It isn't true, as the old saw claims, that history is written by the winners. History is written--rewritten--by omission, by sloppy reporting and indifference to facts, by a fear of rocking the boat.
No better example of this can be found than the mainstream press coverage of the death of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
The story in The New York Times this morning gave a thumbnail sketch of Pinochet's career, his violent seizure of power from elected president Salvador Allende in 1973 and reign of terror thereafter. The Washington Post, at least, mentioned that Pinochet's coup was "U.S.-supported."
Well, no, it was U.S.-backed. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made his displeasure with the leftist Allende known, and the CIA helped engineer Pinochet's coup. This is not a conspiracy theory. These are known facts, and in many parts of the world, it is a commonly held belief that Kissinger should be tried for war crimes.
Here, of course, Kissinger remains a celebrity. He used to date Barbara Walters, he shows up as a foreign policy expert on TV chat shows, he even served as a shadow advisor to The Decider's wacky Iraq adventure.
Not that I think these news-gathering organizations deliberately chose to avoid fingering Kissinger. More likely, the writers that cobbled the stories together were working from wire stories that were themselves the products of sloppy, inattentive reporting. Obviously, higher-ups at The Times and The Post would have known of Kissinger's involvement, but hey, why open old wounds?
It's possible, as the day progresses, that these papers will add background to their initial stories, and may explain the details of the U.S. involvement. But they dropped the ball when it was needed the most, when the headline should have been Brutal U.S.-Installed Dictator Dies.
That would be a story worth reading.
