Between October 1980 and March 1983, five officials of the Human Rights Commission of El Salvador were seized and murdered by the security forces. In accord with a propaganda model, these murders should have been of little interest to the U.S. mass media, and this expectation is borne out by evidence. As an illustrative comparison, the New York Times had a grand total of four back-page articles on these five murders,96 whereas, during the same period, the Times had thirty-five articles on the Soviet human-rights activist Natan Sharansky, not all of them on the back pages. The proportionality
...more
