Dear Editor
Dear Editor Grenada Coverage The "Between Issues" column in The New Leader of October 31, 1983, says: "Utterly confounding was the decision to bar the press from Grenada." Others, including NBC...
...Some there are willing to bet that in about two to three years, when the old-guard leaders associated with the military failures have been replaced or retired, the Army, Navy and Air Force will have resolved their rivalries...
...In two additional positive steps, nine former junta members are to be prosecuted for ordering murder, torture and kidnapping, and a commission has been appointed to uncover the others responsible for the 6,000 "disappeared...
...And Beveraggi is a close ally of the American anti-Semitic populist organization Liberty Lobby, which pays special attention to Argentina as the one place on earth where its version of an anti-banking, anti-Jewish Utopia might conceivably be established...
...A few well-publicized cases may establish the good intentions of the new government, but will do little to satisfy the families of the desaparecidos or human rights groups...
...Friends of a democratic Argentina would do well to read the coverage of Argentina in the Liberty Lobby tabloid, the Spotlight...
...Others, including NBC news commentator John Chancellor, have expressed a deep concern that so many Americans cheered "the exclusion of the news media from covering the invasion and the fighting...
...in October, two companies of soliders wrecked the office of the Indiana Terre Haute Journal and Democrat...
...Southern leaders, in fact, hoping that the Northern press would contribute to Lincoln's electoral defeat in November 1864, were encouraged to keep on fighting...
...Now the Radicals must revitalize a previously moribund party organization, expand its middle class base, and develop the cohesion necessary for governing...
...Alfonsin's daughter, Maria Ines, has lived in Oklahoma for nine years...
...in Iowa in February 1863, about 75 convalescent soldiers wrecked the office of the Keokuk Daily Constitution...
...Curiously, although Chancellor made a passing reference on his program to the listener's adverse reaction to his comments, he seems not to have mentioned the concrete and striking fact that the letters and telephone calls had gone 5 to 1 against him...
...It is easier to get hold of than the fascist magazine Cabildo, from Buenos Aires, which has much the same line, and Spotlight has the advantage that readers of The New Leader will by looking at it see what their own enemies are up to, here at home...
...The newspapers of New York so disgusted Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles that he wrote in his diary that none was sincere, and that the editor of the Times was a "mercenary" (the editor had characterized Lincoln as the nearest thing there was to a fool...
...The Peronists have to decide what they stand for, develop a cadre of younger middle-level leaders, commit themselves to democratic procedures both inside and outside the party, and streamline their coalition to the point where it can move beyond emotionalism to begin to represent its constituency...
...Evanston, III...
...Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War in Lincoln's Administration, warned he would not tolerate newsmen who aimed for "sordid" purposes to "spy out official acts" which the safety of the nation required to remain undisclosed...
...Still, there is reason to hope that the President will realize the considerable potential he demonstrated during the campaign...
...The last Radical president, Arturo Illia, was overthrown by the military with the tacit approval of Washington, which seems constitutionally incapable of comprehending the nature of Argentine nationalism...
...That the Radicals and Peronists were able to come together in a short period of time, select two able candidates (Alfonsin and Ita-lo Luder, respectively), mobilize support and conduct an effective national campaign is to their credit...
...The worst infringements, though, came less from the government than from the readers...
...This was a rare opportunity, however, for the American people to express a lack of confidence in the media engendered during the Vietnam War...
...The bankers and the diplomats will be watching each other's signals carefully...
...Davis, Cal...
...Nonetheless, the Tribune and Times both accepted Lincoln's August 1864 censorship of correspondence with a Confederate mission, lest it "give too gloomy an aspect to our cause...
...That this judgment is not without substance is borne out by the two volumes of Peter Braestrup's study Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington...
...A lot, however, depends on the United States...
...William Crotty Professor of Political Science Northwestern University...
...the Bloomington Times lost its office equipment to a mob the next year...
...he visited her there quietly in 1980...
...The interested reader will find the details of all these episodes I have mentioned set forth in Robert S. Harper's book, Lincoln and the Press...
...Thank you, Leopoldo Galtieri...
...indeed, he was "exceedingly angry" when a Washington paper published news of troop movements based on information mysteriously acquired...
...and so on, and so forth...
...When I was there last January, I did not meet a single civilian, of any social class or political persuasion, who expressed anything but contempt for the militares...
...Finally, Alfonsin has to give new life to the National Congress and undo the junta's long-running "intervention" in the universities, the bureaucracy and the provincial governments...
...His English is good, though he prefers not to speak it...
...Although the military is now discredited, thanks to its incompetence, the Armed Forces remain the best organized segment of Argentine society...
...in Missouri, soldiers, citizens and the Army terminated, looted or destroyed at least eight newspapers during 1861-63...
...After years of repression, the political parties are similarly in need of overhaul...
...let us all hope they are uncharacteristically wise...
...Some of the Right-wing and older labor union leaders allegedly cooperated with the military in exterminating many of their internal rivals...
...Most journalists see the American democracy as imperiled by a few day's absence of their colleagues from the battle places...
...All of this while dealing with a $40 billion foreign debt many feel benefitted the oligarchy and the military, and attempting to reverse the brain-drain of recent decades...
...Charlottesville, Va...
...By showing how utterly bankrupt the military was, he may have finally destroyed the Argentine public's taste for military rule...
...The transformation will not be made easier by the unfamiliar role of loyal opposition...
...Raul Alfonsln will have to work hard at distancing himself publicly from the United States (his Peronist opponents in the election tried to smear him as a tool of Coca-Cola), but that should be no impediment to a decent and mutually respectful relationship if the will and the understanding are there at Foggy Bottom...
...Since now many Americans apparently feel that the newsmen seem perhaps too eager to re-enact their skewed role as reporters during the Vietnam War, in a constitutional, nonviolent way they have conveyed their vote of nonconfidence...
...the Democrat at Bangor, Maine, was looted that month as well...
...One of the most sinister of them is the informal alliance between ultra-Rightist "populists" in this country and neo-Fascist forces in Argentina...
...Yet here, too, there are difficulties: Taking individual action within the antiquated court system against military officers is a slow process, evidence (such as identifiable bodies of the victims) is hard to produce, and most of the judiciary has been appointed by the Armed Forces...
...On another occasion, Lincoln said "he had learned he could not depend on promises of secrecy" by the press...
...This, coupled with the inability of the new government's austerity measures to handle effectively the almost 1,000 per cent inflation, the massive unemployment and underemployment, and the overall economic reorganization the country so desperately needs, could result in another of the coups so familiar over the last 50 years...
...As the public's stand demonstrated, the conviction is widespread that the media, and especially television news networks, engaged consciously or unconsciously in a selective reporting so skewed as to be misrepresentative and misreportive...
...Throughout many towns, particularly the smaller ones, local newspapers were mobbed, wrecked and destroyed: Members of a New Hampshire regiment destroyed a Concord newspaper in August, 1861...
...The Peronists face even more pressing considerations...
...The "party" is really a loose social movement, involving liberal and conservative elements that have been at war with each other...
...Let me echo Kaufman's message in even stronger terms...
...In a history overloaded with ironies, it is still an irony that the Argentine nation may long be in debt to the former military leadership, including ex-President Galtieri...
...Alfonsin has moved quickly to name a civilian head of the Ministry of Defense, in an effort to establish civilian control of the Armed Forces...
...Evidently the exclusion of the media for a couple of days from the actual battle places in Grenada was regarded as a mild and fitting reproof...
...In that instance an ultra-nationalist federal judge in Rio Gallegos held the top banker in the country for interrogation and sought to void the debt-refinancing agreement recently worked out between the national airline, Aerolineas Argentinas, and the banks in New York as a violation of Argentine sovereignty...
...Lewis S.Feuer Emeritus Professor of Sociology University of Virginia Argentina A hearty muchisimas gracias for Robert R. Kaufman's perceptive and accurate article, "Democracy's Chances in Argentina" (NL, November 14, 1983...
...General Grant found himself denounced as incompetent because he would not talk to the press for publication...
...He is right that the new government of Raul Alfonsin faces formidable problems in implementing democratic procedures and norms...
...Particularly if the Peronists put their house in order and, following the lead of their own defeated candidate, show the moderation and good will necessary for democratic government to succeed, Argentina could reclaim the reputation it once held as the most democratic of Latin American nations...
...Lincoln told irate reporters anecdotes, but did not intervene on their behalf...
...in Kentucky, the Louisville Express was suppressed and its editor arrested, after the Nicholasville Democrat was looted...
...There are, of course, various forces working to destabilize the Alfonsin government...
...He knows more about us than we probably do about him...
...I have just read interviews with President Raul Alfon-sin's Cabinet members in the November 22 issue of Siete Dias, and now I too am cautiously optimistic that his government will have the courage and political acumen to tame the military and to resolve the debt crisis...
...But he must also break down the military's isolation from the rest of society, restructure the military curriculum and training procedures, scale down the size of the Armed Forces, and firmly redefine their role as being exclusively concerned with external threats...
...The publishers of New York's newspapers met in June 1863 to protest the alleged infringement upon the press by the Federal government...
...Do the media provide to readers and viewers a sufficient diversity of standpoint to make possible a more significant choice...
...Arthur M. Shapiro Having had the opportunity to observe the October 30 election in Argentina as part of a commission sponsored by the Washington Office on Latin America, the International Human Rights Law Group and the Agency for International Development, I read Robert R. Kaufman's article on the event with special interest...
...Thus the same Dr...
...To restore some sense of proportion, let us note that the American democracy has survived much harsher treatment of its news gatherers in wartime...
...So Raul Alfonsin faces a forbidding task...
...Walter Bever-aggi Allende who attempted in 1982 to get a judicially-sanctioned acknowledgment that the Malvinas debacle was engineered by Israeli intelligence (!) was responsible for another bizarre event early last year...
Vol. 67 • January 1984 • No. 1
