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.

By JEFF COHEN  FAIR  November 14, 2017

Edward S. Herman (image: Real News)

Edward S. Herman (image: Real News)

 

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  “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 if he felt left out. Not at all—the movie “will bring our book more attention, more readers.” Pure Ed.

 is the founder of FAIR. He’s now the founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College.

RELATED

Edward S. Herman (co-author with Noam Chomsky of “Manufacturing Consent’): All the problems of the propaganda media model we talked about in the book have grown worse; new media like Real News show potential but need funding for more investigative journalism.

TheRealNews  Published on Apr 19, 2013

Media Critic and “Manufacturing Consent” Co-Author Edward Herman Dies

 Professor Edward Herman has died at the age of 92. He was author of many books, including “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,” which he co-authored with Noam Chomsky. This is a clip of Herman appearing in the film “The Brainwashing of My Dad.”

Edward Herman: “The mainstream media are elite institutions. The ownership of the media is concentrated in the hands of very wealthy individuals. The media system is really a powerful set of structures. Most people don’t have a choice. They don’t have a spectrum of available choices that they can look at and say, ‘Oh, I like this or that.’ So you have a very limited, constrained set of options, to begin with. So, that’s a bias that’s built into the structure of the system.”


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One Comment

  1. sarahmartin1939 November 15, 2017 at 8:27 PM

    I heard that.  He was a great guest speaker.  He stayed at Mary Shepherd’s.  When was that?  Guess around time of Yugoslavia war.  2000 or so.  Nice evening.
    From: Rise Up Times To: scsrn@yahoo.com Sent: Wednesday, November 15, 2017 8:21 PM Subject: [New post] Edward S. Herman: Master of Dissent (1925–2017) #yiv7464124310 a:hover {color:red;}#yiv7464124310 a {text-decoration:none;color:#0088cc;}#yiv7464124310 a.yiv7464124310primaryactionlink:link, #yiv7464124310 a.yiv7464124310primaryactionlink:visited {background-color:#2585B2;color:#fff;}#yiv7464124310 a.yiv7464124310primaryactionlink:hover, #yiv7464124310 a.yiv7464124310primaryactionlink:active {background-color:#11729E;color:#fff;}#yiv7464124310 WordPress.com | Rise Up Times posted: “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 me” | |

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