Books in Brief: News Coverage of the Sandinista Revolution

News Coverage of the Sandinista Revolution, by Joshua Muravchik (American Enterprise Institute, 128 pp., $19.75)

A rare candid interview with Comandante Tomás Borge appeared recently in the Marxist New Left Review. The revered minister of the “Sentinel of the People’s Happiness,” as the Sandinistas refer to their Ministry of the Interior, noted that, after the Sandinistas took over, there was a honeymoon period in which everyone loved them, including the middle classes. Why? Borge gave a straightforward answer: “They thought we were going to create a democracy.” I thought of this interview when reading Joshua Muravchik’s rather devastating exposé of how the U.S. press described the Sandinistas before and during the first year of their revolution. Here we find Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post writing in May 1979 that, “although considered one of the doctrinaire Marxists within the pluralistic Sandinista leadership,” Borge “pledged that the Sandinistas ‘do not propose a socialistic scenario, but rather a democratic one, with early elections.’ ” Borge, of course, was dissembling in order to mask the Sandinistas’ real agenda. What Muravchik shows is that the American press by and large bought their lies—and often spread Sandinista propaganda as fact. After reading Muravchik’s valuable book, journalists will have little excuse left for not doing their homework. So can we expect better coverage of the Sandinistas now, ten years after their victory? There are glimmers of hope. Press watchers have noted some new tough reporting from Stephen Kinzer, who was undoubtedly affected by being hit on the head after identifying himself as a New York Times reporter at a mass demonstration in which 39 major oppositionists were tear-gassed and arrested. I do not wish that experience on other of our treasured journalists: far easier for them to read and study Muravchik’s book, and avoid the embarrassment of finding themselves in an update a few years hence.

About the Author

Ronald Radosh

Mr. Radosh, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute and a contributing opinion columnist at the Daily Beast, is a co-author of Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War and the author of Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left.

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News Coverage of the Sandinista Revolution, by Joshua Muravchik (American Enterprise Institute, 128 pp., $19.75)

A rare candid interview with Comandante Tomás Borge appeared recently in the Marxist New Left Review. The revered minister of the “Sentinel of the People’s Happiness,” as the Sandinistas refer to their Ministry of the Interior, noted that, after the Sandinistas took over, there was a honeymoon period in which everyone loved them, including the middle classes. Why? Borge gave a straightforward answer: “They thought we were going to create a democracy.” I thought of this interview when reading Joshua Muravchik’s rather devastating exposé of how the U.S. press described the Sandinistas before and during the first year of their revolution. Here we find Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post writing in May 1979 that, “although considered one of the doctrinaire Marxists within the pluralistic Sandinista leadership,” Borge “pledged that the Sandinistas ‘do not propose a socialistic scenario, but rather a democratic one, with early elections.’ ” Borge, of course, was dissembling in order to mask the Sandinistas’ real agenda. What Muravchik shows is that the American press by and large bought their lies—and often spread Sandinista propaganda as fact. After reading Muravchik’s valuable book, journalists will have little excuse left for not doing their homework. So can we expect better coverage of the Sandinistas now, ten years after their victory? There are glimmers of hope. Press watchers have noted some new tough reporting from Stephen Kinzer, who was undoubtedly affected by being hit on the head after identifying himself as a New York Times reporter at a mass demonstration in which 39 major oppositionists were tear-gassed and arrested. I do not wish that experience on other of our treasured journalists: far easier for them to read and study Muravchik’s book, and avoid the embarrassment of finding themselves in an update a few years hence.

About the Author

Ronald Radosh

Mr. Radosh, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute and a contributing opinion columnist at the Daily Beast, is a co-author of Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War and the author of Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left.