Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [259]
106. For an analysis of the bias of the Freedom House observers, see Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, Demonstration Elections: U.S.-Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador (Boston: South End Press, 1984), appendix 1, “Freedom House Observers in Zimbabwe Rhodesia and El Salvador.”
107. R. Bruce McColm, “El Salvador: Peaceful Revolution or Armed Struggle?” Perspectives on Freedom 1 (New York: Freedom House, 1982); James Nelson Goodsell, “Freedom House Labels U.S. Reports on Salvador Biased,” Christian Science Monitor, February 3, 1982.
108. For a discussion of Ledeen’s views on the media, see Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Connection, pp. 166–70.
109. Among the contributors to AIM have been the Reader’s Digest Association and the DeWitt Wallace Fund, Walter Annenberg, Sir James Goldsmith (owner of the French L’Express), and E. W. Scripps II, board chairman of a newspaper-television-radio system.
110. George Skelton, White House correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, noted that in refernce to Reagan’s errors of fact, “You write the stories once, twice, and you get a lot of mail saying, ‘You’re picking on the guy, you guys in the press make mistakes too.’ And editors respond to that, so after a while the stories don’t run anymore. We ’re intimidated” (quoted in Hertsgaard, “How Reagan Seduced Us”).
111. Piero Gleijeses, The Dominican Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 95–99.
112. Jan K. Black, United States Penetration of Brazil (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), pp. 39–56.
113. See above, pp. 23–24; below, pp. 147–150.
114. “The Stalinists of Anti-Communism,” in Ralph Miliband, John Saville, and Marcel Liebman, Socialist Register, 1984: The Uses of Anticommunism (London: Merlin Press, 1984), p. 337.
115. Daix, in 1949, referred to the Stalin concentration camps as “one of the Soviet Union’s most glorious achievements,” displaying “the complete suppression of man’s exploitation of man” (quoted in Miliband et al., Socialist Register, p. 337). Kriegel, formerly a hard-line Communist party functionary, was the author of a 1982 book explaining that the KGB organized the Sabra-Shatila massacres, employing German terrorists associated with the PLO and with the tacit cooperation of the CIA, in order to defame Israel as part of the Soviet program of international terrorism. For more on this profound study, and its influence, see Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle (Boston: South End Press, 1983), pp. 291–92, 374–75.
116. Socialist Register, p. 345.
117. Where dissidents are prepared to denounce official enemies, of course, they can pass through the mass-media filtering system, in the manner of the ex-Communist experts described in “Anticommunism as a Control Mechanism” (p. 27).
118. See chapter 2, “Worthy and Unworthy Victims.” Of interest in the Turkish case is the Western press’s refusal to publicize the Turkish government’s attacks on the press, including the U.S. press’s own reporters in that country. UPI’s reporter Ismet Imset, beaten up by the Turkish police and imprisoned under trumped-up charges, was warned by UPI not to publicize the charges against him, and UPI eventually fired him for criticizing their badly compromised handling of his case. See Chris Christiansen, “Keeping In With The Generals,” New Statesman, January 4, 1985.
119. We believe that the same dichotomization applies in the domestic sphere. For example, both British and American analysts have noted the periodic intense focus on—and indignation over—“welfare chiselers” by the mass media, and the parallel deemphasis of and benign attitudes toward the far more important fraud and tax abuses of business and the affluent. There is also a deep-seated reluctance on the part of the mass media to examine