Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [99]
3.6. NICARAGUA: MEDIA SERVICE IN THE DELEGITIMIZING PROCESS
In contrast with the Salvadoran and Guatemalan cases, the Reagan administration was intent on discrediting the Nicaraguan election, which threatened to legitimize the Sandinista government and thus weaken the case for U.S. funding of a terrorist army. The administration had been berating the Sandinistas for failing to hold an election, but the actual holding of one was inconvenient. From the inception of Nicaraguan planning for the election, therefore, the administration began to express doubts about its quality. And just as it devoted itself to creating a positive image of the two client-state elections, so it expended substantial resources to depict the Nicaraguan election in the worst possible light. The media dutifully followed course, as a propaganda model predicts.
The mass media failed to call attention to the cynicism of first assailing Nicaragua for failing to hold an election, and then striving to have the election either postponed or discredited.85 Time even cites the absence of “official delegations [of observers] from the major western democracies” (Nov. 19, 1984), as if this were evidence of something discreditable in the election, rather than as a reflection of U.S. power. There were 450-odd foreign observers in attendance at the Nicaraguan election, some with superb credentials, observing more freely and at greater length than the official U.S. observers in El Salvador and Guatemala. Time and the rest of the mass media paid no attention to them.86
Stephen Kinzer’s use of observers is noteworthy. In the case of Nicaragua, he completely ignored the unofficial observers—many exceedingly well qualified to observe, as we have noted—and he even ignored the official Dutch government team, drawn from the center-right and highly apologetic about atrocities in El Salvador, which observed both the Salvadoran and the Nicaraguan elections and concluded that the elections in Nicaragua “were more open than in El Salvador, in the sense that more people were able to take part; that the opposition did not fear for their lives”; and that “the legitimation of the regime is thus confirmed.”87 In Guatemala, by contrast, he cited the official observer report in both the 1984 and 1985 elections, despite their great bias and superficiality (see the report discussed in appendix 1). In the 1984 Guatemala election, Kinzer did refer to the report of the unofficial Human Rights Law Group that we cited earlier, quoting their statement that the voting process was “procedurally correct,” but neglecting to note here and elsewhere their numerous statements to the effect that “the greater part of the population lives in permanent fear” (p. 4), so that “procedural correctness” has little meaning.
With no U.S.-government-designated official observers available in Nicaragua, the media relied even more heavily than usual on U.S. government handouts. It is enlightening to compare this conduited propaganda of the mass media with the findings of foreign-observer teams on the scene in Nicaragua. For the purpose of this comparison, which follows, we will use two such reports. One, that of the Irish Inter-Party Parliamentary Delegation, is The Elections in Nicaragua, November 1984. The delegation was composed of four individuals, three from right-wing or moderate-right political parties, who spent seventeen days in Nicaragua at the time of the election. We will also use as a basis of comparison of media coverage the previously cited report of the 15-member delegation sent by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), half of whom had had “substantial field experience” in Nicaragua itself. This delegation spent eight days in Nicaragua before the election, traveled