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shown in table 2–2, there were at least four other Times articles that repeated such information, and similar detail was given in Time and Newsweek and on CBS News. To give a sample of one of many in Time, an article entitled “Grim Tale: Details of a Martyr’s Death” (Nov. 19, 1984), reads as follows: “Church officials who viewed the martyred priest’s body reported that he had been savagely beaten. A rope had been tied around his neck, wrists and ankles so that he would strangle himself if he struggled to get free. Three fingers of Popieluszko’s left hand were sliced through to the bone, and there were deep gouges on his arms. His lungs contained enough water to indicate that he was still breathing, even if unconscious, when he was tossed, bound hand and foot, into a reservoir.” Time repeats these details and others with obvious relish at every opportunity. As we will see, Time is less lavish in details on unworthy victims.

7. Time’s account entitled “Memories of Father Jerzy” (Nov. 12, 1984) has no counterpart in the articles on the deaths of the unworthy victims discussed below.

8. “A Polish General is Tied to Death of Warsaw Priest,” November 3, 1984; “Pole in Killing Tells of Hints of Top-Level Backup,” January 9, 1985; “Pole on Trial Names 2 Generals,” January 5, 1985; “Second Abductor of Polish Priest Says Order Came ‘From the Top,’” January 3, 1985.

9. See chapter 4, below.

10. On May 6, 1986, Laura Pinto, a member of the Salvadoran “Mothers of the Disappeared,” was picked up by three armed men, beaten, raped, and left on the street. On May 29 she was again abducted and tortured, and shortly thereafter twelve members of her group were detained by the police. The British New Statesman expressed surprise that this kind of terror could take place, given the fact that Laura Pinto had previously traveled to Europe and made Western Europeans aware of her existence (Jane Dibblin, “El Salvador’s Death Squads Defy European Opinion,” June 13, 1986). Western Europeans did, in fact, protest these abuses. What made this terror feasible, however, was the fact that the power directly involved in El Salvador, the United States, has media well attuned to state policy. The two assaults on Laura Pinto and the detention of the twelve members of the Mothers were totally suppressed by the New York Times and its confreres. There was not a word in the quality papers when a member of the “Mothers of the Disappeared” who had herself been a victim of the atrocities of Duarte’s security forces was denied entry to the United States in March 1987, to visit several small towns where she had been invited to speak on the occasion of International Women’s Day. See Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism (Boston: South End Press, 1988). The attention that the Times mentions as a constraint on Polish violence was not available to protect an unworthy victim.

11. For a review of Times editorials on El Salvador in the 1980s, exculpating the state terrorists throughout, see Noam Chomsky, “U.S. Polity and Society,” in Thomas Walker, ed., Reagan versus the Sandinistas (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1987), pp. 295–96.

12. The press may also have been constrained by the fact that reporters who dig deeply and provide accounts unfavorable to the military regimes in Latin America may be barred from the country, or even murdered. Western reporters are very rarely physically threatened—let alone murdered—in Poland, the Soviet Union, Cuba, or Nicaragua. They are often threatened and sometimes murdered in El Salvador, Guatemala, and other U.S. clients in Latin America. This irony is not commented upon in the free press, nor are the effects of this potential and actual violence against dissident reporters on the possibilities of honest reporting. This point is discussed further in chapter 3, pp. 90–92.

13. Penny Lernoux, Cry of the People (New York: Doubleday, 1980), p. 73.

14. James R. Brockman, The Word Remains: A Life of Oscar Romero (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1982), p. 11.

15. We discuss this link later in this section.

16. Carter sent former New York mayor Robert