U.S. Media Coverage of CIA's 1973 Chilean Military Coup Revisited

In their book Unreliable Sources: A Guide To Detecting Bias In News Media, Martin Lee and Norman Solomon described how much of the U.S. Big Media reported on what happened in Chile in September 1973:

“Passive phrases and gloss-over euphemisms were invoked by some U.S. reporters in writing about the 1973 military coup in Chile. It was often said that Chilean President Salvador Allende `died’ in the presidential palace, when he was murdered by the armed forces. According to the New York Times, Allende’s policies caused `chaos’ which `brought in the military.’ This obscures the fact that the U.S. government and corporations like ITT were instrumental in fomenting chaos and backing the coup. The notion that `chaos’ prompted the Chilean military to move in and restore order implicitly downplays and neutralizes the brutality of the coup, in which tens of thousands of people were killed, tortured and `disappeared.’

Martin Lee and Norman Solomon also observed that “CIA propaganda planted in the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio played a crucial role in setting the stage for the U.S. engineered coup that overthrew the democratically-elected government led by Salavador Allende" in 1973.

(Downtown 9/1/93)