Lies, when repeated often enough, begin to take on a life of their own. During the 1980s, it got to the point where U.S. officials could say nearly anything about the Sandinistas, and most media would report it verbatim. 1987 as a result of the Iran-Contra scandal. By this time, official lies about Nicaragua had become ingrained media truths. As a U.S. official told journalists Robert Parry and Peter Kornbluh: “They can shut down the public diplomacy office, but they repeated. The Sandinista Party quickly adopted the students’ statement as its own. Journalist Mark Cook traced the origins of the anti- Sandinista smear to the AP’s Tokyo bureau, and AP subsequently retracted the story. But cor- (AP) — T w o representa- te In te rn a t io n a l A ll iance 'eterans, one a fo rm e r Pi ident, we re ev ic ted f r o m / i Republican been unfair never ense. Jost pV-PO*TLAND UANVIX St MINEDAMAGED81BLAST JOHN REED DIES IN RUSSIA ^m e to College, Topock, after a nbassa- y were carried lou lde r ■esenta- ance of T Port- om the as they k, N.Y., ment to testing like to on area for the activist, month, ear ago Recon- oldest I t was the biggest pa r ty launched a hunt co rru p t or crim ina l "b ig leading o f f ic ia ls and thei d w i th in Port- ? book, ster o f A tom ic Walsh Probes Contra ‘Deceit’ Under Reagan ‘Essence o f the Crime Called Inquiry Goal State James A. Baker III, who share ■enchan t for personal diplomacy, ambassadors, and deal Leaders iol ;All' Pa Marsh^fng Fo jrn in, its diversity upheld Rkhtrd ScuniBoa; Borton Unlvenfty Prak Silber. Project Hope Preddeot WUlUm B. »rx retired SupremeCourt JueticePoaer Siewert. By Joe Pichirallo and Walter Pincus WaVunttoo Post Still Wnten Independent counsel Lawrence- E. Walsh said yesterday he is pressing forward with his investigation into the Iran-contra affair and is concentrating on what he now considers the "essence of the crime": "a pattern of deceit" at the highest levels of the Reagan administration. Walsh said part of the deception NORMAN SOLOMON Attended Reed College in Portland M K T ■ Ji a Syndicalists Employed by Big Creek Firm Escorted by Officers to Waiting Bus for Portland centered on administration efforts to hide from Congress the White House’s secret efforts to arm the Nicaraguan contras during a two- year congressional ban on U.S. milcy prepares to bold first meeting with members j. after theywere sworn inWednesday I ^indant H | if Letter. 11$ |OT MEANT, sI’ EAKINt LISTS Bush Takes Clubby Approach To International Diplomacy' Intense Pace Proves to Have Pluses, Pitfalls Collage by Walt Curtis — — I |l Eljc jjork (times By David Hoffman and Don Oberdorfe WashingtonPost StaffWriter When President Bush zilian President-elect Fer lor de Mello in the Oval 26, Bush asked him to vate message to Sovic Mikhail Gorbachev on ing visit to the Kremlir Pi later, Bush telephoni directly, only the thin AI tory that a U.S. presi Soviet leader on the te One of the first asked, an informed ' was, “Did you get my n | This informal and intim<., •nunication illustrates what has become an important new facet of inrapple •ats of jf dip- -fficiais, the first ency both alls of this lis first year 'y phone with Is about 190 e of one such in- .TTudiionai call every other day— and met face-to-face with leaders 135 times, a pace far more intense dent when his car collided with a donkey. Lies, when repeated often enough, begin to take on a life of their own. During the 1980s, it got to the point where U.S. officials could say nearly anything about the Sandinistas, and most media would report it verbatim (assuming it was bad enough) without trying to set the record straight. Sometimes the media’s sycophantic relationship with the State assumed ludicrous proportions, as when Connie Chung declared on NBC News in March, 1985: “Reagan wants to remove the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, not oust them.” In addition to promoting disinformation, OPD sought to pressure journalists when they filed stories deemed objectionable by the Reagan administration. “1talked to reporters, editors, producers, anyone who would listen to our side,” said OPD chief Otto Reich. “I had lots of meetings with editorial boards of newspapers.” After National Public Radio aired a critical report about the Contras, Reich paid a visit to NPR, which he called the “little Havana on the Potomac.” According to NPRemployees, Reich said his efforts had convinced editors at other media to change the tenor of their reporting, which resulted in journalists being removed from the Central America beat. He also boasted that he had a team of people who monitored all NPR programs, as well as other broadcast networks. An NPR staffer described Reich’s remarks as a “calculated attempt to intimidate.” Reich’s courtesy call succeeded in getting NPR reporters to second- guess themselves. After someone filed a story on Central America, an NPR editor asked a colleague: “What would Otto Reich think? ” Public Redundancy A1987 probe of OPD by the General Accounting Office found that the Reagan administration had engaged in “prohibited, covert propaganda activities.” Rep. Jack Brooks (D-TX) called it an “illegal operation” designed “to manipulate public opinion and congressional action.” The U.S. media quietly let the matter drop without further investigation. OPD was disbanded at the end of can’t shut down public diplomacy.” Sure enough, anti-Sandinista volleys continued to ricochet through the mass media long after OPD was scuttled in a bureaucratic shakeup. Within hours after the Chinese government massacre of student protesters at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June, 1989, an AP dispatch reported that Nicaragua and Viet Nam had endorsed the crackdown. The story was completely bogus, as any skeptical editor might have suspected. After all, Viet Nam and China had been adversaries in a brief but bloody war, apd China supplied weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras at the behest of U.S. officials. But these facts weren’t mentioned in the AP wire story about Nicaragua’s alleged support for China’s old guard, which was picked up and amplified in network TV coverage, newspapers, syndicated columns and negative editorials. AP correspondents in Managua should have consulted Barricada, Nicaragua’s pro-government newspaper, which carried a prominent statement by the pro-Sandinista National Union of Students denouncing “indiscriminate repression” in China and urging that such a hideous episode never be rections, when they ran at all, received far less attention than the original lie—a common pattern in the U.S. media. Months later, the disinformation hoax was resurrected by NPR’s senior news analyst Daniel Schorr, who blithely touted the discredited AP tale on the op-ed page of the New York Times and in his radio commentary, claiming incorrectly that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega had endorsed “the massacre of pro-democracy students in Beijing.” As Mark Twain once said: “A lie can go half way around the world, before the truth even gets its boots on.” Writers Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon have just completed UNRELIABLE SOURCES, being published in June by Lyle Stuart (Carol Publishing Group— New York). Martin Lee is publisher of EXTRA!, the journal of the media watch group FAIR. Norman Solomon, a frequent contributor to Clinton St., is a former Portland resident living in California. Clinton St.—Spring 1990 29
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