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NY Times, Nov. 22 2017
Edward Herman, 92, Critic of U.S. Media and Foreign Policy, Dies
By SAM ROBERTS
Edward Herman, an economist who joined the linguist Noam Chomsky in
accusing the United States of foreign policy hypocrisy and the mass
media of complicity in parroting government propaganda, died on Nov. 11
in Penn Valley, Pa., near Philadelphia. He was 92.
The cause was complications of bladder cancer, his wife, Christine
Abbott, said.
Dr. Herman was primarily responsible for the manifesto “Manufacturing
Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” (1988), which he wrote
with Professor Chomsky. It concluded that “market forces, internalized
assumptions and self-censorship” motivate newspapers and television
networks to stifle dissent.
“His work has never been more relevant,” the reporter Matt Taibbi wrote
on Rolling Stone’s website last week. “ ‘Manufacturing Consent’ was a
kind of bible of media criticism for a generation of dissident thinkers.”
Dr. Herman, who was less reticent than Professor Chomsky about
challenging the political left as well as more familiar conservative
targets, was not immune from criticism himself.
“If we consider mainstream media to be nothing but propagandistic,” said
the author Todd Gitlin, a journalism and sociology professor at Columbia
University, “we have no vocabulary left to condemn the likes of Fox News
and Breitbart.”
Still, the public-affairs scholar Derek N. Shearer wrote in The Los
Angeles Times in 1988 that for its case studies alone, “Manufacturing
Consent” “should be required reading for future foreign correspondents
and foreign editors at leading schools of journalism and public affairs.”
One case study, for example, asked why a single Polish priest murdered
by the Communists was more newsworthy than another cleric killed by a
Washington-sponsored Latin American dictator.
“Manufacturing Consent” was severely criticized as having soft-pedaled
evidence of genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda and, during the Bosnia war,
Srebrenica.
Dr. Herman and Professor Chomsky argued that in assessing the killings
they were seeking an accurate count rather than relying on unreliable
reports by survivors. In the civil wars in Rwanda and Bosnia, they said,
the victors had exaggerated the toll to justify their rise to power and
their pro-Western policies.
In the case of Cambodia, they said, the toll had been overstated by
enemies of the brutal Khmer Rouge Communist regime, which, the authors
wrote, had “dealt with fundamental problems rooted in the feudal past
and exacerbated by the imperial system.”
Among their critics was Professor Gitlin, who wrote in an email, “It’s
crucial to their Manichaean view of the world that 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 — bombing that was indeed heinous,
ruinous, and did contribute to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, but that was
only the prologue to the horrendous crimes that followed at the hands of
the Khmer Rouge.”
In The New York Times Book Review, the Cornell University historian
Walter LaFeber wrote that the authors had based their book on “highly
detailed research” but that “their argument is sometimes weakened by
overstatement.”
For example, he noted that the authors acknowledged that despite the
supposedly omnipotent media propaganda system, “an active grass-roots
oppositional movement with very limited media access” was pivotal in
undermining President Ronald Reagan’s efforts to aid right-wing rebel
groups in Nicaragua. But “the only explanation they offer for this
apparent anomaly,” Professor LaFeber added, “is that the ‘system is not
all-powerful.’ ”
Dr. Herman’s articles, interviews, letters and nearly 20 books defied
popular convention and animated public debate on a broad range of
issues, including corporate power, human rights and wars waged by the
United States in Vietnam and Iraq.
Thomas Ferguson, a professor emeritus at the University of
Massachusetts, Boston, said of Dr. Herman’s studies in an email, “Some
of these have been very controversial, but whatever you thought of them,
many, such as the discussions of Vietnam, helped stimulate a rethinking
of the real consequences of policies that many citizens knew very little
about.”
And Professor Chomsky himself wrote, also in an email, of his sometime
collaborator’s “scrupulous, diligent and comprehensive research; a keen
instinct for detecting and exposing hypocrisy and deceit and the effects
of conformity to doctrine; a
