As news organizations update their obituaries of ailing Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, it’s worth recalling how many liberal journalists have fallen under Castro’s spell over the years, sounding like paid Cuban government propagandists as they touted the “great success stories” of Castro’s decades of communist rule. A new report from the Media Research Center offers some of the most egregious pro-Castro quotes of the last couple of decades. For example, back in 1988, then-NBC reporter Maria Shriver let Castro himself lead her on a tour of Havana. “The level of public services was remarkable: free education, medicine and heavily-subsidized housing,” Shriver marveled on Today. The following year, ABC’s Peter Jennings trumpeted how “health and education are the revolution’s great success stories.”
In 2000, during the custody battle over Elian Gonzalez, Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift even claimed on The McLaughlin Group: “To be a poor child in Cuba may in many instances be better than being a poor child in Miami.”
For more quotes, plus a couple of audio and video clips, go to www.mrc.org.
