Americanism abroad : Nicaraguan media
and regional context
The perception management of foreign politics for imperialist
propaganda purposes works across countries as a self-fuelling,
one-sided Moebius-strip production line. Re-selling by corporate US
media of the propaganda spin retailed as "news" by television
channels in Venezuela is the best known example. An unusually
flagrant exposé of this degenerative international media
symbiosis occurred on Fox News recently when New York councillor
Charles Barron was called a "son-of-a-bitch" by Adam Housley, Fox's
correspondent in Caracas, during an exchange in which Barron
contradicted Housley's mendacious reporting on Venezuela.
Disinformation and outright falsehoods broadcast in countries like
Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico become fake virtual news that is then
broadcast as if it were real in the imperial
centres of North America, Europe and the Pacific. This in turn is made
to produce a re-confected virtual reality that is then retailed back as
the
basic premise of news analysis by international corporate news outlets
to media in the original source
countries. The process not only validates the
original propaganda but itself tends to generate yet more fake virtual
news to feed the cycle.
Self-perpetuating and vicious, thoroughly disingenuous and totally
political, this cycle is probably the
single most important perception management mechanism for promoting
Americanism. The cycle's purpose is to subordinate the interests of all
the peoples of the Americas, and beyond, to the aims of the United
States' plutocrat corporate elite and their allies. This
all-pervasive perception management production line is at work
constantly, almost everywhere in Latin America, but is especially
noticeable in countries
where governments develop strategies contrary to the policies of the US
government, its European and Pacific allies and their respective
multinational corporations.
The aggressive
politicization of corporate media outlets and their disinformation
output is an established fact throughout Latin America. Freedom of
speech is
regularly hijacked, given a brutal working over in corporate editorial
conference rooms and then thrown back out onto the airwaves and the
printed page. The
corporate media make-over varies from country to country. In Venezuela,
corporate editorial-brutalized freedom of speech gets dressed up
as a victim of State repression. In Mexico and Colombia, it appears as
the endlessly harrassed public good under threat from popular
movements exercising basic rights but branded as vicious terrorists.
The
same corporate gangsterism is at work in
Ecuador, Bolivia
and Nicaragua. It both serves and feeds dominant local corporate
political
options. Currently, Nicaragua is an especially good example of this
phenomenon.
The media in Nicaragua
Since the Sandinista-led FSLN coalition won the election in November of
last year, local opposition media have struggled, obviously trying to
work out a clear strategy to
destroy the new
government's credibility. As in countries like Mexico, Colombia and
Venezuela the main television channels and daily newspapers are all
owned by elite local and regional corporate interests. The only
important Sandinista television outlet is the Multinoticias news
programme on Channel 4. Reports that the multi-government backed
Telesur media
company may help the FSLN-led Ortega/Morales administration resurrect
the moribund State-owned
Channel 6 television station have been greeted with paranoid suspicion
from the country's existing corporate media. They are all for
competition, but only from people who think like them.
Among them, the Channel 2 television station and the La Prensa
daily national newspaper consistently push the Americanist views of
Nicaragua's traditional oligarchy. They support National Liberal
Alliance (ALN) leader, banker Eduardo Montealegre, unconditionally. The
other
national daily newspaper El Nuevo Diario supports the dissident
Sandinista Renewal Movement (MRS) reflecting the Americanist views of
the centrist professional and managerial classes. Channel 8,
predominantly a news channel, runs the MRS-aligned "Esta Noche" and
"Esta Semana" current affairs programmes, presented by media empresario
Carlos Fernando Chamorro.
All these media are categorically hostile to the FSLN and, to a lesser
degree, to the Constitutional Liberal Party led by disgraced former
President Arnoldo Aleman. They all offer an analysis of Nicaragua's
political reality that is firmly rooted in the premises of Americanism.
Their advocacy of corporate democracy necessarily entails support too
for some variety of the forever-notional free
market economy, inevitably rigged in favour of concentrated foreign
capital. They look to US and European liberalism for models of the
corporate-friendly modernization they deem essential for Nicaragua's
development.
They promote the corporate capitalist model of integration
: concentrating wealth among an elite, consolidating a
corporate-friendly professional and managerial middle class and a
trickle-down poverty-reduction strategy for the impoverished majority
along with debt-plus-aid interventions from the United States and
its Pacific and European allies. An important component of these
interventions is a major role in that debt-plus-aid model for NGOs. The
most politically assertive of the managerial classes who make a very
comfortable living out of the NGO sector are represented by the
Coordinadora
Civil many of whose members actively support the MRS and are also part
of the anti-FSLN Movimiento para Nicaragua.
Conversely, the FSLN-led coalition favours integration via ALBA - the
Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, formed initially by Cuba and
Venezuela and now incorporating Bolivia, Nicaragua and some Caribbean
nations. This model prioritizes bilateral government agreements
to foment a broad range of exchanges covering trade, educational and
cultural initiatives, finance arrangements and regional health
programmes as well as major capital investment projects. It seeks to
prioritize local grass roots participation that will undercut the
self-appointed NGO sector's claims to represent the interests of the
impoverished majority. ALBA prioritizes social responsibilities and
poverty reduction rather than making them an afterthought to gross
corporate privilege.
Manufacturing pretexts : RCTV and half-baked exposé
No surprise then that Nicaragua's right-wing dominated National
Assembly approved an interventionist motion of censure against
the Venezuelan government for its recovery of the broadcast frequency
previously conceded to RCTV. That vote marked a categorical shift to
the right by the MRS whose members supported it. Normally vociferous
attention seeking self-styled left winger Monica Baltodano kept a low
profile as she abstained. MRS spokesperson Victor Hugo Tinoco candidly
admits that a political deal with the ALN in
preparation for the municipal elections in 1998 is under discussion.
These political moves mirror the integration of dissident
sandinista media personalities into the broad right-wing and centre
media onslaught
against the FSLN-led coalition government. Even Channel 2's weekly
cultural
magazine programme
"Tertulia" regularly features anti-FSLN hatchet jobs presented as
topical interviews by veteran journalist Edgar Tijerino. It is hard to
believe the news manufacturing process between Channel 2 , Channel 8,
La Prensa and Nuevo Diario is not coordinated at some level by the
individual members of Nicaragua's tiny corporate media mafia.
On the RCTV issue, all these media sided with the corporate media
gangsters of the Venezuelan oligarchy. Chamorro's Esta Noche programme
ran a friendly interview with representatives of the Latin American
media bosses' organization the Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa (SIP).
Chamorro followed this up with a hostile interview of the Venezuelan
ambassador whom he failed to trip up into admitting a revanchist
political motive for the Venezuelan government's decision not to renew
RCTV's broadcast licence. Even so, in an immediate to-camera editorial
following that interview, Chamorro insisted that whatever the
ambassador might say, the non-renewal of RCTV's licence was a
politically motivated, discretionary decision of President Chavez.
Cleverly taking advantage of the orchestrated regional international
political outcry around bogus "freedom of expression" concerns,
Chamorro was able to place the RCTV related editions of his programmes
in the week immediately after a programme alleging high-level
government involvement in corrupt land deals. The programme was a
skewed exposé by Chamorro's Esta Semana team of one of the
innumerable corrupt land deals that have characterised Nicaragua's
chaotic property law ever since the 1990 election which left vast
tracts of land and innumerable individual properties in a legal
no-man's land. The effects of that mess prevail right up to the
present, making property transactions in Nicaragua a veritable Klondike
for disreputable and unscrupulous business people, lawyers and
investors and corrupt government officials as well as
sling-enough-mud-sure-some-of-it'll-stick political journalists.
Screening their badly-researched exposé at this juncture was
very clearly politically motivated. The exposé attacked the FSLN
leadership personally by making baseless claims of their involvement in
corruption. It also played on the "freedom of expression" motif by
claiming that the exposé placed its instigators at risk of
politically motivated repression. The programme's substantive
accusations were made by a local businessman about land investments in
the Tola area of Nicaragua's Pacific Coast. The exposé
inexplicably excluded very serious accusations by local rural workers
in the area against that businessman, put to Chamorro months previously
according to the rural workers concerned, but ignored.
Subsequent enquiries by the attorney general's office demonstrated that
one key allegation - that the corrupt land deal was negotiated in the
FSLN's head office - was completely false. During the period in
question the individuals concerned
never entered that office, rigorously controlled by the Nicaraguan
police. The Sandinista Multinoticia's
news programme pointed to potential conflicts of interest in Chamorro's
own relationship to the contentious property deals. But the truth of
the matter - who did what to whom over a few dozen acres of land - is
perhaps much less important than the affair's manipulation by leading
anti-FSLN media empresarios like Chamorro and his colleagues in
Nicaragua's media industry.
The ALN aligned Channel 2 resurrected old archive footage of the
allegedly corrupt official in a meeting with Daniel Ortega.
Whenever the case is covered on Channel 2 the technique has been to run
the archive footage for about 15 seconds before putting up a tiny
"archive" sub-title to indicate the footage is not current. Chamorro
can certainly distance himself from this blatant intellectual
dishonesty but he has achieved his probable aim which, despite
transparently
cynical claims to be merely anxious to expose corruption, was most
likely to smear the FSLN leadership. Few other constructions can be put
on Chamorro's politically motivated selective reporting, given the
consistent
anti-FSLN Americanism both of his current affairs television programmes
and of Confidencial, his MRS aligned web magazine.
Think globally, act locally :
Americanism does too
Recent editions of Chamorro's nightly current affairs programme Esta
Noche are characterised by the kind of slavish Americanism one
has come to expect from a political movement content to seek anointment
from the US State Department as "democratic" and to accept financial
support from the US Republican Party's electoral intervention
specialists, the International Republican Institute. One recent
programme allowed a representative of the private foundation of pro-US
Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to assert that the upcoming
referendum in Costa Rica on the Central America Free Trade Agreement
(CAFTA) was not in fact about the benefits or otherwise of CAFTA, but
rather about the validity of Costa Rica's State-owned insurance and
communications companies. Chamorro said nothing about this glaring
distortion, despite the widespread rejection of CAFTA in Costa Rica
which made the referendum there necessary in the first place .
Another programme included Alejandro Bendaña, former
diplomat in the first Ortega government along with Sergio Garcia
Quintero (1) a right wing foreign affairs commentator and former
diplomat to discuss
President Ortega's official visit to Iran. Chamorro twice allowed
Garcia Quintero
to repeat the lie that Iran's Prime Minister had called for
Israel to be "wiped from the map" without comment. In another edition,
Chamorro and dissident Sandinista economist Alejandro Martinez Cuenca
managed to get through a whole programme supposedly analysing
Nicaragua's economic outlook without mentioning the possible
recessionary and-or inflationary consequences of a decline in the
dollar through the end of 2007 into 2008 - probably the single most
serious
threat to the success of the FSLN-led coalition government's economic
policies. Similarly, with both Bendaña and Quintero and with
Martinez Cuenca, Chamorro failed to analyse in any depth the strategic
importance for the ALBA bloc of President Ortega's recent visit to
North Africa and Iran.
Unfortunately, Chamorro's trivializing, petty Americanist brand of
analysis and reporting is, with hardly any exceptions, pretty much as
good as mainstream national Nicaraguan journalism gets. One has to go
to Radio La
Primerisima, via its radio broadcasts in the capital Managua and its
web site, to find one of the very few locally important news outlets
currently committed to a sincere effort at more or less fair and
independent
coverage of events in Nicaragua. But Nicaragua's mainsteam corporate
media
are following the well established trend by which regional news
reporting and current affairs analysis are made to follow the
psychological warfare
agenda of the US government and its allies.
Just as in Venezuela, corporate media domination of news and current
affairs outlets is accompanied by regular absurd cries of alarm about
threats to freedom of expression. In Nicaragua, as in Mexico, Venezuela
and Colombia, a highly politicised corporate media elite puts its
communications apparatus to work ceaselessly at the disposal of the
local oligarchy and their foreign backers. As in Venezuela, the
anti-government media are in many ways substituting for the failure of
the opposition political classes to effectively challenge the FSLN-led
coalition government.
President Ortega's visit to Algeria, Libya, Iran, and Senegal was very
clearly a move to develop the ALBA bloc's wider policy of cooperation
among countries of the Non-Aligned Movement. This is an obvious
and necessary step
towards the combination of less developed economies to defend their
interests against rich
country domination via corporate globalization. ALBA is perhaps the
most advanced prototype of this kind of anti-imperialist cooperation.
The Nicaraguan President's discussions in Algeria, Libya and Iran will
certainly have included
technical training and cooperation components to ensure the successful
construction and operation of the new oil refinery to be started this
year on Nicaragua's Pacific Coast with funding from Venezuela. As the
FSLN-led coalition government sucessfully consolidates its domestic
policies and the ALBA bloc develops a coherent common foreign policy,
the Nicaraguan media will take on an ever more significant and active
role in defending local corporate interests and attacking the country's
people-first government. The next big test in this power struggle will
be the
municipal elections towards the end of 2008.
toni solo is an activist based in Central America - see
toni.tortillaconsal.com
Note: The version of this article originally published in ZNet
mistakenly named
Francisco Aguirre instead of Sergio Garcia Quintero.