Inventing Reality by Michael Parenti

Author:Michael Parenti [Parenti, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Journalism -- Political aspects -- United States, Journalism -- United States -- Objectivity
ISBN: 0312020139
Publisher: New York : St. Martin's Press
Published: 1993-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

In a country like Hungary, long considered one of the more prosperous socialist countries, these capitalist reforms resulted in serious unemployment, a 30 percent inflation rate, a doubling of rents, and a 45 percent rise in consumer energy costs. In order to survive, most employed Hungarians held more than one job, working twelve to fourteen hours a day. Street robberies and violent crime increased by 40 percent, while homelessness, suicides, and mental depression rose dramatically.44 But the New York Times and most other US media had little to say about these things. Instead the Times ran upbeat articles on how retail stores were being privatized in Budapest and how Hungary now enjoyed a “higher standard of living” with an abundance of quality commodities and foods.47 The Times failed to note that most Hungarians could not afford to buy these items. Real wages had fallen 35 percent; food purchases were off 4 percent; clothing sales, 7 percent; and meat sales, 30 percent. Too often shoppers had to spend all their money on food.48

Along with higher crime rates and severe economic hardship, the market reforms in Eastern Europe brought increased corruption in the banking and finance systems, together with a resurgence of nationalistic hatreds, ethnic clashes, anti-Semitism, and neo-fascist organizations.49 While the corruption and abuses of the former communist regimes received repeated attention from the media, these new developments were accorded relatively brief mention and failed to dampen press enthusiasm for the “democratic capitalist” era in the East. Instead, the hardships were universally dismissed as part of a temporary “transition” from state socialism to capitalism. Thus the 'Washington Post referred to “the painful transition to a free-market system.”50

In one NBC telecast, Tom Brokaw explained the tribulations of transition to a Soviet official: “In order to go up you have to first go down.”51 Thus the press transformed the harsh cutbacks inflicted upon the working people of these nations into nothing more than the pains of change, a brief passing through purgatory on the way to heaven. In fact, the Thatcher-like cutbacks were not the products of transition but of free-market capitalism, the raw, undiluted variety practiced throughout the Third World and increasingly within Western industrial nations.

The elections that brought anticommunists to power were, according to the New York Times, the work of “inspired amateurs and improvisers.”52 Largely unmentioned was how the United States poured millions of dollars into the Eastern European elections through the National Endowment for Democracy (funded by the US Congress) and other US agencies, monies that went exclusively to anticommunist opposition parties.53 While US laws prohibit foreign nationals from injecting themselves into the finances and campaign operations of American elections, US interference in the Eastern European political contests went unnoticed— or was depicted as benign assistance to peoples unpracticed in the ways of democracy.

Not even lavish US financial support could guarantee anticommunist victories in all the former communist countries. As elections approached in Romania and Bulgaria, the press, anticipating the same anticommunist results as had occurred in Hungary, Czechoslovakia,

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