"[Herman produced] scrupulous, diligent and comprehensive research; a keen instinct for detecting and exposing hypocrisy and deceit and the effects of conformity to doctrine; and a recognition of the role of institutional structures in shaping interpretation and analysis."
Edward Samuel Herman was an American economist, media scholar and social critic. Herman is known for his media criticism, in particular the propaganda model hypothesis he developed with Noam Chomsky, a frequent co-writer. He held an appointment as professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. He also taught at Annenberg School for Communication
Edward Samuel Herman was an American economist, media scholar and social critic. Herman is known for his media criticism, in particular the propaganda model hypothesis he developed with Noam Chomsky, a frequent co-writer. He held an appointment as professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. He also taught at Annenberg School for Communication
View all quotes by Edward S. Herman"Even today, as regards East Timor, where our brutal Indonesian satellite (authors of the 1965-1966 butcheries) have very possibly killed as many people as did the Khmer Rouge, there is a virtually complete blackout of information in the Free Press. This is a bloodbath carried out by a friendly power and is thus of little interest to our leaders. It is a “benign bloodbath” in our terminology."
"We will consider the facts about postwar Indochina insofar as they can be ascertained, but a major emphasis will be on the ways in which these facts have been interpreted, filtered, distorted or modified by the ideological institutions in the West."
"K. Barton Osborn, who served in a covert program of intelligence in Vietnam, not only testified to a wide variety of forms of torture used by U.S. and Saigon personnel, but also made the startling claim that “I never knew an individual to be detained as a VC suspect who ever lived through an interrogation in a year and a half, and that included quite a number of individuals.”"
"As American foreign policy has moved toward the open use of military power to dominate other states, the employment of Orwellian language has become more frequent. Words with emotionally satisfying (or repellant) qualities are increasingly employed to describe their precise opposites. Nowhere is this more in evidence than the claim by President Johnson and Secretary Rusk that the goal of American policy in Southeast Asia is the preservation of “independent” states."
"Our chapter on East Timor was far and away the most important in the two volumes, precisely because the huge ongoing crimes could have so readily been ended. It passed without mention in the doctrinal system - as, indeed, did our detailed review of many other U.S. crimes. In dramatic contrast, a sizable literature has been devoted to our chapter on Cambodia, desperately seeking to discover some error, and with unsupported and unjustifiable claims about our alleged apologetics for Pol Pot. We reviewed those that were even mildly serious in Manufacturing Consent, and there should be no need to do so again."
"The genius of Manufacturing Consent was that it opened an entirely new way of understanding the news media, not only for activists and people on the left, but also for more than one generation of students and young people trying to make sense of it. It introduced them to a new way of viewing the world from a critical perspective, and understanding the importance, possibility, and necessity of social change. There is no doubt that it is the most widely read and influential work on how to understand the US news media. It remains so, and is more relevant than ever, three decades after its publication."