Worthy and Unworthy Victims

One of Ed Herman’s frameworks that is continually on display

Ed Herman coined the term “worthy victims” in his and Noam Chomsky’s The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, published in 1979, to describe how Cambodians were unworthy victims while the USA slaughtered hundreds of thousands of them, but they became worthy victims under Khmer Rouge rule. Ed’s most famous example of that dichotomous treatment was the coverage of murders of church workers by allied and enemy regimes. Those murdered by enemy regimes became worthy victims, receiving headline news in the mainstream media, while unworthy victims receive scant coverage, if any. Worthy victims are portrayed as saints, while unworthy victims, if noticed at all, are portrayed as deserving their fate. Worthy church worker victims received over 100 times as much media coverage as unworthy victims did. A generation later, Ed, with David Peterson, used that framework on the term “genocide,” and found that the death of a worthy victim was described as genocide over 25,000 times as often as the death of an unworthy victim was. It is the most extreme statistic that I have ever seen in the social sciences.

In the last article that Ed published in his lifetime, he showed that the worthy/unworthy framework was alive and well, as was the Propaganda Model. A recent book explores the unworthy and unworthy victim idea in the contemporary media. While we have a capitalist media, these dynamics will endure. I see them daily in the media.

Ed wrote about the double standards in reporting on “terrorism” and Israel, and it is very evident in the outright genocide that Israel is inflicting in Gaza, which Sam Husseini has long written about. The entire West is abetting that genocide, while the rest of the world largely engages in hand-wringing. Not many people on Earth really care about what is happening in Gaza, not enough to do much about it. This is normal.

I recently wrote about two worthy measles victims in Texas, who were not vaccinated, while children killed by vaccines are ignored. Those are medical racket worthy and unworthy victims. Steve Kirsch amazingly convinced ChatGPT that COVID vaccines are deadly, which is no surprise to the informed. Autopsies of those unworthy COVID-vaccine victims have been performed, and they have similar organ damage from the spike proteins that the COVID vaccine produces. I have friends who were maimed and likely killed by the COVID vaccines, and I have been personally attacked for failing to get a COVID vaccine shot, so this is far from an academic exercise for me. The medical racket has largely refused to investigate vaccine side effects, and the medical racket has never performed credible vaccine safety testing, by comparing vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations. Millions of African girls were killed by Bill Gates’s vaccine campaign, which may have been an exercise in eugenics, and those girls are unworthy victims that will never be discussed in the mainstream media, while it instead fetes Gates as he pontificates about the “solutions” that he profits from.

When people awaken, the daily propaganda barrage becomes obvious and they can tune it out.