Miami Herald

Despite all the huffing and puffing over Florida Senator Marco Rubio's alleged "embellishing" at the Washington Post, the fact is that his parents were Cuban exiles (meaning number 5 at link: "anyone separated from his or her country or home voluntarily or by force of circumstances"). That fact essentially undercuts everything about the WaPo article except the problem with the opening sentence of the biography at Rubio's Senate web site, which has been corrected.

That didn't stop two Associated Press writers, Brendan Farrington and Laura Wides-Munoz from doing quite a bit of embellishing of their own (a better word would be "mischaracterizing") in an item currently time-stamped early Saturday morning, while pretending that the rebuttal to the Post written by Mark Caputo at the Miami Herald doesn't exist. The AP pair's pathetic prose has two particular howlers which simply must be debunked.

In case you missed it, the Washington Post published a Birther-style hit piece on Thursday accusing Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) of lying about when his parents moved from Cuba to Miami.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews invited the author, Manuel Roig-Franzia, to discuss his allegations on Friday's Hardball, and ended the segment by lauding over his guest, "You ought to get some kind of Pulitzer" (video follows with commentary):

Call it the Peter Principle 2.0.

Instead of just promoting someone to the level of his incompetence, McClatchy Newspapers has actually promoted failed Miami Herald executive editor, Anders Gyllenhaal, beyond the level of his incompetence. Is your humble correspondent being a bit too harsh in his assessment of Anders Gyllenhaal's capabilities? Allow me to enter into the record the judgement in September of the people who actually worked for him at the Herald:

Last week, several Miami Herald editors and reporters wrote a letter to the paper's management asking it to stop focusing on delivering quick news and return to its roots in well-reported investigative journalism. We're not sure if this is the answer. But we are sure of one thing: the quality of the paper has suffered a lot under the leadership of executive editor Anders Gyllenhaal. Perhaps he understands the Internet and its role in new journalism, but he is clearly having a hard time putting a plan into action.

Indeed the letter circulated internally and signed by most of the paper's top news personnel is a clear sign of dysfunction. Why would such a group of bright people -- including a half dozen Pulitzer Prizer winners -- resort to assembling such a diatribe if the paper were working.

...Gyllenhaal worked in Miami back in the '80s, but he spent years away before returning several years ago. He doesn't get the pulse of this city. Moreover, he's aloof and not well liked in the newsroom. He is the wrong guy to run the paper at this time. So listen up McClatchy: It's time to dump Anders.

Gov. Charlie Crist "goes it alone in his bid for Senate," the Miami Herald noted in its headline today for a story about the Florida governor's plan to ditch his floundering attempt to secure the GOP Senate nomination in favor of an independent run.

The story by Herald staffers Steve Bousquet, Adam C. Smith and Beth Reinhard painted Crist in a sympathetic light as a misunderstood statesman who's become a "pariah" to his party and has thus been "forced to run an unconventional race" (emphases mine):

TALLAHASSEE -- Gov. Charlie Crist, a pariah in the Republican Party that has been vital to his success, will launch a risky political career Thursday as a ``people's candidate'' for the U.S. Senate with no party affiliation.

Crist began telling campaign donors of his decision Wednesday, which he will announce at 5 p.m. at Straub Park in downtown St. Petersburg, surrounded by family members, friends, local supporters and an army of media personnel. It will be an extraordinary event in Florida's colorful political history, as a one-term governor who blew a 30-point lead in the Republican Senate primary is forced to run an unconventional race.

Americans love to talk sports. Polite Americans don't talk religion. So when those two things meet, the news media has no idea what to make of it.

Unfortunately for journalists, sports and religion - Christianity in particular - seem to be publicly mingling more often these days. Some star athletes are more outspoken in their faith, while many others regularly find themselves in need of spiritual, if not legal, redemption.

Liberals in the media don't understand religion and religious people, so when they surface on the playing field, the resulting coverage veers wildly from awkwardly respectful to clueless to downright contemptuous.

Fox's Brit Hume caused a firestorm by suggesting on air that Tiger Woods could find "forgiveness and redemption" in Christianity, rather than the casual Buddhism the golfer has said he practices. Woods, whose marriage and career are in melt-down because of his serial infidelities, should "turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world," Hume said. And in doing so, the former anchorman committed several mortal sins in modern secular America.

I'm not sure which is funnier about this Miami Herald story; that Adultery 101 was published in that newspaper or the fact that it was actually written by Herald staffers. It is so bizarre of a story that it should be marked down as a sign of desperation to attract readers in the midst of a calamitous circulation plunge.

So let us now join the Miami Herald staffers as they present their readers with "helpful tips" on how to commit adultery with a celeb shoutout to Tiger Woods:

So you're left scratching your head, wondering how a guy like Tiger Woods would allow himself to get caught cheating on his wife.

We're not saying we condone Tiger's actions -- the best way to not get caught cheating on a spouse or significant other is to not cheat on your spouse or significant other. But from observing celeb and non-celeb cheaters from the sidelines for years, following these basic rules would help one cover his tracks.

Attention all you folks who think of yourselves as counterculture types who demonstrate your rebelliousness by wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. The author of the most popular blog from Cuba, Yoani Sanchez who not only talks the talk but walks the walk, thinks you are absurd. The Generation Y blogger was the subject of a Miami Herald story on Saturday. We will get to her marvelous quote on the subject of Che T-shirts below the fold but first some fascinating information on the person who provides an inside look at what is really happening in Cuba which is often missed by news agencies on that island:

Yoani Sánchez, the blogger who has gained an international following detailing the absurdities of daily life in Cuba, is on the phone from her 14th-floor apartment in Havana, where the elevators rarely work. She speaks plainly, boldly, with none of the hemming and hawing common among folks on the island who fear their phones are tapped.

Sánchez is certain hers is. She is constantly followed, too. None of this stops her from finding ways, despite government attempts to block her, of continuing to post to Generación Y, the blog she launched in April 2007 and for which she has won several awards. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2008.

Over at Media Bistro, we find an odd story that has it all: foul language, boorish behavior, sexual harassment, a male U.S. Navy officer, and a female journalist. Only the story isn’t what you might think it would be considering the ingredients. In this case it is the naval officer filing a complaint against the female reporter for sexual harassment.

Media Bistro has learned that US Navy Commander Jeffrey D. Gordon has filed a sexual harassment complaint against the Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg with Gordon claiming that Rosenberg made comments about Gordon’s “sexual orientation,” repeatedly showered foul language upon him, and made comments of a sexual nature to him in the presence of others.

There seems to be an interesting rule of thumb lately in the newspaper business. Whenever a publisher delivers a pep talk about how well they are doing or about their future plans for improvement, it always signals bad news in the near future. And the more fervent the pep talk, the steeper the circulation plunge. This certainly has proved true with the Miami Herald. Here is a video from late March of the Herald publisher, David Landsberg, boldly promising better things in the future for that ailing newspaper:

We've all been dealing with a pretty steady diet of difficult financial news over the last few months. The Miami Herald Media company has taken actions to make sure that we can weather this financial downturn. We've got the largest reporting staff of any news organization in all of South Florida. Our readers tell us we make a difference in their lives and that is really important to us. The Miami Herald's commitment to South Florida won't change. That's something everyone can count on.

UPDATE: The Miami Herald has now taken down their ACN articles. Full report from McClatchy Watch.

Want to know what is going on in Cuba? Well, the Miami Herald is feeding its readers propaganda printouts from the Communist government's Cuban News Agency (ACN) and passing them off as legitimate news. What also makes this practice especially insidious is that the pages on which these stories appear makes it seem as if they are Associated Press stories (AP). Note the prominent capitalized "AP" in the URL of the Herald's most recent ACN story: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/cuba/AP/story/969447.html. And despite that "AP" this is not an AP story. It is strictly a copy and paste story from ACN or, more accurately, ACCN, Communist Cuban News Agency. So let us now take a look at a couple of the recent ACN propa...uh, news stories that have appeared in the Miami Herald including the most recent tender account of President/Dictator Raul Castro happily celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Cuban secret police aka State Security Services:

ACN  [psst! try not to notice us.]

HAVANA -- -- Cuban President Raul Castro today presided over the main ceremony for the 50th anniversary of the founding of Cuba’s State Security Services.

If you thought John Edwards was permanently gone from the political scene, you would be wrong. Unbelievably, Edwards is now tentatively taking steps to re-enter politics as you can read in this McClatchy report by Barbara Barrett which appeared in the Miami Herald. The idea of Edwards returning to politics might seem like an incredibly laughable notion to most of us but not to a certain Brown University professor of political science who takes it completely seriously as we shall see. Please stifle your laughter as you read about the grand return of John Edwards:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Former U.S. Sen. John Edwards took another tentative step into the public spotlight Tuesday, speaking at Brown University about extreme poverty around the world and urging Americans to get involved in what he called a "fundamental moral issue."

Edwards, a two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has struggled to get his message heard since a scandal about an affair he had with a former campaign staffer enveloped his personal life.

While Time's Tim Padgett insists that at its 50-year anniversary the Castro Revolution in Cuba "deserves its due," Huber Matos might agree, but for entirely different reasons. After all, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.

Matos, who fought alongside the brothers Castro to overthrow Fulgencio Batista, has long felt that the Castros betrayed the Cuban people by imposing a dictatorship, not restoring a democracy as they led him and other non-Communist revolutionaries to believe.

Matos now resides in south Florida and sat down for an interview with Miami Herald's Luisa Yanez to share his thoughts:

Remember Baghdad Bob? He was the Iraqi press spokesmen who caused much amusement in the West because of his unrealistically upbeat pronouncements when Iraq was invaded by the United States and its allies in 2003. Among Baghdad Bob's funnier announcements was his declaration that no Americans were in Baghdad at the same moment when American troops were patrolling the streets of that city just a few hundred yards from where he was holding that press conference. Well, the newspaper industry has its own Baghdad Bob in the form of McClatchy CEO, Gary Pruitt, who in early 2007 gave his own unrealistically upbeat reports to his company's employees on the purchase of Knight-Ridder in 2006. That purchase quickly turned into an utter disaster as evidenced that the former Knight-Ridder flagship newspaper, the Miami Herald, is now being put up for sale by McClatchy. Below are a few excerpts from the 2007 video of Pruitt performing his Baghdad Bob routine including a bizarre invocation of that great "philosopher," Lenny Kravitz:

Hi. I'm Gary Pruitt, CEO of McClatchy. This has been a busy year for all of us and I haven't been able to meet  with as many of you as I'd like. I hope to start changing that. But for now I would want to spend a few minutes here talking to you about our company. Where we've been and where we're headed. Let's start with last year. Conventional wisdom is that 2006 was a catastrophe for the newspaper industry. That's just not the case. 

"In Umm Qasr, the fighting is fierce and we have inflicted many damages. The stupid enemy, the Americans and British, failed completely. They're not making any penetration."

Covering a "sober summit" held in Lake Worth, Florida that "focused on boosting jobs and capping the rising costs of healthcare," Miami Herald's Lesley Clark noted that Sen. Barack Obama was joined on stage by the Democratic governors of the swing states of Colorado, Michigan, New Mexico, and Ohio:

''A crisis like this calls for the best ideas, the brightest minds, the most innovative solutions from every corner of this country,'' said Obama, who invited the Democratic governors of four key election states to share a stage with him, along with a small business owner from Miami, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker and the CEO of Internet giant Google.

Yet the 2008 Fiscal Policy Report Card by the libertarian Cato Institute found a C-average among those Democratic governors. By contrast McCain supporter Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R) earned an "A." Michigan's Gov. Jennifer Granholm -- who portrayed Gov. Sarah Palin (R) in Sen. Joe Biden's debate prep -- and Colorado's Gov. Bill Ritter were assigned "D"s for their advocacy of tax hikes (emphasis mine):

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air noted a revision to an existing Associated Press report carried in the Miami Herald yesterday. It concerned Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius's accusations that Republicans are engaging in racial "code word" campaigning.

The original version that Morrissey cached is here; the revision is here (for now; backup is at my web host here if it changes).

Among other adds, changes, and deletes, the revision deleted a racial reference in the original headline. It also removed a direct quote from Sebelius that "(Republicans) are not going to go lightly into the darkness."

Morrissey wasn't sure at the time he noted the revision whether the Herald or AP and writer Nigel Duara (with editorial help?) instigated the changes.

I can tell you that, as expected, it was AP, as the two Google News search pics taken during the noon hour Eastern Time show:

Perhaps it is time for the remaining Miami Herald employees to break out the Santeria rooster once again. Just three months after announcing job cutbacks in June, the Miami Herald has just announced that it is axing another 119 employees (emphasis mine):

Three months after announcing plans to trim 250 jobs, the Miami Herald Media Co. said Tuesday it is cutting another 119 positions, or about 10 percent of the remaining workforce.

Eighty full- and part-time employees will leave the company, while other, vacant jobs will be eliminated, Miami Herald President and Publisher David Landsberg said.

The company will ask for volunteers to leave and accept a severence package, but some of the cuts will be involuntary layoffs, Landsberg told employees in a memo Tuesday.

The cuts will include 23 positions in The Miami Herald newsroom, bringing the journalism staff to a total of 275.

Rarely do the media put their institutional political bias on public display, but this past weekend, America's news industry titans left no doubt that they're fully behind one of the nation's most radical cultural and political movements. 

ABC, AP, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the corporate owners of USA Today, the Miami Herald, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Sacramento Bee, The Dallas Morning News and many other newspapers, all spent thousands of dollars sponsoring the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association convention in Washington, D.C.  Many journalists from these Big Media mainstays attended or spoke at the convention. 

In the name of "diversity," all the organizations listed above ran recruiting booths, as did NPR.  Thus, the nation's major news providers demonstrated that they have bought into the central proposition of homosexual activists: that people engaging in homosexuality or bisexuality, along with transsexuals, are a historically oppressed minority group deserving the same preferential treatment and legal protections that society provides to ethnic minorities and women.

Can anybody out there figure out whom "undecided" Miami Herald columnist Myriam Marquez will ultimately vote for in the November election? Gee. It is really tough to figure it out but perhaps we can investigate a few elusive clues starting with the title of her column, "McCain must move past old Bush mantra." Hmm... Not enough information there. Perhaps we can discover Marquez's preference by analyzing her column which discusses the appearences of both candidates at the VFW convention in Orlando. First the money quote from Ms Marquez:

Still on the fence, like so many other undecided Americans, I'm hoping to see McCain move beyond the old Bush mantra of ''you're either with us or against us'' and patch this blue-state and red-state quilt into one proud nation again.

Ooh! She's on the fence and undecided. Right now, after viewing that Bush slam and the title, I still have absolutely no idea whom Marquez will vote for. Let us first investigate what she had to say about John McCain:

I've always liked McCain's independent style, but the statesman seems to have morphed into an intransigent mini-Bush.

The Miami Herald has reacted to charges that one of its opinion page contributors was a Cuban espionage agent with an article that is both low in substance and high in anger. The background to this story, about how the media is using "expert" analysis from professors identified by the U.S. government as Cuban spies, was reported last Tuesday in NewsBusters by Lynn Davidson. This is Davidson's description of that Herald opinion page contributor:

As if the media's coverage of Cuba isn't fawning enough, now they are using “expert” analysis from three professors that the US government has identified as spies.

Babalu Blog reported that, according to Army counterintelligence officer Chris Simmons, the US government believes at least three of the media's academic authorities on Cuba are actually spies working for the Cuban government. The suspected spies include a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, a Miami Herald board member and columnist and the director of Georgetown University's “Cuba Project.”

If these allegations are true, the danger isn't their potential to gather secrets. Instead, it's their ability to quietly shape opinion and influence public policy on Cuba through powerful academic groups, frequent media statements and slanted analyses as they maneuver within elite academic-think tank circles--and even brief government agencies and the military.

Miami Herald employees, worried about retaining their jobs due to severe cutbacks in the newspaper industry, have now looked to a Santeria 'rooster' (photo) for help. The rooster is actually a life sized replica with a note attached that says:

Brought in by a Santeria priest (the real deal from Hialeah) to help save our jobs. Leave an offering.

The rooster and the offerings were placed on a fifth floor counter last Thursday facing an elevator bank in the Herald building in Miami. Among the offerings placed on the counter by the end of that work day were coins, cigars, and a Virgin de Guadalupe candle. Perhaps the Herald employees need to make even more offerings since the McClatchy Company which owns the Miami Herald just announced big layoffs today:

The McClatchy Company (NYSE: MNI) announced today that it plans to reduce its workforce by about 10% as the company accelerates efforts to manage through today's difficult advertising market and position itself for future success in an increasingly competitive environment.

Miami Herald columnist, Andres Oppenheimer, is like a high school football player who just scored a touchdown. You can spot him in the end zone triumphantly spiking the football and performing his over the top victory dance. However there is something a bit too overenthusiastic about Oppenheimer's self-celebration as if he knows there is a huge caveat to his "victory."

You can read his not quite convincing "celebration" in his Miami Herald column, "About time! Reckless TV anchors put on spot:"

Bravo! A new study has found widespread fear-mongering and reckless journalism by cable television hosts such as CNN's Lou Dobbs and Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, who have made a career of bashing Hispanic undocumented immigrants and their home countries.

Gee! Doesn 't that sound impressive? However guess who did this "study?"

The study by Media Matters Action Network, a watchdog group, says Dobbs, O'Reilly and CNN's Glenn Beck serve up steady anger, resentment and myths ``seemingly geared toward creating anti-immigrant hysteria.''

The Miami (FL) Herald let lose with another propagandistic broadside against the 2nd Amendment on Thursday featuring some more moaning and false statements about how horrible it is for America that the misnamed "assault weapons ban" has lapsed. There is much wringing of hands, waterworks, histrionics and over dramatics by the aptly named Fred Grimm here. In "What's a few dead cops to the gun lobby?" Grimm's final pronouncement is that the 2nd Amendment is a "mythical right" but in between there are many misstatements and out right lies.

Grimm starts out putting on some faux "shock" that a modern "semiautomatic assault rifle" he had the occasion to handle was so light. "The shock was in the weight of the thing. Less than six pounds," Grimm writes. And, what exactly does this mean? A butcher knife weighs less then a pound and can kill, too. What does weight have to do with anything?

How many times will The New York Times publish a disreputable reporter's work before it learns its lesson?

Perhaps the third time will be the charm. Alexei Barrionuevo has under come under fire for plagiarism on two separate occasions, but the Times printed a story March 27 ("Salmon Virus Indicts Chile's Fishing Methods") by Barrionuevo anyway, prompting a response from the salmon industry.

Barrionuevo quotes Adolfo Flores in his article, identifying him as Port Director of Castro, Chiloe Island. But in a letter to the Times May 2, Eric McErlain, writing on behalf of Salmon of the Americas Inc (an industry group), pointed out major problems with the report.

"In actuality, Mr. Flores is simply a security guard who works for a third party contractor," McErlain wrote. "I've enclosed an English translation of a letter from Patricio Cuello, the general manager of the Port of Puerto Montt, which administers Castro, confirming this."

Yesterday, Gateway Pundit noticed what he called an "Uh-Oh... This wasn't supposed to happen" event for presidential candidate Barack Obama:

An amazing article appeared in the mainstream news today. McClatchy actually reported that Obama's church merges Marxism and Christian Gospel and preaches that the white church in America is the Antichrist because it supported slavery and segregation.

That they did. But how did they headline it, and how many McClatchy newspapers actually ran the story?

Margaret Talev's Thursday, March 20 description of the fundamental doctrines of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC) does get right to the point. Talev even goes so far as to question the candidate's motivations for his involvement with the church.

Most importantly, which I why I've bolded the related text, Talev notes that while TUCC's radical and racist philosophies will survive the Rev. Wright's retirement, their continued presence will not deter Obama from continuing to attend:

At NewsBusters we've been noticing the reticence the media are showing in characterizing the Castro Brothers regime in Cuba as a Communist dictatorship. Today's Miami Herald came a bit closer with its February 26 article ("Old-style socialist takes the No. 2 job in Cuba"), although it painted Raul Castro's deputy as a "devout socialist" and results-oriented problem-solver.

Of course, there are "devout socialist" politicians in numerous countries the world over who abide by the results of free and fair elections and respect the rule of law, two things sorely lacking in Cuba.

No matter, the Herald's Frances Robles seemed more interested in painting Raul Castro's number two as though he were Che Guevara with a hearing aid (emphasis mine):

Update 14:16 | Matthew Sheffield. The level of excusing and tip-toeing around the truth about Castro is staggering. As of 2:13 ET when you do a Google News search for "Fidel Castro" you come up with 7,520 results. Add the word dictator after it and you come back with 1,417. That's 81 percent less.

Just a few headlines from major newspapers as Fidel Castro has called it quits as dictator:

• Castro resigns, ending era in Cuba (LATimes.com front page)
• Fidel Castro to step down as Cuba's leader (LATimes.com article)
• Fidel Castro will step down after 50 years at Cuba's helm (Miami Herald)
• Castro resigns presidency (BaltimoreSun.com front page)
• Fidel Castro resigns Cuban presidency (AP article at BaltimoreSun.com)

None of those articles directly referred to Castro as a dictator. Here's how AP's Anita Snow danced around the matter of Fidel's autocracy, conceding that "detractors called him a dictator" while throwing in the favored defense leftists often throw up for Castro (emphasis mine):

Once again, the faux term "gun violence" is used as if the guns themselves are causing said violence, this time in a Miami Herald story. I have to say, this story by David Ovalle is amazing for the near Olympic grade gymnastics it shows as it twists the "tragedies" of death and casualties visited upon a family in the Little Haiti neighborhood into one blamed upon guns. The story starts off trying to make the reader feel sorry for this family that has seen so many of its members killed or catastrophically wounded by firearms. But as one reads on, one finds that this family is filled with drug dealers, murderers and thieves... not much like a hapless family "devastated" by "gun violence" but more like a bunch of criminals that deserve their fate.

After a headline that whines "Gun violence devastates Little Haiti family," we get several paragraphs about how this "devout Christian" family is being murdered one by one.

Here's a story from the Miami Herald that's worth keeping track of for coverage in the larger mainstream media, particularly the networks. I highly doubt this story will be a priority for the MSM, although I'm sure conservative bloggers and perhaps immigration reform activists will make sure the American people become aware of it:

Hundreds of wannabe truckers took a detour on the way to the DMV and got bogus commercial driver's licenses, thanks to an Army National Guard sergeant.

Friday morning, authorities threw up the stop sign.

In a series of early morning raids throughout Miami-Dade County Friday, authorities from federal, state and local agencies arrested five people they say obtained licenses fraudulently. Two others were taken into custody later.

More arrests are coming.

[...]