Summary of Media Posts

How the mainstream media works and my relationships with Ed Herman, Sam Husseini, and Chris Black

As the one-year anniversary of my presence at Substack nears, I plan to update my pinned post, which serves as a kind of index of my Substack site. I will be summarizing various topics in posts, and I plan to update those, too, for future posts. I am going to start this process with my media posts. I plan to update this post, so that it becomes the tent pole for my media writings. I will have sections of these summary posts, and here goes.

My Early Experiences with the Media

I made some audio posts (with a written summary that was a guide to my audio post), such as this one on my media studies over the years. My relationship with the media began when I was nine and read the local daily newspaper, which my mother eventually worked for. I “graduated” to reading the Los Angeles Times in college. In my disillusioning years in LA, I subscribed to Christian Science Monitor, thinking that I was getting a more sophisticated view of events.

Then I had my unbelievable journey with Dennis Lee (whose journey is far more unbelievable), and I watched the media lie about him from nearly the day that I met him, which was my first inkling that maybe the media was not a pursuer of the truth. Over the next three years, I saw the media incessantly lie about our efforts, and especially that local paper that I grew up reading and the LA Times. The irony of being targeted by the same newspapers that I grew up reading was rich.

While Dennis was in jail with his astronomical bail, a roommate mentioned Noam Chomsky, and I had never heard of him. The next year I moved to Ohio, as I picked up the pieces of my shattered life, thoroughly radicalized, and I subscribed to a new magazine, Lies of Our Times, which I heard of while driving to work in LA in early 1990. Edward S. Herman was its editor, and Chomsky wrote an article each month. Thus began my media studies.

Ed Herman and the Propaganda Model

When I began reading Lies of Our Times each month, I had no idea that Herman and Chomsky had co-authored Manufacturing Consent or what the Propaganda Model was, and little did I suspect that I would become Ed Herman’s biographer 27 years later. I am still the only one, nearly eight years after his death. Ed was born 100 years ago this past April. I hope that I live to see a professional biography of Ed’s life. He will go down in history as one of the USA’s greatest dissident intellectuals, and Chomsky will undoubtedly be remembered as its greatest. His passing will mark the end of an era.

Ed invented the Propaganda Model of media analysis, which is a structural model of how the media operates. It is essentially a conflict-of-interest model, which shows how in the capitalist media, the owners, advertisers, and news sources filter what news gets presented, which serves elite interests. Sometimes, news outlets reported a story that threatened elite interests, and those errant outlets then had hell to pay, which Ed called “flak.” The Propaganda Model’s final filter was ideological, which formed a religious atmosphere of identifying out-groups that could be assailed without penalty. When Manufacturing Consent was published in 1988, that final filter was anticommunism, and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union it became “terrorism,” and the wonders of capitalism became an overriding dogma in the triumphant 1990s.

I did not know any of that when I began subscribing to Lies of Our Times, but I soon fell in love with Ed’s work. I looked forward to my dose of his keen wit each month. Ed often discussed Orwell’s work. But it was Ed’s insights and scientific analysis of the media that garnered my respect for his work, which has never been refuted, and nobody has seriously tried. I wrote a series of Substack posts on Ed’s life and work. I constantly use Ed’s worthy and unworthy victim framework.

I became Ed’s biographer when I offered to improve his libelous Wikipedia biography, which remains libelous to this day. Ed died in the middle of my project, and he never got to see my work. I’ll carry Ed’s torch for the rest of my life.

The media is a racket, plain and simple, and it enables and supports the other global rackets. It is not a heavy intellectual lift to understand that. I regularly apply the Propaganda Model to current events. The Propaganda Model will be relevant as long as there is a capitalist media. I am not a fan of Donald Trump (or any president in my adulthood (since 1976), really), but the level of lying about him in the media has been amazing even to me.

Sam Husseini

The last email that I received from Ed introduced me to Sam Husseini, and I am one of Sam’s fanboys. Sam has had a penchant for being dragged out of press conferences, and the State Department’s goons gave Sam a concussion earlier this year. Sam is paying a heavy price for his heroism. Sam’s father was Palestinian, and it is not surprising that the genocide in Gaza has been one of Sam’s primary topics since 2023. Sam has been directing his readers to my Substack, but my work is likely not what many of them signed up for. Sam’s torch is another that I will always carry.

Christopher Black

Ed’s last email to me also introduced me to Christopher Black. Chris’s feedback on my chapter on Rwanda in Ed’s bio was the first indication that I was doing justice to Ed’s work, and it began my friendship with Chris. Chris was one of Ed’s many coauthors, and Chris is why Ed took on Rwanda as his life’s last great writing project. Chris died of a stroke in June, 2025, and his ordeal in Africa might have shortened his life. Ed did not have a stauncher friend than Chris, and between Ed and Chris, I learned a great deal about how the West continues to bludgeon Africa while the media lies about it. The day after I heard of Chris’s passing, I checked out the latest “election” of Paul Kagame, the USA’s man in central Africa. Of course, Kagame got more than 99% of the “vote,” which Wikipedia could not even be bothered to mention. That is how the USA’s feted client states work, as arguably the greatest living mass murderer is favorably compared to Abraham Lincoln, and getting over 99% of the “vote” does not even elicit any comment in the Western media. I will also carry Chris’s torch for the rest of my life.

What an honor it has been to have interacted with those great men, which has also been highly educational.