While media efforts to erase Kurdistan from our collective memory were impressive, an even more astounding case of news management occured in a P-I reprint of a New York Times story on Saturday.

You may remember that last week the voters of Okinawa, in a non-binding referendum, opted by a remarkable 90% to 10% margin to demand the closure of U.S. military bases in the Okinawan islands. Much of the U.S. military presence in Japan is concentrated in Okinawa, and a long-standing anti-base campaign gained near total local consensus after several well-publicized sexual assaults of local women and girls by U.S. soldiers. Leases for many of the bases expire next Spring. The vote (though not the margin of victory) was front-page news in both the NY Times and the P-I.

Well, late last week, under what the NY Times story described as "heavy pressure" from Tokyo and Washington, Okinawa's governor decided that U.S. base leases would be renewed after all. The story here is a government decision, in a "democracy," counter to the virtually unanimous will of its citizens. Yet in the eighteen NYT-reprinted paragraphs the P-I ran on the Okinawan decision, last week's vote was never mentioned. Not once. As though it never happened.

Needless to say, Okinawa's governor and officials in Tokyo and Washington were quoted at length on the difficult decision and how pleased they were. A base opponent was quoted only in paragraph #18, and then only to express distrust of Japanese officials--not the bases or U.S. policy in subverting democracy.

Pravda would have been proud.