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• Sunday, May 11, 2008 04:22 PM

  @Bill Becker

  Not to pile on the nattering-nabob stuff, but I think your example shows how things are getting worse.

  I keep thinking about Raymond Bonner, the NYT reporter who wrote about what happened in El Sal, specifically in El Mozote (someone correct me if I'm misremembering the name of the place). He walked right into the face of all the positive press about the Atlacatl Battalion, the counter-insurgency battalion 'we' had trained, and reported an atrocity ... which was well known (immediately after the fact), documented, and commented on OTR by the embassy staff. Bonner served in the Marines in Vietnam (0311, not as a reporter), and had a good reputation as a reporter.

  Predictably, the RW went batshit when the story appeared, took the usual potshots at the NYT, tried to slime Bonner, etc.

  BUT ... the paper stood by him, piled on more coverage with more reporters (this is a tactic we taught foreign editors struggling with the same things), which was then emulated by other outlets, and the truth became pretty hard to argue. The struggle to define what had happened went on, with the usual ambiguous outcome, but the RW had been handed their ass and people started taking a very critical line against the Reagan administration's claims about what was going on in their attempts to defend the hemisphere against the communist menace. That reporting was crucial to passing the Boland amendment, outlawing aid to the (Nicaraguan) Contras. I could be wrong, but I think that reporting was cited in the hearings.

  Hard to imagine that happening now, isn't it?

  —quickstrategy Read quickstrategy's other letters
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