The Bloodbath Framework, Propaganda Model, and Worthy and Unworthy Victims – The Video
Three of Ed Herman’s inventions that have never been credibly challenged, just like the rest of his media work
The video of this post is here.
This will be a post to Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky’s bloodbath framework, Propaganda Model, how they were applied in analysis, how to validly critique those analytic frameworks, and deal with real-world critiques of them. The bloodbath framework and Propaganda Model were largely Ed’s creations, although he generally first presented them in his joint works with Noam. Ed used those frameworks for the rest of his life. Ed also coined the terms worthy and unworthy victims.
Economists are ideally social scientists, although my opinion is that today’s economic profession primarily justifies elite rule, which is typical academic corruption, as they play elite lapdogs. Ed was one of the relatively few exceptions.
Ed approached his media studies as a scientist. The statistical rigor of his work was evident early on. The so-called “null hypothesis” is defined as: “The hypothesis that there is no significant difference between specified populations, with any observed difference being due to sampling or experimental error.” In statistical work, the 95% and 99% confidence intervals are used to reject null hypotheses, which means that the likelihood that the measured differences in two populations are due to sampling or experimental error are less than 5% and 1%.
When Ed performed his most famous worthy and unworthy victim analysis in Manufacturing Consent, which demonstrated that the media coverage of a worthy victim was more than 100 times as much as an unworthy victim, that was statistically significant, to put it mildly. When Ed and David Peterson adduced a 25,000-fold disparity in the use of “genocide,” depending on whether the bloodbath was benign or nefarious, it was the most extreme statistic that I have ever seen in the social sciences, and it easily rejects the null hypothesis that the media fairly treats all bloodbaths, regardless of who perpetrates them. Ed’s work was really pretty simple and easy to understand. As Ed said near his life’s end, his primary message was that the mainstream media serves elite interests, contrary to its conceit that it pursues the truth. That might seem obvious, but Ed performed rigorous statistical studies to demonstrate it.
The only ways to validly contest Ed’s assertion are to produce statistical studies that invalidate Ed’s work or to show the flaws in his studies. I have yet to see even one of his critics pretend to do that, in anything like a credible manner. Instead, they lie outright or engage in logical fallacies and personal attacks. Such behaviors are either examples of my journey’s primary lesson, that personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity, or evidence that helps answer Brian O’Leary question of whether humanity is a sentient species.
Ed thought that those critics were simply incapable of rational discussion when encountering information that challenged the beliefs that fed them. When ideology meets reality, ideology always wins with the hacks. Ed let such attacks roll off his back, and he defended his longtime colleague Noam Chomsky against such attacks. I don’t think that my work is hard to understand, either, and I have received the same kinds of attacks that Noam and Ed did, but with a far lower public profile, obviously.
In the last article published in his lifetime, Ed presented his last worthy and unworthy victim analysis, which produced nearly the same statistical significance as his first study from 30 years earlier. The last words published in Ed’s lifetime were: “The Propaganda Model lives on.” As long as we have a capitalist media, the Propaganda Model will be relevant, and Ed’s critics will rarely make any kind of valid critique, if ever. Ed will go down in history as one of the USA’s greatest dissident intellectuals.