This is a summary of my posts on Ed, and this post will only link to my Substack posts. Ed was born in 1925 to Jewish parents in Philadelphia, and spent nearly his entire life there. His parents were members of the Democratic Party and he had some radical cousins. Being raised in the Great Depression and during the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust influenced Ed while young. Ed studied economics and went to Berkeley to get his doctorate, because of the radical influences there. Ed got his doctorate in 1953 and taught at Penn State before he landed a job at Wharton, which is one of the world’s most prestigious business schools, in 1958. Ed spent the rest of his career at Wharton and was an excellent professor. Wharton contracted with the federal government to study financial institutions. Ed coauthored studies on mutual funds and savings-and-loan banks in the 1960s, and his specialty was examining conflicts of interest. In 1981, Ed published a classic work on corporate power structures, which helped Ed develop his Propaganda Model of media performance, which is a conflict-of-interest model. Ed retired from Wharton in 1989. Ed was married for 67 years to his first wife, until she died. Ed never had children. He fed stray cats, loved good French food and red wine after a day of study and writing, and played Classical piano music.
Ed began his career as a political writer with his 1966 publication of America’s Vietnam Policy: The Strategy of Deception, with Richard B. Du Boff. He followed that in 1968 with a book on the Orwellian language that the American government used. In 1970, Ed wrote a book on atrocities in Vietnam and how the American government lied about them.
Ed’s ethical stance was like Noam Chomsky’s. They felt a duty to criticize the USA, as Americans, as criticizing their nation could impact it, particularly when it was committing epic crimes as history’s richest and most powerful nation and acting as empires do.
Ed’s first collaboration with Noam was in 1973, and they began critiquing the American media in that book, particularly the New York Times. In it, they presented their bloodbath framework, which Ed named, of constructive, benign, nefarious, and mythical bloodbaths, and the media’s hypocritical coverage of them, which depended on whether the bloodbaths were committed by the USA and its allies and clients, or by enemy regimes. The parent company of their publisher put it out of business to prevent the publication of Noam and Ed’s book, in one of the most outrageous instances of Western censorship ever. All of Ed’s writings since his first collaboration with Noam focused on the American mainstream media and how it covered events.
After that disaster, Noam and Ed began writing articles in periodicals, again focusing on Indochina. In 1979, they published a two-volume series of books that dealt with American imperial behavior and the media’s treatment of it. They went with a radical publishing house, owned by the founders of Z Magazine, so it could not be suppressed. The books built on their censored work from 1973, and the second volume dealt with the USA’s reconstruction of its imperial ideology after the catastrophes of the 1970s, such as “losing” the war in Vietnam (with massive protests), Nixon’s resignation, a Congressional investigation of the CIA, and other disillusioning events. The second volume particularly focused on the media’s treatment of postwar Cambodia and was the direct precursor to Ed and Noam’s Manufacturing Consent, published in 1988.
Although their 1979 books could not be suppressed, they led to a propaganda campaign that lasts to this day, to falsely portray Noam, and to a lesser extent Ed, as supporters of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. What Noam and Ed really did was examine the double standards that the media used in reporting about postwar Indochina, as a way to justify the USA’s genocidal invasion.
Ed developed a scientific approach to exposing media bias, which was to find two similar bloodbaths, but one was constructive or benign, while the other was nefarious. Then he compared the media’s treatment of each atrocity. The media’s bias was tellingly exposed by those exercises. Ed found that the media’s and government’s hypocrisy was so great that he began using the term “chutzpah” to describe it. For the rest of his life, Ed’s work focused on the media’s double standards of coverage, which always served elite interests at the expense of accurately informing the American public.
Ed wrote his first book on the USA’s terror operations (and those of its allies, including Israel) and the media’s enablement in 1982. In the early 1980s, Ed worked with Frank Brodhead to write a book about the sham elections that the USA staged in nations where it overthrew their governments and supported bloody dictatorships. They also wrote a book on the assassination attempt on the pope that the American media tried to pin on the Soviet Union, with flimsy pretexts that collapsed in the courtroom.
In 1986, Ed published a propaganda model that was very close to the one that he used in Manufacturing Consent with Noam. Manufacturing Consent not only became Ed’s most famous work, but it is Noam’s too, at least with the general public.
The year after Ed and Noam published Manufacturing Consent, Ed retired from Wharton, and the next decade was his most active as a writer. He wrote another book on Western terrorism in 1989 with Gerry O’Sullivan and contributed a chapter of a book on the USA’s withdrawal from UNESCO. In 1990, Ed became the editor of Lies of Our Times, which Noam wrote a monthly column for. Ed wrote an article each month in Z Magazine, and his articles could be found in many publications in those years. In the 1990s, he published compendiums of his essays and in 1997, with Robert McChesney, they wrote a book that presciently warned about the rise of the Internet, that it would become just one more corporate/imperial vehicle, which is what has happened. Ed had remarkably thick skin with his critics, and I never saw his critics make valid criticisms of Ed’s work, as they all defended the Empire in the most irrational and even dishonest ways.
In 2000, Ed was 75 years old, and for the rest of his life, he usually partnered with David Peterson, a youngster who capably carried Ed’s spears. Ed’s subjects in this millennium were largely about Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as the media again flipped reality upside-down on behalf of its imperial masters. Ed and David wrote a book in 2010 on the politicization of the word “genocide,” which Noam wrote the foreword to.
In Ed’s last years, he wrote about Russia and Ukraine, and the media’s Orwellian treatment of those subjects. Ed wrote until his life’s end, when he died of bladder cancer at age 92, which was not diagnosed until after his death.
I subscribed to Lies of Our Times in 1990, which was how I became familiar with Ed and Noam’s writings, during my early years of study. I soon became Ed’s fan and first contacted him in 2001. Our email relationship lasted the rest of Ed’s life, and on his 92nd birthday, I offered to improve his libelous Wikipedia bio. Ed took me up on it, and that was how I became his biographer.
Ed’s Propaganda Model has outlived him, which is the most that an academic can ask for. Ed’s Propaganda Model will remain relevant as long as the media is under capitalist control, as it serves elite interests. Ed will go down in history as one of the USA’s greatest dissident intellectuals.