REAGAN'S REPORTERS

...Before long Bonner was persona non grata at the U.S...

...Confusion," says Nissen of Newsweek, "is the mother of misinformation...

...So when Bonner was taken off the Salvador beat, the ripples were felt far and wide...

...When those bodies were pulled out it was suddenly real in the United States, and it changed the way we covered the country...

...Almost invariably, such episodes serve to reinforce Washington's official position...

...Dickey decided to downplay White's charges until they could be independently confirmed...

...After firing Jim Watt, they decided to bull through and make it up...

...The Times sees itself as the Establishment," says Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny, "so by the paper's own definition, you can't have a reporter who can't talk to the U.S...

...But then Ronald Reagan took office and insisted on viewing Central America as a Cold War battlefield...

...Ambassador Deane Hinton and his senior military advisor, Lt...

...In the beginning, I could pretty much write what I wanted to from El Salvador," says one reporter who requests anonymity...

...I think it's an absolute falsehood," Helms said of the D'Aubuisson role...

...Now it has advanced to center stage, and the media have descended in droves...

...Reporters are called in to fill in the blanks, and most of their editors' questions can be answered at the U.S...

...Although the majority of Salvadorans are peasants, only two of 263 identifiable sources used by The Times—under 1 per cent of the total—were peasants," Herman found...

...embassy...

...They wondered where the story had come from—the Salvadoran military, the U.S...

...Colonel John Wag-helstein, headed a campaign to freeze Bonner out...

...Soon soldiers may be marching to those cadences, off to another war they scarcely understand...

...Five years ago, Central America was unknown territory to most Americans, and an unattractive assignment to most reporters...

...Rather, it typified the U.S...

...While the Reagan Administration bangs the war drums in Central America, the media sound a faithful echo...

...The press was no longer content to cover the story there...

...Smith filed Washington-reaction articles, replete with blind quotes from "intelligence and other civilian officials...

...embassy in San Salvador...

...When his Administration began expounding threadbare theories of Soviet-Cuban-Nicaraguan intrigue, coverage of the region underwent another sea change...

...Most of the mainstream media follow the lead of The Times...

...The original account of the invasion and Managua's indignant denial became, in the public's consciousness, one more reason to be wary of the Sandinistas...

...Even as it was printing LeMoyne's charges on page one, the paper's Washington bureau chief, Hedrick Smith, was writing backpedaling articles that undermined LeMoyne's reports...

...It's uncomfortable rocking the boat...

...But The Times came to D'Aubuisson's rescue...

...Despite the self-censorship, the embassy's hostility toward Bonner continued...

...Rosenthal stayed long enough to make it look as though he wasn't yielding to pressure to yank Bonner," says Kwitny...

...Bonner says his experience has had a chilling effect on overall press coverage of the region...

...It's part of the public record...

...embassy like Bonner...

...The denial doesn't necessarily imply that it never happened," Dickey says, "but it does create a situation where you can write a hard lead, and a headline like U.S...

...But he denies that The Times or any of its reporters tried to shoot down LeMoyne's reporting...

...Ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, announced that rebel commandos, presumably from Nicaragua, had landed off the Gulf of Fonseca but had been turned back in heavy fighting with Salvadoran troops...

...But the press seldom does that kind of digging...

...And in Central America, where vast contradictions abound, confusion is an export crop...

...The Reagan Administration exploits the media's weaknesses...

...Colonel Monterrosa has been a pace-setter in the military in showing the new style to foreign reporters...

...Of course, they ought to have a reporter digging around to see if what they are saying is true...

...The damage had been done...

...As it is, however, the press too often acts, wittingly or unwittingly, as a servant of the Administration...

...Shorn of crucial contacts, The Times'* key Salvadoran correspondent grew wary of filing against-the-grain reports...

...Government had claimed all along...

...During the 1982 election in El Salvador—a staged news event if ever there was one—government officials were the only quoted sources in twenty-two of twenty-eight articles in The New York Times, media critic Edward Herman noted...

...The media do the Pentagon's spadework, conditioning the American public to accept an aggressive U.S...

...Ray Bonner knows how craven The New York Times can be...

...instead, it would tack on a Washington-reaction piece or, even better, a Havana-reaction or Moscow-reaction piece...

...There's no question they're not being honest with the American people...

...military role in the region...

...To an inordinate degree, the White House serves as the media's assignment editor...

...media attitudes, according to Beth Nissen of Newsweek...

...The choice was, were you going to try to shoot down the story or were you just not going to give it that much play...

...D'Aubuisson came to Washington cocky as hell, as if he knew we couldn't get anything on him...

...It was an all-day trip from the capital to the beach where the landing supposedly took place," he recalls...

...The editors at The Post took Dickey's "soft" dispatch and hardened it with a denial from Nicaragua's foreign minister, Miguel D'Escoto...

...broadcast to the American public was never confirmed...

...Even the most conscientious reporters have difficulty penetrating the smokescreen...

...It was just the kind of story you would want to believe in El Salvador, but without independent sources it just couldn't be proven...

...You start to pull back a little bit...

...LeMoyne's scoop threatened to spoil D'Aubuisson's face-lift...

...Relying on official sources and staged events tilts coverage in the Administration's favor...

...It turned out that the landing as Joel Millman is a free-lance writer and television producer in New York City...

...Smith concedes that The Times and other news organizations were unprepared for D'Aubuisson's bold assertion of innocence and his decision to fly to Washington even as the stories of the Pickering plot were breaking...

...Bonner's replacement, Lydia Chavez, has been a model of official decorum...

...None of my editors had ever been there, few more had ever heard of it...

...The Salvadoran rebels were cited twenty-seven times, 10 per cent of the source total...

...The prestigious newspaper operates its own wire service and is routinely quoted—"according to The New York Times"—by such news organizations as AP, UPI, NBC, ABC, and CBS...

...But ask yourself what the elections represent if the military agreed to have them only after it eliminated ten thousand people...

...The Reagan Administration puts out its version of events," says Bonner, "and it takes a lot to determine that it doesn't match the facts and the realities...

...I heard other reporters, many other reporters in El Salvador, tell me after I came back, 'Boy, I don't want the same thing to happen to me...

...The incident was hardly an aberration...

...He was being taught a lesson, and his job was twisting in the wind...

...The New York Times occupies a special position among American media...

...In April 1982, Chavez described former National Guard chief Vides Casanova, an officer closely linked with the Salvadoran death squads, as a "committed reformer...

...The role of the press should be to keep Government honest, or at least to equip the American people with the information necessary to know when the wool is being pulled over their eyes...

...embassy, or Washington...

...It was Reagan's pay-off to Jesse Helms and the Right," he explains...

...Smith also quoted extensively from North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, D'Aubuisson's most prominent supporter in Washington...

...The story broke last June at the worst possible time for the White House, which was in the middle of a campaign to upgrade D'Aubuisson's reputation from that of "a pathological killer" When The New York Times yanked its go-getting reporter from the Salvador beat and replaced him with Lydia Chavez, a model of official decorum, the ripples were felt far and wide (as former Ambassador White described him) to that of a born-again champion of democracy...

...The implications were enormous: Nicaragua was directly involved in El Salvador's civil war, as the U.S...

...Government is at odds, no retractions were forthcoming...

...The Times'* executive editor, A. W. Rosenthal, flew to El Salvador to take in the situation first-hand...

...During the next two weeks, the invasion story was discredited by journalists who visited the "landing site...

...It does make you think twice," Bonner says...

...I'm going to be careful.'" Bonner resigned from The Times in July...

...My editors took that lead and grabbed on with both sets of teeth...

...The press basically is Establishment," says Ray Bonner, a former New York Times correspondent in Central America...

...As Smith tells it now, even officials previously hostile to D'Aubuisson adopted the White House line in insisting that the evidence linking the death squad leader to the Pickering plot was sketchy, at best...

...Charges Nicaraguan Invasion, or words to that effect...

...The Administration's position—that the case against D'Aubuisson was "inconclusive"—became The Times'* position...

...Most editors soft-pedaled White's second thoughts...

...But because they lack the gumption to seek out the truth trapped beyond the calculated utterances of the Administration, much of the American public is still woefully uninformed about what is really going on...

...It was an extremely soft story," he says, "so soft I probably should have known it would get changed around...

...Even when reporters know the Administration's version of events is skewed, explains Bonner, they are in no position to challenge official claims except when a contrary authoritative source is available...

...Pressure mounted for The Times to rein in what The Journal dubbed "its overly credulous reporter...

...Even Ambassador White proffered some second thoughts on the matter...

...Her portrayal of a "moderate" Duarte rang the opening bell for the media's peculiar ringside coverage of the match between Duarte the Reformer and D'Aubuisson the Killer...

...The 1980 murder of the four American churchwomen in El Salvador prompted a dramatic shift in U.S...

...Most reporters assemble their stories from press-handouts, staged news events, and official sources...

...So much journalism is defined by editors," says Jonathan Kwitny of The Wall Street Journal...

...media's distortion of events in Central America...

...New York Times reporter James LeMoyne uncovered Roberto D'Aubuis-son's role in a plot to assassinate Thomas Pickering, the current U.S...

...But now I accept it, and I agree with it...

...George Bush says, 'What about the abuse of Indian rights in Nicaragua?' Is someone supposed to write a story saying, 'Wait a minute, they're not as bad in Nicaragua as they are in El Salvador...

...They're masters in this Administration, master communicators, master distortionists, if you will," says Bonner...

...But when the White House started talking about 'drawing the line,' it became an 'East-West struggle' story, or an 'exporting revolution' story, which was very familiar...

...This year, she filed equally glowing stories about Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Mon-terrosa, the commander of counterinsur-gency operations in eastern El Salvador whose troops massacred the peasants at El Mozote...

...It used to infuriate me the way The New York Times would print the latest charge by Alexander Haig on the front page, and bury something I thought was more important," says Bonner...

...One Smith piece quoted an anonymous source as saying D'Aubuisson would not have been granted a visa "if the Administration had firm evidence that D'Aubuisson had been involved in the plot...

...Chavez, recently reassigned to Buenos Aires, also churned out a series of puff pieces about Jose Napoleon Duarte, who was re-elected president of El Salvador in March 1984...

...It brought it all home, the killing," says Nis-sen, who reported from Central America for four and a half years...

...Then he yanked him...

...We may have been snowed, it's possible," Smith admitted a month later...

...Media distortion stems, in part, from the confining strictures of standard media practice and, in part, from institutional and ideological biases...

...There are signs that the arrogant and often insensitive army that ruled El Salvador for more than forty years has progressed," wrote Chavez in a front page Times article that appeared one Sunday in late August...

...this is especially true of the networks, which have been known to duplicate features right off the front page of The Times...

...If you deal with the 1984 elections as if the massacre of 1980 [during Duarte's earlier reign] never happened, then the elections look pretty good," says Christopher Dickey of The Washington Post...

...The press began to focus on the violence in Salva-doran society, and to take a more critical look at the regime...

...The articles flew in the face of White House claims of an improved human rights situation in El Salvador and aroused the wrath of such Far Right groups as the misnamed Accuracy in Media, as well as editorial writers at The Wall Street Journal...

...That's a tough story to write...

...The Times has an obligation to print everything Haig says, or Reagan says, or Kirkpatrick says...

...But, as generally happens when the press is hoodwinked into maligning a nation with which the U.S...

...Christopher Dickey of The Washington Post had only a few hours before deadline to check White's story...

...In 1982, Bonner wrote a series of reports about the Salvadoran Army's slaughter of almost 1,000 peasants near El Mozote...