The American media has, from the beginning, portrayed the Sandinistas of Nicaragua--before they assumed power and in the years since--as being worthy of American support. On the other hand, the anti-communist Nicaraguan Contras who seek democracy and freedom for their country are portrayed in the harshest negative terms. Even a brief look at the record shows the role the media has played.
Earl E. T. Smith, who was U.S. ambassador to Cuba at the time Castro came to power, told a 1979 conference sponsored by Accuracy in Media that the press had played a vital role in The Sandinistas' rise to power in Nicaragua, as it had in Castro's overthrow of the government of President Batista. He described how The New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews had rescued Castro from obscurity and likened him to Abraham Lincoln.
Smith's conclusion: "The media are doing everything in their power to overthrow rightist dictators who are pro-American and anticommunist. They look with favor on leftist dictators who are pro-Communist."
At this same conference in 1979, Max Kelly, who served as President Somoza's personal secretary during his last year in office, charged that the media had been a major factor in the overthrow of the Somaza regime. He said: " I know for a fact--from monitoring of Telex, satellite and telephone lines--that a good number of stories filed from Nicaragua that were either objective or favorable to the government never got printed or shown."
He asked: "Can this country afford to have its foreign policy influenced by this type of reporting? It lends itself to a campaign of disinformation, and we know who are the experts in that field."
Some American journalists have, on occasion, admitted that they were doing something far different from fairly and objectively reporting the news. Karen De Young, for example, foreign editor of The Washington Post, said in a lecture at the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies, that, "Most journalists now, most Western journalists at least, are eager to seek out guerrilla groups, leftist groups, because you assume they must be the good guys."
Long after it became clear that Sandinistas had no intention of fulfilling their promise of democracy and fee elections for the people of Nicaragua, many elements of the media continued to promote the Sandinista perspective of events.
On May 12, 1983 the CBS Evening News showed films obtained from an unidentified source which, together with the commentary, could be considered little more than Sandinista propaganda. The subject was the guerrilla war in Nicaragua--from the Sandinista point of view. People were shown calling the anti-communist guerrillas "beasts" who were supported by "Yankee imperialism." Narrator Ed Rabel, the correspondent responsible for two Pro-Sandinista documentaries aired by CBS in 1982, declared: "A sense of patriotism keeps the army going." The Sandinista army, that is.
CBS News has shown itself willing to go to great lengths to undermine U.S. policy in Central America. Consider its report on August 3, 1983.
President Reagan
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