REPORTING ON EL SALVADOR BY LEFT-LEANING NEWS MEDIA CRITICIZED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000201180061-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 19, 2010
• Sequence Number: 61
• Publication Date: March 13, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
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MORGANTOWN DOMINION-POST (W.V~
13 March 1983
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left-leaning news media criticized
Manfred 0. Meiten
Left-leaning reporting about El Salvador has been apparent
m the beginning of the: trouble there. with the Communists. On
. 21, 1981, the State Department released a White Paper on El
ador. The main point of the White Paper was that the USSR
Cuba are much- involved in helping the guerrillas to
Pd
rthrow the non-Communist government of El Salvador. The
Department's sources of information -were very good, e.g.,
tured documents and weapons-In .-particular,, the report"
-members had
ealed that the Salvadoran Communisty`party
travelled to the USSR in the summer of 1980 to arrange the
delivery of 800 tons of military equipment to be distributed to El
`Salvador via Cuba and Nicaragua.', While there were some
;superficial errors made in the haste of getting the White Paper
out, the main point of the report has been self-verifying in the
course of subsequent events.
However, the national media were very industrious in their
attempt to destroy the White Paper. They set out to indict the
White paper on grounds of internal contradictions and unsup-
ported evidence. First among the critics of the White Paper was
Philip Agee, who had earlier defected from the CIA and had
subsequently made a career of trying to destroy that agency.
(Agee told Esquire in 1975 that "I aspire to be a Communist and a
revolutionary.")
Of course, the Washington Post was among the leading critics
of the White Paper. On June 19, 1981, it published Robert Kaiser's
story on the front page under the title "White Paper on El
Salvador is Faulty."
Even the Wall Street Journal turned against the White Paper in
an article which was noticeably similar. to Agee's critique. In fact,
while Agee is not mentioned in either the Wall Street Journal or
the Washington Post article, Agee himself said in the Los Angeles
Herald-Examinerof July 1, 1981, that he had supplied the analysis
of the White Paper for the Wall Street Journal and the
Washington Post.
Jonathan Kwitny, who actually wrote the infamous Wall Street
Journal article of June 8, 1981, entitled "Apparent Errors Cloud
U.S. `White Paper' on . Reds in El Salvador," admitted to using
one of his sources material obtained from John Kelly, editor of
the CounterSpy, a journal of distinct political prejudice to the
Left. It, for example, had portrayed the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan as an invention of the United States. In -particular, it
was CounterSpy which had leaked to a Greek newspaper the
residential address and identity of Richard Welch, a CIA pri~ncip al
operative in Athens. The result was that on Dec."UJJ ch
was gunned down before his house in Athens. It should also be
noted that at this time Philip Agee was on the Advisory Board of
CounterSpy along with Mark Lane and Marcus.- Raskin, co-
director of the Institute for Policy Studies..
The Wall Street Journal was culpably closed to dialog on the
White Paper. When the State Department issued a point by point'
rebuttal to the Journal article, the Journal did not print any of the
rebuttal. The reputation of the Journal was greatly damaged by
GQir
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'r1the `Kwitny article on El Salvador; though some monthslater the :-m
,Journal acknowledge that Philip Agee' material had .been used
by Kwitny in its article on the White Paper,
In the course` of rarin-hig ~~ -
Journal, Kwitny,: had in erviewed Jones Glasfor smaneoff tl e Statet.
Department because Glassman had been. a major compiler of the
State Department's White Paper. However, Kwitny used little of
Glassman's remarks about El Salvador in the article. When asked
to comment on Kwitnv's article in the Wall Street Journal,
Glassman responded, "The thrust of the article does not represent
my views. ;Mr. Kwitny simply extracted from .a three hour
interview a few anecdotes to support a different point of view.
The result is' a story which does not accurately reflect. my
position." ,... _
Both the Washington Post .and,the;Wafl.StreetJour3W assailed
the WhitePaper?for not havingenough evidence for its claim that
the PLO was supporting the Salvadoran Communist guerrillas In
January of 1982, Arafat in a statement.from Beirut made a fool of
both newspapers when he .announced .that PLO
pilots were serving in El Salvador. The Journal did at least then
acknowledge this embarrassing fact on their front page. The Post
obscured it on page 20 of one of their issues.
Hodding Carter III gave further visibility to these slanted White
Paper critiques on Public Television's program, "Inside Story."
There he praised both the Journal and the Post for identifying the
White Paper to bethe "tarnished report," which the Journal had
said that it was.
These various attacks on this White Paper by the media were
apparently designed to discredit the judgment of our State
Department on Salvadoran affairs. Indeed, they did succeed in
poisoning the waters of support for the Salvadoran junta
government. The result has been another tale of our indecisive
support of a small but strategically located country that is
fighting to save itself from the tenacles of international Commu-
nism. When the Communists have succeeded, civil rights in El
Salvador will be permanently suspended. A ruthless suppression
of freedom, which will far exceed any curtailment of civil
liberties which El Salvador has so far experienced, will set in.
The press will have to bear much of the blame for the tragic
events which will happen when El Salvador falls to the
Communists.
Thanks mainly to Accuracy in Media and to Human Events, we
have some knowledge of how the perversion of news in El
Salvador occurred in these news stories about the El Salvador
White Paper. It is a paradigm of the slanted reports which we
receive each day in the news media. All too often the sources of
avowed enemies of the United States are valued much higher by
the media than sources emanating from our own government.
Dr. Meitzen is a professor and chairman of religious
studies at West Virginia University.
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