World Press Freedom Day 2017: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

"Th newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward". -   Mr. Dooley ( Finley Peter Dunne), 1902

On World Press Freedom Day the map of press freedom prepared by Reporters Without Borders is bleak with a darkening tide of censorship across the globe. Despite having a First Amendment to the Constitution that protects free speech and freedom of the press the United States today has 43 countries ahead of it with greater press freedoms.  This confirms the observation of the late conservative polemicist Joseph Sobran, who passed away in 2010 that “the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.” It gives me no comfort to be able to say, but hey Cuba, our next door neighbor, is at 173 much less free then the USA. As a citizen and a patriot this is one list that if not number one, the United States should strive to be in the top ten. It has not been there for some time. The ten most censored countries in the world according to the Committee to Protect Journalists are also terrible places to live not only for journalists but everyday people.

A free press is a benchmark of a free society that needs to be celebrated and defended from both  external and internal threats to its good works. Since it is a free institution, it must be self-policing and only answer to its customers on the basis of the quality of the journalism.

The ten countries with the greatest press freedom, according to Reporters Without Borders, in contrast do not have refugee exodus crises, even as is the case with Costa Rica (6) and Jamaica (8) they are not materially the richest countries but they are free peoples.

Today is a day to honor courageous and professional journalists who take their work seriously, but are willing to poke fun at themselves as Finley Peter Dunne did 115 years ago. It is an ironic tribute that his skewering of the self-important news media has been edited down and turned into a challenge to some journalists to "comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable." On this day let us comfort journalists afflicted for practicing their trade in closed societies.

.@mothermushroom has been detained since October and should be released immediately #FreethePress #WorldPressFreedomDay #WPF2017 pic.twitter.com/qDqIPT5Bwh

— CPJ Asia (@cpjasia) May 3, 2017

The Vietnamese blogger Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, better known as Me Na or "Mother Mushroom" has been detained since October 2016 while trying to visit an imprisoned activist. She stands accused of "propagandizing against the state."  

Let us also recognize Nguyen Van Hoa, a 22 year old video journalist jailed for using a drone to broadcast environmental protests in Vietnam.

In Venezuela on the evening of May 1, 2017 Marcos Vergara and Deivis Valera, production assistants for the online media platform VivoPlay were taken into the custody of the Venezuelan National Guard while covering a protest, reports the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Please spread the world and demand their freedom.

Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy, journalists for Al Jazeera who were arrested in Egypt in 2013, writing today in The Australian warn that a "tragedy is unfolding in Turkey. Independent journalism is being systematically stamped out. Prison doors are slamming, media outlets are being boarded up and a disturbing silence is falling over what has been a vibrant and ­diverse media landscape."

Be not silent before this atrocity against freedom.

George Orwell well understood that "Freedom of the press if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose." He also understood what was not only "fake news" but also fake language and called it "newspeak" in his novel 1984. 

We must recognize that there are hacks that can due great and lasting damage peddling "fake news" working in free newspapers. The ghosts of Walter Duranty and Herbert Matthews continue to possess the Gray Lady with their enduring and shameful legacies in Ukraine and Cuba. Walter Duranty won the Pulitzer covering up Stalin's 1930s manufactured famine in Ukraine that claimed eight to 10 million lives. With his reports denying the reality all around him this New York Times journalist was complicit in genocide. Twenty years later in Cuba Herbert Matthews engaged in a fallacious propaganda campaign disguised as news reporting to turn Fidel Castro into a national figure presenting him as an anti-communist and a democrat. The total number of dead  is still being added to 58 years later for the lies he reported in the 1950s.

However this hacks are small time purveyors of fake news compared to governments that manufacture entire news agencies, black mail journalists with the threat of expulsion.  The way to counter fake news is with more press freedom to challenge it along with greater reader discernment to weigh the facts and seek the truth. Facts matter, recognizing objective truth exists and getting the story right regardless of agendas is the best way to serve readers.

Believing the government can be dangerous to your freedom. President Ronald Reagan said it best, "trust but verify." He applied that to his dealings with the Russians, but it should be expanded when dealing with all governments.

However the threats to a free press are not only state actors, but also technology and artificial intelligence that threatens to simulate writing and overwhelm the net with inferior prose designed to push an agenda or a product and not inform a readership is a future threat. However, an ever present threat today thanks to the greed of Western technology companies such as Yahoo, Sun Microsystems, Google and others that helped erect the Great Fire Wall of China. Modernizing totalitarianism and giving it new life into the 21st Century. Google is now collaborating with the Cuban intelligence service and military allowing them to store their servers. This means that journalists can write their articles but no one will be able to find them in their online searches. Russia is also now adopting their own version of the great fire wall. This is also a profound threat to press freedom.

The belief that legitimacy is no longer found in objective truth but in "positive results" has proven a destructive meme in schools of journalism that in the final analysis rejects reality as a social construct are bearing fruit in declining readership and sales.

These are great challenges but can be overcome if confronted and resisted.





 

The New York Times and the Castro brothers: A long romance

 "The leader of pro-Castro opinion in the United States is Herbert L. Matthews , a member of the editorial staff of the New York Times. He did more than any other single man to bring Fidel Castro to power." - William F. Buckley Jr.,  Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations

“I got my job through the New York Times.”

The New York Times is at it again, advocating on its editorial page for the foreign policy goals of the Castro regime. On December 21, 2015 it was calling for the repeal of the Cuban Adjustment Act. This echoed not only the sentiments of Raul Castro but his ideological ally in Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega who has precipitated the current crisis in Central America with Cuban refugees. It is a coordinated media campaign with The New York Times leading the charge and when it comes to the Castro regime the Grey Lady has been at it for 57 years to the detriment of free Cubans and U.S. national interests. The Cuban Adjustment Act is a humanitarian law that if repealed will not end the exodus of Cubans fleeing the Castro nightmare, and the dictatorship continues to set Cuba apart from other countries in the hemisphere justifying the policy.


Marie Sanz is a senior correspondent with the Agence France Presse (AFP),  who has authored a paper "The Persistent Advocate: The New York Times' Editorials and the Normalization of U.S. Ties with Cuba" that although filled with "conventional main stream elite" opinion demonstrated the agenda of The New York Times first to promote Fidel Castro's rise to power in the 1950s, secondly to defend the Castro regime from efforts to overthrow it in the early 1960s, and a steadfast advocate for normalizing relations with the dictatorship through to the present day.

The New York Times has had a long time bias in favor of dictatorships and making glaring omissions that predate Cuba. The paper has had reporters such as Walter Duranty who ignored a genocide in Ukraine in the 1930s while providing a sympathetic portrayal of the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin.

Beginning in 1957 Herbert Matthews built up Fidel Castro's image both inside and outside of Cuba with a series of misleading articles in The New York Times. In July of 1959 Matthews reported: "[t]his is not a Communist Revolution in any sense of the term. Fidel Castro is not only not a Communist, he is decidedly anti-Communist." Anthony De Palma has written a book on Herbert Matthews titled, "The Man Who Invented Fidel" and describes how his heroic portrayal of Fidel Castro influenced the fall of the Batista dictatorship and the consolidation of the future dictator as a national figure.
 
William F. Buckley Jr. in an article in the March 1961 issue of The American Legion magazine outlined the impact of Mr. Matthews on the imposition of communism in Cuba and placed it in a larger context: 

"The leader of pro-Castro opinion in the United States is Herbert L. Matthews , a member of the editorial staff of the New York Times. He did more than any other single man to bring Fidel Castro to power. It could be said - with a little license - that Matthews was to Castro what Owen Lattimore was to Red China, and that the New York Times was Matthews's Institute of Pacific Relations: stressing this important difference, that no one has publicly developed against Matthews anything like the evidence subsequently turned up against Lattimore tending to show, in the words of a Senate investigating committee, that Lattimore was 'a conscious, articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy.'"

Marie Sanz in her paper describes the unprecedented series of editorials written by Ernesto Londoño but does not address the factual inaccuracies in his work. For example in his August 24, 2015 opinion piece The New York Times journalist presented a skewed vision of the opposition.

Londoño quotes some of the dissidents who met with Secretary Kerry at an informal cocktail following the official event to which they were not invited.  He fails to mention the presence of Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet, who is a former prisoner of conscience who has been the subject of an hour long documentary "Oscar's Cuba" and 2007 Medal of Freedom Recipient. U2's Bono also gave a shout out to Dr. Biscet during their 2011 tour. This is a high profile and internationally recognized pro-democracy activist but he supports U.S. sanctions on the Castro regime and over twitter the day after meeting Secretary Kerry called the normalization of relations a violation of law:

Diplomatic links between USA and Cuba violates Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act of 1996 (Helms-Burton): Title II, Section 201(13-14); 202; 203; 204; ; 205 and 206.

Is this not newsworthy? Or the fact that on August 24, 2015 state security (G2) detained Oscar Elías Biscet and released him 20 km from his home in order to prevent him giving the presentation: Why is it that U.S. - Cuba relations violate the Libertad Act?

Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet

Even among those The New York Times reporter chooses to quote he fails to provide context. For example, he quotes Yoani Sanchez and 14 y Medio but fails to mention how she took him to task on December 6, 2014 for his editorials in The New York Times describing them as "really pitiful."  Miriam Celaya, raised a question in the same article that many Cubans who read his editorials asked themselves:

What is going on with these editorials? They are still giving prominence to a distorted, biased view, composed of half-truths and lies about what the Cuban reality is. They are still giving prominence to what a government says, and Cuba is not a government. Cuba's government today is a small group of old men, and when I say "old" it's because of their way of thinking, of individuals who have remained anchored in discourse rooted in a cold war and belligerence. The Cuban people are not represented in that government.

Both Yoani Sanchez and Miriam Celaya are Cuban dissidents who are advocates of lifting sanctions but even they have publicly questioned the work of Mr. Londoño because it does not reflect the reality in Cuba.

Finally, in the Cuban diaspora there are five Cuban American congressman and three Cuban American U.S. Senators currently in office and all of them support maintaining the embargo on Cuba and have been sharply critical of the Obama administration's Cuba policy.  

Why such sharp criticism? Because the policy has marginalized the democratic opposition while raising up narrow economic interests at the expense of the freedom of the Cuban people; it has led to a worsening human rights situation in Cuba; and the extrajudicial killings of prominent opposition leaders who were viewed as a threat by the regime because they could oversee a democratic transition. On the international front the Obama administration's policies will further endanger democracy in Latin America and U.S. national security. 

Inside of Cuba, a large number of opposition leaders support maintaining sanctions on the dictatorship. Unlike the anti-embargo lobby fair minded democrats recognize that there is a legitimate difference of opinion on this topic, but not on the underlying nature of the dictatorship and the need for real change. This is something that Mr. Londoño does not reflect in his reporting.
The New York Times editorial board on November 30, 2015  was at it again providing advice to the dictatorship in Cuba on how to prolong its existence this time by achieving its long term political goal of lifting the embargo through partnering with a technology firm to overwhelm congressional opposition:

"Partnering with Google, which has enormous lobbying clout in Washington, could advance Havana’s goal of building enough political support in Congress to repeal the embargo and would make it harder for a future president to dial back the restoration of diplomatic ties that Mr. Obama set in motion last year."

 The New York Times omits and distorts key facts such as the circumstances surrounding Cuba plugging into the global cable network in 2013 enabling high-speed connections that have not reached the average Cuban. First it was President Obama who on April 13, 2009 directed the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and Commerce to take the needed steps to:

• Authorize U.S. telecommunications network providers to enter into agreements to establish fiber-optic cable and satellite telecommunications facilities linking the United States and Cuba.
• License U.S. telecommunications service providers to enter into roaming service agreements with Cuba’s telecommunications service providers.
• License U.S. satellite radio and satellite television service providers to engage in transactions necessary to provide services to customers in Cuba.
• License persons subject to U.S. jurisdiction to activate and pay U.S. and third-country service providers for telecommunications, satellite radio and satellite television services provided to individuals in Cuba.
• Authorize the donation of certain consumer telecommunication devices without a license.

Despite this unilateral liberalization by the Obama administration, it was the Castro regime that showed no interest in a fiber-optic cable linking the United States and Cuba from Key West in 2009 not the Cuban embargo. Instead the Cuban dictatorship went with a fiber-optic cable linking Cuba and Venezuela that required a much longer distance of cable to link the two countries. This was completed in 2013, but high speed internet access has not reached the average Cuban in 2015.
 The New York Times has been defending the interests of the Castro regime for 57 years on its Editorial pages.

Politically motivated extrajudicial killings by State Security

 At the same time it has remained silent before the critiques of the democratic opposition in the island.  For example, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas speaking on behalf of the Christian Liberation Movement in Havana on March 30, 2012 bravely denounced the fraudulent change that was then taking shape and that is being carried out today with the Obama administration's Cuba policy and The New York Times active support:

Our Movement denounces the regime's attempt to impose a fraudulent change, i.e. change without rights and the inclusion of many interests in this change that sidesteps democracy and the sovereignty of the people of Cuba. The attempt to link the Diaspora in this fraudulent change is to make victims participate in their own oppression. The Diaspora does not have to "assume attitudes and policies in entering the social activity of the island." The Diaspora is a Diaspora because they are Cuban exiles to which the regime denied rights as it denies them to all Cubans. It is not in that part of oppression, without rights, and transparency that the Diaspora has to be inserted, that would be part of a fraudulent change.

 The escalating violence and repression by the Castro regime throughout this normalization process has been omitted by The New York Times because it does not fit their narrative. Rising levels of violence against  nonviolent activists and the suspicious deaths of human rights defenders: Orlando Zapata Tamayo (February 23, 2010), Daisy Talavera de las Mercedes Lopez (January 31, 2011) , Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia (May 8, 2011), Laura Inés Pollán Toledo (October 14, 2011), Wilman Villar Mendoza (January 19, 2012), Sergio Diaz Larrastegui (April 19, 2012), Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas (July 22, 2012) and  Harold Cepero Escalante (July 22, 2012). Both Laura Pollán and Oswaldo Payá each had the international recognition and ability to head an authentic democratic transition in Cuba. Oswaldo Payá had forced the dictatorship to change the constitution in 2002 because of Project Varela, a citizen initiative demanding legal reforms within the existing system, and Laura  Pollán through constant street demonstrations achieved the freedom of scores of Cuban prisoners of conscience. It is important to remember that the deaths of these high profile human rights defenders happened on President Obama's watch as he loosened sanctions in a series of unilateral concessions that began in 2009. To understand what is really going on in Cuba one should read the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post.

National Review early on had a clearer understanding on the nature of the Castro regime and the role of The New York Times in bringing the communist dictator to power in Cuba. This is why they had a cartoon of Fidel Castro with the caption “I got my job through the New York Times.” This is a decades long romance that has been at the expense of free Cubans.

The New York Times: A Propaganda Rag?

 Some of the news that they refused to print.

Since 1851 there have been lapses in journalistic ethics

Until now this blog has not addressed the eruption of New York Times editorials regarding Cuba and U.S. policy out of sheer weariness over treading once again over well trodden ground on the sanctions debate, but two items have necessitated a response. The call by The New York Times to release Cuban spies imprisoned for their crimes including the murder of U.S. citizens.

The ten members of the Cuban "WASP" spy network arrested in 1998 used coded material on computer disks to communicate with other members of the spy network of which the FBI was able to obtain 1,300 pages taken from those diskettes translated and used during the spy trial. The documents demonstrate the criminal nature of the Cuban regime's operation in South Florida including their primary objective of penetrating and obtaining information on a U.S. naval station. Furthermore intelligence operatives communicated about burning down a warehouse and sabotaging Brothers to the Rescue equipment. The Cuban government requested that the spies attempt to identify who would be flying at certain times.  What is left out of The New York Times reporting is that in the documents the operatives discuss plans to prepare a "book bomb" that evades post office security while at the same time phoning death threats to a man they describe as a CIA agent in order to terrorize him and then killing him with the mail bomb.

The seriousness of these planned action items would be confirmed by the February 24, 1996 shoot down where two MiGs hunted Brothers to the Rescue planes in international airspace and used air to air missiles to destroy two of the planes killing two pilots and two passengers based on intelligence supplied by the WASP network.

Cover of 2014 article on KGB plans to eliminate MLK

 The second item was the publication of the full letter sent to Martin Luther King Jr. on November 11, 1964  to provoke his suicide and/or silence in The New York Times Magazine article by Barbara Gage titled "What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals" pointing to the FBI as the guilty party. However, at no time does the article mention that the KGB also had a campaign of active measures in place to destroy Martin Luther King Jr. that is well documented.

Letter sent to MLK in 1964 published by The New York Times

The New York Times has had a long time bias in favor of dictatorships and making glaring omissions. The paper has had reporters such as Walter Duranty who ignored a genocide in Ukraine in the 1930s while providing a sympathetic portrayal of the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin. Beginning in 1957 Herbert Matthews built up Fidel Castro's image both inside and outside of Cuba with a series of misleading articles in The New York Times. In July of 1959 Matthews reported: "[t]his is not a Communist Revolution in any sense of the term. Fidel Castro is not only not a Communist, he is decidedly anti-Communist." Anthony De Palma has written a book on Herbert Matthews titled, "The Man Who Invented Fidel" and describes how his heroic portrayal of Fidel Castro influenced the fall of the Batista dictatorship and the consolidation of the future dictator as a national figure.

Considering that the Castro dictatorship in Cuba, that The New York Times assisted in putting into power, has five decades of engaging and sponsoring international terrorism along with a terrible human rights record at home one would think that the Grey Lady would be more cautious in its reporting. Unfortunately what should be the paper of record has too often become a propaganda rag especially when the topic has been Cuba.