Presswatch/Peter and the Wolves

...The temptation to vote secretly for the party of the Americans, for the party that will end the war, the shortages, the misery of hyperinflation, will be irresistible, I believe...

...ABC's reporters "on the ground" seemed blind on this point...

...Nor, for that matter, would it have required much for Jennings to refer to the general problem with polling in Nicaragua, as the Post did...

...Back to Rabel: What had he been doing down in Nicaragua...

...So did print journalists, including Mark Uhlig of the New York Times, in addition to those covering the election for the Washington Post...

...It is impossible to poll opposition sentiment in a Marxist state like Nicaragua where informers are ubiquitous and where until recently ration cards for rice, beans, and sugar were used as a tool of political subjugation...

...As Nina Shea, president of the Puebla Institute, a lay Catholic human rights group, told me, "The T-shirts, the hats, the placards—everything that could be seen was for the Sandinistas...

...A couple of notes, indeed...

...But I'd like to know whether any of the comrades named by Benjamin did fieldwork for the ABC-Post poll...

...John McWethy was next, with a piece assuming an Ortega victory, on future administration policy toward Nicaragua...

...The Post included a quote from an anonymous State Department official: "Everything in Marvin Ortega's background indicates that he is a longtime Sandinista supporter and a self-proclaimed leftist...

...It is perplexing, to say the least, how he could be considered a credible party to conduct an election poll in Nicaragua...

...Would we have heard Peter Jennings intone: "For all of us, journalists included, the polls hint at a simple truth: after years of trying to get rid of the Sandinistas, the Reagan and Bush Administrations have a great deal to show for their efforts...

...Not for Marxism or Marxists, but against an outcome that would reflect well, after all these years, upon U.S...

...Anything to make the reporter's job easier...

...Ed Rabel, NBC's man in Managua, says to Deborah Norville in New York: "Deborah, polls won't close here for another thirty minutes, but the widespread belief that the Sandinistas will prevail has shifted thinking far beyond the ballot box...

...What humdrum old democracy can beat this...

...And CBS can do so with some credibility...

...W hat could ABC have been thinking...

...After his poll story ran, Morin, the Post's director of polling, looked into the question further...

...Still, I can't conclude it's beyond ABC to report what was not tangible by Terry Eastland what was really in the hearts and minds of the majority of Nicaraguans...

...Recently, Michael Gartner, president of NBC, criticized CBS—correctlyfor its treatment of Andy Rooney...

...Thus John Dancy, in a wrap-up piece on Reagan's policy, concluded by saying: "It has been one of the longest and most traumatic chapters in U.S...

...Some of them were members, or had been members of a number of different political organizations, including the Revolutionary Marxist League (LMR), a Trotskyist party originally affiliated to the Fourth International...

...Writes Benjamin in his "Acknowledgments": During my last trip to Nicaragua in May 1987, I met a group of researchers at the Itztani Institute, an independent research institute based in Managua...

...I should give equal time to "NBC 1 Nightly News," which on the eve of the election not only had the Sandinistas winning but had its reporters and anchorwoman "advancing" the story...

...A couple of other notes about our Nicaraguan poll," he said that day...

...In fact, the lead was not that Ortega leads Chamorro, but that he only "appears" to lead...

...I rolled the tape for the week preceding the election and found nothing in ABC's coverage indicating that the vote might favor Chamorro...

...Just imagine the newscast if ABC had featured those polls instead...

...He went on to observe that there had been "a lot of explaining today about what happened...

...the poll's conclusion with the kind of non-polling evidence favoring Chamorro that was known to other journalists, or why ABC had failed to report that polling in Nicaragua generally had been subject to controversy and was perhaps unreliable, or why ABC had failed to note that the Belden and Russonello poll might itself have been ideologically tainted...

...I talked with Paul Friedman, executive producer of ABC's "World News Tonight...

...These education workers and revolutionary activists shared my overall political approach toward the Nicaraguan Revolution...

...Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in the London Spectator (February 24): "I donot share that assessment [that the Sandinistas will win], which seems to be based entirely on opinion polls conducted by foreign firms...

...N ow for some credit where it be- longs, to those who cast a skeptical eye at the polls and felt the rise of freedom: Robert S. Leiken, in the New York Times (February 12): "Despite a determined effort at intimidation by the ruling Sandinistas, the democratic opposition seems poised to win the Feb...

...AND THE WOLVES Let's go to the videotape, to hear from Peter Jennings, "ABC World News Tonight," February 20, 1990: We begin tonight with some facts and figures from Nicaragua that are_ _going to surprise many Americans...

...More than half of all Nicaraguans like the way Ortega has been running the country...

...Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, in their syndicated column (February 16): "Contrary to polls of dubious validity . . . UNO is surging...

...UNO was invisible...

...The last word goes to Jeb Bush, who knew the score long ago when he wrote in the July 1989 TAS: "If the Sandinistas allow free elections, it is likely they will be defeated...

...Nor did its story, written by Richard Morin and Lee Hockstader, hype the poll's findings...

...What's curious here is not only that this book criticizes the Sandinista regime from the left, but that Benjamin, according to the book jacket, wrote it "in collaboration with researchers at the Itztani Institute in Managua...

...Perhaps this is a matter of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, and in any event the covered hand that passed the quote to the Post may be correct...

...Here's CBS's chance to shoot back, by scoring NBC's election-day coverage, or rather its lack of coverage, its editorializing, and its manifest errors...

...Reporters do themselves and the public no favors when they speculate in this fashion...

...Then Jennings again, finishing the segment: A couple of other notes about our Nicaraguan poll...

...I may be shaving the question too fine, but don't appearances count in a matter like polling...

...Maybe Marvin Ortega's not such a type...

...And not to raise this question about Rabel alone...

...Whom had he been talking to...

...An ABC News-Washington Post poll gives the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega a 16-point lead over Violeta Chamorro . . . it may be hard for the opposition to catch up...

...Nicaraguans continue to dissemble reflexively with strangers, sometimes putting on a brilliant show of Sandinista sympathies until they are sure they're not talking to a 'toad' of the regime...

...There is something curious about the State official's saying what he did, because State does business with the same group...

...They are better-dressed than UNO members, they're younger, they play rock 'n' roll, they paint graffiti, their vice president is a novelist, and their minister of foreign affairs is a Mary-knoll priest...

...ABC clearly did not have to report the poll the way it did...

...He told me he had yet to find any information suggesting Marvin Ortega was "a partisan Sandinista...

...It would not have taken much for the usually non-sensational Peter Jennings to have said, on February 20, that there is a "consistent contrast between such poll figures and observations from almost any set of random interviews in the street" (a direct quote from Uhlig's story in the February 18 New York Times...

...NBC's Jamie Gangel then looks forward to "negotiations" between the Bush Administration and the victorious Sandinistas...

...As for INOP-Itztani and its possible Sandinista connection, Paul Friedman said, "First time I've heard that...

...Jennings reported various poll results before concluding: For the Bush Administration and the Reagan Administration before it, the poll hints at a simple truth: after years of trying to get rid of the Sandinistas, there is not much to show for their efforts...

...Or that he was, I'll say the word, biased...

...It wasn't a phone poll, all the respondents wrote down their own answers in secret and apparently with great enthusiasm...

...Marvin Ortega, the director of Itztani, isn't mentioned...

...If they don't, why not go with the polls conducted by La Prensa, the opposition newspaper, which showed Chamorro winning handily...

...Not that this would have helped...

...It could well be that like some other journalists they came to expect a Sandinista victory not only on the basis of polls but also after drinking in the "visuals," all of which favored the Sandinistas...

...On 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 the other hand, maybe he, or his organization, is more Sandinista than the Sandinistas...

...Who says...

...Or could it be that Rabel was trying out for a slot on one of the opinion shows proliferating in Washington...

...The topic of the day is: how will a freely elected Sandinistagovernment be treated by the United States...

...If true, that raises just as serious a question about the survey's credibility...

...I'm also told that the Sandinistas were far better at "press relations" than UNO, that they were always there to drive you somewhere, show you this, set up that interview, and so on...

...of the nets, its pre-election coverage was the best...

...In a country in which two years ago an economist was sentenced to 16 years in prison, for the `crime' of releasing economic data, it is still considered unhealthy to share your true opinions...

...Soon after our discussions in Managua, these comrades M agreed to collaborate with me in producing this book...

...But he didn't explain why ABC had played the poll at the top of its February 20 newscast, or why ABC had failed to qualify Terry Eastland is resident scholar at the National Legal Center for the Public Interest...

...Polls can be unreliable in a situation like Nicaragua's, in which many people are afraid to express dissenting opinions to strangers...

...After next reporting the results of the ABC-Post poll, Morinand Hockstader then noted that the director of INOP-Itztani, the Nicaraguan group that did the fieldwork for Belden and Russonello, was a man named Marvin Ortega, "who fought with the Sandinistas against the government of dictator Anastasio Somoza and [once] worked as a statistician in the agriculture bureau" of the Sandinista government...

...I regret that I didn't have more conversations with our reporters on the ground," Friedman now says...

...Of course, throw all of that in, and the now fairly mushed up story sinks in priority...

...Whose "belief" was "widespread...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 33...

...Besides, it was a slow news day (something anyone who's been in the news business can readily appreciate...

...And here is one more finding: 87 percent of the Nicaraguans we talked to said they were very concerned that the U.S...

...The next day, taking its turn, the Post didn't lead, the paper with news about the poll...

...David Asman, of the Wall Street Journal (February 22): "The polls aren't trustworthy...

...Six days later, reporting the election, which Chamorro won by earthslide proportions, Jennings at least admitted that the poll turned out to be "terribly flawed...

...policy, maybe even upon Ronald Reagan...

...Or to have put it this way: such "survey results seem at odds with reporters' random interviews on the streets, where discontent and resentment at the Sandinistas and their management of the economy are commonplace" (Washington Post, February 19...

...Czech journalist Martin Weiss, hardly a Sandinista apologist, wrote about it in the New Republic of March 26...

...We designed the questions, the poll was conducted by the Washington pollsters Belden and Russonello, who have a lot of experience in Latin America...

...I almost fell in love with the Sandinistas myself...

...The combination was enough to make the story the lead...

...There may be another way to account for the blind spots of some newsmen in Nicaragua: Sandinista charm...

...By the third paragraph, it was qualification time, as the Post's reporters noted what might be called "the reluctance factor" (as in the reluctance of Chamorro supporters to declare themselves truthfully to pollsters), and in the fourth they wrote that "the race may be closer than Ortega's lead in the Post-ABC poll . . . would indicate...

...Obviously not the majority that was a half-hour from finishing its work at the ballot box...

...And kudos to Dan Rather for leading his report on the elections with the observation that the result has stunned the American media...

...After all, Juan Vasquez of CBS, in his reporting, did drop some hints tnat the polls were not the whole story...

...The Post's Morin and Hockstader included the anonymous State Department official's quote in order to raise the issue...

...Here's something to ponder: a new volume titled Nicaragua: Dynamics of an Unfinished Revolution, published by Walnut Publishing Co., Inc., of San Francisco, California, and written by Alan Benjamin, who is identified as editor of Socialist Action, a newspaper...

...25 elections over the ruling Sandinistas...

...He said that the ABC polling unit had "an incredibly good record," and that therefore he was well disposed to go with what it had...

...For just whom was that "the topic of the day...

...In the fifth and sixth paragraphs, Morin and Hockstader took up the matter of polling in Nicaragua, observing that the results of twenty-nine pre-election surveys (the ABC-Post poll was the last one taken) had varied "wildly" and that "the polls themselves have become part of the frenzied debate in this impassioned campaign...

...This Sunday when the people of Nicaragua vote in their first free election in a decade, they will most likely elect as President the man Washington loves to hate...

...Never...

...The drift was there in other NBC pre-election coverage, even afterward...

...I am especially grateful to Rodrigo Ibarra, Orlando Morales Ortega, Carlos Molina Marcia, and Freedy Quizada of the Itztani Institute for this collaboration...

...It is a mystery how the voters will behave on Sunday...

...history in Latin America, and tonight it seems to be ending, and ending in a way Ronald Reagan never could have imagined...

...Yes, but hardly enough to justify the way it was presented...

...It's a question requiring more pursuit than journalism has so far given it...

...might invade their country...