When World-Views View the World
Observing the consolidation of Cold War ideology in the early 1950s, Louis Hartz concluded what would become a classic history of American political thought with two questions: "Can a people...
...It was an article on "Communist Contagion" based on an historic telegram then circulating in the foreign policy establishment, and leaked to Time by officials anxious to galvanize a war-weary public for the coming Cold War...
...Probably best termed the "human rights perspective," since it emerged during the period when the Carter Administration was stressing 28J*l/Ang 1983 2 that issue, this perspective gained much of its impetus from the reactions of reporters to the intensely oppressive nature of the military regimes of Central America...
...Business Week ran this photograph in its January 24, 1983 issue with the caption: "Nicaraguan citizens form lines outside government supermarkets awaiting food rations...
...No wonder some men cannot learn...
...What is the U.S...
...Will it work...
...Today, the Cold War ideology has lost its absolute monopoly, giving up ground to other, different frameworks for understanding the world in general and revolution in particular...
...2. Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1931), p. 238...
...It did not just happen yesterday...
...The Power of Ideology Lincoln Steffens, one of the greatest journalists of the golden age of "muckraking," once wrote: . I seem to have had a conception, a diagram of life, which every new discovery wrecked, or, if it held, had no place for new facts...
...In fact, the photographer took this shot of the third anniversary celebrations in Masaya, a city southeast of Managua...
...not a word about what kind of an economy this was that the guerrillas had declared war upon...
...The guerrillas are winning the economic war...
...There is really only one story that matters, according to this ideology-the global conflict between East and West, totalitarianism and democracy...
...But here, with a special report on the revolution in Nicaragua, is Dave Marash...
...It's not a very big country, Nicaragua...
...But the guerrillas declared war on the economy...
...7. Peter Dahlgren with Sumitra Chakrapani, "The Third World on TV News: Western Ways of Seeing the 'Other,'' in William C. Adams, ed., Television Coverage of International Affairs (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1982...
...In March of 1981, for example, ABC's Barrie Dunsmore introduced a series of special reports in which the network, as he put it, would "try to determine if an EastWest confrontation over El Salvador is desirable or likely...
...The section of 27 oNACLA Report the documentary dealing with Guatemala, parts of which were also broadcast on the evening news, juxtaposed scenes of Guatemalan poverty with images of complacent American businessmen...
...Much more tentatively, it includes a tendency to focus on the conflict between North and South rather than East and West...
...5. Ibid., pp...
...and it was only by being hit over and over again that I could let my old ideal and college-made picture of life be blown up and let the new, truer picture be blown in...
...This is the war the Reagan Administration calls the decisive battle for Central America...
...But most of us have not seen how the war came about...
...Like Time's 1946 "Communist Contagion" map, The Castro Connection showed a map of the Caribbean Basin with Fidel Castro's face superimposed over it and animated concentric circles radiating out from Cuba...
...But when the story is told over and over without political context (indeed, with the assertion that political context is irrelevant or somehow negative by definition) it distorts the violence itself...
...It's a good question, one the American public very definitely needs to know about...
...The basic themes of this coverage-the image of senseless political violence, without history or purpose...
...Asked about reported killings of opposition political party members, Sherwood responds, "I don't think there have been 120 people of all types assassinated here...
...6. ABC World News Tonight, March 9, 1981...
...Consider the following excerpt from the March 20, 1982 CBS documentary, Central America in Revolt...
...3. Time, May 9, 1983, p. 21...
...There was no revolution in the Cold War world, only "subversion," "indirect aggression," or "domestic instability...
...It can be seen, for example, in the typical "human interest" story of the innocent victim, the apolitical common man caught in the middle of political strife...
...There is a strong aversion to undertaking any commitment to shore up threatened pro-American regimes in the third world, no matter how strategically important they are, and a reluctance to believe that the countries of a region could topple like dominoes, no matter how compelling the evidence of spreading subversion...
...I mean, I'm not counting the peasants...
...Ronald Reagan, 1982 point of controversy...
...Quite simply, because they are familiar...
...5 Erosion of the Cold War Consensus To question the basic assumptions of Cold War ideology in the 1950s and 60s was to put oneself outside the bounds of "responsible" political discourse...
...history as well...
...10%--to permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life...
...Liebling Marines landing there in the 1920s...
...And Morton himself would have done well to ponder Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton's well-known March 1965 memo on U.S...
...The U.S...
...Fear of Politics The NBC report cited above comes from a period when El Salvador coverage was extremely sporadic...
...The Cubans are there and the Russians are coming...
...events, is therefore exactly the proprietor of a large, fat cow, told that he ought to enter her horse race...
...defeat [to our reputation as guarantor...
...It is from the introduction to the section dealing with El Salvador, narrated by Bill Moyers...
...the contrast between the American search for order and democracy and third world extremism-are rooted deeply in American political values, and they are very much in evidence in Central America coverage even when coverage is at its most intense...
...they speak to the audience in a language it already understands...
...Also-to emerge from the crisis without unacceptable taint from the methods used...
...role, decrease the military's, and increase that of the politicians...
...8 There is certainly a story to be told in any civil war about innocent civilians suffering and the desire of non-combatants for peace and security...
...to do so...
...We often forget that some of the lands foreign to us are often close by...
...Central America in Revolt took an important step further, responds not only presenting footage of U.S...
...An American said there are three forces in power here, the military, the United States, and the brand new democracy...
...Washington Post columnist, Colman McCarthy government caught in the center (though the emphasis, clearly, was on violence from the Left...
...But Steffens was a Very exceptional man...
...their critics as simplistic (they "often sound as though no revolution ever goes sour...
...T]he United States and its allies in this rural, often unsophisticated place are trying to do something exotic and difficult, create a democracy and a political center where none existed before...
...foreign policy from within the third world...
...More recently, reporting on President Reagan's April 27, 1983 address to Congress-which it called "one of the best of his presidency, forceful yet temperate"- Time resurrected for its own purposes the "chill specter of Vietnam": S. . Out of fear of repeating that colossal misadventure, Americans have seized hold of its lessons, perhaps inaccurately, perhaps obsessively...
...One thing an ideology does is to tell us, quite literally, how to draw the map...
...Vietnam shook the hold the Cold War consensus once had over American political consciousness...
...The article contained a map which divided the world into regions "exposed," "infected" and "quarantined...
...in Nicaragua's future...
...Central America in Revolt stands as one of those occasional departures from the usual blandness of American television, but it isn't an isolated piece of reporting either...
...6 Confrontation with the Soviets appears here as a policy, not an inevitable fact of world politics...
...Caught in the Crossfire This distrust of political partisanship comes across in the news in several ways...
...198, 200...
...Cuban interests and other dangerous forces are at work there...
...It is interesting here to consider El Salvador coverage in the period before the Reagan Administration came to office, when the issue of "Soviet expansionism" had not been raised...
...the U.S...
...The workers are very good," says businessman Fred Sherwood, "they don't mind doing the same thing day after day...
...Its most recent documentary on El Salvador, aired August 21, 1982, closed with the comment, In the long run only American aid will allow Salvadoreans to stop the guerrillas...
...And for 35 years, the ideology of the Cold War has done this in a particularly effi- cient way...
...He goes on to explain the conflict not in terms of its significance for U.S...
...July/Aug 1983 2324 NACLA Report As the opening of The Castro Connection suggests, the ideology of the Cold War is still very much alive, not only in Administration rhetoric, but in the consciousness of journalists as well...
...Matagalpa, July, 1979...
...It also brings in through the back door a particular political interpretation of the conflict...
...He presents the conflict not as "challenge" from the Soviets or a "problem" for U.S...
...Here, for example, is the introduction to a report by Hugh Downs on the first anniversary of the Nicaraguan revolution that appeared on ABC's 20/20: Up front tonight...
...public's distaste for politics is a luxury that can be enjoyed only in a society in which the fundamental questions of social power have already been decided...
...It has in a become fairly standard for television reports on Nicaragua, for example, to include film of the A.J...
...doing to ensure that the new Nicaragua turns out to be democratic instead of totalitarian...
...this was all Morton had to say about why there was a civil war in El Salvador...
...Its perspective on third world revolution is shared-often, in fact, in an even more developed form-by a great many of the print reporters who cover Central America on a regular basis, though they have relatively few opportunities to express it explicitly...
...After a century of largely military rule, young Guatemalan soldiers face a new challenge from left-wing insurgents...
...Such reporting generally accepted the official line of the Carter Administration that the conflict in El Salvador was a struggle between extremists of the Left and Right, with a moderate It is doubtful that even 50 years of terror and 20,000 deaths in the last two years would have opened the press' eye to El Salvador, had not Reagan and Haig turned it into an ideological test case...
...Until very recently, it was virtually unheard "of for journalists to raise the issue of American empire...
...Yet they presented the opposition to that order, most of the time, as a perpetrator of irrational violence, a threat not so much to the old order as to order in general, or as Bremen put it, to civilization...
...In the middle, there are the political parties...
...At times, of course, journalists will consciously emphasize an ideological interpretation of events...
...If they can win that right,' Moyers...
...But we are told the Soviet Union is working through Nicaragua and Cuba to help the insurgents win a victory for Communism...
...Moderates" never have ideologies, nor do they "grab for power"-power is another concept Americans understand poorly...
...It doesn't even have the cold clarity of one side killing those on the other, as Phil Bremen reports from El Salvador...
...involvement no doubt stems from this attitude, as did much of public opposition to the Vietnam war...
...I could say to the press, 'Look, I will trust you by telling you what we're trying to accomplish...
...And we cannot show you that crucial, bloody year of 1932, when the peasants rose up and were slaughtered, thousands and thousands of them, by the dictator who served the ruling class...
...2 Steffens believed that he, as ajournalist, had such intense contact with reality that the myths, the blinders he had inherited, eventually lost their hold...
...But for the most part, the influence of ideology is unconscious...
...If you use that story it will result in harm to our nation, and probably make it impossible to do what we're trying to do.' But they just go with the story-and we read it...
...Granted, the media have covered the guerrillas in Central America much more extensively than they have covered any revolutionary movement since the end of World War II, and they have covered them not simply as "the enemy" but as one side in a political conflict...
...Central America is just south of our borders...
...But it is a stalemate with losers: all the people, all the dreams that have gone wrong...
...The media, like the public at large, are now deeply divided and confused about how to interpret world politics...
...For most journalists, it is precisely because they are confronted with such a bewildering volume of events and claims that they de22JuIy/Aua 1983 23 pend so heavily on stock images and standard formulas to comprehend what is going on and to package it in such a way that the editors and the public will not find it equally bewildering...
...It is a perspective, in short, which presents revolution as a political, not a purely strategic phenomenon...
...those people aren't worth spilling American blood over...
...Oh yes [the government] is very, very cooperative...
...9. NSAM 328, Pentagon Papers, III, p. 349...
...Everyone says the Salvadoreans are hard workers, strivers, ambitious...
...media to report in any depth on criticism of U.S...
...The ideology of the Cold War did, as he had feared, prevent the American public for two full decades from confronting the reality of revolution...
...they are subject only to a few shots, not riddled with volleys, daily, all their lives...
...A good deal of the current opposition to U.S...
...role in terms of global competition with the Soviets and Cubans...
...Similar to Latin America in its wars to win independence from Spain, the United States did experience a political revolution...
...a civil war...
...It was Time which in its April 1, 1946 issue fired what is often regarded as the first shot of the Cold War as far as the U.S...
...The ideology of the Cold War The Reagan Administration, in its attempt to restore the Cold War consensus to its pre-Vietnam vigor, has touched off the most important debate over the basic direction of U.S...
...Here, for example, are excerpts from a CBS story of April 22, 1983, reported by Bruce Morton, also in El Salvador for a brief visit: Alejandro Coto remembers exactly how it was to be: here the marina, there the summer houses, restaurants, shops, festivals, art and music and money all around this artificial lake-money for 33NACLA Report Coto and the people of this resort-town-to-be...
...American officials were presented as dogmatic ("The Reagan Ad32July/Aug 1983 Time magazine originally captioned this scene, "Sandinista leaders...
...It is extremely difficult, therefore, for Americans to understand the ideological passion that accompanies such conflicts, and equally difficult for them to become aware of their own liberal ideology, which, having never been called into question, they have always regarded as "self-evident...
...A refusal to confront the reality of class has always made it difficult for Americans to understand societies where its importance is immediate and overwhelming...
...But once the viewer is "hooked," Moyers does not cater to the "distracted viewer" as does 20/20...
...aims in Vietnam: 70% -- to avoid a humiliating U.S...
...the U.S...
...We're told our own security is at stake here...
...And journalists, dedicated as they are to a professional ideal of political neutrality, are especially so...
...The world image implicit in this kind of coverage is well expressed in the wrap-up to Bremen's story...
...An understanding of that locale in terms of American national security makes it all the more important for the distracted viewer to pay attention to what is about to come up...
...What makes them all part of the same story is...the Castro connection...
...The United States and some people here want to trade military rule for a democracy, want to create a middle ground between Left and Right...
...foreign policy, and in particular the hostility to revolution that has been an axiom of U.S...
...Observing the consolidation of Cold War ideology in the early 1950s, Louis Hartz concluded what would become a classic history of American political thought with two questions: "Can a people 'born equal' ever understand peoples elsewhere that have to become so...
...If we and our democratic friends in El Salvador can't change things our way, the admirers of Fidel Castro will change things their way...
...In Nicaragua these days Marxist militia march to the rhythm of a Cuban beat...
...And as those commanders have grabbed for more and more power, moderates...have slipped away...
...we don't have restrictions or rules at all...
...Time magazine, too, has entered energetically into the fray...
...The first tip-off that something different is going on with CentralAmerica in Revolt is the fact that Moyers draws a verbal map, not of the bipolar world of the Cold War, East vs...
...The journalist will seize upon certain images or "angles"-the fanatical revolutionary, the apolitical Salvadorean voter who chooses "ballots rather than bullets"-not so much to make a point as simply to find a familiar point of reference in an alien reality...
...Of all the criticisms of the press that have been made in recent years, none could be further from the truth than the principal charge the Right has leveled in its critique of Central America coverage-the charge of "romanticizing revolution...
...But where is the U.S...
...Why did 20/20 pose the questions in these 24 NACLAReportJuly/Aug 1983 0 a, a terms...
...Hartz was right on two counts...
...I always respect the principle of selfdetermination," L6pez Portillo tells Moyers...
...and if they are allowed t right," concludes L6pez Portillo...
...The Castro Connection, in fact, is an example of the fact that many in the media have actively sided with the Reagan Administration in its effort to restore this ideology to its former strength...
...But whatever the position on U.S policy, this world view, just as much as that of the Cold War, refuses to acknowledge revolution as a political phenomenon, or to contemplate accommodation with it...
...Its principal characteristics are skepticism about Cold War rhetoric, a tendency to place revolution in the context of internal class conflict rather than "geopolitics"-and therefore to deal much more substantially with the history and politics of the countries involved than journalists thought necessary in the days of the Cold War consensus...
...Central America in Revolt was critical not only of the Reagan Administration and its Cold War rhetoric, but of almost every party to the Central American conflict...
...Every event in world politics can be interpreted in terms of this struggle-or if it can't, it isn't worth bothering about...
...But both questions are quickly framed in Cold War terms: the aftermath of revolution as a choice between "democracy" (the Western model) and "totalitarianism" (the Eastern...
...ministration insists it all be seen in the light of the Cold War between us and the Soviets...
...It has been rare, for example, for the U.S...
...Only the journalists themselves, "without an ideology to promote," as they assure us, appear to possess real wisdom, along with the "moderates" in Nicaragua...
...They still don't use the term, 3t of the but U.S...
...intervention in Guatemala in 1954, but also broaching the issue of economic imperialism...
...More important than the particular political interpretation of the conflict, though, is the cumulative impression of "senseless" violence...
...In the end, even the best attempts to come to terms with the conflict in Central America often end up, at least implicitly, with the dubious conclusion that everything would be alright if people would only calm down and act in an orderly and civilized fashion...
...The simplest way out of this dilemma is to conclude that the agent must be the United States, along with "some people" in Central America -they always seem to be vaguely identified-who believe in democracy on the U.S...
...The intention is to present "reality" in a way the public will understand-and that makes sense to the journalist...
...What El Salvador needs, we are told implicitly, is not revolution, not a change in the structures of political and economic power, but a lesson in civics: if only the extremists would agree to act peacefully, things would be fine...
...4. Quoted in Av Westin, Newswatch: How TVDecides the News (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 199...
...A revolutionary war is confusing enough to those who have lived their entire lives in a society that experiences it...
...But the guerrillas, these young men and their colleagues who are waging war on the country's economy, will not take part in elections, perhaps because many here think the left would lose, perhaps because many leftists fear justifiably that if they show up to vote, the government will kill them...
...The countries of Central America are only two hours by plane from Miami...
...But Hartz was right as well that American unease at the prospect of revolution has historical roots that penetrate even deeper than the ideology of the Cold War...
...foreign I rying to determine what is going on in the world by reading the newspaper is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock...
...Another variant can even be associated with a desire to get out and bloody some noses, show the world "who's boss...
...celebrate in Moscow...
...But the effect is often to subordinate the reality of another society to the symbols of the American world view...
...The monopoly publisher tion, on being told that he ough spend money on reporting dist...
...That's the frustrating thing about reporting this story...
...But, Hartz believed, lacking a feudal past, it never experienced the kind of political conflict that brings an existing social order fundamentally into question-the conflicts that motivated the great European revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries...
...It is the specter of world anarchy, not the image of a bipolar struggle between democracy and totalitarianism, but of "Fortress America," an island of civilization in a world of political barbarism...
...It is extremely difficult for Americans, journalists no less than others, to come to terms with political realities so distant from American experience and assumptions...
...iant of it that is often associated with a kind of paternalistic liberalism in which the United States brings democracy and human rights to a backward world...
...In concluding that documentary, Moyers remarks: My colleagues and I come back from Central America thinking it looks different from close up than from afar, and different if you don't have an ideology to promote or a policy to defend...
...CentralAmerica in Revolt is again a good example...
...First among them, however, is neither government control of information, nor conservative pressure on the media, nor editorial pressure on reporters, but the world view that reporters share with editors, officials and the vast majority of the U.S...
...the rulers of Central America as brutal and backward...
...in the language of the Cold War, "imt to perialism" was a word that could only apply to ant the Soviet Union...
...It can also be associated with an attitude reminiscent of pre-World War II isolationism: "Let's take care of ourselves...
...The photographer identified this shot as: "Distributing free meat and milk...
...policy since the late 1940s...
...If a people want to set up a certain kind of government for themselves, they have the right Bill Moyers and his crew on location with Central America in Revolt...
...public...
...But if those in Central America who take up arms against the old order are rejected as nothing but extremists, who is to be the agent of change...
...The political implications of this world view are ambiguous...
...Cold War imagery was rarely invoked...
...Fortress America" But the human rights perspective is not the only competitor that has emerged to fill the vacuum left by the weakening of the Cold War consensus...
...The strivers are slowly losing...
...Ben Hecht policy since the late 1940s, when that consensus was formed...
...On this Sunday, in the forty-fifth month of civil war, there are only the tears of simple people caught in the crossfire...
...Facts...
...It happened over many yesterdays, all of them filled with violence and terror...
...It is hardly surprising that a U.S...
...There is nothing they distrust more or understand less than political partisanship...
...It is not an image of Communist world conquest, but neither is it Moyers' world of 167 independent nations, each confronting its own set of social problems...
...8. NBC Nightly News, June 5, 1983...
...In other ways as well, CentralAmerica in Revolt represents an important break with long-standing traditions in the reporting of third world revolution...
...Our aim is to decrease the U.S...
...the stereotype of the fanatical revolutionary...
...hopes to do this through elections...
...What happens after a revolution...
...s 6 C1 C 26Julv/Aua 1983 The function of the press in is to inform, but its role is to m money...
...Morton's report would have benefited not only from a little more Salvadorean history, a little more about who precisely were the people described as "allies" of the United States and friends of democracy, but a little more U.S...
...The Iran hostage crisis gave strong impetus to this view of the world, and in fact the El Salvador story was often treated as a sidebar to the hostage story during this period...
...But Central America in Revolt included fairly lengthy interviews with Mexico's PresidentJos6 L6pez Portillo and novelist/statesman Carlos Fuentes...
...It isn't really necessary, if this framework is accepted, for journalists to confuse the public (or them- selves), by delving too deeply into the historical roots of local conflicts...
...3 More often, though, Cold War imagery is reproduced in the news through a much less deliberate process...
...They were aware-and sometimes S3 NACLA RepoartJuIv/Aua 1983 31 reported-that revolutionary violence had deep historic roots...
...By now the sights and sounds of the war itself are as familiar as the evening news...
...7 But there is more to it than that...
...There has to be something that will relate the story to the basic concerns of the television viewer . . . The simplest way is to tie it to American interests...
...In the face of modern ruins, the United States is urging Salvadoreans to put a little civilization in their politics...
...It's been one year since the fighting in Nicaragua ended...
...We assume that most of the people we are reaching have 'zero knowledge and zero interest in the subjects we intend to cover,"' writes Av Westin, executive producer of 20/20...
...There are numerous barriers to critical coverage in foreign affairs-coverage that would re-examine the premises of U.S...
...And they were not at all sympathetic to the established social order in El Salvador...
...As we shall see, there is a varJulv/AuO 1983 31NACLA Report The camera never lies...
...And there is always the worry that if the war goes badly, the Right, which doesn't much like the reforms anyway, will launch a coup, take over, and begin shooting people it doesn't like...
...Few American reporters, of course, are sympathetic to the old order in Central America...
...The war is a stalemate, the officials say...
...journalist plunged suddenly into a revolutionary crisis in an unfamiliar society and asked to say something in 90 seconds or 1200 words about what it all means, should tend to fall back on familiar assumptions and stereotypes...
...And it's certainly worth asking what role the United States will play in Nicaragua's future...
...NBC's documentary division has been consistent and explicit in its views on Central America...
...Con- sider the opening of a recent NBC "White Paper" on Central America, The Castro Connection, aired September 3, 1980: In El Salvador last summer the high school student on the left, 14 years old, was murdered, shot twice by security troops...
...global strategy, but in terms of the history of El Salvador itself...
...There is much of it we cannot show you...
...their opponents as naive (the Catholic missionary) or power-hungry ("The men who really call the shots," Mike Wallace reported from Nicaragua, "are the nine revolutionary directors, the comandantes...
...West, but of: a world of 167 independent nations...
...Romantic Revolutionary or Fanatic...
...Moyers' report begins, to be sure, by stressing the closeness of El Salvador to Miami...
...This is the function of ideology: it tells us what makes things "part of the same story," what kinds of stories can be told about the world...
...As NBC's Dennis Murphy reports from his brief visit to El Salvador: In this little country town today, no one has time to argue politics...
...media were concerned...
...journalists are beginning to deal-very who is cautiously of course-with the question...
...Can it ever understand itself...
...In this atmosphere of confusion, the news coverage from Central America is bringing the United States face to face with new realities-including not only revolution but also its own role as an imperial power...
...Once again, Bruce Morton provides a good example: CBS, April 28, 1983...
...to the extent that journalists bothered to explain the political conflict, they did so in terms of domestic causes...
...Americans are a deeply apolitical, indeed, an anti-political people...
...The military, with the rich, have run El Salvador for the last 50 years...
...We cannot show you the Spanish invaders, making slaves of the Indians to begin an era of brutal rule...
...This television report by NBC's 29 July/Aug 1983 30 NACLA Report David Brinkley is typical of that period: April 1, 1980, David Brinkley: In the tortured country of El Salvador the violence and killing continues every day, and it is random and senseless...
...policy, but as a response of real people to their own conditions of life...
...And some in the media are purposefully choosing up sides in that debate...
...Moyers goes on to pose the Cold War interpretation of the conflict in El Salvador as a "claim" of the Reagan Administration, and to juxtapose that interpretation to another quite different one...
...Not-to 'help a friend,' though it would be hard to stay in if asked out.' WHEN WORLD-VIEWS VIEW THE WORLD 1. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955), p. 309...
...So to a large extent, the image of "senseless violence" it and others project is a product of the sheer superficiality of third world coverage in a period when a story has low priority...
...But the guerrillas declared war on the economy...
...It seems to me now that facts have had to beat their way into my head, banging on my brain like bullets from a machine gun to get in...
...It is notable, incidentally, that the CBS documentary deals not only with poverty but class oppression as a cause of political conflict, even speaking of "the dictator who served the ruling class...
...And the American public, far from being forced to confront another reality, simply sees its own political assumptions mirrored back...
...Bremen (wrapping up): Before the violence, tourists came to see the ruins of an ancient civilization here...
...The Cold War perspective, in other words, is now no longer assumed as an article of national faith, as it was in the Vietnam period, but is posed as a political issue, a central 25NACLA Report Suppose...
...This world view may well be more powerful than any in post-Vietnam United States...
...What is most striking about CentralAmerica in Revolt, compared with the Cold War coverage of the past, is the attempt to portray third world societies on their own terms...
...What happens after a revolution...
...even Reagan himself has paid lip service to the recognition that social change is essential...
...model...
...It is particularly well illustrated by the movie, The Deerhunte, an ostensibly antiwar film whose message was that Americans were corrupted by their contact with the violence of Vietnam...
...20%-to keep SVN [and then adjacent] territory from Chinese hands...
...It's a longshot, the American said, but it might...
...The professional ideology of modern American journalism was formed primarily during the Progressive era of the early 20th century-a period when "good government" was defined as non-partisan government, a supposedly non-political form of "administration...
...But the dominant image of the revolutionary in Central America coverage, nevertheless, has been that of the political fanatic who stands in contrast to the peaceful "moderate" or common citizen...
...We cannot show you the big coffee growers of a hundred years ago taking the land on which the peasants grew food...
...But social change of the sort going on today in Latin America never takes place without partisanship...
...Not a word about the political repression that had caused the Leftcenter and a good deal of the center of El Salvador's political spectrum to cast their lot with the guerrillas in 1979-80...
Vol. 17 • July 1983 • No. 4
