Media critic Edward S. Herman dies at 92

[Adenoid_Hynkel]

Source: Jeff Cohen, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting founder, via Facebook

No official reporting yet, but this is his post:

SAD NEWS: One of the greatest and sweetest media critics ever, ED HERMAN, has passed away.

Ed was the main author of “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,” written with NOAM CHOMSKY -- the 1980s master work that exposed how elite U.S. media typically function as propaganda organs for U.S. empire and militarism.

In 1984, when I was part of a lawyers’ delegation monitoring an “election” in death squad-run El Salvador, I remember a gaggle of progressive attorneys at the Salvador Sheraton tussling with each other to get their hands on a shipment of hot-off-the-press copies of “Demonstration Elections,” Ed’s devastating book (with Frank Brodhead) on the U.S. “staging” of elections as PR shows to prop up repressive puppet regimes from Dominican Republic to Vietnam to Salvador.

A highpoint of my life was flying with Ed across the Atlantic to Brussels to speak alongside him before the European Parliament on the problem of media conglomeration, a hearing organized by the European Greens.

As happened too often, Ed’s name went unmentioned in the 1997 movie “Good Will Hunting”; when Will (Matt Damon) says to his therapist (Robin Williams) that Zinn’s “Peoples History” is a book that will “fuckin’ knock you on your ass,” the therapist responds: “Better than Chomsky’s ‘Manufacturing Consent’?”

I asked Ed if he felt left out. Not at all -- the movie “will bring our book more attention, more readers.” Pure Ed.

Read more: https://www.facebook.com/jeffcohen51/posts/10155145956962951?pnref=story

---

[maxsolomon]

1. That's a pic of him from "Brainwashing of my Dad"

I loved that he was in front of his wall of records.

RIP, and I'm glad he won't see what our nation is sliding blindly in to.