The Importance of Edward S. Herman: An Interview with Chris Simpson

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]All right, what's up world? Welcome to another edition of I Mix What I Like. I mix what I like.org. I mix what I like for all your relevant social media. I'm Jared Ball. Happy to be your host. And today we're talking again with Professor Chris Simpson who among other things is an internationally recognized media scholar who teaches at American University and is uh widely known as an expert in the fields specifically of propaganda, international politics, and democracy. But specifically, we wanted to speak with him today uh just a little bit about his recently deceased former advisor, the late uh great very important scholar for media studies, political economy, and otherwise uh Ed Herman. Uh so, Professor Simpson, thanks for joining us and welcome back to I Mix What I Like.

[00:00:48]>> Great. Thank you.

[00:00:50]So, as I said, uh uh you know, Ed Herman, who who um for those who know him, most popularly associated with his workh for his work with Nam Chsky and manufacturing consent. But as you pointed out in in in an email to several of us uh after he passed, uh Ed Herman has done not only a lot of of great work, but he continued up until he died this past week to be very active uh and very intellectually engaged and sharp.

[00:01:22]And I just went back and found uh a piece he just published over this past summer about uh which I'd like to get into you into with you a little bit about in just a moment about how it's hypocritical for mainstream media, the New York Times in particular, to be uh uh up in arms over the rise of so-called fake news. But anyway, but Professor Simpson, having known Herman and been an advise of his, uh, if you would tell us a little bit about him and what we would want to you would want us to know about his life and work, uh, now that he is no longer with us.

[00:01:58]>> Sure. Sure. Well, he was born into a middle class family uh, more than 90 years ago. Uh he eventually became a professor at the Wharton School of Economics and is uh there he was a specialist in um capitalist economics and regulation and the sort of uh hard science if you will uh of how those systems work. And as he matured, he became more he he understood more and more deeply um why such systems uh are typically very abusive to the people or to the majority of people who live under them. uh and from there he became interested in media and media's role in um propagating uh the policies of ruling elites of governments and so on.

[00:03:00]uh his work with Namchsky the famous work is manufacturing consent and uh Herman was actually the lead author on that book although it's often attributed only to to Chsky the mostly and uh and Herman uh did a very large part of the of the research and the writing of that work um he both before and after that kind of breakthrough through um well, let me back up just a bit. One of the big contributions that work made uh was the the documentation that propagating ideas that are consistent with ruling elites is a builtin feature of um western uh democracies. Uh now he was very critical of the authoritarianism of other countries as well but his main focus was on the United States and um uh the reason for that is it has to do with what Chsky called the moral uh duty of intellectuals which is to say to stand up to the oppression or the repression of one's own country above all. It's easy to criticize Russia, China, India, you know, you name it, uh for their abuses against uh uh their own peoples.

[00:04:33]It's hard to stand up uh or often hard to stand up for the the abuses of our government against our people >> and not just uh American citizens but what Herman and as you point out um uh the work most often attributed or or associated with Chsky. Uh but what they were actually doing, what Herman was actually doing uh was pointing out that not only uh is the the the propaganda effect and the bias uh harm to American citizens, that is the the propaganda effect and the bias propagated by uh the United States media, but that internationally it has a great impact on the world uh in terms of not only how Americans see the world, but how other people in the world see other parts of the world given the influence that American media has uh hierarchically in internationally. Uh but then also in terms of the the the power associated with this this sort of singular hegeimone being the United States uh that goes along with their version of the world being so dominant. That is that if if that that uh um they were able to in many ways shape uh or influence the direction of foreign policy, military uh uh activity and so on. Uh and and I I would think that would be another reason why Herman wanted to spend so much of his time focused on the American media system uh as opposed to and political system and economic system as opposed to some others in the world. Uh does does that make sense or does that jive with what you understood of him?

[00:06:16]>> Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he uh he ran into some real difficult flack and criticism for having done exactly that.

[00:06:25]And there there's two examples. Um, one has to do with the with the civil war in a former Yugoslavia. The other has to do with mass murders in Africa uh between tootssis and hoodus. Uh, you recall that that both of those are heavily publicized events. Um and the gist of his analysis was that the the financial interests and the geopolitical interests primarily of the of the United States both in terms of its government but also in terms of private interests that are interested in minerals or or access to markets um would shape how those uh tragic and often bloody events were reported to the American people and also around the world. So let's let's take Yugoslavia as an example. Um you had a civil war going there. Uh there were and this is during the 1990s. There were terrible atrocities all around you know and like most civil wars there is no shortage of atrocities or war crimes or a variety of of other types of crimes that unfold in those circumstances. What was reported in the US was that the Serbs are the bad guys and uh that the Croats and and some of their allies are the good guys and that the Serbs alone are responsible for terrible crimes, but the other sides were not. as well. And so Ed uh and Ed pointed out that that this um was that this position on the part of the US government uh was driven at least in part in geopolitical interests that the US government has in Europe. Uh okay. So he he documents why this one-sided view of a civil war is um is in intrinsically misleading. Uh and uh so he gets hit back uh by people who are uh experts or pundits of one sort or another that that and the accusation was oh well he's apologizing for genocide. He's he's he's hiding the war crimes of uh uh one side or the other. And in that case that example uh was uh uh the Serbs. Um, and that that's a misunder it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what he was at least attempting to do. And what he was attempting to do was to show and I think he succeeded at this uh to show that in complex situations where there's a lot of blood being spilled that the uh approved victims or the favored victims, the ones that are favored by the government or by corporate interest, they they they are very sympathetically portrayed. uh the uh uh unfavored victims um are often portrayed as as the sole perpetrators. You see you see this also in in coverage of uh Latin America for example. Uh in the African case there was uh longterm um and ongoing uh splits between the uh uh Hutu people and the Tootsie people.

[00:09:55]This was rooted in mainly in French colonialism in that particular region region and had been going on for years uh and had been periodically uh encouraged by the colonial powers. Why?

[00:10:10]It's because it was a convenient way to to rule that particular part of Africa very rich in natural resources. Uh a divide and conquer sort of strategy.

[00:10:21]Herman and his uh co-authors uh reported both the history of this and the shape of current news coverage and again was slammed very hard uh as a as an apologist for genocide and so forth.

[00:10:38]Um and uh the the critic those particular critics misunderstood or deliberately misunderstood where he was going with this. He was not apologizing for mass crimes. He was not justifying mass crimes, which he was accused of, uh, but rather showing how the selection of the victims um, uh, is often shaped by the political and economic interests of the country uh that has the the um media dominance or the uh, geopolitical dominance in that particular part of the world. And that's that's how it became um uh framed in the way that that story was eventually framed.

[00:11:29]>> So, you know, just just to sort of uh as we move towards wrapping up here um for this unfortunately too short conversation about uh Edward Herman and his his work here. But I did want to just in in a in a piece he published just this past July in the monthly review uh an independent socialist uh magazine titled fake news on Russia and other official enemies. The New York Times 1917 to 2017 uh appropriate of course for no you know at least not the least for at least the reason that this is the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution. Uh but he starts off the piece by saying, "It has been amusing to watch the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets express their dismay over the rise and spread of quote fake news. These publications take it as an obvious truth that what they provide is straightforward, unbiased, fact-based reporting. They do offer such news, but they also provide a steady flow of their own varied forms of fake news, often by disseminating false or misleading information supplied to them by the national security state, other branches of government, and sites of corporate power. End quote. And in this piece, he talks a little bit about uh not only the cases that you've raised here, but uh uh with Yugoslavia, but also with Guatemala um uh and more modern Russia. But he also takes a moment to note that right after the Russian Revolution in 1917 that there was uh just just as one of his examples in this piece, there was a tremendous rise of what he describes as as fake news about what the Russian revolution was. uh and uh uh and then shows how that trend uh continues today in in the description of Putin and uh contemporary Russia. Um but also as the you know and and thematically on along the lines of what you've been describing here in terms of uh the political interests of those in power being reflected in the the perspectives.

[00:13:39]So as I just just just as as a way to wrap up, I thought it was of interest given his politics, how he was treated as an academic and even how among those on the left and media scholars uh he is he his his great amount of work is is sort of subsumed beneath uh the work of Nam Chomsky. Um but that also in this moment uh uh of of clash of a of a renewed cold war some have described it and uh you know I would maybe put it as as confused notions about what capitalism and socialism is and all of that. It seems that that that uh and just to to your point at the beginning that his mind remains sharp to the very end. it seems that his work is of great value uh up till now going back historically and of course going forward. Uh so any any of that that you would want to respond to or add to or or supplement or just offer of of of in you know your own concluding remarks about Ed Herman uh and his his value going forward. Well, I think um I'm not sure how to to wrap up something quite that large and long. I mean but but I will say this is that Herman contributed in very important ways to both the sort of theory uh theories that we've been talking about but and this is equally important to practical ways to measure and identify this type of you could call it bias you could call it fake news.

[00:15:15]You know, there's a lot of names for it.

[00:15:17]And and the basic method that he did used was he would compare the coverage of the authorized victims or the desired uh you know, the the approved victims, if you will, the favored victims for a particular uh set of crimes. and and would compare that news coverage with um other people who were victimized in the same struggle who got no coverage at all. Uh and this was particularly powerful in the in the example Guatemala but other places as well, El Salvador and others. uh so that this method of comparison was actually a a scientific or an academic breakthrough in understanding how media works and and I I think he deserves credit for for uh coming up with it and documenting it.

[00:16:13]>> Well, Professor Chris Simpson, thank you very much for joining us and helping us remember a little bit uh of the life and work of of Ed Herman. Uh thanks again for joining us and uh to you we say peace as long as you're willing to fight for it as we often say to the rest of our audience and thank you again.

[00:16:30]>> My pleasure. Thanks.

[00:16:32]>> I mix what I like what I like. What I like what I like what I like.