> ====
>
> UNCLE CHUTZPAH AND HIS MEDIA MINIONS ON THE YUGOSLAV AND
> OTHER ELECTIONS
> By Edward S. Herman
>
> There is no better place than foreign elections to observe
> the brazenness of U.S. interventionism abroad, its crude
> double standard as between targets and client states, and
> the mainstream media's propaganda service in support of
> their country's imperial policies. One feature of this
> service is the media's rush to focus attention on elections
> that officials declare important. Thus when the Reagan
> administration was trying to validate its intervention in El
> Salvador by an election to demonstrate that Salvadorans
> approved our local political instrument, some 700
> journalists attended that election in 1982; and attention to
> Salvadoran elections only ended after the United States had
> accomplished its purpose there of ending a radical threat
> and installing a neoliberal regime. With the leadership of
> Yugoslavia now a target of U.S. destabilization policies,
> once again the media jump to attention.
> Of critical importance, also, is the fact that not only is
> the direction of attention determined by the official
> agenda, that agenda also dictates the character and specific
> content of media coverage. As their government assumes the
> right to intervene in foreign elections, the media also take
> this as a given, and rarely if ever mention the fact that
> foreign money pumped into U.S. election campaigns is
> prohibited by U.S. law. This was never discussed during the
> intensive U.S. intervention in the Nicaraguan elections in
> the 1980s, nor has it been mentioned in connection with the
> open expenditure of at least $77 million in the Yugoslavian
> election this month. This silence represents a media
> internalization of official imperial arrogance and
> privelege.
>
> Both the EU and United States have promised that sanctions
> would be eliminated if Slobodan Milosevic is ousted by
> Yugoslav voters. The United States and Nato have also
> engaged in sabre rattling, with reinforcement of military
> forces in the Mediterranean and troop exercises in
> neighboring states like Croatia. This is justified on the
> ground of the threat of an unlevel playing field and
> possible fraud by Milosevic, but of course these
> interventions could be said to make the playing field
> unlevel, and the policy of conditioning the removal of
> sanctions on a specific election result is a form of
> blackmail. When George Bush did the same in 1990, promising
> to lift sanctions and call off the contras only if
> Nicaraguan voters voted the Sandinistas out of office in
> favor of the U.S. choice, the mainstream media never once
> suggested that this threat was blackmail and perhaps immoral
> and vicious. And here again in the case of the Yugoslavian
> election, a blackmail threat and other forms of intervention
> are seen as perfectly reasonable.
>
> In covering the Yugoslavian election the U.S. mainstream
> media have repeatedly voiced the fear of U.S. officials and
> opponents of Milosevic that the election was being rigged
> and that the demonized leader threatened to steal the
> election by fraud (e.g., Erlanger, "Fears Deepen Milosevic
> Will Rig Vote," NYT, Sept. 24; Fleishman, "Under the world's
> scrutiny, Yugoslavs go to the polls: Some fear Milosevic
> will try stealing the election," Phila. Inquirer, Sept. 24).
> This is a possibility, but was based on no evidence offered
> in the media or on the scene in Yugoslavia. Two Canadian
> observer delegates found the electoral conditions there as
> open and free of any police interference as in any Western
> elections, and delegate observers were free to visit any
> polling places and representatives of all parties were
> active at such polling places. The basic conditions of a
> free election were much more closely met in Yugoslavia than
> in El Salvador in 1982 or 1984 or in Russia in 1996 and
> 2000. In El Salvador, transparent voting boxes and the need
> to sign in for numbered ballots compromised ballot secrecy
> in a society where the army was killing 800 civilians a
> month, and the left was off the ballot by virtue of
> straightforward state terror and death threats--but the U.S.
> mainstream media never noticed, and found these elections a
> "step toward democracy."
>
> The case of Russia is equally revealing. The Yeltsin victory
> of 1996 was accomplished by serious violations of the rules
> on campaign spending, bribery of journalists, media bias and
> one- sidedness favoring the incumbent far more serious than
> anything in Yugoslavia, and possible fraud in counting. But
> in this case Western intervention was on the side of the
> incumbent, so the mainstream media here never spoke of fraud
> and rigging and found once again that this was "A Victory
> for Russian Democracy" (NYT ed., July 6, 1996). The same
> happened in Putin's election in 2000. As the appointed heir
> of Yeltsin and a "reformer" (in the special Western
> meaning--favoring market openings and privatization at
> whatever social cost) he was approved by the United States
> and its allies. The fact that he was a former KGB operative
> and had achieved his popularity by killing many more Chechen
> civilians than Milosevic did Albanians in Kosovo was
> therefore irrelevant. Once again, therefore, the U.S. media
> did not get agitated over either the ethnic cleansing or the
> dubious features of the electoral process--no headlines
> about the threat of rigging or fraud. This was a "reformer"!
>
> On September 9, 2000, the Moscow Times published a massive
> expose of the Putin election triumph based on a six-month
> investigative effort ("And the Winner Is?"). Their reporters
> traveled through the provinces talking to officials and
> comparing official voting figures with those released by the
> federal government. In a number of cases this yielded solid
> prima facie evidence of fraud, which was supplemented by
> much anecdotal evidence of stuffed and destroyed ballots.
> They noted a 1.3 million inflation of voters within a few
> months just prior to the election, a set of voters they
> termed "Dead Souls" after Gogol's famous story, but they
> noted that Gogol's were real though dead people, whereas
> Putin's were just imaginery. This sensational article was
> reported only in the Los Angeles Times, which did so under
> the revealing title "Russia Election Chief Rejects Fraud
> Claims in Presidential Vote." In other words, the paper does
> not put the findings of this detailed study first, it gives
> priority to an official Russian disclaimer. But this was the
> relatively honest paper--the others that had found Putin's
> election another step toward democracy preferred the black
> hole treatment for this inconvenient news.
>
> As one relevant sidelight, the Organization for Security and
> Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had sent several hundred
> observers to watch both the Yeltsin victory of 1996 and the
> Putin election contest, both of which they declared free and
> fair, although imperfect, and in the case of the Putin
> election they asked Russian authorities to look into the
> possible flaws! The Russian media the OSCE found
> "pluralistic and diverse." Matt Taibbi points out in his
> "OSCE--The Organization for Sanctioning Corrupt Elections"
> (The Exile, Issue #18/99, Sept. 14-28, 2000), that the OSCE
> even issued apologetics for the December 1999 Uzbeck
> parliamentary election, with its 93 percent vote in favor of
> the state parties, a 98 percent turnout, and a "genuinely
> Soviet statistical profile" (Taibbi), but which OSCE found
> "fell short" (not "fell far short") of democratic standards.
>
> On the other hand, the OSCE found that the Serb election of
> 1997 was "fundamentally flawed," and that State TV there
> showed a "clear and consistent bias," although "there was a
> commendable effort to provide all the candidates with free
> political advertising, in proportion with their
> representation in parliament," and an opposition radio and
> TV stations did exist. On the OSCE contention that "the
> media in the Russian federation remain pluralistic and
> diverse," Taibbi comments that "If you lived here in Russia
> during the past year and a half or so, you know that state
> television and radio programming not only campaigned
> exclusively in favor of the Putin regime, but actively
> assassinated its political opponents..." Furthermore, "there
> was no 'commendable effort' of any kind to provide other
> candidates with free political advertising." In fact, these
> candidates were kept hidden. And outside of the big cities
> "the press in the Russian regions could hardly be farther
> from being 'diverse and pluralistic.'"
>
> Taibbi notes also that in discussing the Serb election of
> 1997, OSCE was much focused on discrepancies in the vote
> count. No such concern was displayed in its report on the
> Putin election, and the numerous obvious fraudulent elements
> disclosed in the Moscow Times report entirely escaped them.
> Looking at their treatment of the 1997 Serb election and
> Putin's election, Taibbi says "it's hard to come to any
> conclusion that does not involve a conscious effort on the
> OSCE's part to whitewash a dirty election."
>
> In short, the pattern of systematic bias and propaganda
> service applicable to the U.S. mainstream media in dealing
> with foreign elections like those in Yugoslavia and Russia
> also characterizes the U.S. and Nato dominated OSCE, which
> with the aid of William Walker, the U.S.-appointed head of
> the Kosovo Verification Mission, who in early 1999 helped
> create the ground for the Nato bombing war and arranged for
> KLA-Nato liaison and cooperative operations during the
> bombing that ensued.
>
> *************************************************
> Alternative Press Review - www.altpr.org
> Your Guide Beyond the Mainstream
> PO Box 4710 - Arlington, VA 22204
>
> Mid-Atlantic Infoshop - www.infoshop.org
> Infoshop News Kiosk - www.infoshop.org/news.html
>
> "Our first work must be the annihilation of everything
> as it now exists." - Mikhail Bakunin
>
> "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed,
> debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own." - No.6
>
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