Edward Herman

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, particularly 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 and a media analyst specializing in corporate and regulatory issues and political economy. 

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 that opposes corporate control in favor of direct democracy while distancing itself from other radical movements. His writings frequently dealt with Western corporate media reports on violent regional conflicts, disputing mainstream reports to the extent that his critics described as genocide denial.

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 his Bachelor of Arts (in 1945) and later his MA from the University of Pennsylvania. At the University of California, Berkeley, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1953, he met economist Robert A. Brady, who had studied the economics of fascist regimes and significantly influenced 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. 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: "in 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 that criticized 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, William 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.