I enjoy reading news reports from different countries and detecting vocabulary or wordings that reflect bias. “Ukrainian intelligence chief: ‘Putin is seriously ill and will die within two years”. Russia commits “unimaginable barbarism”; “Even if Wagner rebellion fails, Putin’s presidency has never looked weaker”, Putin “threatens” while Zelensky “warns”.

After being an object of media manipulation myself, I always think twice before I believe anything they say and I’m aware there is always a strategic aim behind everything, depending on who they stand with. This is certainly true in the case of Colombia, where private media have been in charge of creating a repulsive image of the “enemy”, FARC guerrilla fighters.

There is an interesting study on the way guerrillas and paramilitaries have been depicted by mainstream media in Colombia, written by linguist García Marrugo. It is called The Texture of Ideology: Demonstrating Bias in the Representation of the Internal Conflict in the Colombian Press. She starts by noticing that most Colombians believe that the guerrillas are responsible for the majority of victims of the conflict (and not paramilitaries), while the numbers of the National Center for Historical Memory show a completely different picture:

She wonders whether the media have something to do with that and starts investigating the language used by four main media in Colombia during 2002-2006. One of her findings is that when the media refer to crimes committed by paramilitaries, they mention “armed men”, “assassins”, or “unknown men”, but when the news is about the guerrillas, they do mention the authors of the crime: “Farc killed four”, “guerrillas kidnap landowner”, “39^th Front of the Farc kills five in Bolívar”. In 25% of the cases, paramilitaries are expressly identified as the authors of the crime, against 60% in the case of news about the guerrillas. In every one out of 8 cases in which the paramilitaries are identified as authors of the crime, doubt is created through expressions like “allegedly”, “seemingly”, “apparently”…  

In the case of the crimes committed by guerrillas, judgmental words like “barbarian”, “evil”, “brutal” or “savage” are used to a much greater extent than for paramilitaries. Victims of paramilitary aggressions are often reduced to a number (“seven were killed”) or they are simply described as “people”. Victims of crimes committed by guerrillas are often extensively portrayed by their families and friends as human beings with dreams, hopes, and feelings. So far García Marrugo’s research.

One emblematic case of media manipulation was the necklace bomb in the year 2000, in Simijaca, Boyacá (a department in the center of Colombia just above Bogotá, its capital).  Mrs. Elvia Cortés, 53 years old, was abducted by four men who put a necklace of explosives around her neck. Her family had to pay some 4000 dollars and if not, they would explode the necklace.

When a policeman, an expert in explosives, tried to disarm the necklace, the bomb exploded and killed both of them. The country was in shock after this horrible crime. Colonel Fabio Santiago Roa Millán immediately declared that the Farc was responsible, which was echoed by national and international media without second thoughts or any kind of investigation.   

The Farc condemned the crime and said it wasn’t responsible for it, but nobody listened http://elpais.com/diario/2000/05/17/internacional/958514406_850215.html. The Prosecutor’s Office, the local authorities, and the victim’s family expressed their doubts about Farc’s responsibility because there were no Farc Fronts in the area where the crime was committed. As early as 2002, the Prosecutor’s Office discovered that a gang of common criminals was responsible, among them one of Mrs. Cortés’ workers, who was sent to prison.

The thing is that people still use this crime, 20 years later, to make their case against the Farc. While the authorities and even the media have recognized that Farc wasn’t responsible, the media boom was so big (and the rectification was relatively insignificant) that people still hold the belief that Farc was responsible. I’m not writing about this to downplay Farc’s responsibilities, at all, but to make a case about the responsibility of the media in creating and strengthening the image of their enemy: the Farc (and about how the media from the global north zealously replicated the news from Colombia).  

Media have a huge responsibility in conflicts. They take sides to “help” define the good ones and the bad ones. This is not new. Let us recall the 1916 Creel Commission created by the US Woodrow Wilson government; a propaganda commission in charge of changing a pacifist American population into a German-hating crowd to justify America’s involvement in the first world war. They did so, using a strategy of convincing the higher, educated class of the atrocities and evilness of the opponent, and succeeded in just six months.

What most intrigues me is not the manipulation or the fact that the media are instruments of power. Nothing new, in the end. What really bugs me is how ordinary people continuously rehash frames created by the mainstream media, without realizing that they are just ruminating what they have been told.  Diehard pacifists all of a sudden become passionate supporters of sending more weapons and tanks to Ukraine, without even understanding whose arguments they are using to defend “their” cause, or why they have become so fanatic or even aggressive in defending that cause (by the way, many of these warmongering people seem to hate me because I made the decision of joining an armed movement, arguing that VIOLENCE IS NEVER JUSTIFIED, but that story I will save for a future article).