Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [274]
105. Stephen Kinzer, “Ortega: Can He Be Trusted?” New York Times Magazine, January 10, 1988; Kinzer, “Ex-Contra Looks Back” New York Times, January 8, 1988. On the realities of the peace accords, and the media contribution to effacing them in serving the government’s agenda, see Chomsky, Culture of Terrorism, and articles updating the record in Z magazine (January 1988, March 1988).
106. There is also an elaborate media pretense that La Prensa is the journal that courageously opposed Somoza, and whose editor was a victim of this U.S.-backed gangster. But the media are surely well aware that the relation of the two journals is barely more than that of a shared name. The editor left in 1980, after a conflict with the owners, to form the new journal El Nuevo Diario, and was joined by 80 percent of the staff. It is this journal, if any, that can fairly claim to be the descendant of the old La Prensa (Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Washington Report on the Hemisphere, July 23, 1986).
107. The leading church opponent of the state in El Salvador, Archbishop Oscar Romero, was murdered, and his murderers have never been apprehended. In Nicaragua, the leading church opponent of the state, Cardinal Obando, continues to live and speak out without fear. This difference is never pointed out in the free press.
108. For a more detailed discussion of the Times’s articles on these subjects, see Edward S. Herman, “‘Objective’ News as Systematic Propaganda: The New York Times on the 1984 Salvadoran and Nicaraguan Elections,” Covert Action Information Bulletin 21 (Spring, 1984).
109. In a larger framework, too, Nicaragua is playing the dangerous game of trying to defend itself against external attack, resisting the demands of the godfather. The absurdity of the claim that Nicaragua would become a military “threat” to its neighbors with added MIGs, when the Reagan administration has been looking for an excuse to attack Nicaragua and would welcome any such Nicaraguan move as an opportunity to intervene directly, never strikes the U.S. mass media. The possibility that the administration wants to constrain Nicaraguan arms imports to reduce its capacity to defend itself against ongoing aggression against it also never arises for the press. Note that unlike guerrilla forces, the contras can survive only with regular airdrops, reaching the level of thirty to forty a month by mid-1987, and two or three times that amount after August, as the U.S. sought to undermine the Guatemala accords. Hence Nicaragua would have good reason to obtain vintage 1950s jet planes to defend itself from the U.S. proxy army.
110. For an account of the performance of U.S. official and semi-official observers in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, El Salvador, and Zimbabwe, see Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections. Appendix 1 provides a summary of the views of an official U.S. observer team to Guatemala in July 1984. All of these fully confirm the statement made in the text.
111. LASA, Report, p. 5.
CHAPTER 4: THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE
1. Some qualification is required by the fact that the three principal sources hired by and/or relied upon by the private media—Claire Sterling, Paul Henze, and Michael Ledeen—all had long-standing relations with the government, and that various Italian government organizations such as the intelligence agency SISMI played a role in the genesis and propagandizing of the charges, as described in the text below.
2. The limited exceptions to these generalizations will be noted below.
3. See further,