Edward S. Herman is a veteran economist and media analyst. His most recent book, co-edited with Philip Hammond, is Degraded Capability: The Media and The Kosovo Crisis. (Pluto Press, 2000). David Peterson is a freelance writer. Herman (with Noam Chomsky) practically pioneered the field of political media analysis in connection with U.S. foreign policy.
Keeping the Lid on the Washington Connection (with Noam Chomsky) A detailed analysis of the hypocritical, scandalously unbalanced way the US media cover foreign policy, especially the numerous crimes committed by US-supported military fascists and other right-wing despots favored by American business. The present article is an adapted version of the introduction to the Chomsky-Herman classic The Political Economy of Human Rights (South End Press, 1979), and reproduced here by kind permission from the authors and publisher.
Nation-Busting Euphoria, Nation-Building Fatigue U.S. imposes its will, by Edward S. Herman. "The United States has a long tradition of arrogance, racism, unilateralism, and disregard of international law in its external dealings. So while it is easy to imagine that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld Axis of Evil represents something new, it doesn't, it is merely more frightening because of the power and global scope and effects of this Axis, which owns and is eager to use a truly massive arsenal of "weapons of mass destruction." The Axis leaders pretend to be quaking in their boots at somebody else's possession of such weapons (the mainstream media and intellectuals quake with them), but they pose the real global threat of their use..."
The Afghan, El Salvador, and Iraq Elections U.S. managed elections, with the threat of violence, are called "democratic". During the October 5 (2004) vice presidential debate, in lauding the Afghan election, Vice President Dick Cheney stated, "Twenty years ago we had a similar situation in El Salvador. We had a guerrilla insurgency [that] controlled roughly a third of the country, 75,000 people dead, and we held free elections. I was there as an observer on behalf of the Congress. The human drive for freedom, the determination of these people to vote, was unbelievable. The terrorists would come in and shoot up polling places; as soon as they left, the voters would come back and get in line and would not be denied the right to vote." That's Cheney's take, typically unchallenged by the media and most establishment politicians. Herman has no difficulty in showing such claims to be bald-faced lies.
All The News Fit To Print (Part II) "The New York Times is a strongly logical paper, whose biases and frequent propaganda service give its logo phrase "all the news that's fit to print" an ironical twist. James Reston acknowledged that "we left [out] a great deal of what we knew about U.S. intervention in Guatemala and in a variety of other cases" at government request or for political reasons satisfactory to the editors..."
All The News Fit To Print (Part III) "It is part of conservative mythology that the mainstream media, especially the New York Times, opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and, effectively "lost the war." Liberals, on the other hand, while often agreeing that the press opposed the war, regard this as a display of the media at its best, pursuing its proper critical role. But they are both wrong: conservatives, because they identify any reporting of unhelpful facts as "adversarial" and want the media to serve as crude propaganda agencies of the state; liberals, because they fail to see how massively the mainstream media serve the state by accepting the assumptions and frameworks of state policy, transmitting vast amounts of state propaganda, and confining criticism to matters of tactics while excluding criticism of premises and intentions..."
Propaganda System Number One A regime of propaganda so smooth and diabolically efficient as to defy detection...
