Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Fifth Freedom
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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be noted on the back pages. The chief foreign correspondent of the
London Guardian, reviewing Ray Bonner’s important book cited above,
comments that Bonner (who notes that he originally accepted
government deception as a journalist in El Salvador) “is rarely as angry
about the journalists as about the officials who manipulated them”: 89
He is well enough aware that the issue in El Salvador is not reality
as such, but how that reality is perceived: the United States is not
just conducting a political, economic and military war, but a
propaganda war as well. But he seems less exercised than he
might be about the degree to which journalists accept the US
Government line. A lie reported as fact on the front page of the
New York Times affects public opinion. The same lie exposed
years later by anonymous officials reminiscing, or thanks to a
Freedom of Information suit, is mainly of interest to historians. For
every exposé which Mr Bonner and the handful of other
industrious reporters make there are countless tendentious stories
which are never challenged. Beside the cascade of one-sided and
inaccurate reports, based on untrue data or false premises, the
honest and probing accounts are no better than a trickle.
Meanwhile, the policy juggernaut rolls on.
Furthermore, even if the media were to treat state propaganda with a
critical eye in the manner employed for official enemies, the government
would still have won the major battle: namely, setting the framework for
debate. We spend little time analyzing or refuting Soviet charges about
the terrorism of the Afghan resistance or Hitler’s charges against Poland
in 1939, but it is more difficult, it seems, to recognize the true nature of
debate over Washington’s charges against the Sandinistas at a time