Presswatch/Nattering Nabobs
Barnes, Fred
PRESSWATCH NATTERING NABOBS by Fred Barnes The coverage of Central America in recent months points up one of the ugly truths about the American press: the better the news, the less of it you get....
...Writing favorably about the course of events in El Salvador and unfavorably about America's chief foe in Central America, Nicaragua, goes against the journalistic grain...
...Fortunately for the press, trouble for the United States flared in Lebanon just as prospects in Central America brightened...
...Nor are John Vinocur of the New York Times or Ronald Radosh, co-author of The Rosenberg File...
...The soaring promises of the 1979 Sandinista insurrection- political pluralism, a mixed private-and-state economy and international nonalignment-are gone, replaced by opened mail, People's Tribunals, smothered debate," wrote Vinocur in the Times last August...
...No longer, though, which means less coverage...
...the evil but deposed Somoza regime...
...The obsession with the negative is endemic to journalism these days...
...His most telling criticism, though, was of the fraudulent "face the people" sessions held by Sandinista leaders...
...Latin Policy" by Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the chairman of the Atlantic Monthly, appeared in September, there was no reason to expect anything but the ritual denunciation of American policy...
...Michael Kramer, the political writer for New York, echoed Zuckerman in his magazine's September 12 issue...
...Rather boldly, Ranney goes so far as to insist that Vice President Spiro Agnew's attack in 1969 on network television's news coverage had some merit...
...It was Carter the long-shot who became Carter the frontrunner," he writes, and this changed the press treatment...
...And there was more...
...I think this amounts to a half-explanation...
...For a Marxist regime, that is the unkindest cut of all...
...And for a long period, there were many such signs to report...
...And the reminders haven't ceased about the links between the American-backed contras in Nicaragua and Fred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore Sun...
...Nicaragua...
...Time will tell...
...And, he adds, "television newspeople also have an antiestablishment bias: that is, they view with special suspicion whatever political leaders and organizations seem most powerful at the moment...
...They described the totalitarian state they were building and vowed that their power would never be put to risk in free elections...
...But at least it offers a structural explanation for dwelling on bad news in Central America and looking elsewhere when good news crops up...
...And the excuse that these trends, as they endured, lacked the freshness or uniqueness which makes for newsworthiness doesn't wash...
...I returned impressed with the effectiveness of United States policy and convinced that we need to be involved...
...I cited both structure and ideology as being factors in coverage of Central America, but it appears that Austin Ranney, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, would disagree, at least as far as television correspondents are concerned...
...I found...
...What is the source of bias in the press...
...He had nothing kind to say about American policy toward Nicaragua, but he found Sandinista society to be "increasingly militarized and polarized, defined for the average person by the daily ration lines for the most necessary commodities...
...Managua does not have East Berlin's watchtowers and machine gunners or Bucharest's near catatonic despair," he said...
...is already classically eastern-European," he said, before going on to knock down myths like the Sandinistas' supposed fondness for a mixed economy...
...The facile explanation for this-believe me, you hear it a lot-is that "we cover the planes that crash, not the ones that land safely...
...For Radosh, such criticism of Nicaragua will only harden the leftist hatred of him that his book on the Rosenbergs has evoked...
...Ranney cites the example of the kid-gloves treatment of Jimmy Carter when he was a long-shot presidential candidate early in 1976 compared to the more critical coverage after he became the favorite for the nomination and for winning the presidency...
...Unlike Eastern Europe, anyone can get a passport and leave.'' Radosh's piece appeared in the October 24 issue of the New Republic, which publishes many tough-minded, cant-free pieces on foreign affairs...
...A visit to the region, to Nicaragua and El Salvador especially, and talks with the leaders on bothsides help put the situation in perspective-and show that the administration's policy, so chaotic from afar, surprisingly seems more coherent and effective than expected," Kramer wrote...
...servatism," he writes...
...But once he lost any chance to beat Carter, he was lionized by the press as a gallant, articulate warrior for the liberal cause...
...Nothing could be farther from the truth...
...But "the greatest myth about Nicaragua is that the Sandinistas' turn to the left is the result of American hostility," he noted...
...If you find that response less than compelling, join the crowd...
...As the war began to turn against the Communist guerrillas in El Salvador, there was a palpable dip in the attention paid to it...
...All of which leads me to cite four notable and praiseworthy exceptions to the structural and ideological slant on events in Central America...
...And that made what they said all the more riveting...
...They were just pretending to be pluralist...
...American military support of El Salvador was "critical" and "essential" if democracy is ever to flourish...
...When the intrusion of American troops and ships (on maneuvers, not a combat mission) started to produce some of the results that the Reagan Administration had promised-stirring in the hearts of Cubans and Sandinistas the desire to negotiate, for one thing, and not bringing on World War III, for another-less was written and broadcast about it...
...Is it really respectable for anyone to devote nearly a whole page of a book to quoting from an Agnew speech that attacked the press...
...a government busily consolidating a left-wing totalitarian state internally, and aggressively involved in attempting to overthrow its neighbors...
...Yet their conclusions about Nicaragua match Zuckerman's and Kramer's...
...Senator Edward Kennedy experienced the same phenomenon in 1979 and 1980...
...And surely for Kramer and Zuckerman, it had to be difficult to conclude, in print, that the policy of the Reagan Administration isn't maniacal...
...The heralded promises . . . have been replaced by a slow but clear movement toward a Cuban-style regime...
...Liberalism is also a factor, but not always the overriding one in political coverage...
...If television plays as important a role in creating political reality for Americans as I contend . . . and if that reality is systematically biased in favor of a particular ideology or party or candidate, then one of the most basic preconditions for democratic government does not exist in this land, and those of us who care about that should think hard about how we can induce the broadcasters to maintain a more objective stance without violating their First Amendment rights...
...The most astonishing was on the op-ed page of the New York Times, not a page of surprises other than those in William Safire's column...
...Of course, there is also an ideological explanation for the slackened coverage in Central America, namely that many reporters are inclined to think the worst of whatever the United States is doing and thus are delighted to report signs of failure...
...Given the normally hysterical reaction of the press to any criticism of its practices, I'm not sure Ranney is on safe ground with this assumption...
...Reporters, both print and broadcast, simply have an unquenchable thirst for bad news...
...So the press focus shifted to the Middle East...
...Unlike Cuba, where Fidel Castro kept his real intentions hidden until well after he overthrew Batista, the Sandinistas-for anyone who cared to read-have always been up-front about their orientation...
...Ranney notes that he pursued the question of bias and remedies for it "on the assumption . . . that one can raise these topics without in any way appearing to be a supporter of Spiro T. Agnew...
...After all, stories on the right-wing death squads are old, but that hasn't stopped their being retold, nor should it...
...Instead, it is a bias "against all politicians, and especially against those most identified with electoral politics...
...Remember now, Zuckerman and Kramer aren't flunkies for the Reagan Administration...
...They leap on any turn for the worse...
...And they do it partly because bad news gets better play...
...But Vinocur doesn't quite buy the Eastern Europe analogy...
...I went [to Central America] holding political views of El Salvador and Nicaragua shared by many liberals and centrists in our nation," Zuckerman wrote...
...The relationship between people and leaders was more feudal than revolutionary: the lord dispensing justice in return for loyalty...
...Life in Nicaragua today...
...In Channels of Power,* his insightful new study of the impact of television on politics, he goes with structural bias alone...
...It seems to me that network television news does have a bias, but it is not a political bias in favor of liberalism or con*Basic Books, $14.95...
...When favored to oust Carter, he was handled roughly, his halting speeches pilloried...
...But wait...
...It seems to me that, at least, Agnew's charges were and remain serious," he says...
...their editors invariably showcase the gloomy, the dire, and the horrendous...
...So when a piece labeled "On U.S...
Vol. 16 • December 1983 • No. 12
