Karla Jacobs and toni solo, April 9th 2011
Last week's Christian Science Monitor article by Central America based US journalist Tim Rogers, “Eyeing Middle East, Nicaragua's Ortega quashes weekend protests”, offers a perfect parody of accurate reporting. Ostensibly presenting a true and fair view of events, Rogers' fake journalism repeats and reinforces a simple anti-Sandinista propaganda message.
The corporate and much alternative media in the United States and its allied countries persistently deliver two false propaganda messages on Nicaragua. Firstly, they insist relentlessly that Daniel Ortega is a corrupt, repressive tyrant. Secondly, they claim there is mass popular discontent in Nicaragua with the government. In both cases, the reverse is true.
The Christian Science Monitor propaganda piece continued this long standing, cynical psy-warfare offensive against Nicaragua's very successful Sandinista government. Subsequently, Rogers' article appeared on several corporate Internet news sites including Yahoo! News. That repetition confirms the long prevalent tendency for Western corporate media of all kinds to offer as “news” what amounts to virtual fabrication almost entirely disconnected from real events. Rogers' article makes heavy use of emotive rhetoric, false assumptions and downright untruth.
He demonstrates his own political bias by only quoting four unrepresentative Nicaraguan opposition figures from the same political current. His coverage of the two political marches that took place in Managua on Saturday April 2nd is so far-fetched that he manages to give the totally false impression that, soon, Nicaragua is likely to explode in a fury of popular discontent against a paranoid and thoroughly undemocratic regime. To give this fantasy some spurious topicality, Rogers invokes an absurd comparison with events in North Africa.
Police repression in which only police officers are injured
According to Rogers, last Saturday's opposition march, which was organized by US and European government funded “civil society” NGOs and the main slogan of which was an anti Daniel Ortega slogan, was “blocked” by “heavily armed riot police.”
In actual fact, far from the police blocking the protest march, the participants of the march themselves refused to follow the route stipulated for them by the police because it differed from the route they had requested. The riot police only arrived on the scene after participants brutally attacked an unarmed cordon of female police officers with sticks, stones and pepper spray.
As a result of this attack, 18 police officers ended up in hospital, two in intensive care. Despite the violence of the demonstrators, the riot police did not use any form of crowd control (no tear gas, no water cannons, no rubber bullets) against the violent “civil society” opposition protesters, nor did they make any arrests.
This sort of extreme police restraint would be unthinkable in pretty much any other country in the world. Apparently, though, Rogers considered those details insufficiently newsworthy to be included in his article.
Roger's “wave of popular discontent”
In the parallel reality in which journalists like Rogers float cynically through their professional careers, it is not just logical but actually quite obvious that the course of events surrounding this opposition march in Managua on April 2nd confirm what in the real Nicaragua is a laughable theory; that President Ortega and his government have demonstrated “paranoia” and “insecurity” in the face of “a wave of popular discontent” comparable to “recent uprisings that ousted leaders in Egypt and Tunisia.”
A key aspect of Roger's hypothesis regarding the current political situation in Nicaragua is the bogus idea that the source of nonexistent widespread wrath against President Ortega is (what the corporate media would have us believe as) the FSLN government's regular violation of Nicaraguan law.
Rogers states as fact, for example, that Ortega's candidacy in this year's presidential elections is “counter-constitutional.” In the name of unbiased journalism, though, it would seem reasonable to expect Rogers to at least mention the existence of a Supreme Court of Justice ruling by the full court, including both Sandinista and opposition magistrates, stating the exact opposite – that reelection bids in Nicaragua are legal and constitutional.
Undeterred by inconvenient facts like these or by other inconsistencies in the anti-FSLN, anti-reality storyline (like the pitiful turnout for the opposition march - 2,000 according to the march organizers, 600 according to independent national media like 100% Noticias) Rogers insists on doing his bit to advance the ridiculous theory about an impending mass popular uprising against Nicaragua's Sandinista government.
Rogers' four sources represent 1% public opinion in Nicaragua
But then Rogers' barmy conclusions appear to be based entirely on an utterly limited and 99% unrepresentative sample of national opinion: that of four individuals who, at first glance, might give the impression of representing a wide range of progressive opinion in Nicaragua - “Sandinista dissidents” Monica Baltodano and Moisés Hassan, “Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights representative” Gonzalo Carrión, and “feminist leader” Azahalea Solís.
But for anyone relatively well informed about Nicaraguan current affairs, it is immediately obvious that all four sources are ideologically aligned with – and, in the case of Baltodano, Solís and Hassan, intimately linked to – the tiny Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS) which according to recent opinion polls commands just 1% support among the population (www.cidgallup.com/Documentos/Aleman_y_PLC.pdf). Currently the MRS forms part of the extreme right wing PLI-UNE alliance.
"Silent majority" versus on the street FSLN support
The arguments put forward by the elitist body of opinion these individuals represent necessarily depend on the concept of a “silent majority” (a concept which was famously invoked by former US president Nixon in a speech intended to counteract the effect of massive protests against the Vietnam War).
In this case, we are asked to take seriously the idea that the interests and opinions represented by a small group of failed right-wing politicians and unaccountable “civil society” organizations concur with those of a majority of Nicaraguans. That majority, somehow unknown to themselves, have to be represented, in some vague and unaccountable way, by a tiny, self-appointed right-wing minority.
Rogers and the individuals he quotes deal with the problematic numerical turnout issue – which has the potential to completely undermine their hypothesis – by claiming with no support whatsoever that the number of people who would like to have taken part in the opposition march was much greater but that many were put off by the threat of police repression (sic).
Simultaneously, Rogers undermines the impressive turnout for the pro government March and Festival for Peace organized by the Sandinista Youth organization, with claims that a significant number of the approximately 100,000 participants were state workers and secondary school students obliged to take part under the respective threats of losing their jobs and failing their exams.
This inherently weak argument (since the 1980s the FSLN has consistently demonstrated its ability to mobilize impressive turnouts at its public events and marches, whether or not the party is in power) is weakened further by Roger's striking failure to come up with a single source (anonymous or otherwise) to back up these claims.
Corporate media's interdependent web of disinformation
In short, the main arguments contained within the article are entirely interdependent on each other within the apparently seamless web of dishonest, reality-detached, anti-FSLN propaganda which journalists like Rogers and a broad range of media outlets like the Christian Science Monitor (and the New York Times, the Washington Post, McClatchy News, the Guardian, Le Monde, El País, Counterpunch, ZNet etc.) have been responsible for creating during the last few years:
Without the lie that President Ortega violates the constitution, the false claim that he is authoritarian and dictatorial falls apart: Without the lie that Ortega is authoritarian and dictatorial the false claim that there is widespread popular discontent falls apart: Without the lie that the FSLN government faces widespread popular discontent the false claim that the government feels obliged to resort to repressive police measures falls apart: Without the lie that the government resorts to repressive police measures the idea that the government needs to justify unjustifiable and illegal acts falls apart.
Journalists like Rogers, in his latest article about Nicaragua, are more than thoroughly disrespectful of the principles of unbiased, independent journalism – they are bound invariably to betray those principles in order to carry any credibility at all in the corporate propaganda media for which they work.
Rogers' article is yet another example of how depressingly wide the gap between liberal thinkers in the North and progressive movements in the South has become in recent years. The predictable electoral battering Rogers' preferred political option in Nicaragua looks set to suffer in this year's November nacional elections will bear testimony to this.
As Nicaraguan writer Carlos Escorcia Polanco points out in his recent article "The Ortega 'Dictatorship'": “Thanks to the wonders of the “free” press controlled by giant multinational media corporations, international public opinion will never know that the Sandinista march … was 20 times bigger than the opposition's march … [But then] international public opinion won't have the opportunity to vote during the November 6th 2011 elections.”