No More Learning

110. George Skelton, White House correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, noted that in reference to Reagan's errors offact, "You write the stories once, twice, and you get a lot of mail saying, 'You're picking on the guy, you guys in the press make mistakes too. ' And editors respond to that, so after a while the stories don't run anymore. We're intimidated" (quoted in Hertsgaard, "How Reagan Seduced Us").
ish case is the Western press's refusal to publicize the Turkish government's attacks on the press, including the U. S. press's own reporters in that country. UPI's reporter Ismet Imset, beaten up by the Turkish police and imprisoned under trumped-up charges, was warned by UPI not to publicize the charges against him, and UPI eventually fired him for criticizing their badly compro- mised handling of his case. See Chris Christiansen, "Keeping In With The Generals," New Statesman, January 4, 1985.
119. We believe that the same dichotomization applies in the domestic sphere. For example, both British and American analysts have noted the periodic intense focus on-and indignation over-"welfare chiselers" by the mass media, and the parallel de-emphasis of and benign attitudes toward the far more important fraud and tax abuses of business and the affluent. There is also a deep-seated reluctance on the part of the mass media to examine the struc- tural causes of inequality and poverty. Peter Golding and Sue Middleton, after an extensive discussion of the long-standing "criminalization of poverty" and incessant attacks on welfare scroungers in Britain, point out that tax evasion, by contrast, is "acceptable, even laudable," in the press, that the tax evader "is not merely a victim but a hero. " They note, also, that "The supreme achievement of welfare capitalism" has been to render the causes and condi- tion of poverty almost invisible (Images of Welfare: Press and Public Attitudes to Poverty [Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982], pp. 66-67,98-100, 186, 193).
In a chapter entitled "The Deserving Rich," A. J. Liebling pointed out that in the United States as well, "The crusade against the destitute is the favorite crusade of the newspaper publisher," and that "There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor" (The Press [New York: Ballantine, 1964], pp. 78-79). Liebling went into great detail on various efforts of the media to keep welfare expenses and taxes down "by saying that they [the poor] have concealed assets, or bad character, or both" (p. 79). These strategies not only divert, they also help split the employed working class from the unemployed and marginalized, and make these all exceedingly uncomfortable about participating in a degraded system of scrounging. See Peter Golding and Sue Middleton, "Attitudes to Claimants: A Culture of Contempt," in Images of Welfare, pp. 169ff. President Reagan's fabricated anecdotes about welfare chiselers, and his complete silence on the large-scale chiseling of his corporate sponsors, have fitted into a long tradition o f cynical and heartless greed.
120. For a full discussion of this dichotomized treatment, see Edward S. Her- man, "Gatekeeper versus Propaganda Models: A Critical American Perspec- tive," in Peter Golding, Graham Murdock and Philip Schlesinger, eds. , Communicating Politics (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), pp. 182-94. 121. Editorial, March I, 1973. The Soviets apparently didn't know that they were shooting down a civilian plane, but this was covered up by U. S. officials, and the false allegation of a knowing destruction of a civilian aircraft provided the basis for extremely harsh criticism of the Soviets for barbaric behavior. The Israelis openly admitted knowing that they were shooting down a civilian plane, but this point was of no interest in the West in this particular case. 122. The New York Times Index, for example, has seven full pages of citations to the KAL 007 incident for September 1983 alone.
123. Patriotic orgies, such as the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, the
I I I . Piero Gleijeses, The Dominican
sity Press, 1978), pp. 95-99.
112. Jan K. Black, United States Penetration ofBrazil (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), pp. 39-56.
113. See above, pp. 24-25; below, pp. 157-61.
114. "The Stalinists of Anti-Communism," in Ralph Miliband, John Saville, and Marcel Liebman, Socialist Register, 1984: The Uses ofAnticommunism (Lon- don: Merlin Press, 1984), p. 337.
115. Daix, in 1949, referred to the Stalin concentration camps as "one of the Soviet Union's most glorious achievements," displaying "the complete sup- pression of man's exploitation of man" (quoted in Miliband et aI. , Socialist Register, p. 337). Kriegel, formerly a hard-line Communist party functionary, was the author of a 1982 book explaining that the KGB organized the Sabra- Shatila massacres, employing German terrorists associated with the PLO and with the tacit cooperation of the CIA, in order to defame Israel as part of the Soviet program of international terrorism. For more on this profound study, and its influence, see Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle (Boston: South End Press, 1983), pp. 291-92, 374-75.
116. Socialist Register, p. 345.
117. Where dissidents are prepared to denounce official enemies, of course, they can pass through the mass-media filtering system, in the manner of the ex-Communist experts described in "Anticommunism as a Control Mecha- nism" (p. 29).
118. See chapter 2, "Worthy and Unworthy Victims. " Of interest in the Turk-
Crisis
(Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univer-
346 NOTES TO P AGES 32-35
NOTES TO P AGES 38-43 347
space-shuttle flights, and "Liberty Weekend," perform a similar function in "bringing us all together. " See Elayne Rapping, The Looking Glass World of Nonfiction TV (Boston: South End Press, 1987), chapter 5, "National Rituals. " 124. See below, chapter 6.
125. On issues where the elite is seriously divided, there will be dissenting voices allowed in the mass media, and the inflation of claims and suspension of critical judgment will be subject to some constraint. See the discussion of this point in the preface, pp. xii-xiii, and examples in the case studies that follow. 126. The role of the government in these cases cannot be entirely discounted, given the close ties of the Reader's Digest to the CIA and the fact that Paul Henze, one of the primary sources and movers in the Bulgarian Connection campaign, was a longtime CIA official. On the CIA-Reader's Digest connec- tion, see Epstein, "The Invention of Arkady Shevchenko," pp. 40-41. On Henze, see below, chapter 4. On the strong likelihood that an influential Reader's Digest best-seller on Cambodia was in part a CIA disinformation effort, see below chapter 6, p. 293, and sources cited.
127. We provide many illustrations of these points in the chapters that follow. Watergate and, more recently, the late-Reagan-era exposures of Iran-Contra- gate, which are put forward as counterexamples, are discussed in chapter 7, below .
128. These points apply clearly to the case of the alleged Bulgarian Connection in the plot to assassinate the pope. See below, chapter 4.
129. We have noted elsewhere that the New York Times regularly relied upon Indonesian officials in "presenting the facts" about East Timor, which was being invaded by Indonesia, and ignored refugees, church sources, etc. In contrast, refugees, not state officials, were the prime source in the Times's reporting on postwar events in Vietnam and Cambodia (The Washington Con- nection and Third World Fascism [Boston: South End Press, 1979J, pp. 151-52, 169-76, 184-87). On attempts to evade the obvious implications, see chapter 6, under "The Pol Pot Era" (pp. 284-85).
130. Thus when the CIA directs Nicaraguan contras to attack such "soft targets" as farming cooperatives, with explicit State Department approval, the media commentators, including doves, either applaud or offer philosophical disquisitions on whether such targets are legitimate, given that they are de- fended by lightly armed militia. Terrorist attacks on Israeli kibbutzim, also defended by armed settlers, are regarded somewhat differently. For details, see Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism (Boston: South End Press, 1988). 131. The variable use of agendas and frameworks can be seen with great clarity' in the treatment of Third World elections supported and opposed by the United States, as described in chapter 3.
132. Classic in their audacity are Michael Ledeen's assertions that: (I) Qad- dafi's word is given more credence in the mass media than that of the U. S. government; and (2) "Relatively minor human rights transgressions in a friendly country (especially if ruled by an authoritarian government of the Right) are given far more attention and more intense criticism than far graver sins of countries hostile to us . . . " (Grave New World [New York: Oxford University Press, 1985], p. 131; Qaddafi's superior credence is described on pp. 132-33). See chapter 2 of this book for documentation on the reality of mass- media treatment of abuses by clients and enemy states.
I
Chapter 2: W orthy and Unworthy Victims
I. In a speech ofJuly 19, 1986, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, in answer- ing charges of religious persecution, asserted that of 138 religious persons murdered and 278 kidnapped or disappeared in Central America since 1979 (a figure that includes Lay Delegates of the Word), none had been victimized by the Nicaraguan government. (Central Amen'ca News Update, Aug. 4, 1986). Many had been killed by the contras, however, in an ongoing tradition of Somocista violence. See Andrew Reding, "The Church in Nicaragua,"
Monthly Review (July-August 1987), pp. 34-36. The large majority were mur- dered by the army and security forces of U. S. client states, or the death squads affiliated with them.
2. In The Real Terror Network (Boston: South End Press, 1982), Edward Her- man shows that in the years 1976-81, the only massive coverage of the victimi- zation of individuals abroad by the New York Times was of Soviet dissidents, most notably Sharansky and Sakharov (pp. 196-99), although there were nu- merous cases of comparable or far worse treatment within U. S. domains.
3. Computed by dividing the number of articles and CBS News reports (or column inches) devoted to Popieluszko by the number dealing with the one hundred religious victims and multiplying by 100.
4? Anthony Lewis says that the Soviet dissidents "are enough like us so that we identify with them" ("A Craving for Rights," New York Times, Jan. 31, 1977), a partially valid point, as the vast majority of victims of U. S. foreign policy are Third World peasants, but invalid in that victims in U. S. client states as much "like us" as Soviet dissidents do not get comparable attention, as shown in the cases mentioned and the reference in note 2.
5. It is not coincidental that the U. S. secretary of state, Alexander Haig, and the U. S. ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, actually de-
fended the assassinations of the American women, as described below.
6. Apart from the details by the New York Times shown in table 2-2, there were at least four other Times articles that repeated such information, and similar detail was given in Time and Newsweek and on CBS News. To give a sample of one of many in Time, an article entitled "Grim Tale: Details of a Martyr's Death" (Nov. 19, 1984), reads as follows: "Church officials who viewed the martyred priest's body reported that he had been savagely beaten. A rope had been tied around his neck, wrists and ankles so that he would strangle himself if he struggled to get free. Three fingers of Popieluszko's left hand were sliced through to the bone, and there were deep gouges on his arms. His lungs contained enough water to indicate that he was still breathing, even if unconscious, when he was tossed, bound hand and foot, into a reservoir. " Time repeats these details and others with obvious relish at every opportunity. As we will see, Time is less lavish in details on unworthy victims.
7. Time's account entitled "Memories of Father Jerzy" (Nov. 12,1984) has no counterpart in the articles on the deaths of the unworthy victims discussed below.
8. "A Polish General is Tied to Death. of Warsaw Priest," November 3, 1984; "Pole in Killing Tells of Hints of Top-Level Backup," January 9, 1985; "Pole
on Trial Names 2 Generals," January S, 1985; "Second Abductor of Polish Priest Says Order Came 'From the Top,' " January 3, 1985.
9. See chapter 4, below.
10. On May 6, 1986, Laura Pinto, a member of the Salvadoran "Mothers of the Disappeared," was picked up by three armed men, beaten, raped, and left on the street. On May 29 she was again abducted and tortured, and shortly thereafter twelve members of her group were detained by the police. The British New Statesman expressed surprise that this kind of terror could take place, given the fact that Laura Pinto had previously traveled to Europe and made Western Europeans aware of her existence (Jane Dibblin, "EI Salvador's Death Squads Defy European Opinion," June 13, 1986). Western Europeans did, in fact, protest these abuses. What made this terror feasible, however, was the fact that the power directly involved in EI Salvador, the United States, has media well attuned to state policy. The two assaults on Laura Pinto and the detention of the twelve members of the Mothers were totally suppressed by the New York Times and its confreres. There was not a word in the quality papers when a member of the "Mothers of the Disappeared" who had herself been a victim of the atrocities of Duarte's security forces was denied entry to the United States in March 1987, to visit several small towns where she had been invited to speak on the occasion of International Women's Day. See Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism (Boston: South End Press, 1988). The attention that the Times mentions as a constraint on Polish violence was not available to protect an unworthy victim.
II. For a review of Times editorials on EI Salvador in the 1980s, exculpating the state terrorists throughout, see Noam Chomsky, "U. S. Polity and Society," in Thomas Walker, ed. , Reagan versus the Sandinistas (Boulder, Colo. : West- view, 1987), pp. 29S-96.
12. The press may also have been constrained by the fact that reporters who dig deeply and provide accounts unfavorable to the military regimes in Latin America may be barred from the country, or even murdered. Western reporters are very rarely physically threatened-let alone murdered-in Poland, the Soviet Union, Cuba, or Nicaragua. They are often threatened and sometimes murdered in EI Salvador, Guatemala, and other U. S. clients in Latin America. This irony is not commented upon in the free press, nor are the effects of this potential and actual violence against dissident reporters on the possibilities of honest reporting. This point is discussed further in chapter 3, pp. 97-98.
13. Penny Lernoux, Cry of the People (New York: Doubleday, 1980), p. 73? 14. James R. Brockman, The Word Remains: A Life of Oscar Romero (Mary- knoll, N. Y. : Orbis, 1982), p. II.
IS. We discuss this link later in this section.
16. Carter sent former New York mayor Robert Wagner to persuade the pope to rein in Romero, which the pope then tried to do. See Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit (New York: Times Books, 1984), p. 176.
The provincial of the Jesuit order in Central America, Father Cesar Jerez, was called to Rome shortly after to explain the Romero letter. Father Jerez, who had fled from Guatemala after the military had threatened his life, was very close to Arch- bishop Romero. Subsequently he was forced to flee EI Salvador as well and is now a refugee in Nicaragua, where he is rector of the Universidad Cen-
troamericana, unable to return to the two "fledgling democracies" except for brief (and dangerous) visits.
17. Quoted in Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 172.
18. On September 27, 1981, Alan Riding wrote in the New York Times that "under the Carter administration, United States officials said security forces were responsible for 90 percent of the atrocities," not "uncontrollable right- wing bands. " In short, not only was Bushnell lying, but the media knew it, and failed to use that information. Riding had an article on March 23, 1980, entitled "EI Salvador's Junta Unable to Halt the Killing. " On media coverage of EI Salvador during 1980, including gross falsification and cover-up of even con- gressional reports, see Noam Chomsky, Towards A New Cold War, pp. 3Sff. , reprinted in James Peck, ed. , The Chomsky Reader (New York: Pantheon,
1987).
19. Church estimates were that the government was responsible for some nine hundred civilian deaths in the first three months of 1980, exceeding the total for all of 1979; a report of Amnesty International dated March 21, 1980, contains seven pages of incidents in which security forces, army units, or paramilitary groups under general military control or guidance killed unarmed civilians, usually peasants (quoted in Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 172). 20. This is a point that was conceded by Duarte himself, who admitted in an interview with Raymond Bonner that the army ruled EI Salvador, but that he hoped to do so in the future (see New York Times, Mar. I, 1982).
21. Weakness and Deceit, p. 146.
22. See chapter 3, pp. 101-102.
23. One proof of the fact that the paramilitary forces kill under official protec- tion is that, year after year, paramilitary murders never resulted in arrests (see Herman, Real Terror Network, pp. IIS-19). As for the regular forces, through 1986, "there were no known instances of Inilitary officers or soldiers who were criminally punished for human rights abuses against Salvadoran civilians" (The Reagan Administration's Record on Human Rights in 1986 [New York: The Watch Committees and Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, February 1987], p. 46).
24. Laurie Becklund, "Death Squads: Deadly 'Other War,''' Los Angeles Times, December 18, 1983.
2S. Michael McClintock, The American Connection, vol. 1(London: Zed, 1985), p. 221.
26. Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 162.
27. "United States Network News Coverage of EI Salvador: The Law and Order Frame" (manuscript, 1986), pp. 17-18. Andersen provides many illustra- tions of how the networks continued to label the junta "moderate" throughout 1980, as atrocities mounted to what Archbishop Romero's successor, Bishop Rivera y Damas, described in October 1980 as the armed forces' "war of extermination and genocide against a defenseless civilian population" (Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 207).
28. "23 Die in EI Salvador As Clashes Continue; 3 Officials Step Down," New
York Times, March 29, 1980.
29. Quoted in Robert Armstrong and Janet Shenk, El Salvador: The Face of Revolution (Boston: South End Press, 1982), p. 146.
350 NOTES TO P AGES 52-57
NOTES TO P AGES 57-65 351
30. From White's cable to the State Department, quoted in Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 184.
31. This statement is quoted in Armstrong and Shenk, El Salvador, p. 152. Others present claim that troops were on the scene, contradicting Duarte, junta, and Treaster assertions to the contrary. Phillip Berryman, who was at the funeral, told the authors that he saw quite clearly two truckloads of troops in the vicinity. Treaster is cagey, though-he speaks only of troops in the plaza, not near the plaza, or in the national palace and other buildings.
32. The view expressed in Ambassador White's cables was that the leftists acted to provoke a response by the security forces, a self-destructive tactic not supported by any evidence.
33. Quoted in Brockman, The Word Remains, p. 212.
34. See note 18. Time magazine did the same kind of misrepresenting as Treaster, but with a little more finesse: "From his pulpit, he regularly con- demned the tyranny and terrorism that have torn tiny, impoverished El Salva- dor apart and brought it to the verge of civil war" (Apr. 7, 1980).
35. "Church in Salvador Now Follows the Middle Path," New York Times, March 22, 1981.
36. For a more detailed discussion of Schumacher's manipulation of the arch- bishop's cautious remarks for an apologetic purpose, see Herman, Real Terror Network, pp. 178-79.
37. It is possible that this failure was based on an honest lack of knowledge of the event. Lack of knowledge, however, reflects in part a lack of concern, and a distorting perspective that removes certain questions from the focus of investigation.
38. Actually, this may be true. The killer may have been a contra assassin hired by the Salvadoran security forces.
39. For the numerous acknowledged attempts to murder Fidel Castro, and the CIA-organized murder of Patrice Lumumba, see Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations, 94th Cong. , 1st sess. , November 20, 1975, S. Rep. 94-465, pp. 13-180.
40. Graham Hovey, "Salvador Prelate's Death Heightens Fear of War," New York Times, March 26, 1980.
41. See Craig Pyes, "Who Killed Archbishop Romero? " The Nation, October 13, 1984.
42. Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 178.
43. Stephen Kinzer, "Ex-Aide in Salvador Accuses Colleagues on Death Squads," New York Times, March 3, 1984.
44. Craig Pyes, "Dirty War in the Name of Freedom," Albuquerque Journa~ December 18, 1983. In November 1987, Duarte announced new (and rather flimsy) evidence implicating D'Aubuisson, but no one associated with the reigning security forces, in the assassination. The announcement was a trans-
. parent effort to maintain his image as a "moderate," holding the middle ground between extremists of right and left. It was carefully timed to coincide with a daring visit to El Salvador by two actual "moderates," FDR leaders Ruben Zamora and Guillermo Ungo, who have lived in exile under threat of assassi- nation in this terror state.
45. Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide (Boston: South End Press, 1985), p. 103. 46. Armstrong and Shenk, El Salvador, pp. 160-61.
47. In an article of February II, 1982, datelined San Salvador, the Mexican paper El Dia quoted D'Aubuisson telling two European reporters, one a German, that "You Germans are very intelligent; you realized that the Jews were responsible for the spread of communism and you began to kill them. " While the U. S. press played up the fabricated claims of Sandinista anti- Semitism, this statement of approval of the Holocaust was not picked up by the elite media.
48. "Peace Is Still a Long Shot in EI Salvador," New York Times, September 27, 1987, Week in Review.
49. This statement was left out of the edition of the report finally released to the public.
50. Report, p. 8.
51. Ana Carrigan, Salvador Witness (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p.
271.
52. Foreign Assistance Legislation for Fiscal Year I982, part I, Hearings before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 97th Cong. , 1st sess. , March 1981, p. 163. Letter from David E. Simcox, State Department, to William P. Ford, dated April 16, 1981. At the time Haig made his statement, the evidence was quite clear that the women had been raped, and killed by close-range shots from behind. Haig himself never apologized for this insulting lie, nor did he suffer any serious attack for this in the mass media, with the honorable excep- tion of Anthony Lewis. This episode also appears to have had no noticeable effect on Haig's reputation.
53. "We ought to be a little more clear about this than we actually are [sic]. They were political activists on behalf of the Frente and somebody who is using violence to oppose the Frente killed these women" (interview in Tampa Tribune, Dec. 16, 1980, quoted in Carrigan, Salvador Witness, p. 279. ) Former ambassador Robert White pointed out that remarks like these by Kirkpatrick, in the context of El Salvador, were "an incitement to murder" (T. D. Allman, Unmanifest Destiny [New York: Doubleday, 1984], p. 17)?
Jean Donovan asked Ambassador Robert White, "What do you do when even to help the poor, to take care of the orphans, is considered an act of subversion by the government? " (quoted in Allman, p. 3). Helping orphans in the Salvadoran countryside was also regarded as an act of subversion by officials of the Reagan administration.
54. The New York Times's version, shown on table 2-2, gives a succinct and inaccurate version of the use of the underwear.
55. "Statement by Revolutionary Governing Junta," December 8, 1980. The statement also notes that "the Revolutionary Government repudiates and condemns violence and the irrational crimes it generates"!
56. Juan de Onis, December 24. The question does not arise for the Times of why the security forces would want to conceal the bodies if they were unin- volved in the murders.
57. We discussed this myth in "Archbishop Oscar Romero" (p. 48).
58. Juan de Onis, "Rightist Terror Stirs Argentina," New York Times, August 29,1976.
352 NOTES TO P AGES 65-71
NOTES TO P AGES 71-73 353
59. See below, note 67.
60. John Dinges, "Evidence Indicates Military Planned Missionaries' Deaths," National Catholic Reporter, July 17, 1981.
61. Stephen Kinzer, "Ex-Aide in Salvador Accuses Colleagues on Death Squads," March 3, 1984. Note the "soft" headline. An option forgone by the Times was a headline like: "Duarte and Defense Minister Casanova Accused of Cover-up of Murder of Four American Women. " Santivanez was paid $50,000 to give his evidence, a sum he requested on the ground of the risk he was taking and the probability that he would be income-short in the future as a result of his confession. This payment was given unusual publicity as sug- gesting a compromising quality to his testimony, and the New York Times squelched a second installment of his evidence on this principled ground- which they never apply to Soviet defectors, who are less in need of protection. The revelation that the "leading democrats" who were formed into a civilian front for the contras by the CIA have been receiving over $80,000, tax-free, annually from the CIA for years has never compromised their integrity as media sources. Nicaraguan defector Miranda got $800,000 for his services without being discredited.
62. Excellent accounts were produced by Michael Posner and the Lawyers' Committee for International Human Rights in a series of investigatory reports, dated September 1981, July 20, 1982, and February I, 1983, which contain detailed and crushing evidence of a completely broken-down judicial process and an official cover-up. Once again, as with the Dinges report, these docu- ments were essentially ignored in the U. S. mass media and their facts and leads suppressed. News coverage of the lawyers' committee documents was negligi- ble. Michael Posner and Scott Greathead did succeed in placing an Op-Ed article in the Times on December 6, 1983, entitled "3 Years after Killings, No Justice in Salvador. "
63. Both Time and Newsweek had articles featuring stonewalling in February 1981-Time's article was entitled "Stonewalling" (Feb. 23)-but although the stonewalling continued for years, this was the end of the news magazines' interest in the matter.
64. Lawyers' Committee for International Human Rights, Update:Justice in El Salvador: A Case Study, February I, 1983, p. 17.
65. Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 80.
66. Larry Rohter, "Salvador Defense Lawyer Charges Cover-Up in Slaying of
U. S. Nuns," New York Times, May 6, 1985.
67. In the same month that Hinton was asserting with assurance that the low-level guardsmen were acting on their own, internal State Department memos were stating that "Reading the documents provoked several questions which we think should have occurred to an investigator whose real aim was to determine who committed the crime" (quoted in Update, p. 31).
68. Quoted in Update, pp. 30-31.
69. On the Tyler investigation, see Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, pp. 78-80.