As I have written, it took about two years before I really understood what Noam Chomsky was saying, and I was an eager student. That was in the early 1990s, before the days of the Internet. So I raided the references and began building my library in earnest. Including Kindle books, my library likely exceeds 3,000 books and includes stacks of magazines, some of which I have disposed of, as I have downsized my library some in recent years.
What Noam, Ed Herman, Howard Zinn, and other scholars had to say was so contrary to what I was taught that I dove deep on the references and sought critiques of their work. Maybe they were exaggerating, playing fast-and-loose with the facts, etc. I had my doubts that they did, because I had been radicalized by my experiences before I ever heard of those guys, but I did my homework. Here is Noam in 1997, in Z Magazine, describing how the media and academia work. It is pretty straightforward and easy to understand. I also raided the references of works such as American Holocaust, where I first read that maybe Junípero Serra was not such a saint after all, just as I first read unflattering things about Columbus in Zinn’s masterpiece.
Their work held up and then some. Also, it gradually became appalling how poor the criticisms of their work were. It was as if their critics could not string two rational thoughts together when they weren’t lying. An example was a critique of Zinn’s work by a Stanford professor that is either a deliberate deception or the professor lost his sanity. Among “skeptics,” those kinds of misrepresentations are standard. I had my own “skeptical” stalker who did the same thing, with lies that a five-year-old could see through. Ed wrote that when pundits turn those logical summersaults that only fool themselves and those willing to be gulled, they are incapable of understanding obvious truths.
Ed’s question was very simple: did the American media pursue the truth or not? Ed’s statistical cases are known in academia as testing the null hypothesis, which in these instances would be the idea that the media impartially seeks the truth. Then Ed compared the situation of the murders of priests and nuns and the media coverage. A priest murdered by an enemy regime received more than 100 times as much coverage as a priest murdered by a client regime. Also, a priest murdered by the enemy regime received hagiographic coverage, and when a priest was murdered by a client regime, if his murder was even noticed, the media would suggest that his murder was justified.
Another analysis by Ed and David Peterson was the deaths of civilians, in both enemy and client regimes, and how often a death was called part of a genocide. A death inflicted by an enemy regime was called genocide more than 25,000 times as often as a death inflicted by a client regime. Those statistics call the null hypothesis into question, to put it mildly.
It was pretty simple and it would be straightforward to reproduce or dispute. I never saw one of Ed and Noam’s critics credibly engage those simple statistical exercises. To be fair, explaining away a discrepancy of more than 25,000-fold would be a tall task, so the critics never even tried to, and instead engaged in personal attacks, completely misrepresented their positions, and the like. Ed never backed down from his critics and regularly wrote rebuttals that demonstrated how far off-base the criticisms were. Ed also critiqued attacks on Noam. Noam noted that such scholars were so brainwashed that they were unable to comprehend “trivial realities,” which was more effective brainwashing than that found in totalitarian states.
In that 1997 Z article by Noam, he discussed how such findings will never be discussed in the media. It was like the predictions that he made in Necessary Illusions about how studies like those would be received. Noam predicted that exposures of the lies around “nefarious” bloodbaths (by enemy regimes) would result in great indignation. And, in fact, the greatest attacks on Ed were his exposures of the media’s lies around the nefarious bloodbaths in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. He exposed the Cambodian lies with Noam, and there has been a propaganda campaign to this day to portray Ed and Noam as supporters of Pol Pot, abetted by scholars (1, 2). There has never been a shred of evidence for such a claim, but it served the purpose of deflecting attention from the media’s lies. Noam and Ed tried to forestall the coming propaganda campaign, to no avail.
In Wikipedia’s libelous bio of Ed, most of the lies are about Ed’s examination of the media’s reporting regarding atrocities in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, which perfectly conforms to the Propaganda Model’s predictions. Not only will Ed and Noam’s positions be misrepresented, their framework will not even be mentioned, and whether the atrocity in question was constructive, benign, or nefarious.
Ed’s obituary in the New York Times was a classic instance of how his work is misrepresented. The New York Times even did the bogus critics one better by stating that Ed and Noam were criticized for “soft-pedaling” evidence of atrocities in Srebrenica and Rwanda in Manufacturing Consent, when those atrocities happened several years after Manufacturing Consent was published. Totally absent from the New York Times obituary was that those atrocities were analyzed to see how the media dealt with the atrocities, not how Ed and Noam did, as they flipped Ed and Noam’s work on its head.
Some around me thought that the New York Times’s misrepresentations in Ed’s obituary were deliberate. Ed might have called it just another example of a structural limitation, in which people were unable to see what was right in front of them.
Ed and Noam did their best to not take the attacks personally, as those people were likely unable to comprehend what they were doing. During my studies over the years, I began to understand that those critics were simply practicing in-group defense, as they licked the hand that fed them. In kind, it was no different from a dog that protected its master’s house from intruders. Such behaviors truly bring up Brian O’Leary’s question of whether we are a sentient species, that such “smart” people could be so irrational. Those attacks were also more examples of my journey’s primary lesson. Noam, Ed, and Howard were beacons in the darkness.