Edward Samuel Herman | |
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| Born | Edward Samuel Herman (1925-04-07)April 7, 1925 Philadelphia,Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | November 11, 2017(2017-11-11) (aged 92) |
| Education | University of Pennsylvania University of California, Berkeley |
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Edward Samuel Herman (April 7, 1925 – November 11, 2017) was an Americaneconomist,media scholar andsocial critic. Herman is known for hismedia criticism, in particular thepropaganda model hypothesis he developed withNoam Chomsky, a frequent co-writer. He held an appointment as Professor Emeritus of finance at theWharton School of Business of theUniversity of Pennsylvania. He also taught atAnnenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.[1]
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 fordownplaying genocide figures.[4][5]
Herman was born in Philadelphia to aliberalDemocratic 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 theUniversity of Pennsylvania. AtUniversity of California, Berkeley, from which he received hisPhD in 1953, he met economistRobert A. Brady, a student of theeconomics of fascist regimes who had a significant influence upon him. Herman joined theWharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania in 1958, where he taught finance and became professor emeritus in 1989.[6]
Following theVietnam War, Herman andNoam Chomsky challenged the veracity of media accounts ofwar crimes and repression by the Vietnamese communists, stating: "the basic sources for the larger estimates of killings in theNorth Vietnamese land reform were persons affiliated with theCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the Saigon Propaganda Ministry" and "theNLF-DRV'bloodbath' at Hue (inSouth 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 defectingSRV 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 authoredCounter-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 publisherWarner 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 toJim Neilson's bookWarring Fictions: Cultural Politics and the Vietnam War Narrative, the publication ofCounter-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 taxsurcharge implemented by Congress upon the initiation ofPresident Johnson.[14][15]
Herman and Chomsky later collaborated on works about the media treatment of post-warIndochina,Cambodia in particular, beginning with "Distortions at Fourth Hand", an article written for the American left-wing periodicalThe Nation in June 1977. While they did not "pretend to know [...] the truth" about what was going on in Cambodia during theKhmer Rouge regime ofPol 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 unreliability 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 toNazi Germany.[16][17][self-published source?]
In 1979, Chomsky and Herman revisedCounter-Revolutionary Violence and published it withSouth End Press as the two-volumeThe Political Economy of Human Rights.[18] In this work they compared U.S. media reactions to theCambodian genocide and theIndonesian 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 bookThe 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 specialistSophal 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 toThe 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]
Herman and Chomsky's best known co-authored book isManufacturing 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 priestJerzy 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: theconcentration 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]
HistorianWalter LaFeber, reviewing the original 1988 edition forThe 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 theLos 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 theContras in Nicaragua and the deposedFerdinand 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 toTodd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and communications atColumbia University. "If you think thatThe New York Times isPravda, 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]
Herman wrote about the 1995Srebrenica 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 termgenocide in the case of Srebrenica, alleging inconsistencies in the case of organized extermination such as theBosnian Serb Army's bussing of Muslim women and children out of Srebrenica.[32][33][34] In a 2004 review ofSamantha 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 GeneralRadislav 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 theInternational Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.[38] Herman's writings on the Srebrenica massacre were criticized byJohn Feffer[39] andOliver 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, theInternational 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]
InThe 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 theKosovo War, theRwandan genocide in 1994, and theWar in Darfur have been publicized as “genocides” in the West to advance an economic and intellectual agenda. They contrast media coverage of these events withSanctions against Iraq and theIraq 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-businessTutsi, while leading to the dismissal ofRwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) complicity in Central African mass killings during and following theRwandan Civil War, bringing up evidence of RPF atrocities from sources such as theGersony Report and the work ofAllan C. Stam.[44] "Genocides", such asEast Timor, for which the West has some responsibility, have been largely ignored.
JournalistsJohn Pilger[45] andDan Kovalik,[46] recommendedThe Politics of Genocide. The book also received negative critical reactions, accusing the authors ofdenialism, from writersGerald Caplan,[47]George Monbiot,[45] and James Wizeye, first secretary at the Rwandan High Commission in London.[48] Genocide scholarAdam Jones criticized the account of the Rwandan genocide as "radically revisionist" if not "fantasist".[49]
Herman was married to Mary Woody, who died in 2013, for 67 years.[50] He married long-time friend Christine Abbott in 2015.[6]
Herman died from complications ofbladder cancer inPenn Valley, Pennsylvania, on November 11, 2017, at age 92.[6]
a lobbying group set up to deny the Srebrenica massacre
he has indefatigably denied the established facts of the Srebrenica massacre
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."
