Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [272]
79. A summary of this document was given in Enfoprensa News Agency, “Information on Guatemala,” June 22, 1984. This excellent weekly bulletin of news on Guatemala reports a continuing flow of seemingly newsworthy items—regrettably, however, on unworthy victims, and therefore not of interest to the mass media.
80. This statement, dated October 1985, is reproduced in IHRLG, Report.
81. The two stories that follow were discussed in Enfoprensa, “Information on Guatemala.”
82. “A New Chance in Guatemala,” December 12, 1985. The Times never found that the Sandinistas had “honored” a promise in 1984, but then neither did the Reagan administration. Nor did the editorial consider the meaning of the fact that the ruling generals had declared an amnesty—for themselves—before allowing the electoral “project” to proceed.
83. The Times’s editorial of December 12, 1985, congratulates Cerezo for pledging to “take charge without vengeance against the military for its murderous rule.” Translated from the propaganda format, this means Cerezo is too weak to promise minimal justice for terrible crimes, which raises serious doubts about whether he has any real power. The newspaper of record makes this exoneration of mass murderers a virtue, and pretends that it is just an act of mercy on Cerezo’s part! The Times also does not speculate on what would happen to President Cerezo if he chose to wreak “vengeance against the military,” or how exactly he might proceed with this mission under conditions of effective military rule.
84. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit (New York: Doubleday, 1982).
85. Of course, there was an even deeper hypocrisy in failing to call attention to the administration’s devotion to a free election in Nicaragua but not in Chile, Indonesia, Namibia, or South Korea, among many others, and its pretense that the elections in the terror states of El Salvador and Guatemala are free and have anything to do with democracy.
86. The New York Times had an article on the numerous observers in Nicaragua, but before the election (“Election Draws Many U.S. Observers,” Nov. 4, 1984). The thrust of the article was to suggest observer bias favorable to the Sandinistas, a subject the Times never addresses in regard to official observers. In later discussion of the elections, the 450 observers, including even the professional society of Latin American scholars, were entirely ignored by the Times. An excellent study by Lucinda Broadbent, “Nicaragua’s Elections: A Cruz Around the Issues; Comparative Analysis of Media Coverage of the 1984 Elections,” as yet unpublished, parallels our findings in detail, based on an analysis of a wide sample, including U.S. network TV and the British as well as U.S. press. Broadbent points out that in her sample, the opposition to the Nicaraguan government is given more than twice the space accorded the government, “an unusual priority for media usually so wedded to ‘official sources’ in whichever country they find themselves” (p. 77). Broadbent stresses, as we do, the domination of the Reaganite frame, even in Britain and in the liberal press, and the massive distortion of reality that resulted from this biased framing. She notes also that the media never addressed the programs of the contesting parties in Nicaragua, which allowed Reaganite clichés about Sandinista intentions and policies to prevail. The media portrayals were “roughly the opposite of what was witnessed by international observers of the election” (p. 99), which is why, in our view, these observers had to be ignored.
87. For further details, see Noam Chomsky, “Introduction,” in Morris Morley and James Petras, The Reagan Administration and Nicaragua, Institute for Media Analysis, Monograph 1 (New York: 1987), note 32, which also discusses the distortion of the Dutch observers’ report by Robert Leiken in the New York Review