Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [56]
This entire package of murder and church response was hardly lacking in drama and newsworthiness. Yet murder, the confrontation of the desperate church with a repressive state, and the dramatic acts carried out to try to mobilize support in its self-defense were subject to a virtual blackout in the U.S. mass media. The murder of Rutilio Grande was mentioned in Newsweek (“Priests in Peril,” Aug. 1, 1977), but it never once reached the audiences of the New York Times, Time, or CBS News. This was important in allowing the terror to go on unimpeded. To paraphrase the New York Times editorial on “murderous Poland”: no publicity and agitation, no containment of terror.
2.3. ARCHBISHOP OSCAR ROMERO
The murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the highest Catholic church official in El Salvador, was “big news,” and its political implications were enormous. At the time of his murder, Romero had become the foremost and most outspoken critic of the policy of repression by murder being carried out by the U.S.-supported military government. In his last sermon, he appealed to members of the army and security forces to refuse to kill their Salvadoran brethren, a call that enraged the officer corps trying to build a lower-class military that was willing to kill freely. Romero had been placed on right-wing death lists and received threats from the right wing, which from the beginning had been closely linked to the army and intelligence services.15 Only a few weeks prior to his murder he had written a forceful letter to President Jimmy Carter opposing the imminent granting of U.S. aid to the junta as destructive of Salvadoran interests. The Carter administration had been so disturbed by Romero’s opposition to its policies that it had secretly lobbied the pope to curb the archbishop.16
Romero, in short, was not merely an “unworthy” victim, he was an important activist in opposition to the local alliance of army and oligarchy and to U.S. policy in El Salvador. The U.S. media’s news coverage of the archbishop’s murder and its follow-up reflected well his threatening role, reaching new levels of dishonesty and propaganda service in their coverage of this and related events.
2.3.1 DETAILS OF THE MURDER AND PUBLIC RESPONSE
The details of the Romero murder provided by the U.S. mass media were concise (see table 2–2). While there were expressions of shock and distress, there were very few quotations and expressions of outrage by supporters of Romero. There were no statements or quotations suggesting that the murder was intolerable and that the guilty must be found and brought to justice. The New York Times had no editorial condemning, or even mentioning, the murder. It was quickly placed in the larger framework of alleged killings by both the left and the right that were deeply regretted by Salvadoran and U.S. officials.
2.3.2 THE PROPAGANDA LINE: A REFORMIST JUNTA TRYING TO CONTAIN THE VIOLENCE OF RIGHT AND LEFT
The Salvadoran and U.S. governments contended at the time of Romero’s murder that the killing going on in El Salvador was being done by extremists of the right and the left, not by the Salvadoran armed forces and their agents; and that the government was trying its best to contain the killings and carry out reforms. John Bushnell, of the State Department, stated before a House appropriations committee that “there is some misperception by those who follow the press that the government is itself repressive in El Salvador,” when in fact the violence is “from the extreme right and the extreme left” and “the smallest part” of the killings come from the army and security forces.17 This statement was a knowing lie,18 contradicted by all independent evidence coming out of El Salvador and refuted by Archbishop Romero on an almost daily basis.19 In his letter to Carter sent on February 17, 1980, the archbishop pointed out that aid to the junta had resulted in increasing repressive violence by the government,