Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | NotiCen: Central American & Caribbean Affairs

JUSTICE COMPROMISED IN FLORIDA: JOURNALISTIC ETHICS AND THE CUBAN FIVE.

Article Excerpt
In July, Cuban President Fidel Castro visited Bolivia. At a press conference there, a reporter, Manuel Cao, asked Castro why Cuba was not letting one of its political dissidents leave the country. Castro asked who was paying him. Exactly how Castro knew Cao was being paid as an anti-Cuba propagandist remains an unanswered question, in some part because it went unasked. But Cao, and many other Miami area journalists, was paid as a propagandist, even though he responded to Fidel, "Nobody pays me for asking questions; it's my job."

The US government was, however, paying working reporters to work within their elaborate and expensive anti-Castro broadcast apparatus, Radio and TV Marti. The story broke in September. This US government programming is beamed directly to Cuba and cannot be broadcast within the US because of anti-propaganda laws. The programming has received US$37 million this year. Cuba has for years jammed the signal on the island, so the Bush administration spent a reported US$10 million on a specially adapted airplane to transmit the broadcasts more effectively.

The story came to light as a result of a federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request the Miami Herald (MH) filed on Aug. 15. The Herald was recently acquired by the McClatchy Co., along with the Nuevo Herald (NH), a...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!