Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [51]
Table 2–1 shows, on row 1, the coverage of Popieluszko’s murder and the trial of his murderers by the New York Times, Time and Newsweek, and CBS News. Rows 2 through 5 summarize the coverage in the same media given to religious personnel murdered in Latin America by agents of U.S. client states:1 Row 2 shows the coverage given seventy-two individuals in a list of Latin American religious “martyrs” named by Penny Lernoux in her book Cry of the People; row 3 describes media coverage of twentythree priests, missionaries, and other religious workers murdered in Guatemala between January 1980 and February 1985. Row 4 summarizes the coverage of the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, of El Salvador, shot by an assassin in March 1980. Row 5 shows the level of media coverage of four U.S. women religious workers, murdered in El Salvador in December 1980.
The coverage of the Popieluszko murder not only dwarfs that of the unworthy victims, it constitutes a major episode of news management and propaganda. Nothing comparable can be found for victims within the free world.2 It can be seen that the New York Times featured the Popieluszko case on its front page on ten different occasions, and the intensity of coverage assured that its readers would know who Popieluszko was, that he had been murdered, and that this sordid violence had occurred in a Communist state. By contrast, the public would not have seen mention of the names of Father Augusto Ramírez Monasterio, father superior of the Franciscan order in Guatemala, murdered in November 1983, or Father Miguel Ángel Montufar, a Guatemalan priest who disappeared in the same month that Popieluszko was killed in Poland, or literally dozens of other religious murder victims in the Latin American provinces, who were sometimes given substantial coverage in the local press of the countries in which the murders took place.
In fact, none of the extremely prominent victims of murder in Latin America, including Archbishop Romero and the four American churchwomen, received anywhere near the attention accorded Popieluszko. We will show below that the quality of treatment of the worthy and unworthy victims also differed sharply. While the coverage of the worthy victim was generous with gory details and quoted expressions of outrage and demands for justice, the coverage of the unworthy victims was low-keyed, designed to keep the lid on emotions and evoking regretful and philosophical generalities on the omnipresence of violence and the inherent tragedy of human life. This qualitative difference is already apparent in placement and editorializing: ten front-page articles on Popieluszko is a statement about importance, as is the fact of three editorials denouncing the Poles, without a single editorial denunciation for the murderers of the unworthy victims.
By comparing rows 1 and 6 of table 2–1, we can see that for every media category the coverage of the worthy victim, Popieluszko, exceeded that of the entire set of one hundred unworthy victims taken together. We suspect that the coverage of Popieluszko may have exceeded that of all the many hundreds of religious victims murdered in Latin America since World War II, as the most prominent are included in our hundred. From the table we can also calculate the relative worthiness of the world’s victims, as measured by the weight given them by the U.S. mass media. The worth of the victim Popieluszko is valued at somewhere between 137 and 179 times that of a victim in the U.S. client states;3 or, looking at the matter in reverse, a priest murdered in Latin America is worth less than a hundredth of a priest murdered in Poland.
The claim is sometimes made that unworthy victims are so treated by the U.S. mass media because they are killed at a great distance, and are so unlike ourselves that they are easy to disregard.4 Poland, however, is farther away than Central America, and its cultural and business links with the United States are not as great as those of Latin American countries in general. Three of the religious victims among the