Lessons from Ed Herman’s Lifelong War against Lies

The story goes that Einstein’s theory of relativity began with a simple question: What if a person could sit on a beam of light? A single inquiry led to an entire field of study, and perhaps the world’s most famous scientific breakthrough.

The late Ed Herman’s questions were less playful. They were about war and death, lies and power politics, but they too created entire areas of study. If properly considered, they can even guide us through the perilous age in which we’re living.

Herman is best known for co-authoring Noam Chomsky’s iconic Manufacturing Consent, which explores how U.S. corporate media operates as a system of disinformation. Written during the Cold War, the book challenged readers who understood propaganda to be a tool of the Soviet Union. How could a diverse industry without official censors to monitor what it published or aired, that was neither owned nor controlled by the state, be used for social control? Quite easily, as it turns out.

The world offers an almost infinite array of events that can be covered, and media insitutions must decide what’s most relevant to their audiences. In other words, they operate as an information filter. But how do they provide their viewers, listeners and readers with the best possible understanding of the world? Ideally, these institutions produce the kind of coverage necessary to make informed decisions about public policy. In reality, Chomsky and Herman discovered, they serve the interests of the rich and powerful.

In their propaganda model, the pair identified five distinct filters: Media ownership, which is concentrated in the hands of a few spectacularly wealthy corporations; ideology, specifically anti-communism, which “helps mobilize the populace against… anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests or support accommodation with Communist states and radicalism”; advertising, or the selling of audiences to advertisers, which can lead to any number of distortions and misconceptions; official sourcing, which often leads to self-censorship as media outlets become dependent on their access to members of the government; and finally organized flak, which allows lobbies to lean on journalists and outlets who deviate from the status quo.

Manufacturing Consent remains as vital today as it was when it first published in 1988. Anti-communism continues to dominate our discourse, even in the absence of a Soviet Union or communist China, while several prominent media personalities have made their careers decrying “leftist ideologues.” Media ownership has become even more exclusive, and the advertising model has overtaken the whole of society by way of Google and social media. Twitter mobs can be manufactured and mobilized; organized flak is now a matter of life and death.

Not only did Herman ask the kinds of questions that produced one of social science’s most compelling theories, but he served as a model of rigor for media critics across the political spectrum. The 1988 edition of Manufacturing Consent ran 330 pages (including appendices), 63 pages of which were endnotes. Its voluminously documented cases were always supplemented by quantitative analysis: the amount of coverage devoted to so-called enemies of the state was inversely proportional to that of crimes committed by the U.S. and its allies. This method can be applied to virtually any line of journalistic inquiry, be it war, economic crisis or a political dispute on campus.

Herman’s priorities were radical, aimed at stopping or preventing the most heinous forms of violence by exposing the media biases that facilitated them. Herman and Chomsky revealed as much in the preface to Manufacturing Consent: “It would have been very difficult for the Guatemalan government to murder tens of thousands over the past decade if the U.S. press had provided the kind of coverage they gave to the difficulties of Andrei Sakharov or the murder of Jerzy Popieluszko in Poland. It would have been impossible to wage a brutal war against South Vietnam and the rest of indochina… if the media had not rallied to the cause, potraying murderous aggression as a defense of freedom.”

Finally, Herman was relentless in his pursuit of a cause he deemed just. “Trolling” has many definitions, but when it comes to politics, it can most aptly be described as the use of bad-faith tactics to demoralize one’s opponent. Having devoted his life to exposing the consequences of media manipulation, Herman was immune to this mode of communication. He threw himself into intellectual debates with little regard for social taboos, and he gave it as well as he took it. (I learned this firsthand when he published a withering rebuttal to my review of the BBC 2 documentary, “Rwanda’s Untold Story.”)

In The Politics of Genocide, which he co-authored with David Peterson, Herman argued that Western media used the term “genocide” to quash debate about foreign policy, specifically NATO’s efforts to dismantle Yugoslavia, and the joint support of the United States and Britain for Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame. He was immediately labeled a “genocide denier.” More recently, in its obituary for Herman, the New York Times accused Manufacturing Consent of “having soft-pedaled evidence of genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, and, during the Bosnia war, Srebrenica.” FAIR and other outlets were quick to point out that the book was published years before two of the conflicts, and the obit was corrected.

The zeal with which these outlets tried to smear Herman’s name could have made a case study for Herman himself. Knowing Herman, the study would have been carefully modeled, meticulously conducted, and revealing in its conclusions about the mainstream media. American readers would have gained a fresh understanding of their country’s propaganda system, not only how it works but how they can subvert it.

Published Feb 15/18 on AlterNet as: What Can Noam Chomsky’s Co-Author Teach Us in the Age of Trump?

The Ossington Circle Episode 29: Media and Empire with… Justin Podur

Dan Freeman-Maloy interviews Justin Podur

In this episode Justin Podur is the guest and guest interviewer Dan Freeman-Maloy asks the questions. We talk about media, Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model, activism in a time of social media monopolies, and empires. The first of a series.

5 Ways Capitalist Logic Has Sabotaged the Scientific Community

Academics should be collaborating, not competing for pseudoscientific rankings.

 

At a time when federal employees are prohibited from uttering the phrase “climate change,” the right routinely attempts to undermine universities’ legitimacy, and tuitions have skyrocketed alongside student debt, it seems perverse that academics would further endanger their mission to educate and enlighten. Yet by embracing a malignant form of pseudoscience, they have accomplished just that.

What is the scientific method? Its particulars are a subject of some debate, but scientists understand it to be a systematic process of gathering evidence through observation and experiment. Data are analyzed, and that analysis is shared with a community of peers who study and debate its findings in order to determine their validity. Albert Einstein called this “the refinement of everyday thinking.”

There are many reasons this method has proven so successful in learning about nature: the grounding of findings in research, the openness of debate and discussion, and the cumulative nature of the scientific enterprise, to name just a few. There are social scientists, philosophers, and historians who study how science is conducted, but working scientists learn through apprenticeship in grad school laboratories.

Scientists have theorized, experimented, and debated their way to astounding breakthroughs, from the DNA double helix to quantum theory. But they did not arrive at these discoveries through competition and ranking, both of which are elemental to the business world. It’s a business, after all, that strives to be the top performer in its respective market. Scientists who adopt this mode of thinking betray their own lines of inquiry, and the practice has become upsettingly commonplace.

Here are five ways capitalist logic has sabotaged the scientific community.

1. Impact Factor

Scientists strive to publish in journals with the highest impact factor, or the mean number of citations received over the previous two years. Often these publications will collude to manipulate their numbers. Journal citations follow what is known as an 80/20 rule: in a given journal, 80 percent of citations come from 20 percent of the total articles published: this means an author’s work can appear in a high-impact journal without ever being cited. Ranking is so important in this process that impact factors are calculated to three decimal places. “In science,” the Canadian historian Yves Gingras writes in his book Bibliometrics and Research Evaluation, “there are very few natural phenomena that we can pretend to know with such exactitude. For instance, who wants to know that the temperature is 20.233 degrees Celsius?”

One might just as easily ask why we need to know that one journal’s impact factor is 2.222 while another’s is 2.220.

2. The H-Index

If ranking academic journals weren’t destructive enough, the h-index applies the same pseudoscience to individual researchers. Defined as the number of articles published by a scientist that obtained at least that number of citations each, the h-index of your favorite scientist can be found with a quick search in Google Scholar. The h-index, Gingras notes in Bibliometrics, “is neither a measure of quantity (output) nor quality of impact; rather, it is a composite of them. It combines arbitrarily the number of articles published with the number of citations they received.”

Its value also never decreases. A researcher who has published three papers that have been cited 60 times each has an h-index of three, whereas a researcher who has published nine papers that have been cited nine times each has an h-index of nine. Is the researcher with an h-index of nine three times a better researcher than their counterpart when the former has been cited 81 times and the latter has been cited 180 times? Gingras concludes: “It is certainly surprising to see scientists, who are supposed to have some mathematical training, lose all critical sense in the face of such a simplistic figure.”

3. Altmetrics

An alternative to Impact Factors and h-indexes is called “alt-metrics,” which seeks to measure an article’s reach by its social media impressions and the number of times it’s been downloaded. But ranking based on likes and followers is no more scientific than the magical h-index. And of course, these platforms are designed to generate clicks rather than inform their users. It’s always important to remember that Twitter is not that important.

4. University Rankings

The U.S. network of universities is one of the engines of the world’s wealthiest country, created over generations through trillions of dollars of investment. Its graduates manage the most complex economies, investigate the most difficult problems, and invent the most advanced creations the planet has ever seen. And they have allowed their agendas to be manipulated by a little magazine called the US News and World Report, which ranks them according to an arcane formula.

In 1983, when it first began ranking colleges and universities, it did so based on opinion surveys of university presidents. Over time, its algorithm grew more complex, adding things like the h-index of researchers, Impact Factors for university journalism, grant money and donations. Cathy O’Neil of the blog mathbabe.org notes in her book Weapons of Math Destruction that, “if you look at this development from the perspective of a university president, it’s actually quite sad… here they were at the summit of their careers dedicating enormous energy toward boosting performance in fifteen areas defined by a group of journalists at a second-tier newsmagazine.”

Why have these incredibly powerful institutions abandoned critical thought in evaluating themselves?

5. Grades

The original sin from which all of the others flow could well be the casual way that scientists assign numerical grades and rankings to their students. To reiterate, only observation, experiment, analysis, and debate have produced our greatest scientific breakthroughs. Sadly, scientists have arrived at the conclusion that if a student’s value can be quantified, so too can journals and institutions. Education writer Alfie Kohn has compiled the most extensive case against grades. Above all, he notes, grades have “the tendency to promote achievement at the expense of learning.”

Only by recognizing that we are not bound to a market-based model can we begin to reverse these trends.

 

First published January 18, 2018 in AlterNet