Edward S. Herman

Edward S. Herman (born April 7, 1925) is professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania^[1] and a media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy. He also teaches at Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is perhaps best known for developing the propaganda model of media criticism with Noam Chomsky. 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 proposed by president Johnson.^[2][3]

Herman received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania in 1945 and PhD in 1953 from the University of California, Berkeley.

Herman and Chomsky

Vietnam

Herman and Noam Chomsky challenged the veracity of media accounts of war crimes and repression by the Vietnamese communists, stating that "the basic sources for the larger estimates of killings in the North Vietnamese land reform were persons affiliated with the 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 that "[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".^[4]

Herman and Chomsky's assessment of the human rights character of postwar Vietnam was at odds with that of most scholars. Jacqueline Desbarats estimated that one million South Vietnamese were sentenced to reeducation camps, often being confined under unhealthy conditions for several years, and that the government of Vietnam may have carried out 100,000 extrajudicial executions between 1975 and 1985.^[5]

Cambodia

The two men later collaborated on works about the media treatment of postwar Indochina, Cambodia in particular. Beginning with "Distortions at Fourth Hand", an article published in the American left-wing periodical The Nation in June 1977, they wrote that while they did not "pretend to know [...] the truth" about what was going on in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot, while 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 "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 interlocuters 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 that 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.^[6][7]

Their book After the Cataclysm (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".^[8] In the book, Chomsky and Herman acknowledged that "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 further asserted that the evacuation of Phnom Penh "may actually have saved many lives," Khmer Rouge agricultural policies reportedly produced "spectacular" results, and there might have been "a significant degree of peasant support for the Khmer Rouge": "How can it be that a population so oppressed by a handful of fanatics does not rise up and overthrow them?"^[9]

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'."^[10]

Many other scholars denying or doubting the character of the Khmer Rouge recanted their earlier opinions as the evidence of massive KR crimes against humanity mounted.^[11]

Manufacturing Consent

Their best known co-authored book is Manufacturing Consent, first published in 1988, and largely written by Herman. The book introduced the concept of the "propaganda model" to the debates on the workings of the mainstream corporate media.

Derek N. Shearer, reviewing the original 1988 edition for the Los Angeles Times wrote that the authors' "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." While Shearer describes the work as "important" and the "case studies" as "required reading" for foreign correspondents, he adds a caveat. In his view Herman and Chomsky "don't adequately explore the extent to which the mass media fail to manufacture consent, and why this might be so."^[12] To suggest the validity of his point, Shearer uses 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.^[12] Historian Walter LaFeber thought "their argument is sometimes weakened by overstatement"^[13] 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.^[13]

Reactions to work on Srebrenica and Rwanda

Herman has written about the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in articles such as "The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre",^[14] Herman writes: "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".^[14] He criticized the validity of the term genocide in the case of Srebrenica, pointing out inconsistencies for the case of organized extermination such as the Bosnian Serb Army bussing of Muslim woman and children out of Srebrenica.^[15][16][17] The historian Marko Attila Hoare has been highly critical of the Srebrenica Research Group, asserting that it was formed "to propagate the view that the Srebrenica massacre never happened".^[18] Michael F. Bérubé has also said the SRG is dedicated to overturning the findings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which has officially designated the Srebrenica massacre as being an example of genocide, and the United Nations.^[19]

In The Politics of Genocide, (co-authored with David Peterson, 2010) Herman argues that some genocides such as Kosovo and Rwanda in 1994 have been heavily publicized in the West to advance a specific economic agenda, eventually leading to a minority controlled government of pro-Western and pro-business Tutsi, while other genocides, such as in East Timor, have been largely ignored for the same reason. Herman and Peterson wrote that the Western establishment has "swallowed a propaganda line on Rwanda that turned perpetrator and victim upside-down....the great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million".^[20] Despite this, Africa specialist Gerald Caplan, in 2010, commented that the answer as to "why the Hutu members of the government ‘couldn't possibly have planned a genocide against the Tutsi’ is never remotely explained".^[21]

The book was commended on the cover by the Australian journalist John Pilger, who wrote: "In this brilliant exposé of great power's lethal industry of lies, [the authors] defend the right of us all to a truthful historical memory."^[22] Furthermore, Dan Kovalik, writing in The Huffington Post, commended the book.^[23] The book also received praise from political philosopher Hans Köchler who is cited on the cover as describing it as a "must-read".^[24] However, the academic Martin Shaw has written: "For scholars of genocide studies, this book is rich source-material. It is not a serious contribution to analysis in the interest of 'truthful historical memory'".^[25] Herman's position, though, has been defended by the editors of Media Lens, the British media analysis website.^[26]

Herman's position on the Srebrenica massacre has been criticized, in addition to Shaw and Marko Attila Hoare,^[27] by John Feffer,^[28] and Oliver Kamm.^[29] Additionally, George Monbiot published a criticism of the book,^[30] to which the authors replied.^[31] Herman and Peterson's position on the Rwandan genocide was found "deplorable" by James Wizeye, first secretary at the Rwandan High Commission in London.^[32] Gerald Caplan,^[21] Adam Jones,^[33] and Oliver Kamm^[29] have all compared Herman and Peterson's approach to Holocaust denial.

Books

• 1968: Principles And Practices Of Money And Banking
• 1968: The Great Society Dictionary
• 1970: Atrocities in Vietnam
• 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
• 1984: Demonstration Elections (with Frank Brodhead)
• 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 ISBN 978-0-679-72559-6
• 1992: Beyond hypocrisy : decoding the news in an age of propaganda : including A doublespeak dictionary for the 1990s ISBN 0-89608-436-1
• 1995: Triumph of the Market
• 1997: The Global Media (with Robert McChesney) ISBN 0-304-33433-2
• 1999: The Myth of The Liberal Media: An Edward Herman Reader
• 2010: The Politics of Genocide (with David Peterson) ISBN 978-1-58367-212-9

Notes

References

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

External links

• Edward Herman's Znet Homepage
  • Edward Herman's articles on Znet Middle East Watch
• Ed Herman, 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'