Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [83]
In brief, the government used a well-nigh perfect system of Orwellian doublethink: forgetting a criterion “that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, . . . draw[ing] it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed.”9 It even acknowledges this fact: a senior U.S. official told members of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) observing the Nicaraguan election:
The United States is not obliged to apply the same standard of judgment to a country whose government is avowedly hostile to the U.S. as for a country like El Salvador, where it is not. These people [the Sandinistas] could bring about a situation in Central America which could pose a threat to U.S. security. That allows us to change our yardstick.10
But while a government may employ a blatant double standard, media which adhere to minimal standards of objectivity and are not themselves part of a propaganda system would apply a single standard. Did the mass media of the United States follow a single standard in dealing with the elections in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, or did they follow their government’s agenda in order to put the Salvadoran and Guatemalan elections in a favorable light and to denigrate the one held in Nicaragua?
3.2. BASIC ELECTORAL CONDITIONS IN EL SALVADOR,
GUATEMALA, AND NICARAGUA, 1982–85
All three of these countries, in which elections were held in the years 1982–85, were in the midst of serious conflict: Nicaragua was being subjected to regular border incursions by the U.S.-organized and supplied contras. El Salvador was in the midst of a combination civil conflict and externally (U.S.) organized and funded counterinsurgency war. Guatemala, as we noted earlier, had evolved into a counterinsurgency state, with permanent warfare to keep the majority of Indians and other peasants in their place, and violent repression was structured into the heart of the political system.
Despite the common feature of ongoing conflict, however, electoral conditions were far more favorable in Nicaragua than in El Salvador and Guatemala, for several reasons. First, and crucially important, in the latter countries, at the time of the elections the army was still engaged in mass slaughter of the civilian population, with the toll in the tens of thousands in each country and the killing often carried out with extreme sadism. Nothing remotely similar was true in Nicaragua. These facts, which are not controversial among people with a minimal concern for reality, immediately establish a fundamental distinction with regard to the electoral climate. In countries that are being subject to the terror of a rampaging murder machine, supported or run by a foreign power, electoral conditions are fatally compromised in advance, a point that the media would recognize at once if we were considering the sphere of influence of some official enemy.11
A further—and related—distinction was that the ruling Sandinista government was a popular government, which strove to serve majority needs and could therefore afford to allow greater freedom of speech and organization. The LASA report on the Nicaraguan election notes that their program “implies redistribution of access to wealth and public services. The state will use its power to guarantee fulfillment of the basic needs of the majority population.” The “logic of the majority,” the report continues, also implies the involvement of “very large numbers of people in the decisions that affect their lives.”12 Qualified observers conclude that the Nicaraguan government pursued this logic, although this fact is excluded from the free press. After citing the World Bank’s observation that “Governments . . . vary greatly in the commitment of their political leadership to improving the condition of the people and encouraging their active participation in the development process,” Dianna Melrose, of the charitable development agency Oxfam, states that “From Oxfam’s experience of working in seventy-six developing countries, Nicaragua was to prove exceptional in the