According to Official Sources...
In the early 19th century, American journalism, like that of most of the world today, was primarily political, i.e., representing partisan politics and dependent on political subsidies.' Since...
...The convoy was ambushed by guerrillas...
...Reagan has purged Central America decision-makers who openly formulated a military escalation/dialogue option in favor of hardliners Jeane Kirkpatrick and William Clark at the same time that he has dispatched an envoy to the region in the name of "dialogue...
...Is anything more going on today than the kind of conflict within narrow limits that characterized media-government relations in the early 60s...
...5. Interview, Washington, D.C., August 13, 1981...
...These planes are regarded as the first step toward bringing in MIG fighters from Cuba...
...The CBS report of March 10, for example, shifted from a report on Congressional testimony by then Secretary of State Haig to a press conference by Nicaraguan leader Jaime Wheelock...
...36-7...
...Heath, 1973...
...On the right, death squads hired by the rich murdered priests and peasants...
...Not only is he afraid some rightwing informer lurking in the bar might overhear.., he is even more afraid that his reputation might get back to his desk...
...2. Douglass Cater, The Fourth Branch of Government (New York: Vintage, 1959...
...Are journalists now more wary of controversial stories, or more careful to cushion stories critical of the Administration position...
...becoming, as Douglass Cater expressed it in the 1950s, a kind of "fourth branch of government...
...While one does not routinely find American journalists making such a comparison, an important change has occurred in the use of the term propaganda...
...some lawmakers are genuinely shifting their opinions about U.S...
...Even with such an effort, the officials believe, it will take from two to seven years before significant progress can be made toward bringing the situation there under control...
...7 What they all accomplish, though, is to focus attention on the issues the Reagan Administration wants to emphasize, even if not always the way it would like them to be covered...
...premature publicity be avoided by all possible precautions...
...Furthermore, it is not limited to field versus Washington disputes...
...The Los Angeles Times ran two lengthy articles on Central America by its London bureau chief, William Tuohy, who had spent four years covering Vietnam...
...But the superficial fairness of it is a long way from capturing the real relation between a fragile revolutionary government in a nation of less than three million people and the military and economic might of the United States...
...2 The more neutral the press is...
...The Administration does not turn us on and off.16 There are, to be sure, constraints on the ability of the Administration to "turn the press on and off...
...9. The Wall StreetJournal, June 12, 1981...
...The Foundation for American Communication (FACS) has been busy on the Central America issue as well, joining with the Washington Journalism Review to sponsor a major conference on foreign policy coverage in March 1982...
...This was obviously a relatively critical report, but it takes for granted the "traditional gunrunning routes," despite several reports a month earlier that sharply contradicted Administration claims about arms flows from Nicaragua...
...Are not many members of the guerrilla front part of what there is of a political center in El Salvador...
...Beyond Day-to-Day Reporting Gelb's article also illustrates another change: a greater willingness among reporters to put the news into historical perspective...
...Nicaraguan officials say the maneuvers are only laying the groundwork for an Americanbacked invasion of Nicaragua...
...CBS, March 10, 1982...
...that sets into motion a certain interest in an area that demands coverage, and it will get covered...
...Balance, of course, is one of the basic principles of objective journalism...
...Victor Bernstein and Jesse Gordon, "The Press and the Bay of Pigs," Columbia University Forum, Fall, 1967...
...These war games are meant as a show of force to pressure Nicaragua to stop its rapid military buildup and to accept American terms for a proposed peace settlement...
...8. On the general importance of dissident sources in the field see David Halberstam, "The Press in Vietnam and El Salvador," The Wall Street Journal, February 23, 1982...
...The routines of journalism, then, have changed relatively little since the early 1960s...
...On FACS conference see More FAGS, April/May, 1982...
...And much of that coverage is still presented in the "straight" style Bernard Cohen wrote about in 1963: The Reagan Administration announced tonight that it is reluctantly cutting off all economic aid to Nicaragua because of its continued support to the guerrillas in El Salvador...
...Los Angeles Times, April 12, 1982...
...Whatever the reason for it, there were changes in television' s coverage during the period when the controversy was building that certainly appear to be a move back toward safe middle ground...
...There is also more determination by postWatergate reporters to look for dissident sources, and more willingness on the part of editors to put leaked information in print...
...The New York Times, January 26, 1982...
...policy at this juncture depends on a bi-polar view of world politics in which all countries are either pro-Soviet or pro-U.S...
...Bonner, said Whitney, had been originally hired as a stringer, had done excellent work in El Salvador but did not have training as a journalist, and was reassigned to New York to receive that training...
...It is interesting to note that two such efforts fell to veteran reporters of Vietnam...
...1 " When the story finally did come out in a New York Times report a few days before the invasion, the Times eliminated all references to the CIA...
...National Security Action Memorandum, April 2, 1965, following decision to use U.S...
...Bonnei himself would not comment...
...If all else fails...
...Harrison Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor, (New York: Ballantine, 1980...
...But nothing is more basic to understanding the conflict in El Salvador than the fact that there is a truly massive disproportion, consistently documented by human rights organizations, between the "white terror" of the various factions of the Salvadorean Right, and the relatively specific political violence of the Left...
...National Security Council Document on Policy in Central America and Cuba," The New York Times, April 7, 1983...
...Steven V. Roberts, "President Pledges to Shift Approach on Arms Control," The New York Times, May 12, 1983...
...36-7...
...The Washington Post, June 8, 9, 1981...
...As one reporter wrote to me: A reporter will often hold back on following the logic of his own opinion if other reporters...
...At the moment, it is giving very mixed signals...
...2. Douglass Cater, The Fourth Branch of Government (New York: Vintage, 1959...
...NBC decided to lead its broadcast with a report on the massacre, shifting then immediately to the Washington story...
...1 5 About two-thirds opposed the Administration's policy...
...8. On the general importance of dissident sources in the field see David Halberstam, "The Press in Vietnam and El Salvador," The Wall Street Journal, February 23, 1982...
...public opinion problems continue in cyclical pattern triggered by six-month certification and by 1984 U.S...
...But for the past few months, with Congress and the Administration wrangling over covert operations, coverage of CIA activity has been heavy and sometimes aggressive...
...and Honduran troops...
...by six to one (62% to 10%) they opposed CIA involvement in Nicaragua...
...9. The Wall StreetJournal, June 12, 1981...
...3 Moreover, information came increasingly through government-press contacts that were initiated and controlled by officialspress conferences, press releases, official proceedings and background briefings...
...Tom Wicker, On Press (New York: Viking Press, 1978), pp...
...a limited view of national interests around the globe...
...With or Without Consensus The changes we have traced, though small, have been prominent enough that despite its success in shifting the terms of political debate, the Reagan Administration has not been able to persuade the public to support its policies, as the polls have consistently shown...
...Low-Keying the Issue The critical tone creeping into much Central America coverage has not surprisingly generated Administration response...
...6. CBS Evening News, April 1, 1981...
...2 Reagan also criticized Central America coverage directly at about this time (in a March 20, 1982 TV Guide interview, for example...
...This seemed to many in the press a dubious parallel and a crudely obvious attempt to create the appearance of a crisis...
...Lloyd filed this report at a time when the "silent invasion" of Nicaragua from Honduras, and American backing of that invasion, were very much a reality, and had been widely reported (including by Lloyd himself...
...1. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978...
...such "evenhandedness" in foreign policy coverage was inconceivable when the Cold War was still in its ice age...
...The revolution, they say, is being fought primarily by peasants who were born and raised in the areas where they are fighting.' 2 Though infrequent, for reasons ranging from economic to ideological, and certainly not always favorable, this approach to coverage of the war is an important change from Vietnam, where the NLF (or "Vietcong"), was treated strictly as "the enemy...
...9 What will be classified, of course, is almost entirely at the discretion of the Administration...
...Thus editors contacted by NACLA consistently denied that political pressures or the general atmosphere of controversy had caused them to deal differently with Central America...
...6 Other reports are more "balanced," citing Nicaraguan denials, or Congressional opposition, or expressing a bit more skepticism in their wording: American intelligence sources claim that Nicaragua has received about a dozen jet military training aircraft from Cuba...
...These movements and changes should be understood as being gradual and wholly consistent with existing policy...
...But across the border in Nicaragua there have been anti-American demonstrations in the capital protesting the maneuvers as being provocative...
...Similarly, an NBC report by Robin Lloyd on U.S./Honduran maneuvers uses the phrase "Nicaraguan military buildup," in such a casual and unqualified way that it evokes and legitimizes Administration rhetoric rather than addressing the issue of Nicaragua's legitimate right to defense, particularly in the face of current attacks from its borders...
...The 10 NACLA ReportJuIy/Aua 1983 11 Times' Ray Bonner reported: El Salvador's political and military leaders call them "terrorists" and blame Communist subversion for the war here...
...A Pacific News Service review of initial editorial reactions to Reagan's Central America policy in 35 newspapersboth "prestige" and "hinterland" -provides a fascinating view of the change in political assumptions...
...He concluded his description, "It was the beginning of another day in El Salvador, a day in which nearly 50 persons would fall victim to political violence...
...Embassy in San Salvador to view photographs of alleged FMLN executions of government soldiers, was reportedly burned alive...
...That same day Salvadorean National Guardsmen had massacred 20 civilians in San Antonio Abad...
...This is a hard kind of question to answer with Network News Timetable for Coverage of Central America Issues October 1979 to January 1983 Minutes 500 Elections in El Salvador LI Statements about Soviet arms/ I snipments to Nicaragua- Unveiling of the Caribbean -Basin Initiative A Release of White Paper/ I any certainty...
...Like the images of Plato's cave, it was, most of the time, shadows of shadows: a representation not of what transpired in the world, but of what Washington said about it...
...Chicago Sun Times...
...3. Leon V. Sigal, Reporters and Officials (Lexington, Mass.: D.C...
...One incident that many have interpreted as evidence that political pressures have had some impact is the reassignment of the chief target of conservative critiques, Ray Bonner, who was pulled out of El Salvador by The New York Times not long after the controversy arose...
...And in fact, coverage of El Salvador dropped off dramatically after April 1981, and did not revive until the Administration's next major "public relations offensive" the following February...
...It is also worth noting an even rarer and more significant departure from that era...
...the more easily it lends itself to the uses of others...
...When reality itself is unbalanced, the kind of evenhandedness which U.S...
...AIM has focused on Central America before, and its complaints to The Washington Post at the time of the Nicaraguan revolution, according to deputy managing editor Richard Hargood, triggered an in-house investigation of Central America coverage...
...are beginning to jokingly refer to him as a "Com/symp...
...But it always had its limits...
...elections," a scenario the Administration considered manageable...
...Karen Rothmyer, "Citizen Scaife," Columbia Journalism Review, July/August, 1981...
...It was the routines and conventions of "objective journalism" itself, the practice of reporting "the facts" without comment or analysis, combined with the focus on official sources...
...Telephone interview, May 17, 1983...
...Tom Wicker, On Press (New York: Viking Press, 1978), pp...
...FAGS describes itself as a "balanced organization," but has considerable funding from New Right sources...
...ACCORDING TO OFFICIAL SOURCES...
...In the 50s and 60s, the government definition of who fit that category was accepted by the media as a clear boundary of what might be called the sphere of legitimate controversy...
...The Washington Post, June 8, 9, 1981...
...their statements were not considered "political...
...Edward Jay Epstein, News From Nowhere (New York: Vingage, 1973), p. 64...
...Has all this controversy made any difference...
...2 4 There have been signs recently that Congress might be losing its nerve for a fight with the President over foreign policy...
...eleven soldiers were killed and along with them a number of civilians...
...1. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978...
...National Security Council Document on Policy in Central America and Cuba," The New York Times, April 7, 1983...
...This is especially true of television, which, with its limited time, tends to ignore issues that are not "hot" in Washington...
...On FACS conference see More FAGS, April/May, 1982...
...But the peasants and their leaders here in Morazin, where the anti-Government movement is the strongest, contend that theirs is an indigenous revolution spawned by decades of political and social injustice...
...Early in 1982, the Administration warned that (unauthorized) officials suspected of leaking classified information would be subject to investigations using "all legal methods," including polygraph tests and possibly (as was the practice under the Nixon Administration) wiretaps.'" In March of this year, the decision to El Salvador's internal war is rooted not in communist infiltration but in wretched poverty...
...In the same month as the Gelb article, to take another example, The New York Times also published a report on disagreements within the Administration over covert aid to Nicaragua (April 7...
...combat troops for offensive operations in Vietnam decision-making...
...involvement in El Salvador was not "morally justified...
...Telephone interview, May 23, 1983...
...In turn, there are more demands on the Administration to give information to Congress-a notoriously "leaky" institution-and to the press itself, in an effort to get its own version across...
...We always try to balance our stories," said ABC Miami bureau chief Frank Manitzas...
...To discuss it now simply in Cold War terms of the 50s is to give the Russians credit for something they did not create...
...Keeping the Shadows Under Control Washington, as we shall see, is much more divided today than it was in the early 1960s, and that opens a lot more space for critical news coverage than existed then...
...Though American journalism still covers the world on a day-by-day basis, increasing space is now given, particularly in the "prestige press" -the nation's top daily newspapers-to long, analytic articles that put the news in historic context...
...By the mid-20th century, as the United States became a power center in world crises, Washington-in particular the executive branch of government-became the primary locus of newsgathering...
...The reason for such controversial articles is simple: with more disagreement over foreign policy now, there are more people willing to leak information or to give dissenting opinions (often "not for attribution...
...And intelligence reports on the prospects for success, as the publication of the Pentagon Papers later showed, were more pessimistic and more likely to arouse political opposition than the public statements issued on these questions...
...7. ABC WorldNews Tonight, April 15, 1982...
...But overall the ups and downs of the media's attention have closely followed the Administration's...
...2 6 Republican Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, once a staunch isolationist, became the symbol of bipartisan Cold War consensus in the 1950s...
...Victor Bernstein and Jesse Gordon, "The Press and the Bay of Pigs," Columbia University Forum, Fall, 1967...
...NBC's Fred Francis, for instance, reported on April 16, 1983: In recent weeks CIA guerrillas have attacked villages like La Rosita, Siuna, Bonanza, and half a dozen other [Nicaraguan] targets, some more than a hundred miles from the traditional gunsmuggling routes into El Salvador...
...But today the political establishment is deeply divided over foreign policy...
...The publicizing of the CIA's "secret war" in Nicaragua is the most striking example...
...The New York Times, April 21, 1983...
...Watchdogging the Media In the mid- to late-1970s, as the impact of Vietnam and Watergate was being felt and the media were becoming generally more aggressive, a variety of conservative "media watchdog" groups were formed, dedicated to reversing what they saw as a media shift leftward...
...And the practice assured efficient use of resources: a beat in the State Department or the Pentagon was sure to produce a reliable flow of usable daily news...
...officials spoke for the nation and for the "Free World" in general...
...At a time when government troops are accused by human rights organizations of massacring innocent civilians, the armed forces here say that massacres like this one show the rebels are capable of committing atrocities as well...
...Field Reporting a Different Reality NBC News, February 1, 1982...
...Yet, for all the skepticism journalists have inherited from the Vietnam period, the continuing tendency to cover world politics primarily through Washington's eyes has been an important resource for the Reagan Administration and an important limitation on the extent to which changes in journalists' views have been reflected in the news...
...A New Kind of Balance Media acknowledgement of the "politicization" of foreign policy is also reflected in the fact that Administration spokespeople are now sometimes paired against their foreign policy adversaries to achieve "balance...
...Los Angeles Times, April 12, 1982...
...Journalists and news organizations care a great deal about their reputation for political independence, especially in the postWatergate period...
...The classified report, known as the Woerner Report, had been mentioned inadvertantly at a Congressional hearing several months before...
...The New York Times, January 26, 1982...
...Isn't it all propaganda...
...The Administration has been able very effectively to put El Salvador in the headlines, but whenever it does-especially when there is a stir in Congress-editors start demanding stories from the field...
...Not only "editorializing" but most "analysis" was excluded from the news columns...
...Heath, 1973...
...The New York Times, May 30, 1983...
...It is always tempting, when analyzing the media, to compare how they are with how one thinks they ought to be and leave it at that...
...1 Gelb himself worked in the Defense Department during the Johnson Administration, was one of the authors of The Pentagon Papers, and later wrote a book on Vietnam The President requests...
...Reliance on official sources and routine channels also served important functions for journal7a NACLA Reoort ists and news organizations...
...They say peasants have been massacred by the rebels for siding with the armed forces, and that recently a family of army sympathizers 20 NACLA Report Reporters crowd a briefing at the U.S...
...activities in the region, while others are backing off because they are afraid they will be accused in the 1984 elections of being 'soft on Communism.' " 2 5 "I sense the spirit of Senator Vandenberg in this room this morning," Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos had said a few days earlier, after the House Foreign Affairs Committee had approved by 36 to 1 a compromise measure to provide additional military aid to the Salvadorean government on the condition that the government begin negotiations with the rebels...
...Los Angeles Times, March 20, 28, 1983...
...The media, as we shall see, are a long way from giving the public an adequate picture of what is going on...
...official concerned with investigating the traffic...
...No reporter goes to El Salvador without being shocked by the level of violence, and none can talk with the victims of that violence without learning that government security forces are heavily involved...
...In general it seems to be true-though it still needs to be tested with content analysis-that television has continued, since this period, to emphasize this kind of false balance between guerrilla and government violence significantly more than it had since the December 1980 killing of four U.S...
...The Wall StreetJournal published an editorial on February 10 blasting the press, and Bonner in particular: Much of the American media.., was dominated by a style of reporting that grew out of Vietnam-in which Communist sources were given greater credence than either the U.S...
...But it cannot hope to do that unless it successfully appeases-or intimidates-Congress, and unless it avoids an escalation of the Central American conflict itself...
...Jay Peterzell, "The Government Shuts Up," Columbia Journalism Review, July/August, 1982...
...By early February a storm of conservative criticism was in full swing, centered around the charge that the media were "romanticizing revolution...
...Hence it cannot rapidly build a viable military force and a centrist government in El Salvador with the popular support essential to success...
...The day before Plante's question, for example, ABC's Barrie Dunsmore had introduced a State Department press briefing, where evidence of an alleged Nicaraguan military buildup was to be presented, as "a major escalation in the propaganda war over Central America...
...To the black-and-white consciousness of that era, the media's handling of the Wheelock press conference, for example, would have been like balancing the scriptures with a statement from the devil...
...It is, for example, written into the Federal Communication Commission's guidelines for application of the Fairness Doctrine (which mandates balanced coverage by broadcasters of "controversial issues of public importance") that "it is not the Commission's intention to provide time to Communists or to the Communist viewpoints...
...Are we going to have to watch this script replayed again in El Salvador, or can we in the press succeed in bringing some perspective to the story...
...A reply by Karen DeYoung appeared in the May, 1982 issue of the Review...
...That's a myth perpetrated by Accuracy in Media...
...The Reagan Administration itself had awakened the often sleepy skepticism of the press in this case by bringing out John Hughes-the man who had briefed the press on the Cuban missile crisis 20 years earlier-to present the evidence of a Nicaraguan buildup...
...Objective journalism, as New York Times associate editor Tom Wicker has put it, is essentially "establishment" journalism...
...It is certainly true, and should be reported, that in any civil war both sides kill civilians...
...A style of reporting that makes perfect sense for an American presidential campaign or a debate in Congress can have very different implications when it is applied to a conflict like the one in Central America...
...and only 8% believed the human rights situation in El Salvador had improved since the previous year...
...Then Salvadorean President Napoleon Duarte, 1982 Napoleon Duarte meets the foreign press prior to the elections forces" (April 22...
...6. CBS Evening News, April 1, 1981...
...foreign policy...
...Absolutely not," said Craig Whitney, Times foreign editor...
...Here lay the irony: it wasn't so much the power of officials (or publishers, or advertisers, or anyone else) to intervene directly in the news reporting process that made the press so tame...
...Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1983...
...This kind of split between what is released in Washington and what is attributed to either dissatisfied, or simply more knowledgeable, sources in the field is common in foreign affairs reporting...
...Consider the following report on guerrilla violence by CBS' Charles G6mez on March 14, 1982, one of many that could be cited: Soldiers say the ambush was just one of several atrocities carried out by the rebels near Chalatenango...
...Los Angeles Times, March 20, 28, 1983...
...This handling is best exemplified by Bill Moyers in Central America in Revolt, a March 20, 1982 CBS special: Extremism breeds extremism . . So on the left guerrillas turned to bombings, kidnappings, robbery and murder to achieve their political goals...
...2 2 This same concern, seemingly, can have the reverse effect, leading at least some reporters to view the question differently than their editors...
...U]nable to win and unwilling to lose, [it] is playing for time in the face of a messy situation in El Salvador...
...It protected journalists politically, relieving them of responsibility for the information they reported...
...Tension between the Kennedy Administration and the Saigon press corps resulted from exactly this willingness to report discrepancies between the official version and the reality discovered in the field...
...Perhaps-but one would have to know more about the circumstances to judge fairly...
...Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick with Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Miguel D'Escoto in debate, and Salvadorean FDR leader Guillermo Ungo has appeared on NBC's Meet the Press...
...This poll, conducted between April 4 and 10 of this year, also found that by nearly two to one (49% to 26%) the public believed that U.S...
...Is it really possible to build a political center...
...As newspapers became successful commercial enterprises, journalism came to be seen as an autonomous profession, whose integrity required that political influence, even of advertisers and publishers, be limited...
...foreign policy statement, or even to suggest such a thing more subtly...
...In the Nicaragua case, it took a while for the story to catch on-the first reports in The Washington Post in mid-February 1982 were not followed up by the rest of the press...
...Of major national media it has historically been television that is most sensitive to accusations of imbalance...
...U.S...
...As national-security correspondent Leslie Gelb reported in The New York Times on April 22, 1983: A range of Administration officials say the United States must make a sustained, increased effort in El Salvador or lose the war to the guerrillas...
...4. Bernard C. Cohen, The Press and Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 28...
...ACCORDING TO OFFICIAL SOURCES...
...the more constrained it feels about makingjudgments on the meaning or importance of 'what transpires'-the more easily it lends itself to the uses of others, and particularly to public officials whom reporters have come to regard as prime sources of news merely by virtue of their positions in government...
...Shortly after the White Paper was released, the Administration decided to try a different strategy: to "low-key" the issue rather than emphasize it...
...Guatemala, incidentally, which is now once again receiving U.S...
...military aid and could eventually become the big story in Central America, has hardly been covered at all by television, except during the March 1982 elections...
...In 1961, the press maintained almost complete silence on the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion, which was common knowledge in Guatemala, where the CIA had a training base, and in the Cuban community in Miami...
...In the 1950s and 60s, the tradition of "objective journalism" was interpreted quite narrowly...
...Ray Bonner's reports in The New York Times appeared late in January, 1982...
...The MacNeil-Lehrer Report and ABC's Nightline have paired U.N...
...and details on a report prepared for the Pentagon in 1981 which concluded that "even with increased military assistance from the United States the Salvadorean military as then constituted could not defeat opposition guerrilla I am losing the war not on the battlefield but in the pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times...
...4. Bernard C. Cohen, The Press and Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 28...
...troops was not under consideration, only to be followed by both Senator Barry Goldwater and General Wallace Nutting from the Southern Command who raised a trial balloon of direct intervention...
...Foreign news, especially, pulsed to the rhythm of U.S...
...Los Angeles Times, March 17, 1981...
...Fifty civilians, he reports, had been riding back to San Carlos from the market in Chalatenango in a military convoy...
...5. Interview, Washington, D.C., August 13, 1981...
...Accuracy in Media (AIM) targeted Central America coverage in The New York Times and The Washington Post...
...Telephone interview, May 17, 1983...
...The Administration's April 1981 planning document (leaked to The New York Times earlier this year) assumes that "U.S...
...David Halberstam and successors played a key role in ridding South Vietnam of the supposedly repressive Diem regime, only to help usher in an even bloodier future...
...The invasion of Honduras by Nicaragua, on the other hand, was nothing more than a charge-if not, as the Sandinistas seemed to think, an objective-of the Reagan Administration...
...Today it is often different...
...Telephone interview, May 17, 1983...
...In the early 19th century, American journalism, like that of most of the world today, was primarily political, i.e., representing partisan politics and dependent on political subsidies.' Since that time, the American news media have undergone two major transformations, which are ironically intertwined...
...The new profession of journalism was taking its place as a part of the political establishment...
...In the 1950s and 60s, only "the other guys" engaged in it...
...Harrison Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor, (New York: Ballantine, 1980...
...7 Plugging Up the Leaks If news coverage is largely a question of sources, then one place to manage the news is at the source...
...The problem is that these are oneshot affairs, appearing for a day in one or at most a handful of newspapers, while the official Washington line is reported day in and day out in all the major media...
...On May 16, the Los Angeles Times reported that...
...Freedom House, headed by Gerald Sussman of Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies, released a report criticizing Central America coverage which received considerable press attention...
...Unidentified Reporter about Central America...
...Neither the Post nor the Times have conducted such investigations recently...
...The traditional techniques of news management are still powerful...
...Telephone interview, May 23, 1983...
...Its efforts have included raising the issue at a Post stockholders' meeting, meeting with Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, and beginning a letter-writing campaign directed at the Times...
...7. ABC WorldNews Tonight, April 15, 1982...
...Nevertheless, foreign affairs reporting has, in many ways, changed dramatically from the early days of Vietnam...
...the text of a "highly classified" document summarizing a meeting of top Reagan foreign policy advisers, which among other things, calls for a strategy to "co-opt" the issue of negotiations regarding El Salvador and reveals a decision to keep quiet for several months about a short-fall in the amount of aid needed (also April 7...
...Once journalists came to see it as their job to present "facts" rather than political opinion, channels of information became crucial...
...See chart...
...Telephone interview, May 17, 1983...
...On February 1 of this year, NBC's Robin Lloyd reported joint maneuvers in Honduras involving U.S...
...What has provoked the strongest conservative reaction is the relatively sympathetic coverage that has sometimes been given to the Salvadorean guerrillas...
...Following a Reagan speech on Afghanistan, correspondent Bill Plante shouts a question from the floor: "The Russians are in Afghanistan, the U.S...
...And things there look very different from the way they do in Washington...
...This report is a good illustration of how much has changed since the early 60s...
...The New York Times, April 21, 1983...
...The President opens his mouth, the Secretary of State opens his mouth," says Karen DeYoung, Washington Post foreign editor, "and he gets covered...
...involvement in Central America is likely to lead to another Vietnam...
...Has anything really changed...
...How the Press Covered the Sandinistas," Washington Journalism Review, March, 1982...
...Effective Intimidation...
...in Nicaragua...
...United States officials agree with what those leaders say: that Cuba and Nicaragua are supplying weapons, training and men...
...Press Shines Harsh Light on Reagan's Salvador Policy," Pacific News Service, March 27, 1981...
...An important example of this is the following report by Chris Dickey in The Washington Post on February 20, 1983: Despite the insistence of Administration officials in Washington that Nicaragua is continuing to provide a significant amount of weapons to the Salvadorean rebels, diplomats and military officials in Central America say that for more than a year there has been very little solid evidence of material support for the Salvadoreans originating in Nicaragua...
...At the end of his article, Gelb did something still very unusual in American journalism: he raised "a number of questions that many officials do not want to talk about, or, in some cases, have not thought much about...
...will the [Administration] then advocate sending United States combat troops...
...The official sources journalists rely on are now telling them very different things, and journalists feel an obligation to take an independent stance in relation to administration policy they never would have considered in the days when foreign policy was considered "above politics...
...Another example...
...This is as true of American journalism today as it was in previous years...
...There was no question then of "balancing" an official release from the State Department with a statement from Havana or Hanoi...
...Shadows on Cave Walls Thus by the Vietnam period, what was most characteristic of American journalism was its dependence on the perspectives of official Washington...
...and the Washington Journalism Review published an article by Shirley Christian, a Latin America correspondent for The Miami Herald, criticizing coverage of the Nicaraguan revolution which, she charged, had failed to warn that it would end in a Marxist dictatorship...
...Karen Rothmyer, "Citizen Scaife," Columbia Journalism Review, July/August, 1981...
...MacNeilLehrer and Nightline devoted broadcasts to the controversy...
...The same fate again befell the Reagan Administration on January 21, 1983, when The Miami Herald's Sam Dillon painted a grisly portrait of Salvadorean treasury police grabbing two teenage girls, tying their thumbs behind their backs and driving away with them...
...The more neutral the press is," wrote Bernard Cohen, in a 1963 study of foreign affairs reporting, "that is...
...The New York Times, May 30, 1983...
...Jay Peterzell, "The Government Shuts Up," Columbia Journalism Review, July/August, 1982...
...The Reagan Administration had gone to Congress to request additional military aid for El Salvador...
...Officials Speak Propaganda...
...A similar percentage, according to a recent Los Angeles Times poll, had a "negative" impression of the current Salvadorean regime...
...3. Leon V. Sigal, Reporters and Officials (Lexington, Mass.: D.C...
...government or the government it was supporting...
...Mary Ellen Leary, "U.S...
...no journalist would dream of using the term for a U.S...
...policy was subject to the kinds of internal conflicts that now exist...
...That assignment was temporary, and Bonner is now back in New York on the financial page...
...Were the guerrillas reckless about civilian lives...
...What's the difference...
...Stockton (Calif) Record: U.S...
...On the one hand, they have become formally independent...
...citizens put the human rights issue in the spotlight...
...Dillon drew no conclusions of his own, but his story-of an event which had taken place two weeks earlier--appeared the very day the Reagan Administration certified to Congress that the Salvadorean government had made a "concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized standards of human rights...
...Roughly twothirds of the public, according to most surveys, believe U.S...
...Edward Jay Epstein, News From Nowhere (New York: Vingage, 1973), p. 64...
...Simultaneously, Reagan told Congress that the use of U.S...
...classic domino theory logic, applied wrongly once again to misleadingly simplify a complex civil war...
...Several papers, for instance, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, eventually published critiques of the White Paper which were never even picked up by most of the media.' Repetition Becomes Truth The Administration's major themes have by now been repeated so often that they have become part of the standard vocabulary for talking 8 NACLA ReportJuIy/Auu 1983 9 A reporter who has recently received a set of clippings is keenly aware of what has been deleted by the editors back home...
...The Administration cannot control the actions of its Salvadorean allies any more effectively than it could dictate to past dependents such as South Vietnam...
...G6mez had to bend quite a way backward to achieve "balance" here...
...July/Aua 1983 910 NACLA Report two events in the same broadcast...
...The Kennedy andJohnson Administrations were able to keep a lid on both policy disagreements and information about the probable extent and duration of U. S. involvement...
...journalists both need-as a protection against political controversy-and believe in, is often the enemy of July/Aug 1983 truth...
...Reporters may take justifiable pride in their bravery in the face of death but few would expose their reputations with such recklessness...
...Asked if the tendency to react to Washington coverage would make it possible for the Administration to low-key Central America coverage, ABC bureau chief Frank Manitzas responded, "Once the speeches have been made in Congress...
...A reply by Karen DeYoung appeared in the May, 1982 issue of the Review...
...Steven V. Roberts, "President Pledges to Shift Approach on Arms Control," The New York Times, May 12, 1983...
...Los Angeles Times, March 17, 1981...
...But 20 years ago a network would have been reluctant to include these Getting into the act-a journalist shoulders a bazooka in El Salvador...
...Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1983...
...Press Shines Harsh Light on Reagan's Salvador Policy," Pacific News Service, March 27, 1981...
...And in an atmosphere of political division, the routines of "objective journalism" take on a different meaning...
...The problem is not a simple one of leftist insurgents against a government friendly to the U.S...
...Bernard Cohen Key to this dual transformation was the use of sources...
...It is very possible Nicaragua is not feeding anything but peanuts into El Salvador," said one U.S...
...Mary Ellen Leary, "U.S...
...The grim reality of El Salvador is one of the great dilemmas Reagan has had to face...
...while the "police and national guard conducted a reign of terror against any challenge to the government and the oligarchy in charge...
...Editorials: A Special Test It may well be that the single most important change that has taken place in American journalism and in American politics generally is that the Cold War view of the world is no longer accepted as a given...
...How the Press Covered the Sandinistas," Washington Journalism Review, March, 1982...
...FAGS describes itself as a "balanced organization," but has considerable funding from New Right sources...
...sources in the field that most of the guerrillas' arms were captured from the Salvadorean government...
...A few editorial comments: The Miami Herald...
...Leaks in the Ship of State It wasn't until years after troops were dispatched to Vietnam that U.S...
...This made news management much easier: not only did this mean that the context tended to be provided by the officials quoted in the news, it also meant that major policy changes could be announced piecemeal, in such a way that their full significance didn't become clear until they were a fait accompli-precisely the way the Johnson Administration handled the 1964-65 escalation in Vietnam...
...The implicit message is, "the Right's despicable, but the Left isn't really any better...
...Balancing" an Unbalanced Reality Even on its own terms, the emphasis on "balance" in reporting on Central America illustrates one of the great ironies of American journalism...
...At the same time, however, relations between press and government were becoming close and regular...
...This was buttressed by Drew Middleton, the New York Times military affairs reporter, who was told by U.S...
...Whitney pointed out that Bonner was subsequently assigned to Washington to cover Central America issues...
...If the Administration wants to continue its policies in Central America, as it has done up to this point, without public support-but also without triggering the kind of activist opposition that brought masses of people into the streets in the 1960s-it will have to try again to "low-key" the issue for an extended period of time...
...In any case the "atrocity" is hardly comparable to the strictly political murders outside of combat which G6mez offers in juxtaposition...
...Most major news organizations, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, have had reporters traveling with the guerrillas, or have purchased such material from free-lancers...
...Sacramento Bee editorial use polygraphs was reaffirmed, and an Administration committee proposed legislation that would make government employees disclosing classified information subject to criminal penalties...
Vol. 17 • July 1983 • No. 4
