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By Root 2704 0

have an “elected president” and would never permit elections unless compelled to do so by U.S. force. On December 1, 1987, the New York Times, in an editorial urging the administration not to betray Haitian Democrats by “shrugging off impoverished and anarchic Haiti as a hopeless case,” states that doing so “would undermine Washington’s protestations about the need for free elections in Nicaragua.” The wording is murky, and the remarks on Haiti characteristically ignore Washington’s support of the Duvalierists who made the elections a mockery, but it is clear that the Times accepts the Reagan line that free elections were not held in Nicaragua in 1984 and that the U.S. goal is to bring about free elections. This line is based on major falsifications, but in keeping with their propaganda function, the Times as well as the other major media find Big Brother’s portrayal of elections in Central America to be true, by hook or by crook.

As we stressed earlier, the media’s adherence to the state propaganda line is extremely functional. Just as the government of Guatemala could kill scores of thousands without major repercussion because the media recognized that these were “unworthy” victims, so today aid to state terrorists in El Salvador and Guatemala, and the funding of contra attacks on “soft targets” in Nicaragua, depend heavily on continued media recognition of “worth” and an appropriate legitimization and delegitimization. As their government sponsors terror in all three states (as well as in Honduras), we may fairly say that the U.S. mass media, despite their righteous self-image as opponents of something called terrorism, serve in fact as loyal agents of terrorism.

4

The KGB-Bulgarian Plot to Kill

the Pope: Free-Market

Disinformation as “News”

In the case of the Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Nicaraguan elections, the government was the moving force in providing the suitable frames of analysis and relevant facts, with the mass media’s role mainly that of channeling information and assuring that the government’s agenda was not seriously challenged. With the shooting of the pope, in May 1981, and the eventual charges of a KGB-Bulgarian plot, the mass media played a much larger role in originating the claims and in keeping the pot boiling from inception to conclusion of the case.1

In many ways, however, the process was similar. A dominant frame was eventually produced that interpreted the shooting of the pope in a manner especially helpful to then-current elite demands. A campaign quickly ensued in which the serviceable propaganda line was instilled in the public mind by repetition. Alternative frames were ignored, and sources inclined toward other ways of looking at the issue were excluded from the mass media. Facts were selected that fit the dominant frame; others were passed by even if they bore on the validity of its premises.2 At the same time, the dominant sources, who had been allowed to monopolize mass-media space, complained bitterly that their voices could not be heard over the din of Soviet propaganda. When the legal proceeding brought against the Bulgarians in Italy was lost after a lengthy trial, this was rationalized by the media as far as could be done. No serious retrospectives were entertained, and, without resolving the contradictions, the story was then dropped.

What makes the Bulgarian Connection so apt an illustration of the value of a propaganda model is that there was no credible case for a Bulgarian Connection from the very beginning, and long before the Rome trial it had taken on a truly comic aspect. But the mass media played it straight to the bitter end. An analogous sequence carried out in Moscow, with the West as the target—with a half-crazed criminal, after seventeen months in a Soviet prison and some friendly sessions with the KGB and a prosecutor, implicating employees of the American embassy in a conspiracy to murder, and subsequently changing his testimony on a daily basis—would have been hooted off the stage in the West without anyone even bothering to look at alleged evidence.