Edward S. Herman - Herman and Chomsky

Herman and Chomsky

Herman received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania in 1945 and PhD in 1953 from the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1968, Herman and Noam Chomsky signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. The two men later collaborated on works about Cambodia. Beginning with "Distortions at Fourth Hand", an article published in the American left-wing periodical The Nation in June 1977, they wrote about the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot and disputed the reports and accounts of atrocities from refugees. Their book After the Cataclysm (1979), which appeared after the regime had been deposed, has been described by Sophal Ear - now an Assistant Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School - as "one of the most supportive books of the Khmer revolution" in which they "perform what amounts to a defense of the Khmer Rouge cloaked in an attack on the media". Herman defended himself in 2001: "Chomsky and I found that the very asking of questions about the numerous fabrications, ideological role, and absence of any beneficial effects for the victims in the anti-Khmer Rouge propaganda campaign of 1975-1979 was unacceptable, and was treated almost without exception as 'apologetics for Pol Pot'."

Their best known co-authored book though is Manufacturing Consent, first published in 1988, and largely written by Herman. The book introduced the concept of the "propaganda model" to the debates on the workings of the mainstream corporate media.