from FAIR founder Jeff Cohen’s remembrance of Ed (FAIR.org, 11/14/17).
But it contained a glaring error—one that illustrated a frequent criticism that Ed made of media outlets like the Times.
In the obituary, the Times‘ Sam Roberts wrote of the classic book that Ed co-wrote with Noam Chomsky:
Manufacturing Consent was severely criticized as having soft-pedaled evidence of genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda and, during the Bosnia war, Srebrenica.
The problem with this statement was that Manufacturing Consent was published in 1988—years before the 1994 Rwandan genocide or the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. After hearing from FAIR activists, the Times ran a correction on November 27: “Those arguments did not appear in their book Manufacturing Consent, which was published several years before those genocides.”
Herman and Chomsky’s book does deal at length with the Cambodian genocide.
They do not argue that the Khmer Rouge were not guilty of mass murder, but rather that different standards of evidence and vastly different levels of outrage were applied to atrocities committed by the United States compared to those of official enemies—a duality illustrated by Herman critic Todd Gitlin’s comment to the Times that the hundreds of thousands killed by US bombing in Cambodia were “only the prologue to the horrendous crimes that followed.”
Herman and Chomsky note that they came under sustained attack—referred to as “apologists for Khmer Rouge crimes” and the like—for insisting that the same standards be applied to mass violence, regardless of the perpetrators. As the authors say:
Charges against dissident opinion require no evidence and…ideologically useful accusations will stand merely on the basis of endless repetition, no matter how ludicrous they may be.
The New York Times‘ posthumous accusation that Manufacturing Consent was criticized for downplaying atrocities that happened years after it was published certainly falls in the “ludicrous” category.
—Jim Naureckas
