( page four

READ

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-