As I sat down to write this, I realized that I need to give proper credit where it is due: if not for Wikipedia’s libelous biography of Edward S. Herman, I would have never become Ed’s biographer. If Google had not de-ranked my bio of Ed to oblivion, I might not have done this at Substack. It was like how Mr. Deputy was responsible for my life’s pivotal moment, as he rubbed my face in evil. The dark side deserves some credit.
To be fair, Ed is far from alone in being libeled by Wikipedia, as it has smeared many figures from the right, left (1, 2), alternative medicine, and anybody who does not echo Establishment views.
Several years ago, I wrote an essay that applied the Propaganda Model to Wikipedia, and Ed’s Wikipedia bio was an ironic confirmation of the Propaganda Model, just as Ed’s New York Times obituary was. I went into a fair amount of detail on the libelous parts of Ed’s Wikipedia bio, so I will only hit a few highlights.
Anybody with the slightest familiarity with Ed’s work knows that he never denied bloodbaths, except for some of the “mythical” ones, such as at Racak and Huế, and even for Racak’s the bloodshed was not denied, but focused who did it, who died, and why. Ed’s emphasis was always on the media’s treatment of them and who committed them – the USA and its allies and clients, or enemy regimes. The American media’s performance was really little different from wartime propaganda.
For the Srebrenica massacre, Ed eventually mounted a project on it. As those who have done their homework know, the Srebrenica massacre was the execution of maybe 800 men, mainly soldiers, who had been abandoned by the West, very likely so that they would be massacred, subjected to Serbian vengeance for the slaughter of Serbian civilians for years, as justification for the West’s murderous interventions. The West’s propaganda machine inflated that massacre into a “genocide,” and it is a punishable crime in Europe to even dispute that designation. Oh, what Orwell would have had to say about that.
Marko Attila Hoare’s claim to fame is that he helped draft the indictment against Slobodan Milošević in the kangaroo-court tribunal. Ed wrote about the ideological service that Hoare provided to the USA’s imperial effort. Just as I consider Amnesty International an accessory to murder in Milošević’s death, so is Hoare. Hoare has repeatedly gone on the record stating that the Srebrenica-research effort that Ed launched was intended to deny that the Srebrenica massacre even happened. That is a bold-faced lie.
In Ed’s Wikipedia bio, Hoare’s lie was added by Philip Cross, who was arguably Wikipedia’s most notorious editor, as he smeared many people, generally antiwar activists. Cross’s editorial crimes were so extreme that Wikipedia banned him from editing. Cross’s original addition of Hoare’s lie was taken from David Horowitz’s far right-wing rag, which even Wikipedia does not consider to be a reliable source. The month after I published my essay on Wikipedia and the Propaganda Model, I pointed out the false statements from unreliable sources in Ed’s Wikipedia bio. The Wikipedia admin’s response was to leave in Hoare’s lie but source it from something more “reliable.” A lie is a lie. Wikipedia is untroubled by printing lies and preventing anybody from removing them. This is an example of Ed’s chutzpah.
Sophal Ear lied about Noam and Ed’s work on Cambodia, as he portrayed them as Khmer Rouge supporters. Ear’s claim to fame is attacking Noam over Cambodia. Ear first made his false claim in a college paper, which falls far short of Wikipedia’s reliable-sources standards. But Ear’s collegiate lie has a place of prominence in Ed’s Wikipedia bio, as well as the ravings of a former janitor with zero scholarly credentials – Bruce Sharp – who also wrote deceptively about Noam and Ed’s work on Cambodia, and even wrote an essay that called them “evil scholars.” Cross added those lies to Ed’s Wikipedia bio more than a decade ago, and any attempts to remove them have been defeated by Wikipedia’s editors and admins.
Wikipedia’s libelous efforts on Ed’s bio are merely part of the propaganda barrage directed at Ed for around 50 years. As Ed said about such propaganda, it robs readers of an opportunity to understand how the world really works. On almost anything with any contemporary political-economic relevance, Wikipedia is a propaganda rag that services the American Empire above all else.