Almost before it got down to business, the Pentagon closed down its "strategic influence" office. The New York Times obtained a copy of the Department of Defense memo about the project, which contemplated an international publicity campaign that would have mixed a large dose of lies into news reportage about various situations, groups and individuals. Mr. Rumsfeld's adaptation of the policy most famously expounded by Herr Goebbels became untenable and the Bush administration quickly backed down.

Meanwhile, in Colombia the government is blaming the FARC guerrillas for murdering a popular Liberal senator, and most of the mainstream corporate US media are reporting that as established truth; while FARC says that the government did it, and that claim is not being reported by the newspapers and television networks from which most people in the United States get their news.

It's often not possible for even the most competent and scrupulous journalists to get to the truth of a matter.

Too many, like Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, Spanish photojournalist Juantzu Fernández and dozens of our Colombian colleagues, have been killed while searching for the truth. Pearl was shot dead by Osama bin Laden's friends in Pakistan, Fernández was killed by the US Army in Panama and Colombia's martyred journalists have fallen at the hands of the left wing rebels, the right wing paramilitaries, government forces and the drug cartels.

Belligerents on all sides, however, have found that deception is usually more effective than murder when the object is to suppress an unflattering truth. Governments have found that economic pressures and manipulation of access to stories are especially effective when dealing with media whose owners run in the same social circles as the captains of industry and government leaders.

There are limits, however. For example, George W. Bush appointed Elliott Abrams, the master of death squad deceit from the Central American wars of the 80s, as his "democracy" advisor for Latin America. Abrams was convicted of perjury for lying to Congress, then pardoned by our current president's father, then went on to be a shill for Haiti's brutal and corrupt Cedras dictatorship.

We have not seen Abrams on CNN or read his pronouncements in The New York Times. Nothing that he says will ever be reported for the purpose of affirming or negating the truth of any matter in The Panama News. Habitual liars are unreliable sources, no matter how exalted their official positions, and responsible journalists treat them as such.

That's a big problem with respect to the Colombian conflict, because the two main belligerent forces, FARC and the government, cannot be trusted. FARC's years-belated denials that it kidnapped three American missionaries from the Darien village of Pucuro and eventually murdered the men stand in sharp contradiction to its earlier ransom demands. Even the US State Department has had to admit that the Colombian government's denial of an alliance between its forces and the AUC paramilitary is a lie. Moreover, the US and Panamanian governments' records with respect to Colombia are not much better: American military intervention by way of "civilian contractors" is nothing but institutionalized lying (in Washington circles the euphemism is "plausible deniability"), while official Panamanian pronouncements about the Colombian conflict's seepage across our borders and the government's policies about it are notoriously unreliable.

The ways around these obstacles are the standard "he said, she said" stories in which the opposing sides' conflicting claims are stated with roughly equal prominence and disclosure of any facts that would tend to show that one side or the other is disingenuous; a preference for the tales of ordinary people caught in the middle of the conflict over official sources; greater use of documentary, historical and circumstantial evidence; and most of all the exclusion of individuals whose word is worthless from the discussion. Those who take these routes will have to work harder and won't make many friends in high places, but they will be much worthier professionals than those who merely recycle the press releases of one side or the other.

© 2002 by The Panama News All Rights Reserved For information or problems with this page contact: editor@ThePanamaNews.com
News Business Editorial Opinion Letters Arts Reviews Community Fun Travel Galleries Calendar Outdoors Dining Science Sports Español Archive Front Page