Harper's editor Francisco Goldman published a review of the Central American press in August 1988.
Journalistic standards are abysmal.
The war and terror barely exist. Elsewhere we learn that American reporters are allowed in, but choose not to report on the hundreds of thousands of people starving to death or the many driven from their homes, despite pleas from the Church and relief workers. These and other mechanisms of media manipulation are described by Edgar Chamorro, the CIA-selected press spokesman for the contras, in his unmentionable study of how the U.S. media were handled. I found no such departures from its mission. In reality, it is not only in Central America that such a newspaper would not long survive, under such conditions.