0 OPINION Tuesday, January 14, 1986 Page 4 The Michigan Daily 0 Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan Vol. XCVI, No. 73 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Editorials represent a majority opinion of the Daily's Editorial Board Understanding AD Media ignores atrocities SUPPORT FOR James Martin, a law school professor who died last week of Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), should be applauded. Law School Dean Terrance Sandalow has provided a model for the Univer- sity community in his decision to retain Professor Martin despite previous knowledge of his illness. Much of the objection to this decision and others like it grows out of an uninformed fear thatAIDS is highly contagious through minimal contact. But since resear- chers have presented no evidence that AIDS spreads through casual daily contact, the University should not expel afflicted teachers and students. In addition, it is unnecessary to publicize individual cases. The traumatic experience of coping with a fatal illness is not lessened through public scrutiny. In light of the homophobic, often judgemen- tal response to AIDS victims, in- dividual privacy should be of primary concern. People must focus on AIDS, not as a homosexual problem, but as a Carbide 's I N THE aftermath of the Bhopal, India gas leak of December 3, 1984, Union Carbide presented an orchestrated public image by recognizing responsibility for the, disaster. Having caused the deaths of over 2000 people and the injuries of another 200,000, Union Carbide calculated that international opinion and the courts would judge Carbide harshly if it did not appear to care. The press has since lost interest in the Bhopal incident, and GAF threatens to take over Carbide. This combination of reduced publicity and increased economic pressure has resulted in Carbide's decision to shirk its responsibility to the Indian people. Fearing that the Indians will collect crippling damages, Carbide has resorted to legal bargaining which focuses around a racist, blame-the-victim strategy. Car- bide has implied that by settling around the Bhopal plant Indians were accountable for their own death. In the November 26 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Carbide sexually transmitted virus which has the potential to affect everybody. Although AIDS has been prevalent in the homosexual and bisexual community, it will soon spread to the heterosexual community. Recent studies con- ducted in Haiti show an increase from 12 percent in 1979 to 30 per- cent in 1985, of women who have AIDS. In Africa, where the virus originated, AIDS affected men and women on an almost equal basis. AIDS is one of the most feared and least understood diseases in the 80s. Most people who contract AIDS do not recover and resear- chers agree that no vaccine will be found before the year 2000. Until then, it is essential that people learn the facts about AIDS, deter- mine if they are in a high risk group, and take appropriate preventative action. AIDS research and support for victims as disabled but still a vital part of their community, are essential to the stress reduction and myth destruction surrounding AIDS. negligence Chairman Warren Anderson remarked, "That's what they do in the Third World." In addition, the corporation has said that the In- dian subsidiary of Carbide is in- ferior to branches in the United States because the Indians them- selves control operations and adopt lower standards. Carbide hopes to confuse judges by proving that India changed the plant's safety design. However, the documentation they presented shows that American Carbide took command in past accidents. Former Carbide officials and some courageous employeeshave testified that India Carbide followed American Carbide's in- structions immaculately. Indeed, it appears that India Carbide wan- ted to keep the fatal gas in smaller tanks to limit the potential of leaks, but American Carbide overruled. Now Carbide is faced with losing all its American assets in American courts instead of just its Indian assets in Indian courts. The difference, between $10 billion and $100 million is the impetus to blame the Indians for Carbide's negligen- ce. By Brian Leiter Although U.S. foreign policy has been the most ruthless and brutal in the post-WWII world, this is distinctly not the picture that emerges from the American media. Yet given the former claim, it remains to be seen how the media can "cover" the news while still maintaining the three-part belief system discussed in yesterday's article (1. America promotes freedom and democracy; 2. America is justified in inter- vening in other countries to promote these ends; 3. American atrocities are anomalous and misfortunate occurences.) We may identify a number of techniques employed by the media. Ignoring events is certainly the simplest and most common practice of the American media: many nasty things that happen sim- ply do not show up in American news coverage - or they appear in obscure places (e.g. two paragraphs on p. A9 of the Times) or with numerous qualifications and/or distortions. For example, the In- donesian genocide in East Timor received almost no coverage in the major U.S. media, though reporting on this event in Europe was widespread. More recently, the extensive bombing of the civilian- countryside in El Salvador has failed to draw U.S. coverage; it is worth noting that this military strategy parallels exactly that employed following the U.S. invasion of S. Vietnam in 1962. More generally, American coverage of the terror and torture cam- paigns of South and Central American police forces has been spotty at best and perversely indifferent at worst, despite the fact that the available evidence indicates that these campaigns are far worse than any events going on in the communist world. Jacobo Timmerman, the Argen- tinian journalist and author who was tor- tured by the Argentinian government during the 70s, has remarked that in Argen- tina a Lech Walesa would have been killed immediately. Yet despite voluminous reports on Poland, we hear almost nothing about the violent attacks on labor movements in Chile and Guatemala, just as we heard little about the Nazi-like bloodbath in Argentina during the 70s. Perhaps the most recent and interesting turn of events has been in Grenada. Everyone surely recalls the gleeful recep- tion by the American public and shortly thereafter by the media of the U.S. invasion in 1983. Yet a recent report by the Washington-based watchdog group, the Council on Hemispheric Relations, in- dicated that Grenada is quickly becoming one of the worst human-rights violators in the Western hemisphere - this, by the way, on a list of rights abusers that includes such gems as the governments of Guatemala and El Salvador. To my knowledge, this report has yet to receive any headline attention. Of course, to any attentive student of American foreign policy this development comes as no surprise: it fits a long- established pattern. Leiter is a graduate stuaent in law and philosophy. Wasserman Of broader interest, also, is the whole pat- tern of coverage of events in El Salvador. First, the media has been unfailingly loyal to the U.S. government's characterization of Duarte as a moderate, despite his 15-year history as essentially a civilian mouthpiece for military rulers and his apparent failure to take any action against military terror tactics. Similarly, many will recall the enormous attention given to Duarte's land- reform program: a program that affected 10-15 percent of the privately-owned land and which did not even touch the land belonging to the coffee magnates, who also happen to control the Salvadorean banks and are the most important civilian power constellation in El Salvador. Interestingly enough, the program turned out to be so laughably superficial that even the Reagan administration has stopped waving the land-reform flag. Most disgraceful, however, has been the failure to report on the brutality of the Salvadorean government itself. Many will recall the initial attempts five years ago to blame most of the violence on the rebel movements; this, however, became such an implausible claim that it has been aban- doned on the whole in favor of the two- pronged strategy: 1. Blaming the violence on the right wing military, an entity distinct from the government and 2. Spotty reporting of the atrocities being committed. Perhaps the most perverse example of the media's conduct in this regard: on the day of the Lempa River Massacre (3/16/81), an orgy of slaughter of thousands of refugees by Salvadoran and Honduran troops, the New York Times ran an article entitled "For Salvadoran Peasants, Fruits of Change Seem Good." Subsequent coverage of the Masscre itself was, not surprisingly, negligible. The American reporter T.D. Allman, following a visit to Salvadoran refugee camps in Honduras, remarked with regard to Reagan that it is "difficult- to find an in- stance of an American president standing quite so resolutely behind a regime that quite so shamelessly tortured peasants and castrated doctors of philosophy and disem- boweled little children and raped nuns and shot archbishops dead while they celebrated mass." The American media is also notable for its short memory. Kissinger has been elevated in the last five years to the status of wise elder statesman without any regard for his responsibility for the American genocide in Laos and Cambodia beginning in 1970 or his role in the installation of the brutal Pinochet regime in Chile or his role in giving the go-ahead and providing military aid for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor and the ensuing genocide in 1975. Similarly, despite the anti-terrorism rhetoric of the Reagan administration, it is worth recalling that George Bush was head of the CIA when CIA-trained Cuban exiles bombed a Cuban passenger plane in 1976 killing all 73 on board - for that year it was the single worst act of terrorism. Another strategy of the American media is to make the best of bad situations. For example, any bit of evidence, no matter how insubstantial or unreliable, that suggests a turn away from established brutal policies is pounced upon - consider the recent. coverage of El Salvador and Guatemala in this regard. The democratic election in Brazil received highly laudatory coverage in the U.S. despite the fact that the original democratically nominated candidates of both parties were nixed by the military jun- ta and had to be replaced with acceptable. candidates. Surely one can imagine the critical coverage such an event would have received had it occurred in Nicaragua! When all else fails, the media, following the government line, invokes the com- munist bogey man. In the name of preven-¢ ting the evils of communism, the U.S. has killed or sponsored the killing of an estimated three million people since WWII and facilitated, sponsored and justified the maintenance of totalitarian regimes under which some one billion people live. But this only scratches the surface of the perverse disingenuousness of the Com- munist Bogey Man Theory. First, whereever the U.S. encounters populist op- position of any political persuasion, i "discovers" communism. Second, the reliability of U.S. opposition to all democratic and egalitarian movements that threaten U.S. policy interests insures that in order to survive populist movements must ingratiate themselves with the Soviet imperialist system. Finally, the media and the government use the atrocities required for Soviet hegemony to distract allattention from the atrocities regularly required for U.S. hegemony. The prevalence of this latter strategy is evidenced by the oft-employed response to any criticism of American foreign policy which is: "Look what awful things the Soviets do!" Of course, the point is that everyone knows what the Soviets do; yet the comparatively more brutal foreign policy record of the U.S. remains enshrouded in myths and moralistic rhetoric. The American media would rather devote headlines to Sakharov than to Lempa River Massacres. 0 6 Finally, the media employs the Anomaly, Theory to explain away even the most grotesque U.S. behavior. For example, the escalating U.S. war in Nicaragua, while of- ten vigorously criticized, is treated as a distinctly Reagan phenomenon instead of a very natural continuation of ordinary U.S. behavior in the region. Similarly, widely acknowledged past events - like the over; throw of the Guatemalan government in 1954 or the Chilean government in 1973 - are cited as unique examples *of bad and' disagreeable American conduct which are not to be emulated, rather than as examples of the systematic conduct of U.S. foreign policy which are paralleled by events in almost every other Third World country with which the U.S. has had dealings. Tomorrow, Leiter considers a more plausible framework for understanding U.S. foreign policy. TS OPINL DVVA9 11 WA BUT IT WAS NOT THE RjSULT oE OUR \WE USED THE SRAI'A4 &P ST/ NDARtS CUTTING COR2NR Ii C gig , " , - °i t ' yi I r C 'A :' x J , /7 k Nr CIRXk 'I. U160po__ IUse 111&1/ ! //iL AAga Z vi t f j I . In [An I l