Another Lie Gets Repeated on NPR

This time it's the one about the Sandinistas' having supposedly lost when they "finally" let the Nicaraguan people vote. Here's what I just wrote Morning Edition: In your story this morning about the upcoming Salvadoran election, you said, "No leftist candidate has ever won a presidential election in Central America." This is false. The Sandinistas won Nicaragua's elections in 1984. Perhaps you forgot about them because the US government refused to recognize their legitimacy. But independent observers called them free and fair. In fact, as documented in Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent, they were marked by better guarantees of ballot secrecy and other prerequisites of legitimacy, than were the much-touted elections held in other, US-backed states in the region during the same period.