CNN/Time pundit Fareed Zakaria is considered one of the smartest guys in elite policy/media circles. Speaking with CNN host Anderson Cooper on Friday (3/4/11), he advocated CIA intervention in Libya. Deriding a no-fly zone as something less than a "magic solution," he explained:

 ZAKARIA: There's a lot of covert stuff we can do. We can effectively fund the Contra war against Gadhafi the way we did in Afghanistan.

COOPER: So you think the opposition should be armed?

ZAKARIA: I think the opposition--I think that the CIA should start looking into covert actions that can fund the rebels, that can provide food, logistics, weaponry. And if Khadafy Gadhafi realizes this-- and believe me, we don't need to advertise it -- he would realize, he will see, the people around him will see he can't win.

Zakaria's historical references are a little bizarre. The U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua were a disaster--a murderous group trained and armed in an attempt to overthrow a left-wing government that had overthrown a U.S.-backed dictatorship. The Contras directed much of their violence against Nicaraguan civilians. When direct funding of the group was blocked by Congress, the Reagan administration hatched a plan to sell arms to Iran and funnel the profits to the Contras--what became known as the Iran/Contra scandal. In other words, not exactly the kind of plan one would cite as a model.

Zakaria refers to Afghanistan as well--presumably meaning U.S. support for mujaheddin fighters battling the Soviet Union. Some of those fighters would eventually regroup under the banner of Al-Qaeda. Again, not really the kind of project you'd want to replicate.

Kudos to the New York Times for publishing a front-page article (10/8/09) about the U.S. advisers and lobbyists who have been working (in one form or another) on behalf of the coup government in Honduras. But the piece glosses over the U.S. history in the region. Reporters Ginger Thompson and Ron Nixon write that the coup government "has also drawn support from several former high-ranking officials who were responsible for setting United States policy in Central America in the 1980s and '90s, when the region was struggling to break with the military dictatorships and guerrilla insurgencies that defined the cold war."

When "the region was struggling to break with the military dictatorships and guerrilla insurgencies"? A little more clarity is needed there. The U.S.--to take two examples--supported a thuggish military government in El Salvador and created a "guerrilla insurgency" to try and defeat a left-wing government in Nicaragua. In other words, while "the region" may have wanted one thing, U.S. foreign policy sought to bolster violent, anti-democratic force. Stating these facts clearly would give readers a better sense of of the context--and demonstrate that people like Otto Reich and Roger Noriega are still on the wrong side.

In a Consortium News rejoinder (4/30/09) to how "mainstream U.S. news media often laments the decline of objective journalism, pointing disapprovingly at the more subjective news that comes from the Internet or from ideological programming," Robert Parry writes that

one could argue that the U.S. mainstream press has inflicted the severest damage to the concept of objective journalism by routinely ignoring those principles, which demand that a reporter set aside personal prejudices (as best one can) and approach each story with a common standard of fairness.

The truth is that powerful mainstream news organizations have their own sacred cows and tend to hire journalists who intuitively take into account whose ox might get gored while doing a story. In other words, mainstream (or centrist) journalism has its own biases though they may be less noticeable because they often reflect the prevailing view of the national Establishment.

Parry looks to "double standards" in corporate reportage on Nicaraguan Contras in the '80s and the 2005 "assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri" to make clear that "how that translates into daily coverage is that an American news outlet often will demand a much lower threshold of evidence about serious accusations against a perceived U.S. enemy than an ally." Anyway, as a longtime FAIR associate once noted on the age-old debate over the merits of journalistic objectivity: "Passive acceptance of murderous priorities in our midst is a form of de facto advocacy."

The Washington Post editorial yesterday on Nicaragua begins:

Through much of the 1980s, the United States waged a proxy war to prevent Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista party from consolidating a dictatorship in Nicaragua. In 1990, Mr. Ortega finally agreed to hold a presidential election, which he lost....

That history is false. Nicaragua held a presidential election in 1984, which Ortega won. The 1990 vote happened on schedule in accord with the Sandinista constitution. This is a fact that the Post has gotten wrong before in its news pages. Ironically, the Post was credited in Extra! (10-11/87) for reporting on a

"secret-sensitive" NSC briefing paper which outlined a "wide-ranging plan to convince Americans [that the] Nicaraguan elections were a 'sham.'"

There are certainly legitimate questions about Ortega's rule; but if the Post can't get the recent Nicaraguan past right, why should one bother reading what they think of the present?

The paper does admit, though, that "there is no need for another Contra army." Well, there's a relief.