Edward S. Herman and the Propaganda Model
Landmark Work By One of History's Greatest Dissident Intellectuals
In 2017, I became Edward S. Herman’s first and so far only biographer. Ed’s memory deserves far better than that. Fortunately, the situation with Ed’s legacy is far better than it is for other people whose torches I carry. I am the only person on the Internet who really carries the torch for Dennis Lee, Brian O’Leary, Ralph McGehee, and Gary Wean. Only Dennis is still alive. Fortunately, there is quite a stable of academics and scholars who carry on Ed’s work. If we turn the corner as a species, future historians will place Ed in the first ranks of history’s dissident intellectuals. I have been a bigger fan of Ed than Noam Chomsky for the past 30 years, and that is saying something. Noam will probably be regarded as the USA’s greatest dissident intellectual, and is the only living person who can be credibly compared to Einstein. To the general public, Noam is better known for Manufacturing Consent, but Ed was that book’s primary author and their legendary Propaganda Model was Ed’s invention, which he developed from his studies of corporate power structures.
Being Ed’s biographer has been a labor of love, and I felt a great duty to do his life justice. My bio is more of a summary of Ed’s political writings, and I think that Ed would have preferred it that way, as he was rarely very disclosing about his personal life and wanted his work to speak for itself. My offer to improve Ed’s Wikipedia bio, as I had done for Brian’s, is what led to my biography project for Ed. But Wikipedia’s bio of Ed remains libelous, and I doubt that that will change anytime soon. Wikipedia is an imperial rag where the USA is concerned.
The Propaganda Model is a series of filters that act on the mainstream media of capitalist nations (particularly the USA), which determine what news is fit to print. Those filters are:
1. Size, ownership, and profit orientation of the mass media;
2. The advertising license to do business;
3. The sourcing of mass media news;
5. Anticommunism as a control mechanism (partly replaced by the “war on terror” and “free-market” ideology after the fall of the Soviet Union, and arguably “humanitarian intervention”).
Chomsky argued that the Propaganda Model was only a special case of the constraints that all intellectuals in capitalist societies are subjected to. Chomsky took it further, back to the Old Testament and how the “prophets” called out the abuses of the powerful, and were often punished for it.
The primary upshot of the Propaganda Model is that the media will reliably serve elite interests instead of accurately informing the public. In that sense, there is nothing new about the Propaganda Model, which is just a modern version of the observation that the emperor is stark naked, but nobody is brave enough to say it, and in the case of the media, many people really seem to see those robes.
Ed took a scientific approach to detecting media bias, and his use of paired examples is justifiably famous. Ed showed, in simple statistics, the double standards evident in how media subjects were treated, which served elite narratives above all else. Some of those statistics are among the most extreme ever adduced in the social sciences. There really is no arguing with them, which is why media venues such as Wikipedia smear Ed in crude fashion. The truth cannot be tolerated, not when there is brainwashing to be done.
I often refer to Ed’s work in my writings, for good reason, which I did long before I became his biographer. Oh, do I ever miss my regular dose of his work.
Wade,
You wrote "Anticommunism as a control mechanism (partly replaced by the “war on terror” and “free-market” ideology after the fall of the Soviet Union, and arguably “humanitarian intervention”)."
I subscribed to all of those control mechanisms, along with a few others, such as America's exceptionality, grandiose history, our Founding Fathers' guidance from God and their own personal virtue, our righteousness in all of our wars that were brought upon us by the evil nature of other nations, etc. However, by the time that the war on terror was invented almost immediately after 9/11, I had jettisoned almost all the control mechanisms mentioned previously. It took me perhaps two weeks to understand the real cause and nature of our war on terror. Since I began reading your online works, I have come to understand now that almost all people on earth are controlled by one or more of the specific and different control mechanisms that are being used in their various countries and/or civilizations. My only control mechanism remaining is my sincere desire to submit my every thought and action for the rest of my life to my attempt to replace my normal self-centered thoughts and motivations with as much as possible of the infinite compassion, along with my total life review, that I have read about that awaits all of us humans after we die. As Marting Luther King Junior said, from now on "I only want to do God's will." But unlike Dr. King, I have learned that God's will is not revealed in any ancient written scripture, be it the Moslem Koran, Jewish Torah and Talmud, Christian Bible, Book of Mormon, etc. I already know what compassion is. All I have to do now is learn how to exercise it all the time.
Thank you, Wade, for all your valiant effort in promulgating your understanding of our future human epoch on Earth and what awaits all of us created beings, whether we are sentient Earth-resident beings or resident elsewhere in the vast universe, of whom we have only very limited knowledge so far.
I spent much of last night awake rather than sleeping, as I kept thinking about the innumerable, different, and inhuman ways that we humans treat each other and how much everyone needs as much compassion as possible from all other people. I am privy to some horrible things that have happened to a few of my close circle of friends and/of relatives, but only because they are close friends or relatives. I know nothing of the horrible things that happen to the other 99.999999% of humanity. And things are only going to get a lot worse before they begin to get better for everyone.
I have Herman’s book “The Terrorism Industry” published in 1990 and it is quite prescient regarding the upcoming ruling class War on Terrorism strategies. He writes about Netanyahu also. Unfortunately Chomsky, in the event, failed to apply their model to the COVID Industry as did most of the Left.