(27.Mai) Such Golden Silences and bypassing of inconvenient sources is incompatible with honest journalism but is standard operating procedure in mainstream journalism, with variations mainly in severity and depth of burial of the awkward facts. These latter are often not completely hidden but put so deep in an article and in such cautious or qualifying language as to be effectively buried or suppressed.
This is dramatically illustrated when we compare the treatment of “worthy” and “unworthy” victims, categories that Noam Chomsky and I stressed in Manufacturing Consent. (Chapter 2 is entitled “Worthy and Unworthy Victims.”) Worthy victims are victims of enemy and target states, whereas unworthy victims are killed by us or one of our allies or clients. We gave details on the huge media attention to the murder of a Polish priest in Communist Poland in 1984, a single worthy victim who, as we showed, got more U.S. media attention than 100 religious victims of U.S. client states in Latin America (1965- 1985), taken together.