Media : Press War Replaces the Contra War : Last year’s presidential election helped restore open debate in the country. Now, Nicaraguans have access to a broad range of opinion. The political exchanges are often quite lively.

Carlos Briceno, a high-strung idealist, took charge of the state-owned television station last April for Nicaragua’s new government. His self-assigned mission was as revolutionary for this country as anything ever attempted by the outgoing Sandinista regime.

Like other youthful members of the slick new Managua elite, Briceno, 32, had learned his trade in exile--studying journalism at the University of Missouri and reporting for Miami’s Spanish-language Channel 23. Back home, he set out to turn the lone national station, a blunt instrument of government propaganda under the Sandinistas, into something like American public TV--a nonpartisan outlet for all political views.

None of his experience abroad, Briceno now admits, prepared him for the battles at home. Sandinista mobs seized the station’s studios and stoned his house last July, prompting him to pack an automatic pistol in his briefcase. Then he became embroiled in a public feud with his government superiors over official meddling with his newscasts.

“What the Sandinistas cannot accept is that the most powerful propaganda tool is no longer theirs,” Briceno said, hunched over his cluttered desk at the Channel 6 studio. “And what some people in the government do not understand is that we can’t build a democracy without balanced, credible journalism.”

Nearly a year after Nicaragua’s first truly competitive elections, the freewheeling debate opened by the campaign has become an enduring feature of public life under President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro. Recovering from an eight-year war used by the Sandinistas to justify censorship, Nicaraguans today can hear and read a broader and livelier exchange of opinions than people in other Central American countries.

Yet, as Briceno is learning to his frustration, the new press freedom often sounds like a cacophony of partisan voices shouting past each other, each with its own truth. As the media war replaces the Contra war, he said, “there isn’t a single outlet not blinded by some ideological cause.”

Both morning newspapers here, Barricada and El Nuevo Diario, are Sandinista controlled. La Prensa, the lone afternoon daily, is owned by the president and her family. The government’s Radio Nicaragua battles on the airwaves with two popular Sandinista stations, Ya and Sandino. Sandinistas have a 9:30 p.m. newscast on Channel 6 to counter Briceno’s 8 p.m. version of the day’s events.

The president’s conservative supporters, who feel she makes too many concessions to the Sandinistas, vent their protests over Radio Corporacion and Radio Catolica and in El Nicaraguense, a weekly tabloid that competes with the Sandinistas’ El Seminario and the Marxist-run El Pueblo. Even the country’s humor magazine, Semana Comica, is politicized; its editors are Sandinistas and heap unprecedented ridicule on the country’s leaders.

Accounts of a single event here by two or more of these media can be so different as to make a reader wonder whether they are in the same country. Foreign diplomats and other outsiders complain how hard it is to find an accurate picture of Nicaragua amid the haze of contradictions.

But the president seems to relish the diversity of the debate, even if her government does not dominate it. “Everybody talks, everybody criticizes,” she said in an interview, listing free expression as one of her early achievements. “That’s how it is in a democracy.”

Press freedom has been at the heart of Nicaragua’s recent struggles against dictatorship. Dona Violeta’s husband, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, became the leading opposition figure of his time as publisher of La Prensa. The paper’s editorial crusades against President Anastasio Somoza led to Chamorro’s assassination in 1978.

When Chamorro’s widow backed the Sandinista guerrillas who took control of the popular uprising sparked by his death, Somoza’s planes bombed the La Prensa plant. Soon after the Sandinistas seized power in 1979, Dona Violeta fell out with them and turned La Prensa into the leading opposition voice. The paper was heavily censored after the Contra war began in 1982 and was closed by the government for 15 months in 1986 and 1987. Opposition newscasts were banned from radio between 1982 and 1988.

Only in their last year in power did the Sandinistas allow unfettered criticism. After losing the election last February, President Daniel Ortega moved quickly to assure his Sandinistas access to the media as an opposition party. He put 17 state-owned radio stations in private Sandinista hands and abolished a law giving the state a monopoly over television.

The party’s once-rigid control over the contents of its own media has eased somewhat, reflecting a process of self-criticism among Sandinista leaders over the authoritarian style of rule now accepted as a factor in their defeat. Sandinista reporters say they now feel freer to report the news as they see it and to fraternize with colleagues from other media.

“We’re competing for credibility in a democratic game,” said Dionisio Marenco, the Sandinistas’ former propaganda chief who now manages the television station the party plans to launch in April. “I’m going to run the station as a Sandinista, but before defending the interests of the party, I have to make a profit.”

In a tentative step toward professionalism, Sandinista media now carry straightforward interviews with members of the Somoza family returning from exile and with Vice President Virgilio Godoy, the government’s leading Sandinista-basher. La Prensa has crossed the ideological divide by publishing the thoughts of Humberto Ortega, the Sandinista general who still runs the army.

When political temperatures rise, however, so do the old partisan barriers. During a Sandinista-led general strike last July, for example, the airwaves were full of epithets such as “perverts” and “scoundrels.” A former Contra leader announced over Radio Corporacion that he had armed men ready to “lop off Sandinista heads” to end the strike. Corporacion’s studios became the scene of shoot-outs between strikers and anti-Sandinista militants until saboteurs blew up the transmission tower.

As Sandinista workers threatened another strike in October, gunmen burned down the studios of the pro-Sandinista Radio Primerisima. Anti-Sandinista protesters blocking the country’s main east-west highway in November let only non-Sandinista reporters get through to cover the story.

Jose Castillo, Radio Corporacion’s director, defends the airing of vitriolic language from right-wing listeners to his station’s call-in program.

“Our radio is an escape valve for the people,” he said. “In my 41 years in journalism, Nicaragua has never had so much freedom.”

The media war is also fought within La Prensa and Channel 6 as journalists resist attempts to turn them into government mouthpieces.

After Dona Violeta took office and appointed Antonio Lacayo as her chief of staff, Cristiana Chamorro came under pressure from colleagues at La Prensa to resign as editor to avoid compromising the paper’s independence. Cristiana Chamorro is not only the president’s daughter but Antonio Lacayo’s wife as well.

But Cristiana Chamorro has stayed and defended the government against a rising chorus of right-wing opposition--some of it from La Prensa’s staff--to the policy of reconciliation and negotiation with the Sandinistas that Lacayo forcefully advocates. Tensions came to a boil with the November highway blockade, organized by Chamorro supporters seeking the ousters of Lacayo and Gen. Ortega, and with the arrest of former Contra leader Aristides Sanchez on charges of trying to turn the protest into an armed conflict.

When Cristiana Chamorro was out of the country, La Prensa staffers staged an editorial coup: a stinging attack on the president for “joining with those who are in reality sabotaging your government . . . against those who elected you.” When the editor returned, she limited La Prensa’s initial account of Sanchez’s arrest to a government communique, but the staff objected and more balanced coverage followed.

The editor denies any conflict of interest. “I have nothing to do with the government,” she said. “But we are not up against a dictatorship like Somoza’s or the Sandinistas’. We have a democracy. We share objectives (with the government) but we are not subordinate to anyone.”

Many La Prensa staffers disagree. “A government official will send us a fax and order us to print it on Page 1,” a reporter said. “They don’t always get their way but there’s interference. It’s not exactly censorship but it has the same effect.”

Briceno faces similar pressures at Channel 6. To try to cool tempers, the government has vetoed his idea to televise American-style “Firing Line” debates. Briceno has been ordered to keep Vice President Godoy’s criticism of Dona Violeta off the air. When Sanchez, the former Contra leader, was arrested, the government tried unsuccessfully to limit Channel 6’s coverage to official communiques.

To get around the TV director, government officials forced his news editor to resign last Oct. 31 and began sending propaganda tapes to a more cooperative replacement to put on the news. Briceno responded with an open letter of protest to Danilo Lacayo, the government’s information director and a distant relative of the president’s chief of staff.

“They think I’m a loose cannon,” Briceno said in an interview. “I’m just trying to educate them how to use television. We inherited a station that lied, distorted and defamed under the Sandinistas. Those methods created a backlash. People stopped tuning in. We have to be less Stalinist and more Madison Avenue, more sophisticated.”

Frank Arana, the new deputy information director, said the government’s growing effort to control television is part of a belated strategy to shape public opinion more aggressively.

“Sometimes the Channel 6 newscast comes out totally Sandinista,” he said. “If Briceno works for the government, he has to follow a strategic objective, not his own independent line.”

A large man who was once the spokesman of the Contra guerrillas, Arana gazed out his office window at a giant hilltop statue of Augusto C. Sandino, the hero and namesake of the Sandinista revolution.

“The shadow of Sandino still falls over Nicaragua,” he said. “The Sandinistas are more professional at managing the media war. They are way ahead of us.”