Missing a Story in El Salvador

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The high turnout startled everyone--including journalists

To the list of recent events that have surprised reporters--the fall of the Shah in Iran, the upsurge of feeling against Anwar Sadat in Egypt, the suppression in Poland by Polish rather than Soviet troops--the world press can add last week's elections in El Salvador.

Viewers of U.S. network television news and readers of leading newspapers were left unprepared for the most hopeful news from Central America in a long time: the record turnout of 1.4 million voters, more than double what U.S. officials had predicted. In the aftermath, most American news organizations told touching anecdotes about voters who braved bullets, but pointed up only belatedly the fundamental political result: that leftist guerrillas had been discredited, at least for the moment, as a popular force.

Few were as incautious as David Brinkley and Jim Wooten of ABC. On the air shortly before noon on election day, they voiced skepticism that the elections could be "clean and free" or "on the level," let alone meaningful. Surrounded by eager voters, Wooten said that the balloting "probably means more to Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haig than it does to them." Seemingly unimpressed by the public's brave defiance of guerrilla threats, he added: "This voting . .. probably isn't going to be a significant chapter in El Salvadoran "history. A paragraph, perhaps, but nothing much more than that, because the real context of the country is terror." ABC balanced Wooten's words at the next opportunity, the evening newscast, when Richard Threlkeld delivered an upbeat assessment of the vote.

Not only did the guerrillas fail to intimidate voters, they were able to mount only scattered skirmishes in place of a promised nationwide offensive. Yet, by blocking voting in the eastern town of Usulutan (pop. 41,000), the media-wise rebels attracted almost as much journalistic attention as they would have by creating numerous disruptions across the country. Fighting in Usulutan and a handful of other places provided the second sentence of the morning-after election reports in the New York Times and Washington Post, and commanded a separate Page One story in the Los Angeles Times. Although nearly all newspapers led with the turnout, the gunfire was also played prominently in, for example, the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and Boston Globe.

The TV networks, which rely heavily on the visual excitement of the shootouts that their camera crews cynically call "bang-bang," gave the guerrillas even better coverage. Though ABC's election-night text said that fighting was confined to a few towns, its opening images were mostly of soldiers waving guns and dragging corpses.* NBC led with a small-scale encounter on the outskirts of the capital, in which it reported 15 people died, before turning to the huge turnout. Of the three major networks, only CBS emphasized on election night that the guerrillas were at odds with the wishes of the people and that the vote was a triumph for democracy. Said Anchor Charles Osgood at the start of the late-night newscast: "The leftist guerrillas didn't want the election that took place today in El Salvador, but the people, it seems, did want it." Yet two of the three reports from El Salvador in that program showed gun battles. And CBS's prior, early-evening report opened with a body count and described the day as "bloody."

By the next morning CBS had concluded that the turnout was "a repudiation of the extreme left," a phrase that Anchor Dan Rather repeated that evening. NBC's John Chancellor was milder: "It is too early to declare winners in the elections in El Salvador. But the losers today were the rebels who told people not to vote." ABC's Threlkeld said, "The message was: Let's see if this thing called democracy really works."

The hesitation about the vote's meaning reflected a widespread perception among journalists that the guerrilla war is the "real" story. Tom Brokaw of NBC disputed the idea that the voters had clearly rejected the left, telling TIME: "I don't think we know that." Many voters feared reprisals from the army if they abstained, Brokaw said. Others simply hoped for peace. And some, he suggested, came out "in sort of an Iowa caucus effect. Here we were, all these authority figures, treating this event as important, so they thought they should too." That notion may explain American political behavior, but it seems dubious when applied to a rural country with a high illiteracy rate.

In fact, three semisecret polls of Salvadorans, the first taken in December, before the press focused on the elections, forecast a turnout of 70% to 85%. But reporters simply refused to believe such numbers--as did most of the Salvadoran and U.S. government officials who leaked portions of the polls to the press, while publicly forecasting a smaller vote. Restraint was certainly understandable: past turnouts had been far lower, and polls in Central America tend to be primitive and partisan. Even so, the reporters were overcareful. Few stories even hinted at the possibility of such a turnout.

Much of the press also was slow to recognize the subsequent political jockeying among center and right parties. Story after story in newspapers referred to President Jose Napoleon Duarte's "winning" an election in which he was not a candidate. Few reports foresaw the likelihood that right-wing parties would try to exclude Duarte from power unless his Christian Democrats won an absolute majority. By the evening after the election, NBC had realized that a right-wing coalition, in Chancellor's words, "could be the end of Duarte." CBS said that "both sides were scrambling."

ABC imprudently opined: "President Duarte appears to have won." Hours later, on Nightline, Threlkeld recouped by breaking the story that the right was uniting against Duarte as a leader.

The story quickly receded off the front pages of most major newspapers and into the bottom half of the networks' nightly newscasts. El Salvador had lost its high drama. The extra network crews and the masses of newspaper reporters were moving on. It probably would take a coup or more "bang-bang" to bring them back. --by William A. Henry III

*Among the day's casualties was Chilean Cameraman Carlos Ruz, the ninth foreign journalist killed in El Salvador since 1979.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.