Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [59]
The title of Treaster’s article of April 7, 1980, is “Slaying in Salvador Backfires on Rebels.” The article reads as follows:
The murder of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero two weeks ago and the killing of 30 at his funeral may have benefited, rather than hurt, the ruling civilian-military junta, in the view of many diplomats, businessmen and Government officials.
The extreme right is being blamed for the killing of the Archbishop and the extreme left is being blamed for the shooting and bombing that turned the crowded central plaza into chaos as Archbishop Romero was being eulogized.
“It’s not so much that the junta gained,” said Robert E. White, the United States Ambassador to El Salvador, “but that its opponents on the extreme right and left have lost prestige. The net result is a boost in prestige for the junta.”
We may note how the title of the article transforms the murder of the leader of the dissident forces (and then of his followers at the funeral) from a moral issue deserving outrage into a question of political advantage, and turns that against the rebels. It would be hard to imagine the New York Times publishing an article on Popieluszko headed “Slaying in Poland Backfires on Solidarity Movement,” featuring perhaps the playing up by the official press of demonstrator aggressiveness or violence. Note also how the question of identifying the killer of Romero, and the government’s obligation to seek justice, has been pushed into the background. Finally, there is the statement that “the extreme left is being blamed” for the deaths in the plaza. Use of the passive voice allows Treaster to avoid specification of just who is blaming the extreme left. He mentions as his sources for the article as a whole “many diplomats, businessmen and Government officials”—he doesn’t even pretend to have talked to ordinary Salvadorans or church representatives—but his only citation near the statement that “the extreme left is being blamed” is the then-U.S. ambassador, Robert White. By relying only on government handouts and carefully avoiding readily available conflicting evidence and alternative views, the Times once again found the means of applying the usual formula of a deadly right offsetting a deadly left, with the junta favored by the U.S. government once more placed in the middle—with enhanced prestige!
2.3.3. MISREPRESENTATION OF ROMERO’S VIEWS
As we noted earlier, Romero was unequivocal in laying the blame for the violence in El Salvador on the army and security forces, and he viewed the left and popular groupings as victims provoked into self-defense by violence and injustice. The peoples’ organizations, he told Carter, are “fighting to defend their most fundamental human rights” against a military establishment that “knows only how to repress the people and defend the interests of the Salvadorean oligarchy.” And in his diary, Romero completely repudiated the idea that the army was reacting to somebody else’s violence—the security forces are instruments “of a general program of annihilation of those on the left, who by themselves would not commit violence or further it were it not for social injustice that they want to do away with.”33 Thus Joseph Treaster’s statement on the front page of the New York Times that Romero “had criticized both the extreme right and the extreme left for widespread killing and torture in El Salvador” (Mar. 31, 1980) is straightforward lying: Romero never accused the left of torture or widespread killing, he never equated the right and the left, and he was quite clear that the government (an agent of the right) was the primary killer. In this respect, Romero’s perception, essentially the same as that privately conveyed to the press by the U.S. government, was grossly falsified in