My Edward S. Herman biography project

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I just published phase one of my biography project on Ed Herman.  I hope to finish the project this year, and then it is off to my long-overdue update of my big essay.  

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I found out in the past hour that Uncle Ed has died.  I literally got home from an all-nighter at the office to get this news.  I am grief-stricken at the moment.  As I am sure many of my readers suspected, my next step, after publishing a draft of his bio, was to do battle at Wikipedia.  Ed’s Wikipedia bio is truly execrable today, and this project came about when I remarked in my birthday greeting to Ed how terrible his Wikipedia bio was, and he asked me to rewrite it.  Being Ed, he was emphatic that I was under no obligation to, even though that Wikipedia bio was sickening to him.  But writing his bio was truly a labor of love.  I told Ed that I would get something good at Wikipedia this year, and that is still my plan.  

As with Brian, I would gladly do battle with the “editors” at Wikipedia on Ed’s behalf, and I can easily live with Brian’s Wikipedia bio as it stands today.  I hope that I will be able to put up something as lasting at Wikipedia for Ed, but I will always have the originals on my site, where Wikipedia’s “editors” can’t get at it.   

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I will be getting over Ed’s death for a while.  Ed had a good run, living to be 92.  If I have remotely as productive a writing life, it will have been an insanely good run.  Ed has been my role model on that score.  Ed and I only corresponded.  I had an idea that I might visit him after I finished my bio project on him, but that day will never come.  The bio project will include improving some Wikipedia articles related to Ed, and I will write an essay like I did about Brian.  But I obviously did not know Ed as well.  That said, we had a wonderful writing relationship over about twenty years, and we corresponded every year, sometimes multiple times.

I literally addressed him as “Uncle Ed” fairly often, and he even signed off an email or two as Uncle Ed.  He was delightful like that.  Ed was funny, which was part of my attraction to his work, but the quality of his work brought me to him.  What a giant.  In the past few years, I remarked on the huge shoes that he, Noam and Howard would leave to fill, and he replied, “They aren’t empty yet!”

As with Brian, when Ed asked me to do his Wikipedia bio, I think that he knew that the end was coming, even though he stressed in recent years that he was in relatively good health.  Ed brought me into his circle, I heard from some of them yesterday, and the theme was about what a wonderful man he was.

I published that biography draft one week before he passed, and after fixing a couple of typos, I am going to preserve that draft on my site.  My final bio will be beefed up a little, and maybe with some help from Ed’s pals.

I always thought that Ed was a better writer than Noam, but that is like comparing the virtues of Buddha and Jesus.  Ed had an article in Z Magazine literally every month until his 90s, so I read Ed’s work every month.  It was always the first thing that I read in each issue.  While Noam is one of history’s most prolific writers, as well as humanity’s most towering intellectual today, I read Ed’s work more often, partly because of Z Magazine.  Even though I have read Ed’s work since 1990, when I subscribed to Lies of our Times, the process of writing that bio draft was somewhat mind-boggling.  Last spring, when I began the project, I did not have his early Vietnam writings, so I immediately bought them and studied them, and then worked my way through his oeuvre.  I had already read most of it, but rereading older works and then studying his newer works over the past several months was an unforgettable experience.

Even though Ed said that his health was good, as I worked on his bio, I wondered if he would live to see it finished.  His public writing dropped off in his last months, and I heard from him only once since he asked me to do his bio.  I wondered if his health had slipped, and now I know.

When Ed passed, the angels were lined up ten deep, with trumpets.  I’ll meet him in the “flesh” on the other side, one day, after my earthly work is finished, and I hope that I have 30 more good years ahead of me.  Ed was crazily prolific, clear into his 90s, and is my inspiration.  

There is a lot more to write about Ed, and I will in the coming weeks and months.  

Best,

Wade

Edited November 15, 2017 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

 

Boy, have I been hearing from some heavy hitters about Ed since yesterday, and with offers to help on my bio project.  It brings tears to my eyes.  A giant has left us. 

 

Best,

 

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

The eulogies are coming in for Ed (1, 2, 3).  I am also hearing from some of his closest colleagues, and so far, nothing but praise for my bio draft and offers to help tackle Ed’s Wikipedia bio, as we will likely be fighting the hacks.  I have had my work at Wikipedia summarily erased by the “editors” before, several times, and had battles over Brian’s bio before it ended up in pretty good shape that I can live with.  This figures to be a bigger battle, but for Ed’s memory, it will be worth it.  I hope to have a Wikipedia bio up by year-end.  

Here is an interview with Ed that I gleaned off of the Internet.  Here are some videos (1, 2, 3, 4).  

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have put up my final “pre-death” bio draft on Ed, and will now begin work on my final big bio for him, and then it will be off to the Wikipedia version, then doing battle with the “editors.”  We will see if I can get it all done this year.  I have been in contact with a bunch of Ed’s pals, and our interactions are bringing up memories of Ed.  Here are a couple.  These will also make it into an essay that I will write about Ed, kind of like I did for Brian.  

I can’t overemphasize the scholarly learning experience that I got at the knees of Noam, Howard, and Ed.  While Noam and Howard were among my most gracious correspondents ever, Ed was the only one of that trio that I kept in contact with.  Interacting with Ed could be very educational, and one anecdote came to mind yesterday.  If you look at the list of Ed’s books, it is obvious how collaborative he was, and several of the people that I heard from since Ed’s death were his collaborators, and they all remarked on what a wonderful collaborator and man Ed was.  

One collaborator was Christopher Black, and they wrote an article together on Louise Arbour, which made the compelling case that she was really a war criminal, not somebody who should be a prosecutor in war crimes tribunals.  I’ll use that article in Ed’s bio, and while rereading that article yesterday (I read all of Ed’s Z Magazine articles for 25 years, and they were the first thing that I read in each issue for as long as I can remember), it took me back to the 1990s, when Ed was helping to educate me, and not just with his prodigious published output.  I began the full-time work that led to my 2002 site in 1997, and sometimes wrote letters to the editor, such as this one that predicted something like 9/11.

I donated to Amnesty International in those days, and I began getting pleas from them to ask the authorities to deliver Milosevic to The Hague.  The Hague’s war crimes tribunal was obviously a kangaroo court from the outset, and I still had a bit of naïveté to shed.  I was shocked when I got those pleas from Amnesty International, and I asked Ed about it.  He agreed that it was scandalous, and wrote that he only donated to local human rights groups anymore, and he mentioned one in the Balkans, if I recall correctly.  I never donated to Amnesty International again.  In 2002, Ed wrote a couple of articles in Z that exposed Human Rights Watch as an imperial tool (here is a later article).  I asked him if he was going to follow it with one on Amnesty International, and he said that he was not planning to, as Amnesty was not as bad as Human Rights Watch.  I was tickled when I read Ed and David give it to Amnesty in Enduring Lies (p. 67) more than a decade later, and he wrote an article in Z little more than a year later that repeated it.  

The next anecdote is kind of funny.  People have been attacking or promoting my work for more than 20 years, and back around 2001, a woman began promoting my work. She was one of those New Agey Beverly Hills housewives, and our relationship did not last that long, maybe a year or two, but as the drums began beating for the Iraq invasion, which I wrote plenty about, desperately (and that letter was written exactly 15 years before Ed died, as I just realized), I got that woman in contact with Ed.  

I can’t overemphasize what a wonderful correspondent Ed was.  He was so friendly, honest, and insightful that almost anybody who interacted with him wanted more (until they got one of their oxen gored, which has been the case with me, too, over the years), and so it went with that woman activist.  Actually, it got “worse”: she got the hots for him!  It was kind of embarrassing, not only because Ed was a devoted husband and about 75 years old at the time.  I was not trying to play matchmaker, but it is easy to see how a woman like that could fall for Ed, even just through correspondence.  I never heard how that “romance” ended, but I am sure that Ed was able to end it amicably.  Oh, the hazards of being Ed!   

Best,

Wade

Edited November 17, 2017 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Ed’s pals helped get a decent obituary in Washington Post, which Ed’s last article lambasted.  That obituary was far better than the black eulogies that the mainstream published when Howard Zinn died.  I traded email with Ed when Howard died, and Ed called Howard an “awfully good man.”  The New York Times, which Ed spent much of his media analysis career studying, had a perfunctory obit that made the rounds in the mainstream.  All in all, not bad.  Here is another eulogy from one of Ed’s pals.

I have a lot more to write on Ed.  The subject of structural analysis versus conspiracy theories is near and dear to my heart, and is a highly controversial issue amongst the Left.  As Uncle Mike stated, many in the Left have a “conspiracy-phobia,” but Ed was not one of them.  In his Doublespeak Dictionary, Ed defined a Magic Bullet as:

“One that wends its way through several bodies, smashing bones on the way, but ends up in pristine condition, conveniently located for police attribution to the gun of choice.”  

In his Doublespeak Dictionary, Ed defined a Conspiracy Theory as:

“A critique or explanation that I find offensive.”  

Ed’s deep structural analysis was invaluable, which informed his advice on reforming the media.  He cautioned media activists from thinking that a few clever laws were going to do the trick, not with the deep structural constraints on the media that he and Noam examined.  

Ed read my account of Gary’s conversation with John Tower three weeks after the JFK hit and was intrigued, and even leaving that conversation aside, which I consider incontrovertible fact, the Magic Bullet is indeed arguably the key piece of evidence that shows what a sham the Warren Commission was.  Ed and Noam did not always sing the same song, such as Noam’s Rethinking Camelot, which challenged the idea that the CIA had any motivation to kill JFK (it certainly did, IMO).  Ed mixed it up with the “Left” often, such as his fisticuffs with the “Cruise Missile Left,” which was behavior that Noam would not engage in, as it tended to “divide the Left,” which Noam thinks that “conspiracy theories” also do.  That is a big subject that I won’t get into today, but I wanted to show that Ed was not a typical leftist.  

Ed reviewed my site long ago and said that I did it how he wanted to do it, organizationally, to put his work all under one roof.  Ed’s work is scattered far and wide, and his output dwarfed mine.  He would have needed a full-time assistant to put all of his work under one roof.  Ed was a man of his generation, and writing books and articles for publication in print was his style, and that was fine.  The stacks of his books next to my desk right now comprise a gold mine of insightful analysis, but Ed also took advantage of the Internet, and many of his later works were primarily or exclusively available online.  It is beyond my means to do it, but a very worthy project would be to put all of his work online on one site.  But it would be a monstrous task.  I may host some of his work on my site as it disappears off of the Internet, as a book on Srebrenica already has from its original site, but has been preserved here for now.

For my big essay, I have been hosting documents that have disappeared from the Internet, which I used in my essay.  Even though it was once erased by one of Wikipedia’s “editors,” who I believe was somebody’s employee while defacing Brian’s Wikipedia bio, Brian’s doctoral thesis exists only on my site today, after NASA removed it from theirs, soon after I published Brian’s Wikipedia bio.  Coincidence?  I have experienced many such “coincidences” during my publishing career on the Internet.  I don’t lose any sleep over it, but I doubt that they were all “coincidental,” and I may host some of Ed’s work on my site one day, as it slowly disappears from the Internet.  So, I can see the virtue of books these days, although I have yet to locate Ed’s The Great Society Dictionary, which was a precursor to his Doublespeak Dictionary.  

Best,

Wade

Edited November 18, 2017 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Ed and I surprisingly had professional overlaps, too, and they were not insignificant.  I did not realize the extent of them until I worked on his bio.  Ed taught economics at Wharton (and was very good at it, as one of his pupils once told me), and I went to business school.  Ed taught at one of the top institutions on Earth, and I was a record-setting business school student, and I was led to business school in my first instance of otherworldly guidance.  When I began my auditing career, I worked on banks, some of the largest on Earth.  My idealism tried to make sense of my business school training in the real world.  It was not easy to see, and led to a funny event.  

I saw the Savings and Loan Scandal from the inside, before it became a scandal.  I was assigned to a very high exposure audit of one of the world’s largest savings and loans banks as it was going under, in what became one of the most famous and earliest events of the Savings and Loan Scandal.  I was still trying to figure out my profession, and what the partner who ran the job told me, a month into that engagement, helped me figure it out years later.  There was a fatal conflict of interest at the core of my profession: we were providing financial regulation, but the targets of our regulation paid our salaries.  It was like hiring the cops that “policed” you.  That practice turned public watchdogs into corporate lapdogs, and rendered my profession essentially worthless.  We only kept honest companies honest, and that conflict of interest exists today.  I am the only accountant that I know of who has ever publicly pointed it out.

Many years ago, I read Ed mention the conflict of interest in the auditing profession, and it was the only time that I ever saw it mentioned in any media, even though Ed worked on the fringes.  Ed and I never discussed it, but it was one of the many Twilight Zone moments of my journey when I began doing Ed’s bio, and learned that his early claim to fame was pointing out conflicts of interest at savings and loans!  

Ed and I were professional comrades-in-arms, pointing out how the emperor was stark naked, but that was not part of our relationship, strangely.  However, it did lead me to trying to wake Ed up to a bigger picture in economics, but Ed never went there.  I can sort through my emails with Ed and find when it was, but I think that it was about 15 years ago when I tried to get Ed to think about economics in energy terms. Ed admitted that he probably should undertake that task, but he never did.  Ed often pointed out the Chicago School’s bogus economic framework.  Very early on, as I tried to make sense of the world, economic theory bothered me.  I got plenty of it in school, but it seemed obsessed with prices and money.  I intuitively knew that it was missing important aspects of economic reality.  It did not seem to deal with the real world very well, especially after my first wild stint with Dennis.  There were no such things as free markets.  They were as mythical as unicorns, but economists and the media treated them as if they were real.  Economic theory was bedtime stories for adults.  

But it was not until I studied for my big essay that I was able to articulate what the problems of economic theory were.  Neoclassical economics, which is what economics of both the right and left are based on, is an invalid ideological framework that ignores the real world in favor of social theories of market equilibrium.  When I completed the 2002 version of my site, one of Bucky Fuller’s pupils called me a “comprehensivist,” and I did not know what he meant.  He had me read some of Bucky’s work, the lightbulb went on for me, and my work has been consciously comprehensive ever since.  I was a seat-of-the-britches comprehensivist but did not know it, and seeing Bucky present a comprehensivist perspective was the final step in crystallizing the paradigm that I had been groping toward for 20 years.  I long ago saw how greed and fear were cornerstones of economic and capitalistic theory, and I knew that there was something wrong with that, but it still took many years for me to describe just what the problem was.

Right after reading Bucky’s work, I was introduced to the Peak Oilers.  I saw the disdain that scientists had for economists, but I had yet to more fully understand the problems with economic theory, although I was getting there.  I began to see how economic theory was founded on an assumption of scarcity.  After interacting with the leading Peak Oil spokesman, who feigned interest in free energy technology, I was able to finally express what I had been seeing for many years: people were addicted to scarcity.  Another way of saying it was that people have made many adaptations to scarcity, and their adaptations are how they eat and survive.  Free energy and what comes with it will put an end to scarcity and usher in a super-epoch of abundance.  Nearly everybody reacts to the idea of free energy and abundance with denial and fear, which could take many guises.  What all of those reactions of denial and fear had in common was the understanding that free energy would end the world as they knew it, and they had dug out their niche of hell and were not about to budge.  Even if free energy could turn Earth into something resembling heaven, all that they could see was their niche disappearing.  

When I finally read a book on energy and economics, as I was writing my big essay, the last pieces finally fell into place for me, and I clearly saw the big picture of how off-base modern economic theory was.  But I had already been writing for years that all dominant ideologies on Earth are founded on the scarcity assumption, and how all will become obsolete in the super-epoch of abundance.  I gradually realized how we were swimming upstream against all dominant ideologies on Earth.  As I elucidated the Epochal framework of my big essay, which was years in the making, I gradually understood that nobody in world history saw the next Epoch before it happened.  They could not even imagine it.  Then it became very clear to me why people reacted to the idea of free energy and abundance like they did.  They will only begin to understand when they can experience it, not before.  It took a 40-year journey for me to come to that understanding, and I was not there yet when I tried to introduce Ed to Brian, back around the time of our NEM days.  

I tried it more than once with Ed, but he never took me up on it.  With Ed, you would get a polite silence.  I never even tried to tell Ed about my bizarre journey.  But Brian was an ex-astronaut, fellow Ivy League professor, advisor to presidential candidates, and explorer of the fringes.  Brian had some credentials.  But I was never able to interest Ed in interacting with Brian, to my lasting sadness.  That was a delicate area for me.  On one hand, he was Uncle Ed to me, and I had been learning at his scholarly knee for more than a decade.  On the other, free energy and abundance blows all of today’s economic theory out of the water.  Ed was a scientist of a scholar, and one of his hobbies was astronomy, and Brian was an astronomer to boot.  How could Ed pass this up?  Well, he surely had his hands very full with the work he was doing, and probably considered this free energy stuff to just be a distraction from his important work, and I could not blame him for seeing it that way.  However, the public arrival of free energy will be the biggest event in the human journey, by far.  Nothing else comes remotely close, as humanity will form a Type 1 civilization.  

So, after those attempts to interest Ed in energy and economics, and free energy and abundance, I stopped, and never brought it up again for the remaining 13 years of our relationship.  Ed was far from alone, however, and the last thing that I would ever do would be to get on Ed’s case.  I greatly respected what he had committed his life to, and worked with him inside of that framework.  It turned out that I never interested anybody in the so-called radical left in free energy.  Their ideology got in the way, as it does for nearly everybody, which is one more reason why I know that I seek needles in haystacks.  The rad left is hacking at branches, IMO, just like all of the other activists on Earth.  Rad lefties can have sophisticated reasons for denying free energy’s possibility and desirability, and I have called such deniers Level 3s.  In ways, they are the most frustrating level to deal with, with their “laws of physics” and “conspiracy theory” objections.  I long ago learned to relinquish judgment of the situation and just accept it.  If I could not get Ed interested, what chance did I have with any other lefties?  Progressives could be particularly obtuse on the subject.  Reshuffling the deck of scarcity, playing the exchange game, is not going to solve humanity’s problems, as we have our toes over the edge of the abyss.  As Uncle Bucky said, there are no political solutions to this problem.  Retail politics are meaningless, and sitting American presidents are puppets and know it.  JFK was the last president who thought that he could make a dent, and he was rudely disabused of that notion.  

But for what Ed had focused his efforts on, media analysis, he was best that I had seen or heard of.  So, I stayed within Ed’s framework in our relationship, and here I am, carrying his spears, even after he is gone.  I carried Mr. Mentor’s spears for many years, then Dennis’s, then Brian’s, and now Ed’s.  I also helped carry Ralph McGehee’s and even Gary’s.  Carrying their spears was among my life’s greatest honors and pleasures, but there is nobody left in my life to carry spears for, other than my wife and cats.  Carrying spears is in my blood, but I think that carrying Ed’s is going to be the last time that I do it for anybody.  It is time to get my task done, and I have devoted the rest of my life’s “spare” time to its pursuit.  

With this post, I am going to stop reminiscing about Ed and get on with the task of writing my final bio for him, making the Wikipedia version, publishing it, and doing battle with Wikipedia’s “editors.”  Part of me is not looking forward to it, but as with Brian, I am happy to do it for those giants among men.  I have also had offers of help from Ed’s pals, so this might go easier.  We’ll see how it goes.  

Best,

Wade

Edited November 19, 2017 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Well, I’m not quite done with Ed yet.  The New York Times (NYT) had an obituary that was its second on Ed.  The NYT’s first was perfunctory.  As the NYT was Ed’s favorite target, it could have been far more scathing.  

I think that Ed would have liked the NYT’s obit, as it illustrated his work quite well.  One part read:

“One case study, for example, asked why a single Polish priest murdered by the Communists was more newsworthy than another cleric killed by a Washington-sponsored Latin American dictator.”

Actually, it was why the Polish priest’s death was more than 100 times as newsworthy.  That obit deftly underplayed the magnitude.  

The next part of it stated:

“Manufacturing Consent was severely criticized as having soft-pedaled evidence of genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda and, during the Bosnia war, Srebrenica.”

That is actually wrong.  The conflicts in Rwanda and Bosnia had not yet happened when Manufacturing Consent was published in 1988.  In the second edition of Manufacturing Consent, published in 2002, only Serbia/Kosovo is mentioned in Yugoslavia, and only in comparing the disparity of how the media described the events as “genocide.”  Bosnia and Srebrenica were never mentioned in any edition of Manufacturing Consent, and neither was Rwanda.  Ed wrote about the events in Bosnia at length later, and again in the context of the media’s treatment of the events.  Ed was a media critic above all else.  

The next section of Ed’s NYT obituary is very misleading, too:

“Dr. Herman and Professor Chomsky argued that in assessing the killings they were seeking an accurate count rather than relying on unreliable reports by survivors.  In the civil wars in Rwanda and Bosnia, they said, the victors had exaggerated the toll to justify their rise to power and their pro-Western policies.”

“In the case of Cambodia, they said, the toll had been overstated by enemies of the brutal Khmer Rouge Communist regime, which, the authors wrote, had “dealt with fundamental problems rooted in the feudal past and exacerbated by the imperial system.”

“Among their critics was Professor Gitlin, who wrote in an email, “It’s crucial to their Manichaean view of the world that the suffering of the Cambodians is less important than their need to pin the damage done to Cambodia in the 1970s primarily on the American bombing that preceded the rise of the Khmer Rouge to power — bombing that was indeed heinous, ruinous, and did contribute to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, but that was only the prologue to the horrendous crimes that followed at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.”

Gitlin’s email treads very closely to the “genocide denial” charges that have always been falsely attributed to Ed and Noam.  The entire point of Ed’s and Noam’s writings on Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia was how the American media treated those events, not the objective truth about any of them.  Those were all nefarious genocides in Ed and Noam’s framework.  Ed would have pointed out that their work on Cambodia was explicitly about the American media’s treatment of it, particularly in contrast to the slaughters in Indonesia and East Timor, which were constructive and benign bloodbaths/genocides, which the American media either cheered or was silent on.  Regarding Rwanda, Ed wrote extensively about how the media had literally turned reality upside down.  Ed wrote for many years about the situation in Yugoslavia and how the media misrepresented the situation there.  

So, Ed would have likely congratulated NYT on performing its propaganda function by almost completely missing the point of his work.  Ed’s work was focused on the media, and the NYT in particular.  Any cursory reading of Ed’s and Noam’s work shows what it was about, but the NYT turned it on its head, as usual.  The NYT’s obituary was a fitting tribute to Ed, proving his point.  

That said, I saw black eulogies when Howard Zinn died, and it was nice seeing Jeff Cohen get the last word.  The obituary could have been worse.  

Best,

Wade

Edited November 22, 2017 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Thanks Krishna:

That UNESCO document is exactly the kind of document that the USA stopped funding back in the 1980s.  I devote a section of Ed’s bio draft to his analysis of the media treatment of the USA’s withdrawal from UNESCO.  

Yes, back to those imperial anomalies that you pointed out, illiteracy is relatively cheap to remedy, so you can have very poor nations with high literacy rates, and as the West has outsourced things such as programming and call centers, poor nations with high literacy rates are where they can end up.  As you know, India has been one of those places.  In my lifetime, India went from more than 80% illiterate to nearly 80% literate, and the most literate state in India is one of the poorest, Kerala, which Western progressives have long cited as a model of what even poor humans are capable of.  As long as people are not living under imperial oppression, improving human welfare is very feasible “on the cheap.”  The capitalists don’t like it, obviously.  

As I begin work on Ed’s bio, I have found myself reading Uncle Noam’s work (on Ed’s and his propaganda model, which I will write more about in Ed’s big bio), and a work that attempts to make a connection between Noam’s linguistics and political work.  

On a related note, The New York Times corrected the blatant “error” in Ed’s obituary a couple of days ago.  That obit, even with that “correction,” is largely a smear on Ed, so I am likely going to refer to it when I write Ed’s big bio in the coming weeks.  

Best,

Wade

Edited November 29, 2017 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

For the rest of the year, I will be working on Ed’s biography, in my “spare” time.  What I published the week before he died was only intended as a rough draft, and I expected that when Ed saw what I had done, I could collaborate with him to take it the rest of the way.  Ed was kind of an invisible man in his writings, even to the extent of often writing “this author” when referring to himself in his writings.  He rarely wrote in the first person, and biographical details were sparse in his writings.  I was hoping to get more from Ed after he saw my rough draft.  When I did not hear from him for months and he largely stopped publishing anything, I guessed that his health was poor, and I was sorrowfully right.  

So, I am going to slog on to the finish line without Ed’s input, but Ed looped me into his circle of pals in my last email from him, several have offered to help, and we will see how it goes.  

It looks like I might have found the source of the “correction” of Ed’s New York Times obit, as FAIR mounted a campaign to get it corrected.  FAIR made the same point that I did, that the “having soft-pedaled evidence of genocide” charge was fraudulent in of itself, never mind that they allegedly “soft-pedaled” evidence that did not yet exist, in the New York Times’s original obit.  Ed and Noam never remotely did that.  Instead, what they did was analyze the media’s performance on reporting bloody events that were very similar, with one key difference:  

“Was the crime perpetrated by us [the USA, client regimes, or allies] or them [official enemies of the USA]?”

Ed and Noam’s work was about exposing the media’s double-standards on reporting such events.  What Ed and Noam did do, as scientists, was seek the most reliable sources of information about such events and see how the media handled them.  Their focus was on the media’s treatment of the events, not the events themselves.  Pretty much without exception, in situations for which “we” committed the murders, if the media even covered the events, the victims were “unworthy,” even if they were American nuns, and actual American-sponsored genocides would receive complete silence in the American media while they happened, such as in East Timor.  Arguably even worse, if “we” did it, the perpetrators could often be lionized nearly to the point of sainthood, and Ed contrasted the “good genocidist” Suharto with the “bad genocidist” Pol Pot.  

If “they” committed the crimes, any rumor would do, and the more lurid, the better. The media treated “their” victims as saints, with even hagiographic coverage.  The media even plays up largely or wholly fictitious events, such as the “Racak Massacre” or Iraqi incubator story to justify bombing campaigns, and a massacre of 500 soldiers becomes “genocide” when “they” did it, while our outright genocide of several million people either passes in silence or, incredibly, becomes a heroic deed, a “constructive” genocide.  As another example, arguably humanity’s greatest mass murderer in the past generation is lionized in the West as a heroic figure.

Ed and Noam did a Q&A back in 2009 on how their propaganda model had aged since Manufacturing Consent was first published.  Their work is Orwell for the 21^st century, and I have been reading a bit of Noam’s work since Ed’s passing, from the Noam shelf of my library.  My Ed project has made my Ed shelf perhaps larger than my Noam shelf, if we leave out a quarter-century of Ed’s Z Magazine articles.

I am expecting one heck of a eulogy for Ed in the next Z Magazine, and this was a wonderful remembrance from one of his friends.  The best mainstream obituary on Ed that I have seen so far naturally did not come from the American media, but British, as the British media did not get its ox gored as badly by Ed over the years, and The Independent is where Robert Fisk works.  

Best,

Wade

Edited December 4, 2017 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

It took a few weeks, but I finally received a book with an interview of Ed, and read it last night, along with an interview with Noam in the same volume.  That interview is where some of the quotes in Ed’s obits came from, such as this one.  While Noam seems to give interviews weekly, not so with Ed.  He only gave a handful that I am aware of, and I think that Ed was OK with that, as he wanted his work to speak for itself, and it was never about him.  It was about our world and how to make it better.  That said, Ed was a man of his Epoch, and his work revolved around the Fourth Epoch’s politics and economics, or, at least, the retail versions of them.  No Godzilla and free energy on his radar.  My work was a little too radical for him.  In fact, I have had to coin a new term for my work, which is “Epochal.”  The so-called radicals are not really very radical, operating within the confines of their Epoch, unable to imagine anything beyond it, as all peoples have always done.  I am not picking on them.  Noam and Ed are examples of what high-integrity scientists and scholars have been like in the Fourth Epoch, if a little blinkered by the paradigms of their Epoch.  

Now, I will spend the rest of my year’s “spare” time working on Ed’s big bio, fielding feedback from his pals, and then making the abridged Wikipedia version.  Next year will be working on my essay update, which is way overdue because I resumed my career and my “spare” time is very limited.  I am going on all cylinders and then some, and I don’t see any daylight for another decade, if I am lucky, and then it will be time for my dotage.   

So, I expect that my forum postings will slow down next year, as they did at times this year, as something has to give.  

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have been working on Uncle Ed’s big biography lately, and plan to be relatively quiet until I get it done.  I want to get my Ed project done this month, including getting a Wikipedia bio published, and then it will be off to battle the hack “editors” at Wikipedia.  I have been doing my homework, and Ed wrote about the numerous attacks on Noam over Cambodia and the Faurisson Affair in this book, but it costs over $1,000 today, so I’ll have to do without it.  But Ed talked and wrote about the issues enough elsewhere, so I can get my task done well enough.  The next steps will have to be taken by a professional biographer.  Some of Ed’s pals have offered to help, and we will see how it goes.  

I’ll leave you with a morsel from my account of Ed’s academic career, which I drafted this morning as an overhaul of this section, as I make my way through his bio.  As I have written, Ed and I had some profound professional overlaps that I did not fully realize until recently.  The below further reflects those overlaps, and shows how Ed was far from a slouch in his profession.  

Academic career and writings

Herman’s post-doctoral career began at Penn State in 1954.  In 1958, he joined Wharton’s finance department to help perform studies of banks and corporate control mechanisms, which Wharton had contracted with various government agencies to study.  For the next 15 years, Herman participated in studies of various financial institutions.  Herman’s specialty was analyzing the power and control issues in those institutions.  

In 1962, Herman’s team, led by Wharton professor Irwin Friend, completed the first large-scale study of mutual funds, which was commissioned by the Securities and Exchange Commission and published by the United States Congress.  Wharton’s study became a landmark in the field, and one of its key findings was that:

“The main problems affecting mutual funds do not seem to relate to the size of the individual funds or companies…The more important current problems appear to be those which involve potential conflicts of interest between fund management and shareowners, the possible absence of arm’s-length bargaining between fund management and investment advisers.”

Among the Wharton study’s conclusions was that the performance of mutual fund advisers was no better than that achieved by randomly selecting securities.  In the study’s wake, one senator picked a portfolio by throwing darts at a list of stocks, which subsequently performed better than the average common stock mutual fund.  In a preview of his political writings and media analysis, Herman publicly defended the study from an attack by an interest-conflicted mutual-fund-related professional, which generally praised the study but challenged the motivation of its authors, including Herman’s.  

Wharton’s next major study was on savings and loan banks, for which Herman wrote the chapter on conflicts of interest.  When the study was published, the savings and loan industry called a press conference to specifically dispute Herman’s chapter, and Herman was particularly proud of receiving that denunciation.  Herman then studied bank trust departments and their conflicts of interest.

In 1981, Herman published Corporate Control, Corporate Power, which The Twentieth Century Fund sponsored.  It was partly an update of A.A. Berle, Jr. and Gardiner C. Means’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property.

In Corporate Control, Corporate Power, Herman analyzed the internal structure of American corporations, their influence over the American economy and polity, and the competing interests within corporations, which were primarily owners, lenders, and managers.  Herman wrote that corporate managers had prevailed in those power struggles, and that in 1981, management’s “triumph is virtually complete,” although managerial ascendance did not dim the overriding corporate goal of profit maximization.  The primary competing interests within corporations were united on that premise.

Herman wrote that expanding government influence in the 1960s and 1970s was resisted by the American business community and that “Big Government” was in the midst of attacks on it.  Herman concluded that American corporations were, on average, as immune to outside influence as they were at the turn of the 20^th century, as they operated with virtual autonomy, no matter their impact on American society, including environmental harm.  Herman wrote that government influence over corporations was “extremely modest,” and that efforts by public interest groups and citizens to make corporations more accountable to American society were “extremely feeble.”

Near his life’s end, Herman said that although he sometimes received anonymous and unhappy critiques from members of Wharton’s faculty, many at Wharton thought that his public political writings and media analyses were valuable, and he never had any professional repercussions at Wharton due to his activism or his political writings or media analyses.  Herman noted that because he was a “steadily producing professor according to the rules of the game, I was promoted and became a full professor during the Vietnam War years,” and that Wharton’s dean was friendly to Herman.

 

That is it for that section, and I’ll try to make a post or two this week, between stints of writing on Ed.  

Best,

Wade

Edited December 11, 2017 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Over the next week, I will largely put up sections of Ed’s bio that I am working on.  I previously mentioned that what I published last month was only intended as a rough draft, and the Manufacturing Consent chapter was intentionally short, because Wikipedia already had a fairly decent article on Ed and Noam’s propaganda model.  

I decided to beef up the Manufacturing Consent section to get it to a standalone standard in my bio, although I will likely truncate it in my Wikipedia bio, because of that propaganda model at Wikipedia.  What is pretty bizarre is that Ed was the primary author of the propaganda model, which is widely used by media analysts globally, while the Wikipedia article on Ed himself is borderline libelous.  

So, without further ado, here is my section on Ed and Noam’s first filter of their propaganda model, which is who owns the media.  I partly draw on my previous writings on the issue.  You can’t see my references in this post, but they will be available when I publish my final bio on Ed.  

Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model has the following “news filters” that determine the mass media’s news content in the United States.

Size, ownership, and profit orientation of the mass media

Herman and Chomsky cited the work of James Curran and Jean Seaton on the British working class press in the first half of the 19^th century.  British elites tried to destroy the working class press through punitive laws, which proved ineffective.  After the punitive laws were repealed, there was a brief renaissance of the working class press, but the last half of the 19^th century saw the “industrialization of the press,” and the working class press could not keep up with capitalist industrial practices.  In 1837, the cost of establishing a profitable national weekly newspaper was less than a thousand pounds and breakeven sales were a circulation of 6,200.  By 1867, the cost of establishing a new London daily was 50,000 pounds, and in the early 20^th century, the Sunday Express invested two million pounds to reach a breakeven circulation of 250,000.  By the end of the 19^th century, the British working class press was effectively defunct.  The United States never had anything resembling a working class press.

Herman and Chomsky analyzed the American media in the late-20^th century, particularly 24 of the largest media companies.  The authors cited Ben Bagdikian’s statistics that showed that the 29 largest media systems dispensed more than half of the newspapers, books, broadcasting, magazines, and movies in the United States.  Herman and Chomsky argued that perhaps more important was how those large media organizations provided the national and global news for local media organizations, which usually only provided original news on local events.  

Herman and Chomsky made the case that those large media conglomerates were all profit-seeking corporations that were owned and controlled by wealthy interests, and that any reporting contrary to the interests of the owners would be distorted by that conflict of interest.  In addition, large industrial corporations such as General Electric, which was also a huge military contractor at the time, diversified into owning media companies, which further concentrated the ownership of the media into a few rich hands and created greater conflicts of interest.

When Ben Bagdikian first published The Media Monopoly in 1983, he noted that 50 media organizations controlled more than half of the United States’s media content (which shrank to 29 companies in The Media Monopoly’s 1987 edition, which was cited in Manufacturing Consent).  Bagdikian observed that each edition of The Media Monopoly was dismissed by media figures as “alarmist,” but that by 2013, the number of media organizations controlling more than half of its output had shrunk to just five companies.  

A few years after Manufacturing Consent was published, the influence of media ownership became starkly evident during the first Gulf War.  General Electric (GE), through its subsidiary GE Aerospace, was one of the world’s largest military contractors in 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and GE had acquired NBC in 1986.  Before 1991, GE had been involved in several instances of censoring NBC’s reporting, such as removing a reference to GE in a Today Show segment on substandard products.  

During the United States’s Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991, GE’s technologies were part of nearly every weapons system deployed in that war.  NBC regularly dispensed with journalism in favor of cheerleading, such as calling Iraq’s Scud missile an “evil weapon” while describing an American missile as “accurate within a few feet” soon after admitting that such an “accurate” missile had just hit Iraqi homes.  

When the United States invaded Panama in 1989, the Pentagon’s spokesman was Pete Williams, whose prevarications on behalf of the Pentagon became legendary (such as his announcing 457 Iraqi deaths during Operation Desert Storm, when the real number was more like 100,000), and his performance during Operation Desert Storm earned him the appellation as commander of “Operation Desert Muzzle.”  Williams’s and the Pentagon’s lies were so influential to NBC anchor Tom Brokaw that he announced that the Patriot anti-missile system “put the Scud in its place.”  NBC’s glowing commentary failed to mention that the weapons it praised were built by its owner.  In 1993, NBC hired Williams as a news correspondent.  

GE’s influence led to a spectacular instance of censorship during 1991’s Gulf War.  Jon Alpert has won 15 Emmy awards and has twice been nominated for Academy Awards for his documentary efforts.  He was the first American journalist to bring back uncensored footage from Iraq in 1991, which depicted heavy civilization casualties.  The footage was presented to NBC, which had commissioned the effort, and although even Tom Brokaw wanted it aired, NBC president Michael Gartner not only killed the story but fired Alpert and ensured that he never worked for NBC again.  Alpert then took the footage to CBS, where CBS Evening News Executive Director Tom Bettag told Alpert that he and his footage would be on the air with CBS Evening News’s anchor Dan Rather the next evening.  However, Bettag was fired that night and Alpert’s footage never aired on an American news show.

It was not until 1997 that the American people heard about the truth of those highly praised weapons systems, when a General Accounting Office report was declassified, which detailed the exaggerations of effectiveness made by the Pentagon and weapons manufacturers regarding the American weapons used in Operation Desert Storm.

I’ll put up the other sections as I draft them.  

Best,

Wade

Edited December 13, 2017 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Here are two other sections on Ed and Noam’s propaganda model.  We’ll see if the cigarette vignette makes it into the final version.

The advertising license to do business

Herman and Chomsky wrote that the Liberal chancellor of the British Exchequer, Sir George Lewis, in the mid-19^th century observed that market forces would marginalize dissident opinion by promoting those newspapers “enjoying the preference of the advertising public.”  The authors noted that, indeed, the pressure of advertising weakened the working-class press, and that the subsidy of advertising and the affluent audiences that they target, as well as the “downscale” audience that is also attracted, gives media that cater to affluent audiences an economic edge that marginalizes and drives out media that don’t attract or rely on such advertising revenue.

Herman and Chomsky cited Curran’s work on the subject, which noted that in its last year of publication, the Daily Herald had nearly twice the circulation of The Times, Financial Times, and the Guardian combined, and was held in far higher regard by its readers, but because it was not integrated into establishment systems with their generous advertising revenue, it failed, along with other social-democratic newspapers in the 1960s, which contributed to the Labor party’s decline.  The authors wrote: “A mass movement without any major media support, and subject to a great deal of active press hostility, suffers a serious disability, and struggles against grave odds.”

Herman and Chomsky wrote how CBS took pride in informing its shareholders how it used a sophisticated approach to attract and retain affluent audiences.  Just as the 19^th century British press did, CBS was not seeking a wide-audience, but an affluent one that, in the 21^st century parlance of the Internet, can be “monetized.”  The authors noted that the advertisers, seeking those affluent audiences, exert great influence on media content.  Advertisers do not want to help fund unsettling media content, but prefer content that puts viewers in the “buying mood.”

Herman and Chomsky provided an example of advertiser clout when, in 1985, public-television station WNET lost its corporate funding from Gulf + Western when it aired a documentary titled “Hungry for Profit,” which depicted predatory corporate practices in the Third World.  Even before the documentary aired, WNET executives, who anticipated the negative corporate reaction, did their best to “sanitize” the show, but that effort did not prevent Gulf + Western’s pulling its funding while its CEO stated that the show was “virulently anti-business if not anti-American.”  The London Economist remarked on the situation that “Most people believe that WNET would not make the same mistake again.”

Advertisers can also gang up on publications that step out of line, an example of which was when Mother Jones ran a series of articles in 1980 that discussed the medical findings that smoking was a major cause of cancer and heart disease.  The tobacco companies pulled their ads en masse from Mother Jones, and that event helps explain that while Reader’s Digest had been campaigning for generations on the health hazards of smoking, no other mainstream publication dared to, including Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report.  Eight years after the Mother Jones incident, the world’s largest ad agency, Saatchi and Saatchi, lost its huge RJR Nabisco account when it produced an ad that announced Northwest Airline’s strict no-smoking rule on its flights.  RJR Nabisco sold the Winston and Camels cigarette brands.  Saatchi and Saatchi learned its lesson, and when it subsequently bought an ad agency that was preparing anti-smoking messages for the Minnesota Department of Health, Saatchi and Saatchi cancelled the deal with the health authorities rather than risk its $35 million fee for promoting Kool cigarettes.

The next year, U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop angrily denounced magazines and newspapers that were full of ads for cigarettes and refused to publish anything on the dangers of smoking.  The media collectively yawned and quickly consigned Koop’s diatribe to media oblivion.  Andrew Mills, TV Guide’s assistant managing editor, stated in an interview for Unreliable Sources, “I think it would be naïve to expect publications that take a lot of revenue from the tobacco industry to go after them vigorously.”  When Mills made that statement, every issue of TV Guide was filled with cigarette ads, and Mills never heard that TV Guide ever thought of publishing anything critical of cigarettes.

Some tobacco-ad-carrying publications went even further, as Playboy magazine ran an essay authored by an attorney that attacked proposals to limit cigarette ads, defended the rights of cigarette companies to promote cigarettes, and the essay specifically defended a Camels ad aimed at teenagers.  In that issue of Playboy was a two-page color Camels ad.

The media’s conflicts of interest with advertisers could reach surreal levels.  For a generation, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) ran tobacco ads.  It only stopped running them in 1954 when drug companies that advertised in JAMA, as well as physicians, complained.  Drug ads appeared next to cigarette ads in JAMA’s pages, those cigarette ads featured doctors promoting various brands, and the ads often made health claims that made cigarettes appear to be wonder drugs.  

The event that finally spurred JAMA to cease running cigarette ads was the final ad campaign for cigarettes in its pages, which began when JAMA’s former editor, Morris Fishbein, the face of American medicine for a generation, entered into a lucrative consulting arrangement with Lorillard, the maker of Kent cigarettes, to structure research that “proved” the superior properties of Kent’s new Micronite filter, which was made of asbestos.  The ad blitz that followed the Micronite filter “research” finally inspired the AMA to stop running cigarette ads and declare that its scientific meetings would ban cigarette exhibits (although the AMA’s headquarters had cigarette vending machines in its lobby until the 1980s).  Fishbein worked with Phillip Morris on a similar “research” campaign in the 1930s, for the diethylene glycol “moistener” in its cigarettes, which Phillip Morris’s representatives used for a publicity campaign that it took directly into doctor’s offices and onto JAMA’s pages.  It was not until 1950, the year after Fishbein was finally ousted as JAMA’s editor, in the aftermath of a scandal relating to his wiping out an alternative cancer treatment practitioner, that the first study of lung disease and smoking appeared in JAMA’s pages.  That study showed that 96.5% of lung cancer patients in St. Louis hospitals were smokers.

In the increasingly hostile environment for American cigarette companies during the 1980s, the Reagan administration successfully used the threat of trade sanctions to force Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand to open their markets to American tobacco companies.  The “free trade” rhetoric behind the Reagan administration’s offensive was reminiscent of the British Opium Wars against China.  The tobacco industries in those nations were moribund before the entry of the American tobacco companies, and their market was primarily comprised of adult men.  In the wake of the entry of American tobacco companies, with ad blitzes that specifically targeted women and children, smoking rates in those nations skyrocketed.  

That groveling before their advertisers was far from restricted to cigarette ads.  At Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report, they would give their advertisers advanced notice, including tobacco companies, if an article ran, including plane crashes and studies on alcoholism, that put their advertisers’ products in an unflattering light, so that the advertisers could move their ads accordingly.  Also, those publications would produce ad copy that looked like news, not an ad, to readers who were not careful to distinguish ads from “news.”

Herman and Chomsky concluded that the “buying mood” imperative of TV advertisers ensures that only bland, lightly entertaining content will be delivered to viewers, as the primary reason for advertising is to disseminate the “selling message.”

The sourcing of mass media news

Herman and Chomsky wrote that “The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interests.”  The authors noted that the media’s needs for a reliable stream of raw material for news, and the need of powerful institutions to shape society to their liking, form the basis of symbiotic arrangements between the media and governmental and corporate institutions, which steadily produce material that is increasingly published by news agencies virtually unaltered, turning the mass media into little more than a conduit of governmental and corporate propaganda.  The media dependency on those news sources can be extreme.  Herman and Chomsky wrote, “It is very difficult to call authorities on whom one depends for daily news liars, even if they tell whoppers.”  

Herman and Chomsky presented a survey of the American military that showed that the Pentagon produced 371 magazines in 1971, at a cost of $57 million, which was 16 times larger than the largest American publisher.  The authors wrote about Senator J.W Fulbright’s investigation of the U.S. Air Force in 1968 that yielded the findings that the Air Force had 1,305 full-time public relations employees, and that the resources that governmental and corporate institutions devoted to spreading their message are hundreds and even thousands of times greater than those of dissident organizations.  

Regarding the American government’s public relations efforts, Herman and Chomsky wrote:

“It should also be noted that in the case of the largesse of the Pentagon and the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy, the subsidy is at the taxpayer’s expense, so that, in effect, the citizenry pays to be propagandized in the interest of powerful groups such as military contractors and other sponsors of state terrorism.”

Herman and Chomsky wrote that in 1972, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urging them “to buy the top academic reputations in the country to add credibility to corporate studies and give business a stronger voice on campus.”  The authors noted that in the 1970s and early 1980s, that buy-an-expert trend began the era of “think tanks” that had the effect of “propagandizing the corporate viewpoint.”

Herman and Chomsky provided an analysis of such “experts” on terrorism and defense on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour for a one-year period in 1985-1986, on the subjects of the so-called Bulgarian Connection to the assassination attempt on John Paul II, the shooting down of the Korean airliner KAL 007, and terrorism, defense, and arms control.  The majority of guests on the show were current and former officials and conservative think tank “experts.”  

The year after Manufacturing Consent was published, the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) published a study of 40 months of Nightline shows, which confirmed Herman and Chomsky’s analysis of MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, in that the vast majority of American guests on the show were professionals, government officials, or corporate representatives.  Only five percent of the guests spoke on behalf of the public interest (peace, environmental, consumer advocates, and so on).  Nightline’s most frequent guests were Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig, both former U.S. Secretaries of State.

Nightline responded to FAIR’s survey and Ted Koppel, the host of Nightline, replied that FAIR’s survey merely reflected Nightline’s shows during the reign of the conservative Reagan administration.  FAIR’s director, Jeff Cohen, replied to Koppel’s defense with:

“This explanation could have been given uttered by a Soviet TV news programmer – pre-glasnost.  American television news is not supposed to be strictly a forum for representatives of the state.  FAIR does not criticize Nightline for inviting policy makers to appear on the show, but for its exclusion of forceful American critics of the policy.  Critics, and critical sources, are part of a news story.”  

In 1994, the authors of the study released by FAIR on Nightline, David Croteau and William Hoynes, published By Invitation Only: How the Media Limit Political Debate, which presented not only their Nightline research results, but also their analysis of the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and their results were similar to Herman and Chomsky’s.  Their study of several hundred Nightline episodes showed that of Nightline's guests, 82% were male, 89% were white, and 78% were government officials, professionals, and corporate representatives.  They also presented the same data taken from The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour.  Those numbers were even more skewed, at 87% male, 90% white, and 89% government officials, professionals, and corporate representatives.  

The media themselves also provided their own “experts,” such as Claire Sterling and John Barron, and another class of experts was remarked on by Herman and Chomsky, of “former radicals who have ‘come to see the light.’”  Those former “sinners,” whose work was formerly marginalized and ridiculed by the mass media, were suddenly catapulted into the bright lights and became revered “experts.”  The authors recalled how Soviet defectors during the McCarthy era vied with each other to provide the most lurid stories and warnings of a coming Soviet invasion.  Herman and Chomsky concluded that, “The steady flow of ex-radicals from marginality to media attention shows that we are witnessing a durable method of providing experts who will say what the establishment wants said.”  

Best,

Wade

Edited December 15, 2017 by Wade Frazier