Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [19]
The Boston Globe, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, editorializing on the death of Pol Pot on April 17, 1998, were uniformly indignant over his crimes and regretful at his escape from justice, but all avoided mentioning the long U.S. support of the criminal—as well as the U.S. contribution to the first phase of a “Decade of Genocide.”92 The Washington Post blacked out the inconvenient fifteen-year period of support of Pol Pot with this summary: “After the nightmare of Khmer Rouge rule and genocide, the United States and its allies pumped millions of dollars into Cambodia to help rebuild and to hold elections.”93
It is enlightening to compare the media’s treatment of Pol Pot and Indonesian leader Suharto, who was also in the news in 1998, as Indonesia suffered a financial crisis that—along with popular resistance to the dictatorship—eventually led to his ouster. Pol Pot was described in the editorials and news columns of April 1998 as “crazed,” a “killer,” “war criminal,” “mass murderer,” “blood-soaked,” and as having engineered a “reign of terror” and “genocide.” But in 1998 and 1999, and in earlier years as well, while Suharto was occasionally referred to as a “dictator” and running an “authoritarian” regime, he was never a “killer” or “mass murderer” or one responsible for “genocide.” The terminological double standard is maintained reliably throughout the mainstream media.94
Less obvious but equally interesting is the difference in willingness to identify the responsible parties for the killings of Pol Pot and Suharto. In the case of Pol Pot, there is no uncertainty or complexity: editorials and news articles uniformly make him and the Khmer Rouge leadership clearly and unambiguously responsible for all deaths in Cambodia during the period 1975–78. He was the “man who slaughtered two million” (USA Today), “the executioner” (Boston Globe) who “presided over the deaths” of his victims (Washington Post), “the man who drove Cambodia to ruin” (New York Times).
But in Suharto’s case, we move to an ambiguous responsibility, which means none at all: in the New York Times, for example, “a 1965 coup led to the massacres of hundreds of thousands of supposed communists” (editorial, Aug. 23, 1996), where we have no agent doing the killing; or “a wave of violence that took up to 500,000 lives and led Suharto to seize power from Sukarno in a military coup” (Seth Mydans, Aug. 7, 1996), where the massacre not only has no agent, but is falsely situated before the takeover of power by Suharto. In a later piece, Mydans states that “more than 500,000 Indonesians are estimated to have died in a purge of leftists in 1965, the year Mr. Suharto came to power” (April 8, 1997). Note the passive voice, never used in connection with Pol Pot, the word “purge” instead of “slaughter” or “massacre,” and the continued failure to identify the agent.
In the case of East Timor, also, the Times is uncertain about the source of the killing: “This is one of the world’s sadder places, where 100,000 to 200,000 people died from 1974 in a brutal civil war and the consequent invasion through combat, execution, disease and starvation . . .” (Steven Erlanger, Oct. 21, 1990). In addition to the lack of a clear agent, this sentence seriously misrepresents the facts—the civil war was short and left small numbers dead; and the invasion was not “consequent” to a brutal civil war, except in Indonesian propaganda.
Another important difference in the treatment of the “worthy” victims of Pol Pot and the “unworthy” victims of Suharto is in the willingness to explain away the killings. With Pol Pot, as we describe in chapter 7, the background of the first phase of the genocide was completely blacked out in the mainstream account—there is no qualification to Pol Pot’s responsibility as a killer because his forces had undergone terrible damage and sought vengeance for the crimes they had suffered; nor