Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [268]
CHAPTER 3: LEGITIMIZING VERSUS MEANINGLESS THIRD WORLD ELECTIONS
1. 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), passim.
2. In the case of the Salvadoran elections of 1982 and 1984, the government relied on the media to play down not only this plan, but also the fact that the rebels were driven into rebellion by decades of refusal of the army to allow any democratic option, and that the rebels could not have participated in the election anyway because they would run heavy risks of being murdered—the five leaders of the political opposition in El Salvador were tortured, murdered, and mutilated in San Salvador in November 1980.
3. As we pointed out in chapter I, the government and other power groups try to monopolize media attention not only by flooding the media with their own propaganda, but also by providing authentic and reliable “experts” to validate this propaganda.
4. For a model illustration of observer bias and foolishness, see appendix 1 on the findings of a U.S. official-observer team at the Guatemalan election of July 1, 1984.
5. “The observer delegation’s mission was a simple one: to assess the fairness, honesty and propriety of the voting, the counting of ballots and the reporting of final results in the Salvadoran elections” (Senator Nancy Kassenbaum, Report of the U.S. Official Observer Mission to the El Salvador Constituent Assembly Elections of March 28, 1982, Report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 97th Cong., 2d sess., p. 2. This agenda does not include consideration of any of the basic framework conditions—like free speech and the absence of state terror—that determine in advance whether an election can be meaningful. See the text below.
6. The New York Times even allowed the right-wing Freedom House observers to dominate its reports on the election staged by Ian Smith in Rhodesia in 1979 (articles of April 22 and May 11, 1979). Although a brutal civil war raged and the rebel black groups were off the ballot, Freedom House found the election fair. In a rerun held a year later under British government auspices, the black candidate sponsored by Ian Smith who had received 65 percent in the “fair” election got only 8 percent of the vote, whereas the previously excluded black rebels received a commanding majority. Freedom House found the second election doubtful! See Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, appendix 1, “Freedom House Observers in Zimbabwe Rhodesia and El Salvador.”
7. Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 71–72.
8. Philip Taubman, “Shultz Criticizes Nicaragua Delay,” New York Times, February 6, 1984; Security and Development Assistance, Hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 98th Cong., 2d sess., February 22, 1984, p. 83.
9. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet, 1950), p. 163.
10. “The Electoral Process in Nicaragua: Domestic and International Influences,” Report of the LASA Delegation to Observe the Nicaraguan General Election of November 4, 1984, Latin American Studies Association (Nov. 19, 1984), p. 32 (hereafter, LASA, Report).
11. The U.S. media quite properly condemned in advance the January 1947 elections held in Poland, under Soviet control and with security forces omnipresent in the country, although not killing on anywhere near the scale seen in El Salvador and Guatemala, 1979–87. See Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 173–80.
12. LASA, Report, p. 5.
13. Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example? (Oxford: Oxfam, 1986), p. 14. Oxfam’s U.S. affiliate also has warm words for the Sandinista effort, stating that
Among the four countries in the region where Oxfam works [Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua], only in Nicaragua has a substantial effort been made to address inequities in land ownership and to extend health, educational, and agricultural services to poor peasant families. (Oxfam America