Simple Ideas, Robust Evidence, Part 1: The Media
Ed Herman’s simple yet irrefutable work
I have written that I built my comprehensive perspective conservatively. I had to. While mainstream dogma can be spectacularly wrong, the fringes are also filled with chaff, and orthodoxy and the fringes can both be bewildering places to explore for truth-seekers. I am going to present a series of posts regarding my adventures and studies, on very simple ideas with robust, often-irrefutable, evidence but which often sits on the fringes, ignored or attacked by orthodoxy’s defenders. Many times, I have watched ideas and evidence that were scorned and suppressed by the mainstream to later be embraced by the mainstream, generally without acknowledging the heretics on the fringes who had been attacked, marginalized, and often died in obscurity. That fate even befell the founders of numerous branches of today’s science, although they could receive posthumous recognition (but often did not).
But I also will present orthodox positions that are supported by the evidence very well, even irrefutably, but the fringes reject them, generally for ideological reasons. Walking the razor’s edge to the truth can be hard, but it can also be easy, when one puts aside ideology and just pursues the evidence.
I am going to begin this thread with Ed Herman’s work on the media. Ed’s first political books were devoted to the hypocrisy of the American government in its genocidal invasion of Vietnam. Ed did not criticize the media in those books. Ed began criticizing the media in his first joint work with Noam Chomsky, written in 1973. I don’t know if one of them deserves more credit than the other for their initial media work, but it was likely Ed. He named the bloodbath framework in that book, which was comprised of:
Constructive: crimes that directly advanced American interests, so were celebrated;
Benign: crimes perpetrated by allies, client states, and states with little American political-economic involvement, so were ignored;
Nefarious: crimes committed by enemy regimes, so were denounced;
Mythical: a subcategory of nefarious bloodbaths, which were crimes that were either not committed by enemy regimes or were minor events inflated into legendary status.
Ed used that framework for the rest of his life. That book was subjected to one of the most notorious instances of censorship ever, as the owner of the publisher of that book puts its own company out of business to prevent the book’s publication.
Six years later, in 1979, Noam and Ed published a greatly expanded version of their censored book, which was a two-volume series (and published at a radical publishing house, so it would not be suppressed). In that work, they explicitly compared a nefarious bloodbath, the genocide under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, to the Indonesian genocide inflicted on East Timor, which was benign, as it was committed by an ally, which received great American assistance in the slaughter, especially in weaponry and diplomatic support.
Both genocides began in the same year, 1975, and both killed, as it turned out, similar proportions of the targeted populations. But since Cambodia was an official enemy, after the USA slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, even though there was little independent confirmation of what was happening in Cambodia, the American media began a deafening drumbeat of genocide. East Timor, on the other hand, had received American media coverage during its revolution that overthrew Portuguese rule, as Portugal lost the last shreds of its empire. But when Indonesia invaded soon afterward, with no justification whatsoever, the American media began going silent, and as the killings escalated over the years, the American media went completely silent. As Noam later said, the American media was actually complicit in genocide in that instance.
But, instead of acknowledging that vast difference in coverage, a propaganda campaign began, which lasts to this day, of calling Noam and Ed apologists for the Khmer Rouge, which was a Big Lie from the beginning.
In that two-volume work can be seen the seed of what became Ed’s Propaganda Model, which Ed first described in detail in 1986. In 1988, Ed and Noam published the work that they are best known for: Manufacturing Consent. Ed’s most famous statistical analysis was in Manufacturing Consent, as he compared the media coverage of murders of church workers by governments, depending on whether allied or enemy regimes committed the murders. Ed named the distinction “worthy and unworthy victims.” Worthy victims were killed by enemy regimes, and unworthy victims were killed by allied regimes, usually that the USA trained and supplied with the weapons used in the murders, as with the genocide in East Timor. The results were not of minor statistical significance: worthy victims received more than 100 times as much media coverage as unworthy ones.
Ed also performed a qualitative analysis. Not only did worthy victims receive more than 100 times as much coverage, but the media extolled their saintly virtues. If the unworthy victims received any media notice at all, the media suggested that they deserved their fate, even when they were American nuns, as the government and media lied about the circumstances of their deaths. The hypocrisy of the media was laid bare, and to this day, the media has never credibly addressed Ed’s analysis. Instead, he was attacked and called names by the day’s intellectuals.
Ed not only performed that statistical analysis, but he created the Propaganda Model to explain it. His Propaganda Model was a set of “filters” that determines what news is fit to print, and the filters were:
Nearly 40 years after Ed invented it, the media has never credibly discussed it. As Noam later said, the media can’t afford to, as it shows that the emperor is stark naked. So, it was ignored, Ed and Noam were attacked, called names, etc.
A generation after Manufacturing Consent was published, Ed coauthored a book on the politicization of the word “genocide” in the media, and the results were far starker than his worthy-and-unworthy-victim analysis. A death inflicted by an enemy regime was called “genocide” more than 25,000 times as often was one caused by an allied regime. The hypocrisy was so great that Ed began using “chutzpah” to describe such activities.
In the last article published in his lifetime, Ed performed his final statistical analysis, on murders of unworthy and unworthy victims, that time on protestors, and the 100+-to-one ratio was once again demonstrated, and the last words that Ed published were: “The Propaganda Model lives on.” Ed said in a late-life interview that his greatest contribution to scholarship was his pairing analyses and his exposure of the media as elite-serving institutions.
I was able to add the bloodbath framework to Ed and Noam’s earliest works on it (1, 2) at Wikipedia, but that framework will likely never appear in Ed’s libelous Wikipedia bio, as it would expose the bio’s ideological nature, which misrepresents Ed’s work on three nefarious bloodbaths, in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, while not admitting that they were nefarious bloodbaths and what that meant in Ed’s analyses.
Ed’s work on the media will never be credibly refuted, and his Propaganda Model will be applicable as long as there is a capitalist media in the USA. His work was very straightforward and rigorous, even irrefutable, but the media’s defenders can’t even admit that it exists.