Human Rights and Foreign Policy

excerpted from the book

Unreliable Sources

a guide to detecting bias in news media

by Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon

A Lyle Stuart Book, Carol Publishing Group, 1990

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... In reporting on Third World regional conflicts, U.S. journalists often depict their government as a mediator or peace advocate in someone else's war, even when the U.S. has been instrumental in fomenting and perpetuating the strife. In a news article headlined "Lonely Peacemaker," the Times portrayed Secretary of State George Shultz and the U.S. government as crusaders for peace-from Central America to the Middle East to Southern Africa. Although the U.S. and South Africa had been arming guerrilla forces in Angola for over a decade, American news media cast the Reagan administration as a champion of peace, not as a major party to the bloody conflict.

When it comes to peace talks, the onus is usually on enemies of the U.S. government to prove their sincerity. When Central American leaders signed a peace accord in August 1987, U.S. journalists kept asking: "Can the Sandinistas be trusted to negotiate?" Yet the record shows that Washington, not Nicaragua, had failed to negotiate in good faith. Typical of the media's misplaced skepticism was Ted Koppel's comment to a Nicaraguan official that his government should offer "some serious proposals," not "more rhetoric." Koppel did not ask U.S. officials about a once-secret November 1984 memo from John Poindexter to National Security Adviser Robert MacFarlane on peace talks with Nicaragua: "Continue active negotiations but agree on no treaty and agree to work out some way to support the contras either directly or indirectly. Withhold true objectives from staffs."

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Double standard on human rights

... when Jimmy Carter became President and started to talk about making human rights the centerpiece of his foreign policy, the issue received a \ dramatic boost in media attention-even though a coherent human rights policy never emerged during his administration. The Los Angeles Times index shows a sharp increase in the number of articles listed under "human rights," with 16 references in 1976 compared to 230 in 1977, Carter's first year in office. Data from CBS Evening News show a similar trend: six segments indexed under "human rights" in 1976 compared to 93 segments in 1977. This was significantly higher than the average number listed during the Reagan administration, which declared at the outset that "counter-terrorism" would replace human rights as the guiding theme of U.S. foreign policy.

Right from the start, Reagan flaunted his disregard for human rights by nominating Ernest W. Lefever to be his first Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights. A congressional inquiry disclosed that Lefever ran an institute that received money from the South African government to circulate views favorable to the apartheid state. So Elliott Abrams got the job instead, and human rights became a potent weapon in a full-fledged ideological war. The Reagan administration loudly decried abuses in the USSR and other "enemy" states, while pursuing a quiet policy of "constructive engagement" with South Africa, China, Guatemala, Indonesia, Turkey and other "friendly" regimes whose brutalities were often overlooked.

This dual standard was reflected in media coverage of human rights. When the Nicaraguan government temporarily closed the U.S.-financed opposition paper, La Prensa, it was widely reported in the U.S. media as an example of Sandinista totalitarianism. By contrast, major media were virtually silent when U.S.-backed Salvadoran security forces murdered the editor of La Cronica del Pueblo and destroyed the offices of El Independiente in El Salvador. Similarly, the bombing of the independent Guatemalan journal La Epoca in June 1988 received next to no coverage in the United States. Looking at U.S. coverage, London Times correspondent David Gollob wrote that Guatemala's closing of a TV station "did not create an international scandal, while Nicaraguan moves to silence opposition media are headline news."

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky compared repression in Communist Poland and anticommunist Guatemala, and found a significant disparity in press attention. Example: For months the U.S. media doggedly followed the case of Jerzy Popieluszko, the activist priest killed in 1984 by Poland's security forces. Yet in the early 1980s, more than a dozen priests were assassinated by government-sponsored death squads in Guatemala, and this was virtually ignored by major U.S. media. Americas Watch called Guatemala "a nation of prisoners," but it never got admitted into the pantheon of "captive nations" by the papers of record, which reserved such appellations for Poland, Czechoslovakia and other Communist countries.

Writing about Poland in May 1988, A.M. Rosenthal offered this description of a "captive nation" in his New York Times column: "Its economic and political systems, both distasteful to its people, were imposed by another state. Its economic fortunes are shaped by the regular pressure or occasional benevolence of that state. Its leadership cannot survive without the approval of the greater power. Year to year and decade to decade, the threat of intervention-economic or military-varies in immediacy but never vanishes. If the danger of intervention disappeared entirely, the people would dismantle the imposed government and the structure on which it perches, fast." Rosenthal's description of a captive nation could also have applied to Guatemala and El Salvador-albeit with an important distinction: The violence visited upon Central Americans by their anticommunist governments has been far more severe than in Communist Eastern Europe.

While human rights abuses in Eastern Europe were regularly traced back to Soviet domination, U.S. media rarely explained Guatemalan state terror as a product of continuous U.S. intervention since 1954, when a CIA-sponsored coup overthrew a democratically-elected government. One exception was a two-part series on PBS's Kwitny Report, which examined the U.S. role in Guatemalan human rights abuses. Jonathan Kwitny provided historical context as he interviewed human rights activists and exiled Guatemalan opposition leaders, as well as U.S. officials, in a hard-hitting expose that linked U.S. business interests to death squad activity in that country. Fred Sherwood, former president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Guatemala, was heard telling journalist Allan Nairn: "Why should we do anything about the death squads? They're killing commies. I'd give them more power! I'd give them cartridges if I could..." A few months after airing this segment, Kwitny Report was dropped by PBS for lack of funds.

Guatemala has one of the worst human rights records in the Western Hemisphere, yet it receives far less media attention than Nicaragua or, for that matter, El Salvador, where the U.S. government has invested heavily in a war against leftist rebels. This underscores another key point about the way in which human rights reporting is policy-driven. As Michael Posner, executive director of the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, explained: "Countries that loom large in East/West regional conflicts get a lot more press than countries that aren't perceived in the same geopolitical terms." El Salvador and Nicaragua loomed in the 1980s, while Guatemala-where an estimated 50,000 people were murdered by security forces early in the decade-faded into hellish obscurity.

Friendly dictators

If the gravity of human rights violations were the sole factor in determining the amount of coverage a country received, reporting on human rights would be substantially different. Consider, for example, the case of Indonesia, a nation where political and civil rights have been systematically suppressed during President Suharto's 24-year dictatorial rule. Although Indonesia is the world's fifth most populated country, it gets scant attention in the U.S. media-partly because of tight restrictions on journalists, but also because Indonesia, a U.S. ally, is not a focal point of East/West conflict. Despite a continuing record of torture, disappearances, summary executions and thousands of political incarcerations, Suharto was described as a "moderate leader" by the Christian Science Monitor. The Indonesian dictator got a free ride in the press when he visited Washington in June 1989 to discuss economic matters.

Press coverage was minimal even when the Indonesian army massacred an estimated half-million people in 1965. And the silence continued when Indonesia, armed by the U.S., invaded neighboring East Timor and slaughtered a third of the population in the mid-1970s. While these atrocities by a "friendly" anticommunist government were being ignored, the American press was filled with stories about the killing fields in Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge, led by the maniacal Pol Pot, butchered more than a million people. The Communist Khmer Rouge were eventually ousted by Vietnamese troops, whereupon the Reagan administration quietly shifted its support to Pol Pot's army-a cynical and outrageous foreign policy maneuver that provoked little comment in the U.S. media at the time.

In January 1990, after Vietnam had withdrawn its forces, the New York Times rewrote history in a chronology headlined "Two Decades of Suffering in Cambodia." But the chronology skipped five grief-stricken years-from March 1970 to April 1975. This was a period of massive American bombing of the Cambodian countryside that left the country in ruins, with hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced. A Finnish government commission of inquiry on Cambodia referred to the entire 1970s as the "decade of genocide," but the Times omitted any reference to the genocidal violence perpetrated by the United States.

Of the 35 signatory nations of the 1975 Helsinki accords, Turkey is one of the most egregious human rights violators, yet it's a low priority for American media. When the Turkish government, a staunch U.S. ally and NATO member, figures in human rights stories, they are usually about the brutal mistreatment of the Kurdish ethnic minority. But very little is said about the Turkish government's ongoing oppression of its own people.

"The coverage of Turkey is terrible," Helsinki Watch director Jeri Laber told us. "It's amazing how little gets into the press." Laber has spoken with U.S. journalists who filed human rights stories from Turkey (the fourth largest recipient of U.S. aid), only to have them killed by editors more interested in travel articles about Turkey. Ironically, freedom of movement is a right many Turks cannot exercise. Since the military coup in 1980, as many as 300,000 Turkish citizens have been denied passports, and, according to Amnesty International, 250,000 political prisoners were detained and nearly all were tortured; 200 Turks died while in custody because of torture.

One would think that U.S. news organizations might show more interest when their own employees are brutalized by Turkish authorities. But the U.S. media didn't publicize the case of Ismet Imset, a UPI reporter who was beaten and imprisoned on trumped-up charges in 1984. (Imset was fired by UPI after he criticized how it responded to the incident.) Nor have U.S. media shown much concern for the 2,000 reporters and editors tried in Turkish courts since a civilian government was installed in 1983, or the 41 journalists in jail as of 1989.

Labor unions have also been a prime target of Turkish government repression. Martial law in Turkey put an end to collective bargaining in the early 1980s, and the trade union movement was decimated by mass arrests, torture and executions. This occurred at a time when the fledgling Solidarity movement in Poland was a major story in the American media. Driven more by U.S. policy interests than by a concern for human rights, mass media averted their eyes from the nightmare in anticommunist Turkey, and thereby helped to perpetuate it.

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... in mid-1980s ... the Reagan administration, in last-minute policy shifts, took credit for engineering the departure of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, who had been toasted in 1981 by Vice President Bush for his "adherence to democratic principle." So too with the departure of Haitian dictator Jean Claude Duvalier. A July 1985 Washington Post headline read: "U.S. Praises Duvalier for Democratic Commitment." Yet seven months later, after Duvalier fled the country, the Post reported that the Reagan administration claimed it "laid the groundwork" for his departure. This contradiction went unnoted in coverage of the grim situation in Haiti, as U.S. support for successive military juntas continued in the post-Duvalier era, despite massive human rights abuses.

State Department fudge

A New York Times editorial in December 1988 spoke of President Reagan's human rights "conversion" in the waning days of his administration. The editorial praised the State Department for issuing "candid annual reports on human rights." Said the Times: "There is now an American consensus that a plausible human rights policy has to strive for a single standard of judgment."

Unfortunately, U.S. media-the Times included-have not applied a single standard of newsworthiness to human rights violations around the world. Instead, coverage has often mirrored the geopolitical priorities of the State Department, which is obliged to provide yearly reports on the status of human rights in countries throughout the world. (If abuses are found to be increasing, Congress may be required to cut off foreign aid to the offending government.) But Mark McLeggan, a State Department official, has admitted that the annual "Country Reports" are edited to take into account political and diplomatic considerations. Hence, they are not quite as "candid" as the Times editorial claimed. If these assessments were truly candid, it would not be necessary for Human Rights Watch and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights to publish a detailed critique of the numerous omissions, errors and distortions contained in the State Department's Country Reports.

While the New York Times gave its stamp of approval to the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, a Chicago Tribune news story by Ray Moseley offered a different appraisal. Citing numerous examples from the 1988 State Department survey by Human Rights Watch and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, he stated: "It may help explain why the State Department is widely known, even to its own diplomats, as the Fudge Factory."

Reagan's so-called human rights "conversion" was mostly a matter of expediency, as U.S. strategists scrambled to keep up with momentous changes around the globe, particularly in the Soviet Union. Concurrent with the release of hundreds of political prisoners and the emergence of thousands of grassroots organizations, Soviet television began showing photos of skeletons dug up from mass graves in an effort to exorcise long-suppressed demons from the Stalin era. This national soul-searching had significant implications for human rights throughout Eastern Europe and beyond. But as new reforms were being implemented in the Soviet Union, old myths were kept alive by the U.S. media.

When President Bush flew to Paris to meet with Western leaders in July 1989, ABC News correspondent Brit Hume summed up the official consensus by declaring, "These are good times in the Free World"-in contrast to life behind the "Iron Curtain." And when the Berlin Wall was rendered obsolete a few months later, CNN anchor Bernard Shaw repeatedly spoke of East Germans visiting "the Free World." The use of such loaded jargon was a reminder that the U.S. media's human rights spotlight is still aimed at selective targets abroad. (The "Free World" presumably includes such anticommunist allies as Turkey, South Africa and Guatemala.) Likewise, U.S. abuses such as homelessness, poverty, the oppression of Native Americans and FBI harassment of domestic dissidents are not framed in terms of human rights by the mainstream American press. For this would be tantamount to acknowledging that human rights problems exist in the United States, and such an admission would belie a cherished myth about life in "the Free World."

DEMOCRACY AND ELECTIONS, CENTRAL AMERICAN STYLE

In August 1987, New York Times editorial writer Karl Meyer reminisced about Major Smedley Butler, describing him as the U.S. Marine hero who tried to bring "true democracy" to Nicaragua 75 years earlier. Repeated U.S. interventions in Nicaragua had been motivated by our desire to spread democracy, said Meyer. As proof he cited a communiqué from Washington that Major Butler carried with him to Nicaragua: "America's purpose is to foster true constitutional government and free elections."

Butler, however, saw his role somewhat differently than the historical revisionists at the Times. He admitted rigging Nicaragua's 1912 election on behalf of the Taft administration, which entailed rounding up 400 Nicaraguans who could be counted on to vote for the U.S.-controlled dictator, Adolfo Diaz. Only those 400 were told of the election, and as soon as they cast their ballots the polls were closed. "Today," Butler wrote home to his wife, "Nicaragua has enjoyed a fine 'free election,' with only one candidate being allowed to run... To the entire satisfaction of our State Department, Marines patrolled all the towns to prevent disorders."

After Butler retired, according to editorial writer Meyer, he "lamented the futility of his own interventionist missions." Not exactly. Butler attacked the motivation behind U.S. meddling. The New York Times didn't see fit to print Butler's speech before the American Legion on August 21, 1931, in which he stated: "I spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.

"I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

"I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions... I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents."

Nixing Nicaragua

Throughout this century, successive U.S. administrations have talked about bringing democracy and economic advancement to Latin American. But during the reign of the Somoza family in Nicaragua, a handful of wealthy landowners, bolstered by U.S. corporate interests, dominated the economy, while the nation as a whole remained underdeveloped and most people lived in abject poverty. Such conditions still persist throughout the region-although this isn't stressed in rose-colored media accounts of Central America's "burgeoning democracies." How democratic can a country be-few journalists ask-if its population is largely illiterate and hungry? Having suffered under the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship, Nicaraguans were not overly impressed by Washington's sudden concern for democracy when the Sandinistas took power in 1979.

Although rigged elections during the Somoza era raised hardly an eyebrow in the U.S. media, Nicaragua's November 1984 election was uniformly denounced by U.S. officials and the mainstream press. "It was not a very good election... It was just a piece of theatre for the Sandinistas," State Department public relations spokesperson John Hughes (now a columnist for the Christian Science Monitor) told Time magazine, which denigrated the vote: "The Sandinistas win, as expected... The outcome was never in doubt."

Indeed, the Sandinista victory was not surprising, given the social advancements in Nicaragua since the 1979 revolution. After five years of Sandinista rule, infant mortality dropped to the lowest level in Central America. Over 85 percent of the population had learned to read and write at least on a third-grade level as a result of a crash literacy program acclaimed by UNESCO. The number of schools had doubled since the overthrow of Anastazio Somoza. ("I don't want educated people," he once declared, "I want oxen.") The Sandinistas also initiated sweeping agrarian reform, emphasizing basic grains and crops for local needs rather than export-a development strategy that brought Nicaragua close to food self-sufficiency.

In addition, the Nicaraguan government banned DDT and other harmful sprays, while neighboring states still serve as dumping grounds for U.S.-made chemical toxins. Strides in Nicaraguan health care won praise from the United Nations and other international groups. The World Health Organization lauded Nicaragua's success in nearly eliminating polio, measles and diphtheria, and reducing infant mortality. But many of these achievements were subsequently eroded-along with the Sandinistas' popularity-as the Nicaraguan government diverted its resources in an effort to defend itself from attacks by U.S.-financed mercenary forces. "Unfortunately," said former contra leader Edgar Chamorro, "the contras bum down schools, homes and health centers as fast as the Sandinistas can build them."

While the U.S. media followed Washington's lead in dismissing the 1984 Nicaraguan elections as meaningless, the vast majority of independent observers considered it to be a free and fair vote. The British Guardian summed up the results in a news story headlined "A Revolution That Proved Itself at the Polls." A report by an Irish parliamentary delegation stated: "The electoral process was carried out with total integrity. The seven parties participating in the elections represented a broad spectrum of political ideologies." The general counsel of New York's Human Rights Commission described the election as "free, fair and hotly contested."

Thirty-three percent of the Nicaraguan voters cast ballots for one of six opposition parties-three to the right of the Sandinistas, three to the left-which had campaigned with the aid of government funds and free TV and radio time. Two conservative parties captured a combined 23 percent of the vote. They held rallies across the country and vehemently criticized the Sandinistas. Most foreign and independent observers noted this pluralism in debunking the Reagan administration charge-prominent in the U.S. press-that it was a "Soviet-style sham" election.

Shortly after the vote, the Washington Post published portions of a "secret-sensitive" National Security Council briefing paper which outlined a "wide-ranging plan to convince Americans [that the] Nicaraguan elections were a 'sham."' The crux of the U.S. strategy was to focus media attention away from those conservative parties actively campaigning and toward Arturo Cruz, who was anointed leader of "the democratic opposition" by the White House and the U.S. press. Cruz had hardly lived in Nicaragua since 1970 and had dubious popular support, but the U.S. media made his candidacy the litmus test of whether the election was free and fair.

"An election without [Cruz's] participation will be judged a charade," declared a Washington Post editorial a few weeks prior to the vote. Sure enough, Cruz dropped out of the race after Washington convinced him not to participate (a decision Cruz later regretted). A recipient of CIA funds, Cruz joined the contras after boycotting the vote. U.S. officials admitted to the New York Times that the White House "never contemplated letting Cruz stay in the race" because "legitimate" elections would have undermined the contra war. Leaders of all three right-of-center parties which competed for votes complained to election observers of having been pressured or bribed by the U.S. Embassy to quit the race.

Although the U.S. boycott strategy had been exposed, it still worked to perfection on leading editorial pages. The New York Times proclaimed, "Only the naive believe the election was democratic or legitimizing proof of the Sandinistas' popularity."

El Salvador's "fledgling democracy"

While the U.S. media fixated on the CIA-financed candidate who was pressured to withdraw from Nicaragua's election, virtually no explanation was offered as to why the leftist opposition chose not to participate in 1984 Salvadoran elections. The reason was simple: Right-wing death squads had murdered tens of thousands of Salvadorans-unionists, students, church activists-and anyone campaigning for progressive change or for human rights would have risked his or her life. But ongoing state terror, which precluded an open campaign essential for a free and fair vote, didn't figure in the U.S. media as a factor that had any bearing on the Salvadoran election-an event designed to put a happy-face on a government drenched in blood from massacring its own people. Few U.S. journalists featured the protests of Maria Julia Hemandez, a leading Salvadoran human rights monitor: "These elections have been imposed by the U.S. State Department to legitimize the government so it can get more U.S. military aid. All this will mean is more deaths, more violations of human rights."

Edward S. Herman's analysis of New York Times coverage showed that reporting on El Salvador's 1984 elections relied almost exclusively on non-critical U.S. and Salvadoran government officials, while 80 percent of the Times sources about the Nicaraguan election were critical U.S. officials and Nicaragua's boycotting opposition. Herman found that issues of press freedom and limits on opposition candidates were discussed in most articles about Nicaragua's elections, but these topics were ignored in articles about elections in El Salvador, where local journalists were murdered and newspapers bombed out of existence. Moreover, U.S. media often cited threats by Salvadoran rebels to disrupt the elections in that country, but rarely mentioned that the contras had urged Nicaraguans not to vote and killed several election workers.

U.S. officials trumpeted the elections in El Salvador, won by Christian Democrat Jose Napoleon Duarte, as a triumph for democracy. And mainstream media reported it that way, undaunted by the fact that elections don't guarantee civilian control over the military. Journalists avoided basic issues, such as what democracy could mean in a country where death squads routinely carved up people (including priests and human rights monitors) and no officers were punished for human rights offenses. As Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch noted, "Elections are certainly a crucial step toward democracy, but you can't talk about authentic democracy unless there is also the rule of law. This apparently hasn't sunk in with much of the press."

The rule of law didn't apply in El Salvador during Duarte's term in office (1984-89). Although death squad killings persisted, Duarte was exonerated by U.S. media, which depicted the Salvadoran President as pursuing a moderate course between violent extremists on the left and right. This widely-accepted notion ignored well-documented evidence that the vast majority of killings were committed by death squads connected to the Salvadoran government.

"It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between the death squads and the government security forces in El Salvador," explained Holly Burkhalter of Americas Watch, "because frequently the security forces will abduct people in unmarked vans, wearing plainclothes." Under the circumstances, Burkhalter said journalists would be more accurate referring to Salvadoran death squads as "government-controlled."

Amnesty International characterized the Salvadoran death squads as "official personnel acting in civilian clothes under the direction of superior officers." A 1989 Amnesty report, El Salvador "Death Squads"-A Government Strategy, identified a "persistent pattern of gross human rights violations by the Salvadoran armed forces" including "arbitrary arrest, torture, disappearance and extrajudicial execution."

Although human rights groups have continually linked death squad activities to the Salvadoran government, most U.S. media have reported on death squads as if they were a mysterious, independent force. This convenient fiction allows the U.S. government to continue providing massive military aid to the Salvadoran government as it commits horrendous cruelties-all in the name of promoting "democracy." In May 1989 Meg Greenfield rhapsodized over "the worldwide democratic surge" in Newsweek, going so far as to describe El Salvador as a "democracy, or at least a pretty good approximation of it."

The idea that El Salvador's civilian leaders were do-gooders caught between two violent extremes stretched the limits of credulity when Alfredo Cristiani of the far right ARENA party was elected to succeed Duarte as the President of El Salvador. The March 1989 elections were also marred by government violence. Reporting on the vote, the New York Times indicated at the end of a lengthy news article that three journalists (one foreign, two Salvadoran) had been killed by military personnel during the elections. But the trigger-happy military men were transformed into leftist rebels in a Times editorial, which described the killings as follows: "Cristiani has been at pains to present ARENA as a mainstream conservative alliance. He says the true extremists in El Salvador are Marxist guerrillas who terrorize the countryside and did their best to disrupt an election in which 33 were killed, including three journalists."

And that was it. Not a word about what had been reported in the news pages regarding the murder of the journalists. The editorial made it sound like the guerrillas were responsible. When we asked about the misleading statement, Times editorial writer Karl Meyer acknowledged that the sentence was "clumsily written." He promised a correction would be printed the next time the newspaper ran an editorial on the subject, but no such correction was forthcoming.

With Cristiani at the helm, at least in a titular sense, the U.S. media took pains to distinguish him from his party's sickening reputation as a death squad haven. One of the distinctions, according to Times reporter Lindsey Gruson, is that Cristiani-types in the ARENA party are "conservative, American-trained technocrats"-implying that U.S. training made a crucial ~ difference. But Roberto D'Aubuisson, founder of ARENA and key force t_ behind the Salvadoran death squads, was also trained by the U.S.

The Times' State Department correspondent Robert Pear also drew spurious distinctions when he wrote that ARENA's "leaders now include far-rightists like Mr. D'Aubuisson and moderates like Mr. Cristiani." Pear didn't mention that the two men were close friends and poker partners. Nor did he explain why a so-called moderate would represent a party that was launched in 1980 as a paramilitary organization modeled after the Nazis and whose "honorary president for life," Roberto D'Aubuisson, is an admirer of Adolf Hitler.

Death squad murders began to increase soon after Cristiani was sworn in as President. Yet even when uniformed Salvadorans tortured and assassinated six priests and two others at the Jesuit University in November 1989, many U.S. journalists kept framing the issue as though moderate Cristiani was trapped in a crossfire between violent extremes that threatened a fragile democracy.

Meanwhile, as Nicaragua's 1990 elections approached, the American press once again put itself at the U.S. government's disposal, resurrecting myths about U.S. foreign policy. "Before the Feb. 25 election," a Christian Science Monitor news story reported, "the [Bush] administration wants to do as much as it can to strengthen the democratic process inside Nicaragua." Toward this end, according to the Miami Herald, the State Department began "funding classroom courses for the Nicaraguan contras about a subject the rebels hope will come in handy someday-democracy."

In article after article about the upcoming 1990 elections, U.S. journalists asserted that if the Sandinistas played by the rules, it would be the first free and fair election in Nicaraguan history. Reporters ignored what Virgilio Godoy, a vehement foe of the Sandinistas who was the U.S-supported vice presidential candidate in the 1990 election, told the Christian Science Monitor about the last election five years earlier: "If the U.S. administration said that the Guatemalan and Salvadoran elections were valid ones, how can they condemn elections in Nicaragua, when they have been no worse and probably a lot better? The elections here have been much more peaceful. There were no deaths as in the other two countries, where the opposition were often in fear for their lives."

The main tactical issue mulled over in the U.S. press with respect to Nicaragua's 1990 elections was how to channel millions of dollars to the political opposition-covertly via the CIA or openly through the National Endowment for Democracy. That such meddling-whether overt or covert-might compromise the integrity of the Nicaraguan electoral process was never mentioned by most mainstream journalists, who seemingly took for granted that it's perfectly fine if the U.S. government interferes in the affairs of other countries. Funding foreign political candidates is a common CIA practice, constituting one of the largest categories of coven projects undertaken by the Agency. Recent beneficiaries of the CIA's largess have included Duane's Christian Democrats in El Salvador, opponents of Costa Rican President and Nobel Peace Laureate Oscar Arias, and candidates running against General Manuel Noriega's cronies in the May 1989 Panamanian presidential election.

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Mexico's President: wimp or death squad symp?

The Mexican presidential elections in December 1988 were also marked by extensive fraud. Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the ruling PRI party took office after claiming to have won slightly more than 50 percent of the vote, amid charges of massive irregularities at the ballot box in regions where opposition candidates of the left and right were popular. U.S. media acknowledged that fraud had occurred, but this hardly put a damper on their enthusiasm for the new Mexican leader.

Salinas had been President barely a month, but already the U.S. government and press were praising him. A Miami Herald article, headlined "Salinas signals that he's not a wimp," cited the arrest of Mexico's "oil workers' boss" and other "shows of force" by the new government as evidence that Salinas is a tough, assertive leader.

"Salinas signals he's soft on human rights abusers" would have been a more appropriate headline; the other "shows of force" referred to by the Herald (pan of Knight-Ridder, the second largest U.S. newspaper chain) included a massacre by police following a prison uprising that left 25 dead, with several inmates allegedly killed "after they surrendered," and Salinas' appointment of hardliner Miguel Nazar Haro as police intelligence chief of Mexico City. "Nazar," wrote Knight-Ridder correspondent Katherine Ellison, "is reputedly also the ex-chief of the White Brigade, a secretive paramilitary team believed to be responsible for the torture and disappearance of hundreds of suspected leftists in the 1970s."

Ellison noted that Nazar had been indicted in 1982 by a U.S. grand jury in San Diego, which linked him to a luxury car-theft ring. Jailed briefly in the U.S., Nazar fled after posting $200,000 bail. On the day after disclosing details of Nazar's checkered past in its news pages, the Herald ran an editorial that hailed President Salinas for putting his "foes on notice that he means to make good on his campaign promises to curb corruption."

The New York Times followed suit with an editorial ("Mexico's President Gets Tough") stating, "Salinas' crackdowns [on Mexico's labor unions] deserve support." Acknowledging that Salinas' legitimacy had been "tainted by the fraud used...to inflate his vote tally" (a subtle way of soft-pedaling allegations that he stole the election), the Times editors warned that "unless Mr. Salinas faces down the obstacles to reform early in his six-year term, his chance to achieve change from within could collapse." Ironically, the "obstacles" mentioned include "vote-riggers" and corrupt public officials.

A month after Salinas took office, a front-page story in the Times by Larry Rohter discussed government-sponsored political executions in Mexico. "In the first public acknowledgment of death squad activity in Mexico," the article began, "a former Mexican Army soldier is maintaining that he was pan of a secret military unit that executed at least 60 political prisoners here in the late 1970s and early 1980s." Two top Salinas appointees were linked to the death squads: Miguel Nazar, the police intelligence chief under indictment in the U.S. for car theft; and Deputy Interior Minister Fernando Gutierrez Barrios, who commanded the forces that massacred several hundred demonstrators in Mexico City days before the 1968 Olympics. Nazar resigned shortly after Rohter's article appeared in the Times, but Gutierrez kept his post in the Mexican government.

While this may have been the first time the paper of record referred to death squad executions in Mexico, it was certainly not the "first public acknowledgment" of such activity, as Rohter asserted. Inside the League, a book by Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, discussed the Tecos, a bizarre neo-Nazi cult based in Guadalajara that coordinated its death squad operations with other paramilitary groups in Latin America. The Tecos comprised the Mexican chapter of the World Anti-Communist League, an organization which later played a key role in providing aid to the Nicaraguan contras.

Nor did death squad activity in Mexico cease in the early 1980s, as the Times suggests. Within weeks after Salinas took office in December 1988, there were 40 political assassinations in Mexico, according to the Mexico City daily La Jornada. Most of the victims were rural supporters of leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, Salinas' principal political rival. However, these killings were virtually ignored by major U.S. media which, like the U.S. government, preferred to laud Salinas as a great reformer.

Despite widespread charges that Salinas' ruling PRI party had committed fraud in July 1989 regional elections, the Times again hailed Mexico's chief in an editorial titled, "Winning by Losing in Mexico." The "losing" was a reference to PRI's acknowledgement that it had been beaten by a right-wing candidate in Baja California. This showed that Salinas was dedicated to "preparing his party and his country for a future of democratic pluralism," according to the Times.

But Salinas' party refused to concede defeat in Michoacan, a Cardenista stronghold plagued by widespread voting irregularities, prompting Proceso, a Mexican magazine, to declare, "Selective democracy: Baja California yes, Michoacan no." By contrast, the Times editorial concluded: "Even the boldest reforms are devalued when regimes rig the rules against real opposition. Mr. Salinas knows that. His vision and courage deserve U.S. support' Once again, the Times editors were echoing Washington officials.

"Controlled democracy" and the debt crisis

For decades, the U.S. government has sanctioned fraudulent elections in Latin America and other areas of the Third World. U.S. administrations have also instigated coups that toppled democratically-elected leaders when the results were not to their liking: Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; Brazil, 1964; Chile, 1973. Yet few mainstream journalists ever question whether promoting democracy and human rights is the actual objective of U.S. foreign policy.

"There is kind of an unconscious constraint among journalists that's related to the official American definition of the situation," said Cynthia Brown of Americas Watch. "Some influential reporters and editors have not made the distinction between elections and democracy. Instead they adopted the Reagan administration's jargon, which has become the general parlance. It's dangerous because the subtext is that we don't have to worry about Latin America anymore. They are electing civilian governments and therefore everything must be fine."

Many astute Latin American observers take Washington's professed concern for democracy with a large grain of salt. Father Luis Perez Aguirre, a leading Uruguayan human rights activist, drew attention to a significant factor jeopardizing the process of democratization in Latin America-the debt crisis. Said Perez Aguirre: "The debt is more than just an economic problem; it is also a political problem. The creditors are aware of this, and they try to maintain our countries in submission by keeping the dependency system."

The results are grim: Half a million children died in 1988, according to UNICEF, as families in the developing world slid into severe poverty, while their governments imposed strict austerity measures at the behest of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. This was the standard prescription for servicing the foreign debt-much of which had accrued in Latin America while U.S.-backed dictators looted their own treasuries, siphoning loans into various secret bank accounts. Yet the loans kept coming.

In our conversation with Esther Perez Aguirre, he talked about the transition from Latin American military dictatorships of the 1970s to electoral democracies of the 1980s, emphasizing a truth rarely spoken in the U.S. media: "The national security regimes are becoming obsolete, but the policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank haven't changed. Transnational and U.S.-based corporations are seeking to maintain the same unjust policies without propping up openly repressive regimes. Accordingly, the U.S. government is promoting a new doctrine, not very well known yet, called democracia tutelaria, or 'controlled democracy.' This doctrine tries to avoid the brutal image of military rule, but the oppression of our people continues."

THIRD WORLD TROUBLE SPOTS

In June 1987, millions of South Koreans protested nonviolently against military rule in that country, forcing the government to announce that it would hold elections by the end of the year. Several U.S. senators and congressmen who traveled to Seoul to observe the elections reported evidence of counterfeit ballots, vote-buying, political harassment and the beating of election monitors. Amidst charges of fraud, former general Roh Tae Woo, the military's hand-picked candidate, claimed victory.

After the elections, U.S. media quickly closed ranks behind Roh, glossing over irregularities at the polls that had been reported by members of Congress. A Wall Street Journal headline read, "Koreans Elect Roh as President in Easy Victory; Little Is Found to Confirm Charges of Wide Fraud Made by the Opposition." The next day, a Washington Post editorial stated, "The air is thick with complaints of fraud, but the proof offered so far is thin."

U.S. media largely ignored the fact that South Korean police had shut down an independent vote-counting center staffed by the National Coalition for Democracy, which kept a computer tally for comparison with the official government figures. When police intervened and closed the Coalition's offices, only 60 percent of the vote had been counted. Nor did major American media report that police had raided the Christian Broadcast Company on election eve, closing down the only independent national television network in Korea. As a result, Korean citizens and American journalists relied solely on state-controlled media for the election results.

The official count gave Roh 36.6 percent of the vote, while the opposition candidates, Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung, divided 55 percent of the tally between them. Even though a majority of Koreans had voted for major change from past abusive rule, Time magazine called the results a "Vote for Stability."

Roh Tae Woo was sworn in as South Korean President in February 1988. His decision to fill most of his cabinet with recently-retired generals and other holdovers from the U.S.-backed military regime provoked widespread dismay among Koreans. So did Roh's decision not to follow through on a much-repeated campaign promise to free all political prisoners, many of whom had been tortured. "We cannot but be overwhelmed by disappointment," the nation's largest newspaper, Dong-A-llbo, editorialized.

This disappointment was not shared by major U.S. media, which hailed Roh's inauguration as a great step forward for democracy. A Chicago Tribune editorial praised the "peaceful transfer of power from a military autocrat to a democratically-elected civilian. Roh Tae Woo, elected President in a free and fair election in December, has shown the vision needed to consolidate public support and avert military interference."

The Tribune editorial was wrong on all counts. The election of Roh was marked by fraud, and the notion that he would hold the military at bay didn't square with the cabinet appointments he had already made. Moreover, the editorial's claim of a "peaceful transfer of power" was contradicted by a Chicago Tribune news story from the same day: "Students who oppose Roh in Seoul and several other cities clashed with riot police in scenes reminiscent of protests last summer that eventually led to the election."

A New York Times editorial, "Not So Regressive in Korea," praised President Roh Tae Woo in March 1989 after he postponed a plebiscite he had promised voters during his election campaign. "Friends of South Korean democracy shouldn't be alarmed," assured the Times. "In his first year in office, President Roh has already laid to rest doubts about his democratic convictions... He has let workers struggle for long-denied union rights and kept the powerful security forces leashed."

A few days later, the Times ran a brief Reuters dispatch which stated: "More than I0,000 riot police, firing tear gas and in full battle gear, stormed [South Korea's] biggest shipyard early today and arrested workers... Strikers fought back with stones, gasoline bombs and clubs. About 700 people were arrested and 20 wounded..." So much for keeping the security forces "leashed" and letting workers "struggle for long-denied union rights."

Israelis and Palestinians

Another example of discontinuity between editorials and news stories can be found in the Washington Post's coverage of human rights violations in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Correspondent Glenn Frankel has often brought abuses to the fore, quoting human rights groups, Palestinian detainees, Israeli officials and U.S. State Department sources in his articles. Meanwhile, the Post's editorial page offered palliatives with this ideological two-step: "What counts most, however, is the nature of the system... That Israel is at heart a democratic country remains its core strength."

John Healey, executive director of Amnesty International USA, responded to these remarks with a letter to the Post. "Visualize the arm of a teenager held out by soldiers and broken at midshaft," said Healey, "a rock-thrower Iying dead with a bullet in his back or an infant in her cradle asphyxiated by tear gas. Next, record the name and age of each person who has been abused-and chronicle dozens of deaths as a result of plastic bullets and many thousands of wounded people. Finally, count the thousands imprisoned without trial and the scores tortured. Now, turn to an editorial by the Post and read, 'What counts most, however, is the nature of the system."'

The outbreak of the intifada (the Palestinian uprising) in December 1987 came as a surprise to U.S. media, which had long ignored serious human rights abuses in the Occupied Territories. For 20 years Israeli forces had been detaining people without charge, closing universities, censoring Palestinian publications, torturing political prisoners, blowing up Arab homes, and operating military courts which made a mockery of justice. Yet prior to the intifada, the New York Times called the military occupation "benign" and praised Israel (the largest recipient of U.S. government aid) as "a society in which moral sensitivity is a principle of political life."

The killings, beatings and daily humiliation of a people under occupation were not deemed worthy of coverage in the U.S. press until the intifada erupted with full fury. It was only then that American journalists began to pay unflattering attention to the poverty and degradation suffered by many Palestinians, whose "towns are short of hospitals, sewers, paved roads and schoolrooms," as Newsweek put it. ABC News correspondent Dean Reynolds portrayed the Palestinians as victims of an unjust occupation, drawing parallels between the West Bank and the black South African township of Soweto. Most Palestinians, said Reynolds, "live in refugee camps, stateless and homeless. They work low-paying jobs that Israelis refuse. Most are under 20, and have spent their whole lives under Israeli rule. They watch helplessly as Israeli settlements in the territories expand... The tragedy of the Palestinians is they seldom get attention to their problems unless they're killing someone, or someone is killing them."

The sense of frustration and desperation among Palestinians was compounded by the fact that repeated peace overtures by the PLO-viewed as "the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" by 93.5 percent of Arabs in the Occupied Territories, according to a 1986 Newsday poll-were rejected by Israel. For years PLO chief Yasir Arafat had been advocating a negotiated settlement with Israel, based on the principle of "exchanging land for peace," but this was consistently ignored by major U.S. media.

The PLO reiterated its position on several occasions, sometimes ambiguously and sometimes quite clearly, but the U.S. media turned a deaf ear to Arafat's conciliatory words. In the spring of 1984, for example, Arafat issued a series of statements in Europe supporting "direct negotiations between the Israelis and ourselves," which would lead to "mutual recognition between two states." This was reported by the London Observer, Le Nouvel Observateur in Paris, and the Jerusalem Post, but not by the New York Times or the three major U.S. networks.

In December 1987, shortly after the intifada erupted, the Hebrew press in Israel gave prominent coverage to Arafat's assertion that he was "ready for direct negotiations with Israel." But this offer was ignored by the New York Times, which also slighted Arafat's statement on January 14,1988, that the PLO would "recognize Israel's right to exist if it and the United States accept PLO participation in an international Middle East peace conference." Instead the Times editorialized, "Until the PLO summons the courage and wisdom to accept peace with Israel in return for some kind of Palestinian homeland, it would be folly for Israel to bargain."

In May 1988, Bassam Abu Sharif, one of Arafat's closest advisers, submitted an article outlining the PLO's moderate stance to the Washington Post, which reportedly solicited the piece for its op-ed page. But Abu Sharif's carefully crafted position paper didn't sit well with the Post's editors, who refused to print it. His article-explicitly calling for a two-state solution, with a Palestinian state coexisting in peace alongside Israel-was subsequently included in a PLO press kit given to journalists covering the Palestinian summit conference in Algiers in June. A brief account of Abu Sharif's article ran in the Wall Street Journal, and a Boston Globe editorial quoted snippets from his statement, characterizing it as one of "exemplary moderation."

Nothing about Abu Sharif's peace overture appeared in either of America's newspapers of record until two weeks after it was first mentioned in the Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post ran an AP story from Cyprus which focused on the fact that anti-Arafat Palestinian fringe groups had rejected Abu Sharif's moderate position. This was how Post readers first learned about his declaration. The next day a critical column by Post editor Stephen Rosenfeld focused on those fringe groups rather than Abu Sharif's position.

The New York Times did somewhat better, running a news report on rejectionist criticism of Abu Sharif near the front of the newspaper, along with a summary of the main points of his article on its editorial page. The Times also printed a laudatory column by Anthony Lewis, who described Abu Sharif's article as "one of the most important documents in the tormented history of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians." Yet it was never mentioned during network news coverage of the Algiers summit conference.

In November 1988, the PLO issued a declaration of Palestinian independence that once again affirmed Israel's right to exist in peace as part of a two-state Mideast solution. The PLO also rejected "terrorism in all its forms." The Palestinian communiqué was greeted by media across the country and abroad with cautious optimism. WNBC-TV in New York summed it up: "PLO recognizes Israel, but many obstacles remain." A Christian Science Monitor editorial was headlined, "A welcome move by the PLO."

But the New York Times kept insisting that the PLO had not actually recognized Israel. The rest of the world had been suckered by the PLO, but the Times knew better. According to a Times editorial, "The PLO: Less Than Meets the Eye," Arafat merely sought to appear conciliatory, when he actually wasn't. The PLO announcement "will do little to strengthen the hand of Israelis who search for a basis of negotiations," said the editors. "The fine print [of the PLO declaration] plays directly into the hands of the Likud bloc and its leader, Yitzhak Shamir, who totally opposes any settlement based on trading land for peace." Actually, it was the fine print of the New York Times that played right into the hands of Israeli rejectionists.

As the days passed and the PLO continued to receive accolades from Western Europe and elsewhere, Times correspondents joined their editors in verbal contortions to minimize the PLO declaration. Robert Pear employed no less than four minimizing clauses in one sentence when he reported that the PLO "appeared to some to have implicitly taken a step toward accepting Israel's right to exist [emphasis added]."

The Times steadfastly refused to accept the PLO declaration until weeks later, when the green light came from the State Department. It was then that the paper of record finally acknowledged that the PLO had made the proper minuscule word changes that it had requested. At which point the Times editors asserted that the PLO underwent a "seismic shift of attitude...towards a serious negotiating position." Joel Brinkley, the Times correspondent in Jerusalem, described it as a major breakthrough: "Yasir Arafat, the PLO leader, is saying openly for the first time that he wants to solve the Palestinian problem through negotiation." In fact, Arafat had been saying so openly for years. It was the State Department that shifted its position, not the PLO. Brinkley and his editors were guilty of seriously distorting the historical record.

Although the Israeli government continued to reject negotiations with the PLO, the Times placed much of the responsibility for the logjam on the Palestinians. When Israeli hardliner Ariel Sharon called for assassinating Arafat as a precondition for "peace," his threat was buried inconspicuously in the middle of a Times article headlined, "Israel Asserts Threats by PLO Imperil Bid to Revive Peace Plan." Israeli Prime Minister Shamir warned that Palestinians resisting occupation would be "crushed like grasshoppers," with their heads "smashed against the boulders and walls." Yet in his August 1988 New York Times magazine profile of Shamir, Joel Brinkley stated: "Shamir is a tactician. He's not a man of volatile emotions, subject to such dangerous feelings as hate."

By this time, coverage of violence in the Occupied Territories had become repetitive, almost numbing, with a few more Palestinian youths dying each week, their bodies embalmed in cold statistics and "buried in shallow, two-paragraph graves," as media critic Dennis Perrin put it. After yet another fatal clash between Israeli troops and Palestinians in the West Bank, Israeli minister Yitzhak Peretz was quoted as saying in a cabinet meeting that Israel could not allow "every dirty Arab" to infringe on Israeli access to religious sites in the Old City of Jerusalem. Washington Post reporter Edward Cody described Peretz's racial slur as "a measure of the bitterness" Israeli officials feel toward Palestinians. If someone had used the phrase "dirty Jew," it would rightly have been characterized as a blatant expression of anti-Semitism. But when an Israeli official says "dirty Arab," the Washington Post discerns only bitterness, not racism.

Seeing red in Southern Africa

For all its deficiencies, U.S. press coverage of repression in the Occupied Territories has increased substantially since the intifada. This is more than can be said about reporting on human rights abuses in most of sub-Saharan Africa. When 400,000 Somalians fled their war-tom East African country in the summer of 1988, it barely entered public consciousness in the United States. Initially backed by Moscow in its conflict with Ethiopia, Somalia later turned to the U.S. government, which became its principal military supplier. With American backing, Somalia has committed mind-boggling atrocities against unarmed civilians. Similarly, a 1988 massacre in Burundi came and went with hardly any follow-up in the U.S. press.

Such incidents in "obscure" places receive little coverage, partly because they have only minor impact on U.S. economic interests or East/West relations. Racial bias is also a factor. As one network news reporter commented,

"TV news executives figure that the American population cares less about what happens to people the darker their skin is." According to former CBS correspondent Randy Daniels, "The preponderance of news from Africa is clearly from a white point of view and deals primarily with whites."

Africa is consistently the most under-reported area in the world, as far as U.S. media are concerned. Journalists quip that you have to add a few zeros to the number of casualties in Africa before it is deemed newsworthy. The exception is South Africa, where coverage of violence by the apartheid government has catalyzed worldwide protests, including calls for economic sanctions and divestment. Media attention helped turn the struggle inside South Africa into an international cause. Pretoria responded by imposing harsh press restrictions in 1985 that succeeded in limiting coverage of the unrest.

"There is no formal censorship system," New York Times then-foreign-editor Joseph Lelyveld said of the South African press regulations. "I don't think we have ever submitted a line of copy. It's a system of self-censorship... Some use the government's pressure of close scrutiny as an excuse for not doing a hell of a lot."

It is often said that if U.S. journalists defied the press rules, they would be expelled from the country. But former ABC News reporter Ken Walker feels that the U.S. media have been complicit in Pretoria's media manipulation. He contends the same fear of getting tossed out was not present in Eastern European countries where government restrictions were routinely challenged, and where expulsion was often a badge of honor. Walker points to a lack of black network correspondents assigned to South Africa as a sign of widespread reluctance to challenge the status quo.

A South African journalist told Africa Report magazine that a reporter's political outlook is as crucial as his or her racial sensitivity. "South Africa is viewed as one of us, as a Western democracy, and the correspondents operate as if it was one," he asserted. "Western reporters cover South Africa from the point of view of the people who run it, not from the point of view of those who suffer it." Indeed, while the U.S. media described the protesters in Eastern Europe and China as "pro-democracy" demonstrators, black South

Africans demanding a system based on one-person one-vote were rarely, if ever, referred to as "pro-democracy" activists.

A Cold War frame has skewed U.S. reporting on the war in Angola, a target of South African aggression since the mid-1970s. Mainstream media have obscured the origins of the Angolan conflict, depicting South Africa and the U.S. as responding to Soviet-Cuban "expansionism" in Southern Africa. Typical was a Los Angeles Times news article, which claimed that "within weeks of Angolan independence, Cuban troops arrived to support the new government, and South Africa, worried about the Soviet-backed Cuban troops' threat to Namibia, sent its own troops into Angola to help the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola [UNITA]."

Not so, according to John Stockwell, head of the CIA's Angolan task force during the mid-1970s. Stockwell maintains that Cuban forces entered the fray after some 5,000 South African troops invaded Angola and drove 500 kilometers toward the Angolan capital of Luanda in a week. This is what prompted the Angolan government to request the assistance of Cuban soldiers, who helped stave off the South African attack and defeat the CIA-supported rebels.

UNITA was resurrected as a guerrilla force during the Reagan administration, which armed the South African-backed rebel army at a time when military assistance was prohibited by Congress. Scattered reports in the U.S. media provided evidence of a Southem African connection to the clandestine operations run by CIA director William Casey and Lt. Col. Oliver North. This was one of the hidden stories of the Iran-contra affair, but the U.S. press again neglected to pursue mounting evidence of illegal covert actions.

From the outset, UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi was treated with kid gloves by the American media, which rushed to sanctify him as a legitimate anticolonial leader. Yet in the early 1970s, Savimbi had collaborated with neofascist mercenaries employed by the Portuguese secret service, in assassination attempts against rival Angolan guerrilla leaders who were fighting the Portuguese colonial regime. This was not reported by the mainstream press.

During 15 years of civil war in Angola, U.S. journalists paid little attention to human rights abuses by UNITA forces. In 1986, for example, the Africa Faith and Justice Network reported that UNITA had kidnapped 60 priests as part of an ongoing U.S.-backed terror campaign, but this was ignored by most media. UNITA's indiscriminate use of land mines maimed thousands of civilians, prompting a Wall Street Journal reporter to describe central Angola as the "amputee capital of the world." But the Journal and other U.S. media didn't mention that UNITA targeted medical clinics, attacking an artificial limb center in Huambo four times during the war.

UNITA atrocities, including the use of starvation as a weapon, had long been cited by church groups and human rights monitors. But it wasn't until March 1989, when peace talks between the warring parties were underway, that major media began to acknowledge the sinister side of Savimbi and UNITA. A front page New York Times article by Craig Whitney and Jill Jolliffe featured a UNITA defector who asserted that Savimbi had ordered the torture and killing of dissenters. In another case of reporting too little too late, the Times referred to eyewitness accounts from an Amnesty International study which said that Savimbi-hailed as a "freedom fighter" by the Reagan administration-burned some of his opponents at the stake after accusing them of being "witches."

Unreliable Sources

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