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The Other Press

September 17, 1981

 

 

THIRD WORD‘ NEWS

Written by Tom Hawthorn
former B*C* bureau chief

for Canadian University Press

 

 

NO LONGER
THE VOICE

 

THE PEOPL

 

CHATTER ON THE WIRE

. The eight-inch wad of per-
forated sheets struck the
podium with a thud, tot-
tering briefly before plun-
ging unceremoniously to the
floor. These, as EDMON-
TON JOURNAL editor Steve
Hume admitted, were the
more than one million words
the paper’s editors had
spared from public consum-
tion in a single day.

.Not that the stories were of
poor quality, Hume ex-
plained, because in fact they
certainly met his news-
paper’s standards. The re-
jects merely could not fit
into the JOURNAL’s “‘con-
scious’’ 15 per cegt allot-
ment, after advertisements,
for international news, ‘‘A
journalist is hired to be a
filter, Hume said. ‘‘We are
paid to go through this
stuff.’’
And with good reason. That
same night, the rescured

  
 

wire copy provided no end
of amusement for two dozen
would-be Cronkites. What
Hume would have led them
to believe to be the harvest
of the best foreign reporting
available was rife with tri-
vial stories. Read aloud the
items were hilarious. Ele-
phants arrested in Zim-
habwe.

Monk Skyjacks Jet to Learn
Religious Secret Omelette
Preparation Heads Up Trial
And buried deep within one
story was a quote from a
U.S. businessman that acid
rain wasn’t bad because,
after all, ‘‘what else did it
do but just kill fish?’’
.Winnipeg free-lance jour-
nalist Eric Mills dripped
with sarcasm when des-
cribing some of the more
obvious cases of distortion
in foreign coverage at an
Edmonton conference on
The International News
Blues held at the University
of Alberta in May.

.One ABC-TV corres-
pondent, in the midst of a
virtual civil war in El Sal-
vador, reported that support
for the rebels was faltering

as civilians opted out
of revolution on
wee kends for more’
patrician © past—times
at the beach. ‘“‘I guess

they all have cars,’’ Mills
said, ‘‘even though El Sal-
vador is the poorest nation
in Latin America, and they
just drop their weapons to
go to the beach every week-
end.’’

.The beach theme also hel-
ped one American jour-
nalist’s promotion of Ura-
guay as a tourist spot.

Although all pretences to
democracy have been eli-
minated and all political
activity declared illegal, the
reporter duly noted for his
readers that this loss of
freedom wasn’t of great
significance since ‘‘all politi-
cal movements are on the
wane during the summer
beach months anyway.’’

DIME A DOZEN DEATH
.. Laying face down in the
street, his arms stretched
out in. front of him.
,out in front of him, the’
American television reporter
must have thought the

roadblock check a bit of

annoying routine. The sol-
diers gave no suggestion
that something was amiss’
But then, unbelievably, a
young Nicaraguan soldier
walked towards the prone
reporter, aimed his rifle,
and with an imperceptible
squeeze blew the reporter’s
head off. The execution
stunned the millions of Am-
ericans who watched the
evening news that day, be-

ING BETWEEN

coming another of those
harsh images of war that
become ingrained on the

psyche.
. With the death of a single
American television rep-

orter, Americans suddenly
‘‘discovered’’ Nicaragua
and its revolution. Or, as
Alexander Cockburn wrote
in Harper’s, Nicaragua
went from being a Totally
Invisible Nation in the eyes
of the U.S. press to being a
Totally Fucked Nation.
.‘‘What we get is a cov-
erage limited to a kind of
crisis state,’’ says. Jacques
Marchand, publisher of
Mother Jones maga—
zine. ‘’Places appear and
disapear again. The cover-
age in the U.S. and Can-
adian press promised us
that a bloodbath should
occur if the nationalists win,
followed by economic col-
lapse, societal collapse.
Well that didn’t happen.
Ergo, it drops out of the
news.

. ‘Obviously there are racist
and nationalistic motives.”’
And if the death of a single
American reporter in Nica-
ragua or three American
nuns in El Salvador, can
create such a furor in the
midst of bloody civil wars,
the media has created a
scale of values, Marchand
says.

.In the early '30s, Gen.
Maximiliano Hernandez
Martinez unleashed his Sal-
vadoran government troops
against a popular uprising.
About 30,000 peasants were
slaughtered in one of Cen-
tral America’s bloodiest
conflicts. Barely a word
appeared in the North Ame-
rican media, suggesting that
30,000 peasants may have
been a ceiling of acceptable
death.Marchand said the -
scale would work out that
3,000 urban workers could
be slaughtered with little
adverse publicity, or 300
students, or 30 faculty me-
mbers. ‘‘And, of course,’’
Marchand offered, ‘‘50,00(
faculty members would have
to be killed to get the
attention of one murdered
journalist.’’

.Iran, he says, has virtually
faded back into a Totally
Invisible Nation. ‘‘Similarly
the threat of the Rusian
juggernaut through Afganis.
tan to the Persian Gulf has
not taken place. But ne
matter for we’ve suddenly,
discovered Communists in
El Salvador.
.Hugh McCullum says vir:
tually the only reporting: we
see from El Salvador is of
non-analytical body counts
McCullum, editor of the
tiberal United Church
Observer reported from
&l Salvador last August.
There he found only three
journalists from the West-
ern media: a Reuters string-