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By Root 2799 0

the major mass-media outlets and tried to interest them in doing a story on their report. LASA was turned down by every major outlet. The LASA report is probably the best-documented and most closely reasoned observer report ever written. Its authors are far and away the most qualified group ever to write such a report, half with field experience in Nicaragua, and the document was an official report of the major scholarly organization that deals with Central America. The authors represent a variety of opinions, on balance liberal but revealing a strong critical capability (and in no sense biased, as are the official observer teams to whom the media accord much attention). Their report covers every issue of importance and openly confronts and weighs evidence. If one reads the LASA report, and then the accounts of the Nicaraguan election in Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times, it is not so much the difference in conclusions that is striking but the difference in depth, balance, and objectivity. LASA offers serious history and context, a full account of the organization of the election, and a full discussion of each relevant issue with comparisons to other elections. We believe that an important reason the mass media failed to use LASA as a source of information was that its report contradicts in every way the propaganda claims which the media were disseminating daily and uncritically. Thus its very credibility, objectivity, and quality were disturbing, and necessitated that it be bypassed by institutions serving a propaganda function.

3.10. CONCLUDING NOTE

As we have seen, electoral conditions in Nicaragua in 1984 were far more favorable than in El Salvador and Guatemala, and the observer team of LASA found the election in Nicaragua to have been “a model of probity and fairness” by Latin American standards.111 In El Salvador and Guatemala, none of the five basic preconditions of a free election was met. In both of these countries, state-sponsored terror, including the public exposure of mutilated bodies, had ravaged the civilian population up to the very day of the elections. In both, voting was required by law, and the populace was obliged to have ID cards signed, testifying that they had voted. In both, the main rebel opposition was off the ballot by law, by credible threat of violence, and by plan. Nevertheless, in exact accord with the propaganda line of the state, the U.S. mass media found the large turnouts in these countries to be triumphs of democratic choice, the elections legitimizing, and “fledgling democracies” thus created. This was accomplished in large part by the media’s simply refusing to examine the basic conditions of a genuinely free election and their application to these client-state elections. Only for the Nicaraguan election did the media look at matters such as freedom of the press, and they did this with conspicuous dishonesty. Despite its superiority on every substantive count, the Nicaraguan election was found by the media to have been a sham and to have failed to legitimize.

Given the earlier similar performance of the mass media in the cases of the U.S.-sponsored elections in the Dominican Republic in 1966 and Vietnam in 1967, we offer the tentative generalization that the U.S. mass media will always find a Third World election sponsored by their own government a “step toward democracy,” and an election held in a country that their government is busily destabilizing a farce and a sham. This is, of course, what a propaganda model would predict, although the degree of subservience to state interests in the cases we have examined was extraordinary, given the absence of overt coercion. The “filters” yield a propaganda result that a totalitarian state would be hard put to surpass.

Having perpetrated a successful fraud in the interests of the state, the media proceeded, in subsequent years, to reinforce the imagery established by their deception. Guatemala and El Salvador were “new democracies” with “elected presidents.” Nicaragua, in contrast, is a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship that does not