Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [12]
But the mainstream media accepted this story with astonishing gullibility—the possibility of coaching and pressure on Agca to name the KGB and Bulgarians, much discussed in the Italian media, was almost never mentioned as even a theoretical possibility. And the weakness of the alleged Soviet motive, the sheer stupidity of the enterprise if Soviet-based, and the complete lack of confirmatory evidence was almost entirely ignored by the media (as described in chapter 4). When the case was lost in an Italian court in 1986, despite a substantial Italian government investment and effort, for the U.S. mainstream media this merely reflected the peculiarities of the Italian system of justice; the continued absence of hard evidence led to no reassessment of the case or reflections on their own role.
In the years that followed, two developments threw some light on the case. One is that the Soviet and Bulgarian archives were opened up, and Allen Weinstein of the Center for Democracy gained permission from Bulgarian authorities in 1991 for members of his investigative commission to look at the Bulgarian Interior Ministry’s secret service files. After a stint in Bulgaria, Weinstein returned home having failed to locate any confirmatory evidence of Bulgarian or KGB involvement. The Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and Time, each of which had reported Weinstein’s initiative and impending trip to Bulgaria in 1991, all failed to inform their readers of his negative findings.55
Later in 1991, at Senate hearings on the confirmation of Robert Gates as head of the CIA, former CIA officers Melvin Goodman and Harold Ford testified that the CIA’s analysis of the Bulgarian Connection had been seriously compromised and politicized in support of the Reagan era anti-Soviet propaganda campaign. Goodman testified that not only had the CIA found no evidence of Soviet or Bulgarian involvement in the shooting, but that based on the CIA’s “very good penetration of the Bulgarian secret services” its professionals had concluded that a Bulgarian Connection did not exist.56
This testimony, which was a brutal coup de grâce to the claims of a connection, put the media on the spot. It was now clear that in their enthusiastic support of the plot they had seriously misled their readers and performed badly as news purveyors and analysts, although serving well the propaganda needs of their government. But as in 1986, after the case against the Bulgarians was dismissed in an Italian court for insufficient evidence, none of them felt any obligation to explain their failures and apologize to their readers. They reported the CIA revelations tersely, with some still claiming that while the connection had not been proved it had not been disproved either (ignoring the frequent impossibility of proving a negative).57 But in general the mainstream media moved quickly on without reassessing their performance or the fact that they and their media colleagues had been agents of propaganda.
The New York Times, which had been consistently supportive of the connection in both news and editorials, not only failed to report Weinstein’s negative findings from the search of the Bulgarian files, it also excluded Goodman’s statement on the CIA’s penetration of the Bulgarian secret services from their excerpts from his testimony. The Times had long maintained that the CIA and the Reagan administration “recoiled from the devastating implication that Bulgaria’s agents were bound to have acted only on a signal from Moscow.”58 But Goodman’s and Ford’s testimony showed that this was the reverse of the truth, and that CIA heads William Casey and Robert Gates overrode the views of CIA