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NA

24. Security force presence at voting stations

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* Based on a study of 21 news articles appearing between Sept. 5 and Nov. 6, 1984.

NA = Not Applicable

It can readily be seen in table 3–1 that in the Salvadoran election the Times’s news coverage dealt heavily with subjects above the line and neglected the basic conditions that make an election meaningful in advance. We can observe how the Times totally ignores the question of freedom of the press, organizational freedom, and limits on the ability of candidates to run.108 Table 3–2 shows how the Times treated the forthcoming Nicaraguan election in the same two-month period covered in table 3–1. It is evident that the paper focuses heavily on the fundamental conditions of a free election, i.e., on topics that it was entirely ignoring while addressing the Salvadoran election. Table 3–3 shows the breakdown of topics covered by the Times during the Nicaraguan election later in the year. Again, although the differences are less marked than the ones in tables 3–1 and 3–2, the substantial attention to basic conditions in the Nicaraguan case is clear, reflecting editorial news choices that follow a patriotic agenda. As the basic conditions for a free election were superior in Nicaragua and the coercive elements less acute, the emphasis on basic conditions only in the Nicaraguan case is even more clearly evidence of systematic bias.

3.8. THE MIG CRISIS STAGED DURING NICARAGUA’S ELECTION WEEK

As Newsweek pointed out on November 19, 1984, “The story of the freighter [to Nicaragua, allegedly carrying MIGs] first broke during the election-night coverage,” but at no point does Newsweek (or Time, the Times, or CBS News) suggest that the timing was deliberate. The Times, in its extensive coverage of the MIGs that weren’t there, at one point quotes a Nicaraguan official who suggests that the crisis was purely a public-relations operation, but that exhausts the Times’s exploration of this point. Although the MIGs weren’t there, and the timing was perfect for diverting attention from a successful election that the Reagan adminstration had been attempting to discredit, the elite media asked no questions, even in retrospect. The administration claimed that when the freighter was loaded, satellite observation was blocked so that the cargo was unknown. The mass media presented this as fact, making no effort to evaluate the claim.

What the media chose to focus on was administration assessments of what it might do if MIGs were in fact being delivered. This allowed the whole frame of discourse to shift to the assumption that the Nicaraguans had done something (and something intolerable, to boot). Newsweek, in a retrospective article entitled “The MIGs That Weren’t There,” had a lead head: “To bring in high-performance craft indicates that they are contemplating being a threat to their neighbors.” The fact that the MIGs weren’t brought in, as stated in the article’s very title—that this was a concoction of U.S. officials—doesn’t interfere with imputing an intention to the Nicaraguans based on a nonexistent fact. The assertion that they were contemplating being a threat, as opposed to defending themselves against a proxy invasion, is also a patriotic editorial judgment. Newsweek also says in the text that “All sides appeared to be playing a very clumsy and very dangerous game.” This is an intriguing form of evenhandedness. A person who, admittedly, had been falsely accused of robbery by an assailant is alleged to be “playing a dangerous game,” along with the attacker who is also the bearer of false witness.109

In the middle of an article on the Nicaraguan election, Time inserts the government claim that a ship carrying crates of the type used to transport MIG-21s was due at a Nicaraguan port. Time never questions a government propaganda ploy, no matter how blatant, and it offers a retrospective only when the government tacitly concedes it had deliberately deceived. Like Newsweek and the Times, Time allows the government to set the agenda with a public-relations statement: