Fidel Castro

First it was New York Times reporters who were quoting unelected Cuban dictator Fidel Castro insulting the “idiocy and ignorance” of the two lead candidates for the GOP nomination, in a January 26 story. Now columnist Thomas Friedman gets in on the act, quoting Castro approvingly in Sunday’s “Made in the World.”

Who cares what an unelected dictator thinks about the U.S. presidential campaign? Well, New York Times reporters do. Michael Shear and Trip Gabriel were in Miami following the campaign in the runup to next Tuesday’s Florida primary and quoted Fidel Castro in Thursday’s “Candidates Scramble to Win Hispanic Voters in Florida.”

They even suggested the dictator (who they merely called “the retired Cuban leader”) “had reason to be annoyed” at threats voiced by Republican candidates Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.

A disgusted Andrea Mitchell on Thursday decried the "anti-Castro vitriol" coming from Republican presidential candidates in Florida, sneering that they are "pander bears" to the Cuban community. [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Teasing a discussion with Chuck Todd, Mitchell dismissed the GOP contenders: "And as Romney and Gingrich try to outdo each other with their anti-Castro vitriol, appealing to Florida voters, they think, Fidel weighed in today with his view of them." Todd lectured that Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney "ought to be careful, because it doesn't sound believable."

This week the Today show is celebrating 60 years of being on the air, and for over 20 of those years the MRC has been documenting the NBC morning show’s liberal agenda. From past anchors like Bryant Gumbel blaming “right wing” talk radio for the Oklahoma City bombing and  Katie Couric trashing Ronald Reagan as an “airhead,” up through current anchor Matt Lauer wondering how Barack Obama would “manage the expectations” of being called “The Messiah,”
MRC analysts have been documenting the worst the show has offered.

The following are 10 of the most obnoxiously liberal examples of Today show bias from the MRC’s archive; for even more bias from the Today show anchors please visit the Profile in Bias pages of Gumbel, Couric, Lauer, Meredith Vieira and Ann Curry. (Top 10 Video Countdown after the jump)

Last March, Venezuelan raised actress Maria Conchita Alonso wrote a NewsBusters published open letter to Sean Penn in which she scolded the Oscar winner for his ill-informed support of Hugo Chavez.

On Sunday, Alonso had a run-in with Penn at the Los Angeles airport, and as she told Steve Malzberg filling in for Chris Plante on WMAL radio Monday, she ended up calling her foe a "communist a--hole" (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary, mild vulgarity warning):

Tuesday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), yours truly noted an email from the Associated Press's Images Group which encouraged subscribing outlets to use its "iconic images and videos" to promote the 85th birthday of Fidel Castro, the "Legendary Cuban revolutionary and longtime leader."

Today, writing what may be the wire service's last calendar-driven excuse to heap praise on him while he is still alive, the AP's Peter Orsi described Cuban dictator Castro as a "revolutionary icon" with an "outsize persona," who in his prime was "a gregarious public speaker," and while in retirement remains a "prolific writer."

Communist Cuba's Castro brothers may be asking themselves why they need to engage in any propaganda on their own when they have Associated Press's Images Division promoting photos of Dear Leader Fidel Castro as "iconic" and the brutal Ché Guevera as a "revolutionary hero."

What follows is the text of an email NewsBusters and BizzyBlog commenter/correspondent Gary received from AP Images on Monday. It's so over the top that you almost wonder if it's a gag. This link proves that it's not. Here goes (complimentary words and descriptive flattery bolded by me):

Last November, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell admitted on air to being a socialist.

In a segment on "The Last Word" Tuesday addressing how Cuba - a country nearing economic ruin - is moving towards capitalism, O'Donnell said, "We are all socialists in this country who support public education, state funded universities, government-run hospitals, Medicare, Social Security, classic socialistic programs that have sensibly found their way into the American economy" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The guess here is Associated Press writers Peter Orsi and Andrea Rodriguez believe their May Day dispatch from Cuba represents an example of objectivity and insightful analysis. Anyone with knowledge of how a country under the iron grip of a five-decade Communist dictatorship really operates would beg to differ.

CNN International's Zain Verjee on Monday's Newsroom highlighted The Guardian's left-wing talking point that the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabby Giffords "points to the rise of political extremism in the United States." Verjee also bizarrely played up a post from al-Jazeera's website which speculated whether the U.S. would blame Islam for the shootings in Arizona [audio available here].

Anchor Kyra Phillips brought on the CNN International anchor 53 minutes into the 9 am Eastern hour to report on international reactions to the violence, and asked, "So, what are the headlines there, starting in Great Britain, Zain?"

Verjee launched right into The Guardian's headline as she held up a copy of the newspaper:

[Video embedded below the page break]

How about that, there's someone on the airwaves more unhinged than liberal radio talker and MSNBC heat miser Ed Schultz. And go figure, that someone happens to be a frequent Schultz guest.

But between his appearance on Schultz's radio show Nov. 22 and Schultz's MSNBC program several hours later, the caffeine apparently wore off for Mike Papantonio, a lawyer and co-host of the radio show "Ring of Fire," seeing how Papantonio dialed down his remarks from what he initially told Schultz.

Here's what Papantonio said during the first hour of Schultz's radio show Monday between noon and 1 p.m. while complaining about President Obama's upcoming appearance before the US Chamber of Commerce (audio and video below page break) --

 

Appearing as a guest on Saturday’s Huckabee show on FNC, actor Jon Voight condemned Time magazine for the cover on its September 13 issue which provocatively displays the words "Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace" in the middle of a Star of David made from daisies. Voight charged that there must be anti-Semitism at Time magazine if such a cover could be devised. Voight:

Listen, if Israel falls we all fall. Did you see the Time magazine, did you guys see the Time magazine cover? Cover? It was amazing. Here's a cover with a Star of David on it, and it says Israel doesn't care about peace. ... But this is anti-Semitism. This is, who are the anti-Semites who are running Time magazine? And their prior cover, you know, they alluded to the Islamophobia, they're calling America Islamophobic.

As previously documented by NewsBusters, Time managing editor Richard Stengel bizarrely seemed to see a down side to fewer terrorist attacks against Israelis when he appeared on the Thursday, September 2, Morning Joe on MSNBC, as he suggested that it was a "sad truth" that the low level of recent violence from terrorists -- including the "Hamas folks" -- had made Israelis feel less urgency about negotiating with Palestinians. Stengel:

The ABC, CBS and NBC evening new shows have yet to notice Fidel Castro's astonishing admission that Cuban Communism does not work. But non-journalist Jay Leno brought the news to his Tonight Show audience on Thursday, joshing:  "Most Cubans heard this announcement on a 1954 RCA Deluxe console TV -- beautiful black-and-white, all mahogany...." (Video at right)

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg recounted Castro's confession in a September 8 post:

During the generally lighthearted conversation (we had just spent three hours talking about Iran and the Middle East), I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting.

Editor's Note: Media Research Center (MRC) President Brent Bozell released the following statement earlier today -- available here on his official Facebook page. The NewsBusters publisher praised Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank for denouncing the "clinic" that President Obama put on "for some of the world's greatest dictators in how to circumvent a free press" in his April 14 column, "Obama's disregard for media reaches new heights at nuclear summit":

It's a rare occurrence that the MRC and the typically left-leaning Dana Milbank agree, but this time he is spot on. Indeed, President Obama must have made world leaders feel as if they were transported back to a ‘Soviet-era Moscow' for the media restricted nuclear energy summit instead of arriving in the capitol of the free world."

But are we really surprised? After all, this is the same President who has won lavish praise from some of the world's most brutal dictators including Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro."

If Fidel Castro and Sean Penn are in the same room, which one do you think hates America more?

Such a question doesn't seem to concern Vanity Fair who according to the website TMZ has hired Penn to write an article about how Barack Obama and his administration have impacted Cuba.

As reported by Agence France-Presse Sunday (h/t Big Hollywood):

"As Castro Turns 83, Cuba Caught Between Past, Future," announces an August 13 headline for the CBSNews.com World Watch blog.

The 10-paragraph entry by Havana-based news producer Portia Siegelbaum amounted to an electronic birthday card for the Communist dictator.

No Castro critics, domestic or foreign, were cited in the story, although Siegelbaum made sure to note how a "U.S.-based religious group, Pastors for Peace" got to hang out on Wednesday with the aging despot.

Yet Siegelbaum failed to note the leftist political bent of Pastors for Peace, describing it merely as "an anti-embargo organization." The Web site for Pastors for Peace, a project of the Interreligious Foundation for -- wait for it -- Community Organization (IFCO), insists that its purpose is:

It is not surprising that such far left Hollywood celebrities as Sean Pean and Danny Glover would support an outright communist dictatorship in Cuba but many other seemingly sane folks also have expressed their sympathy for Fidel Castro. I'm talking about people like Kevin Costner and Steven Spielberg. Costner is not known for any extreme leftwing politics and Spielberg, while liberal, has embarrassed himself with his support for the communist regime. Why? Well, we might have the answer: blackmail.

According to an article by Humberto Fontova pubished in the Canada Free Press, it was the task of a high ranking former Cuban intelligence official to bug the hotel rooms of visiting celebrities:

“My job was to bug their hotel rooms,” says high-ranking Cuban intelligence defector Delfin Fernandez. “With both cameras and listening devices. Most people have no idea they are being watched while they are in Cuba. But their personal activities are filmed under orders from Castro himself.”

Ever notice the media love to report stories about people fighting the power, unless, of course, the power happens to be something the media favor?

A March 31 New York Times article about Cuba's Havana Biennial art festival highlighted several artists whose political statements were in line with the anti-American, communist outlook of the island's regime, while ignoring prominent Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez, who risked her freedom to protest government oppression.

During an open mic session at the festival, the award-winning Generacion Y blogger criticized Cuban policy and the lack of free expression. However, the Times did not mention her pro-free speech performance art or even cover it in a separate piece. Instead, most of the artists the paper described railed against the usual evils, such as capitalism, America and the bourgeoisie.

Afterwards, the government issued a condemnation that singled out Sanchez for “staging a provocation against the Cuban Revolution.” Fortunately, on Wednesday, Reuters reported the controversy:

Is the Cuban government pulling off a Weekend At Bernie's scenario with a deceased Fidel Castro in the role of Bernie? That is the rumor floating around South Florida. MSNBC has reported on this possibility but in doing so they have smeared Cuban Americans with a complete lie which WBPF-TV where they got the report eventually corrected (emphasis mine).

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Fidel Castro hasn't appeared publicly in more than two years.

The 82-year-old's time out of view has many people in South Florida wondering about the Cuban leader's health and future.

There has been a lot of speculation within the Cuban-American community about whether Castro is dead or alive.

The fiftieth anniversary of Fidel Castro’s Iron Curtain around Cuba may suggest that in some dark corners of the world, Soviet-style communism still lives. But it also demonstrates that antique "peaceful coexistence" bias is as persistent as the Castro brothers. Time magazine is still demonstrating the tired tendency of moral equivalence, treating the free world and the miniaturized communist world as bickering kids who should hang up their boxing gloves. Tim Padgett wrote:

The Cuban revolution deserves its due: it overthrew the putrid Batista regime and showed the U.S. that its worst impulses could be thwarted. But after 50 years, maybe it's time for both sides to move toward (yes) a resolution.

How are America’s "worst impulses" proven to be morally exceeded by Castro’s reign of poverty and oppression? How is Batista "putrid" and Castro so obviously superior? Can’t both be regrettable dictators? But Time finds no moral equivalence there. Padgett insisted it’s time for grown-ups to take over the diplomacy, and Obama is just in time. Dictatorship is to be treated with light humor:

Fidel will someday disappear, but MSM nostalgia for the Cuban revolution is forever.  Good Morning America devoted a segment today to celebrations in Havana marking the 50th anniversary of Castro's dictatorship.  The thrust of Jim Avila's report was that, yeah, there are those who "complain" about that oppression stuff, but the key is that Cuba is free from los Yanquis!

JIM AVILA: It is Raul Castro who now runs the country, with Fidel incapacitated.  He brought the celebration back to where in 1959, he, Fidel and Che Guevara came out of the Sierra Maestra mountains to overthrow the American-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista.

Cut to clip of Batista and Pres. Nixon exchanging smiles and a handshake.  Funny: Avila referred to Batista as a "dictator", but never used that term for the Castro boys.

AVILA: That was ten American presidents ago. And while many Cubans complain about economic conditions and oppression, most still take pride in their independence. 

Associated Press writer Will Weissert apparently thought that the Communist government in Cuba wasn't doing a good enough job of white washing and glorifying Fidel Castro's legacy and decided to try his hand at it. Thus he wrote a little piece describing the humble hut that Castro used as a head quarters during his Communist rebellion:

Before he was Cuba's unchallenged "Maximum Leader," Fidel Castro was a guerrilla warrior who slept in a hut made of sticks and palm leafs, with a hole-in-the-ground outhouse at the bottom of a hill.

Tuesday’s The O’Reilly Factor on FNC showed a pre-recorded interview with CNN founder Ted Turner, in which O’Reilly got Turner to admit that he and Jane Fonda, who both opposed America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, had ignored the slaughter of millions by the Khmer Rouge communists in Southeast Asia after America’s withdrawal from the region. Turner: "You got me. I didn’t really think about it. You know, it didn’t make the news very much at the time."

The CNN founder, who was appearing to promote his biography, "Call Me Ted," readily admitted to "admiring" Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and expressed doubt when O’Reilly argued that Castro had murdered many people. Turner: "Well, I admire certain things about him. He’s trained a lot of doctors, and they’ve got one of the best educational systems in the developing world, and, you know, he’s still popular with a lot of people down there. He’s unpopular with a lot of people, too." After O’Reilly injected, "But he’s a killer. He’s a killer," Turner responded: "He’s not, that has never, to my knowledge, that’s never been proven."

But Turner only reluctantly praised President Bush after O’Reilly argued that Bush "has saved more lives, sent more money, and provided more medical care for the citizens of all the countries of Africa than any human being that’s ever lived." Turner: "I think he made a lot of mistakes, too, but you can’t, he did some good things, but I think you basically, he’s got a good heart."

Who would you think is more concerned with the best interest of the United States? Americans? Or those in other countries?

If you chose the latter, then you are likely a liberal. You are also, apparently, like many other countries in the world. Countries that will go from respecting the authority of this nation, to snickering behind our backs at the possibility of electing a President who thinks the world is his constituency, and not his native country.

The media is unconsciously making this obvious, by revealing what may be a major reason we should be concerned about the possibility of the phrase ‘President Barack Obama.’

The world is salivating at the prospect of appeasement, and that will be Obama’s number one foreign policy platform.

Just check out these Election Day headlines:

CNN, following the same vein as the Associated Press, highlighted how Elian Gonzalez is now a member of Cuba’s Young Communist League. Correspondent Shasta Darlington reported on Monday’s "American Morning" that the newly-minted communist "vowed he would always follow the examples of Fidel Castro and his brother, Raul, Cuba's new president." She also acknowledged unquestioningly Fidel Castro’s "personal relationship" with the boy.

Darlington, reporting live from Havana, introduced her report by announcing that Elian took his "first step that, for a select few, lead to a bright political future in Cuba." She then gave a short summary of the custody dispute over the child eight years ago, during which she stated that "Fidel Castro himself led the ideological battle to bring Gonzalez back to Cuba and his father."

Leave it to the mainstream media to highlight the latest "accomplishment" of the Castros’ oppressive regime.

One of Yahoo.com’s front page news items Monday morning linked to a story from the Associated Press about Elian Gonzalez’s entrance into Cuba’s Young Communist Union. The short uncredited story put the news this way:

The Cuban boy at the center of an international custody battle eight years ago has joined Cuba's Young Communist Union.

Communist youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde quotes Elian Gonzalez as saying he will never let down ex-President Fidel Castro and his brother Raul Castro, who succeeded Fidel earlier this year.

They may not have food to put on their tables, but at least Cuban citizens can text message about it now.

CBS's "Early Show" gave a fairly glowing report from the May Day celebration in Havana, Cuba, May 1, on changes Cuban President Raúl Castro has made in the country. Reporter Elizabeth Palmer called the leader's brother, Fidel Castro, a "revolutionary hero."

Fidel Castro handed provisional power to Raúl Castro, his younger brother, in July 2006. Raúl Castro officially took over the presidency in February 2008 after Fidel Castro fell ill.

Anchor Russ Mitchell said the May Day celebrations in Cuba signaled a "new era" for the country, and Palmer touted reforms like "cell phones," "text-messaging," opening of "resort hotels" to Cuban citizens and "shiny new Chinese buses."

On Thursday's The Situation Room on CNN, Time magazine's managing editor, Richard Stengel, suggested that the 1961 Bay of Pigs attempt to overthrow Cuban dictator Fidel Castro should not have been planned, as he assigned some of the blame for the fiasco to President Eisenhower for planning it in the first place. During a discussion of the importance of experience for a new President, Stengel contended: "John Kennedy, when he was first elected, very inexperienced President, got us into the Bay of Pigs. Terrible mistake. But who planned the Bay of Pigs? Dwight Eisenhower." (Transcript follows)