Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Edward Herman was a professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His specialty was “banking and corporate power structure” (UPenn.edu), and it was this field of study that led to his theory of the “propaganda model.” He was a harsh critic of American foreign policy, especially its wars in Iraq and Vietnam. He and co-author Noam Chomsky also collaborated on The Political Economy of Human Rights and Counter-Revolutionary Violence (1979), a two-volume study of American foreign policy with a focus on the Vietnam War. Political economy is an interdisciplinary work that examines the real-world intersection of economics and public policy. Herman’s expertise in the field—as well as his skepticism of the media—gave him a unique understanding of the collaborative relationship between media and economic power, and the way that money and power intertwine. Herman was an unabashed progressive whose other writings included The Myth of the Liberal Media: An Edward Herman Reader, as well as numerous essays in the socialist magazine the Monthly Review. Herman died in 2017. 

Noam Chomsky was Institute Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 2017, when he joined the faculty of the University of Arizona.