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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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aid, etc. Forty of fifty-four named sources are business leaders and
opposition politicians; “The remaining citations are largely pro forma
rebuttals by government officials to the main thrust of an article.” “In
two years of reporting, she did not record a single sympathetic comment
from the twenty-five shopkeepers, stallholders, small farmers and
businessmen, baseball fans and taxi drivers she interviewed,” but only a
“relentless litany of complaints about Cuban influence and food lines
and nostalgia for better days under Somoza.” She reported charges of
Sandinista “massive murder” made by a business leader (who, it has
since been learned, was on the CIA payroll), but not the conclusion of
Amnesty International that there was no substance to these charges.
The Sandinista social programs are dismissed briefly in her book as a
ruse. This unabashed state propagandist also has the gall to condemn
journalists for their alleged “love affair” with the Sandinistas, who they
saw “through a romantic haze”; that is, for occasionally departing from
the US government propaganda line. Not surprisingly, this is the way to
gain wide prestige and to merit appointment as a correspondent for the
New York Times. 150
The device of insinuating a Party Line by careful selection of sources
is one of the standard techniques of Western Agitprop. Journalists would
be departing from objectivity if they were to express their own opinions,
so to serve the purposes of the free press it is necessary to proceed in a
more roundabout way, for example, by extensive citation of those who
express the approved doctrines and careful avoidance of alternative
perspectives.
Such news reports are not without value, however. Thus Christian
observes that the anti-Sandinista mood in Congress “has made it
politically possible for the Administration to drop the argument that it
was supporting the Nicaraguan rebels as a means of interfering with the
supplying of the guerrillas fighting the Washington-backed Government