Word: nicaragua
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mind-set too was involved in misjudging the Sandinistas who took over Nicaragua when the Somoza dictatorship collapsed. In a remarkable article in the Washington Journalism Review, Shirley Christian, Pulitzer-prizewinning correspondent for the Miami Herald, analyzes with more "soul-searching" than anger how the New York Times, Washington Post and CBS covered the story in the crucial years...
...major turn of events, right-wingers in particular are apt to suspect a liberal bias. That charge infuriates press professionals who think they know how to put aside whatever political opinions they have when going after a story. The reason the press misjudged some events in Poland, Egypt and Nicaragua is more complicated. It was less a case of bias than of mindset, to apply a clumsy but useful vogue word...
...exile or otherwise disillusioned." The Marxists insisted that they were not strong enough to take over and thus favored a "pluralistic democracy." SANDINISTAS DISCLAIM MARXISM was a Washington Post front-page headline. Perhaps these preconceptions explain what Christian regards as the press's worst misjudgment in Nicaragua...
...Times forecast that Borge was now, in the Times 's words, "in a position to control the most radical elements among the rebels." Before long, Borge's men killed one business leader, arrested others, and sent mobs to attack the newspaper La Prensa. Christian concludes: In Nicaragua the American media went on a "guilt trip." The story that reporters told- with a mixture of delight and guilt- was the ending of an era in which the U.S. had once again been proved wrong. . . "Intrigued by the decline and fall of Anastasio Somoza, they could not see the coming...
Christian is now covering the troubles in El Salvador. In some ways the situation is similar to Nicaragua, but in important ways different. El Salvador is too violent, too confused, too changing to report except in grays. But, Christian said last week, one European journalist of her acquaintance has been reproached by his editor for not seeing more clearly in black and white the approaching and deserved victory of the guerrillas. Mind-sets again...