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By Root 2758 0

media have followed a government agenda in treating elections in client and disfavored states. In El Salvador in the 1980s, the U.S. government sponsored several elections to demonstrate to the U.S. public that our intervention there was approved by the local population; whereas when Nicaragua held an election in 1984, the Reagan administration tried to discredit it to prevent legitimation of a government the administration was trying to overthrow. The mainstream media cooperated, finding the Salvadoran election a “step toward democracy” and the Nicaraguan election a “sham,” despite the fact that electoral conditions were far more compatible with an honest election in Nicaragua than in El Salvador. We demonstrate that the media applied a remarkable dual standard to the two elections in accord with the government’s propaganda needs.

This same bias is apparent in the press treatment of more recent elections in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Kenya, Mexico, Russia, Turkey, and Uruguay. Cambodia and Yugoslavia were the only two of these seven ruled by a party strongly objectionable to U.S. policy-makers, and it is in these cases that the New York Times warned of serious problems: As regards Cambodia, it asserted that “flawed elections are worse than none,” and that “the international community must proceed cautiously, lest a rigged election give Mr. Hun Sen a veneer of legitimacy.”42 In reporting on the Yugoslavian election of September 2000, in which U.S. officials intervened openly to prevent the re-election of Slobodan Milosevic, the Times and media in general repeatedly warned of the possibility of fraud and a rigged election.43 In the case of Kenya, where U.S. policy toward the ruling government was ambivalent, here also the Times was skeptical of election quality, noting that “holding elections is not enough to assure democratic government” and stressing the need for “an independent electoral commission less bound to political parties” and “independent broadcast media, allowing opposition voices to be heard outside election periods.”44

But in the other four elections, organized and won by governments strongly favored by the U.S. State Department, there were no suggestions that “flawed elections are worse than none” and no featuring of the threat of fraud; the importance of an independent electoral commission and broadcast media was not pressed, and in each case the election was found to be a step toward democracy and hence legitimizing.

In the case of Mexico, long subject to one party (PRI) rule, but supported by the U.S. government over the past several decades, the Times has regularly found the Mexican elections encouraging, in contrast with past fraudulent ones which, at the time, the editors also contrasted favorably with those in the more distant past! It has featured expressions of benevolent intent and downplayed structural defects and abuses. Thus, in its first editorial on the 1988 election that brought Carlos Salinas de Gortari to power, the Times noted that prior elections were corrupt (the PRI “manipulated patronage, the news media and the ballot box”), but it stressed that PRI candidate Salinas “contends” that political reform is urgent and “calls for clean elections.”45 The editors questioned whether “his party” will “heed his pleas,” a process of distancing the favored candidate from responsibility for any abuses to come. In the editorials that followed, the Times did not suggest possible ongoing electoral fraud, “manipulated patronage,” or media controls and bias, although this election was famous for a convenient “computer breakdown” in the election aftermath, which turned Carlos Salinas from an expected loser into a winner. Just three years later, however, at the time of the 1991 election, the editors stated that “as long as anyone can remember, Mexican elections have been massively fraudulent” as it prepared readers for new promises of a cleanup.46 But all through this period and later, the Times (and its media rivals) did not focus on fraud or call these elections rigged; in both news stories and editorials