NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #26/NN_1992_26.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/8233

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-09 | 2.8 KB

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Subject: The Corporate "Free Press" Covers the Elections (IV)
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The Corporate "Free Press" Covers the Elections (IV)

"The [Salvadoran election of 1982] was tailor-made for television ...
if the guerrillas of the FMLN-FDR chose to boycott the election, this
was because they had an innate preference for bullets rather than
ballots, not because the entire leadership of the leftist alliance
had been abducted and killed in November 1980, or because their
successor had been included on a ``traitor list'' published by the
armed forces in March  1981. If a guerrilla perspective on the
elections was lacking, the biases of t press corps were not entirely
to blame, for Salvadoran military did their part to ensure that
journalists would steer clear of such controversial topics. Ten days
before the vote, reporters were summoned to the San Salvador morgue.
Laid out in stark wooden coffins under the harsh glare of the
cameramen's klieg lights were the bodies of a four-man Dutch
television crew, shot dead as they traveled to keep an appointment in
a rebel-held area. The military announced that they had been ``killed
in crossfire,'' but the corpses had been mutilated, the pants pulled
down to expose their bloodied genitals.... this was a formal display
of the dead for demonstration purposes, and there was little room for
ambiguity about the message. The same day, an anonymous death list was
circulated with the names of thirty-five foreign journalists. In the
months leader up to the March election, major newspapers, including
the New York Times and the Washington Post, had run reports from behind
rebel lines, which the U.S. embassy accused of romanticizing the
guerrillas. These now abruptly ceased.

Instead, there was euphoria about the pageant ... Dan Rather led off
his election-night broadcast on CBS News with an exclamation of
delight: ``It was a triumph! A million people at the polls.''

``After a lifetime of journalism, I still cannot understand the media.
I cannot fathom the pool of silence into which the killing of the four
dutch journalists in El Salvador has been dropped.'' -- I. F. Stone,
1982."

[Pages 151-152, George Black, _The Good Neighbor_, Pantheon Books
(Random House), New York, 1988] " ]