爱德华·塞缪尔·赫尔曼

Edward Samuel Herman (April 7, 1925 – November 11, 2017) 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 at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ideologically, Herman has been described as a "dedicated radical democrat", an ideology which opposes corporate control in favor of direct democracy while distancing itself from other radical movements. His writings frequently dealt with what he called "Western corporate media reports" on violent regional conflicts, disputing mainstream reports to an extent that he has been criticised for downplaying genocide figures.

Early life

Herman was born in Philadelphia to a liberal Democratic family, the son of Abraham Lincoln Herman, a pharmacist and Celia Dektor, a homemaker.

Herman received a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania. At University of California, Berkeley, from which he received his PhD in 1953, he met economist Robert A. Brady, a student of the economics of fascist regimes who had a significant influence upon him. Herman joined the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania in 1958, where he taught finance and became professor emeritus in 1989.

Political views

Vietnam War

Following the Vietnam War, Herman and Noam Chomsky challenged the veracity of media accounts of war crimes and repression by the Vietnamese communists, stating: "the basic sources for the larger estimates of killings in the North Vietnamese land reform were persons affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the Saigon Propaganda Ministry" and "the NLF-DRV 'bloodbath' at Hue (in South Vietnam) was constructed on flimsy evidence indeed". Commenting on postwar Vietnam, Chomsky and Herman argued: "[i]n a phenomenon that has few parallels in Western experience, there appear to have been close to zero retribution deaths in postwar Vietnam." This they described as a "miracle of reconciliation and restraint". In discussing the 1977 Congressional testimony of defecting SRV official Nguyen Cong Hoan, on the subjects of mass repression and the abrogation of civic and religious freedoms, Herman and Chomsky pointed to contradictory accounts of post-war Vietnam, concluding that while "some of what Hoan reports is no doubt accurate ... the many visitors and Westerners living in Vietnam who expressly contradict his claims" suggest "Hoan is simply not a reliable commentator."

Chomsky and Herman authored Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda, a book which criticised U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia and highlighted how mainstream media neglected to cover stories about these activities; the publisher Warner Modular initially accepted it, and it was published in 1973. However, Warner Modular's parent company, Warner Communications, disapproved of the book's contents and ordered all copies to be destroyed. According to Jim Neilson's book Warring Fictions: Cultural Politics and the Vietnam War Narrative, the publication of Counter-Revolutionary Violence was stopped by an executive of Warner Publications, Robert Sarnoff, who thought its discussion of American foreign policy "was a pack of lies, a scurrilous attack on respected Americans, undocumented, a publication unworthy of a serious publisher". Because of a binding contract, copies were passed to another publisher rather than destroyed.

In 1967, Herman was among more than 500 writers and editors who signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse to pay the 10% Vietnam War tax surcharge implemented by Congress upon the initiation of President Johnson.

Cambodia

Herman and Chomsky later collaborated on works about the media treatment of post-war Indochina, Cambodia in particular, beginning with "Distortions at Fourth Hand", an article written for the American left-wing periodical The Nation in June 1977. While they did not "pretend to know [...] the truth" about what was going on in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot, they believed, in reviewing material on the topic then available: "[w]hat filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available". Referring to what they saw as "the extreme unreliability of refugee reports", they noted: "Refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocutors wish to hear. While these reports must be considered seriously, care and caution are necessary. Specifically, refugees questioned by Westerners or Thais have a vested interest in reporting atrocities on the part of Cambodian revolutionaries, an obvious fact that no serious reporter will fail to take into account". They concluded by stating Khmer Rouge Cambodia might be more closely comparable to "France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months" than to Nazi Germany.