Here at NewsBusters, we often bring you irrational rants from paranoid lefties who are certain that Chimpy Bush McHitler is trying to become dictator of America, enslave anyone to the left of Pat Robertson, and personally assasinate Pinch Sulzberger.
Now, for a change of pace, here's Val Prieto on some real journalists who actually are living in a totalitarian government. Here's an excerpt but the entire piece is very well worth reading:
Right now there remain at least two dozen independent journalists incarcerated in Cuba simply because they dared speak the truth. Some have been locked away since 2003, still in the infancy of their 15 or 20 year sentences. Truth has made them suffer beatings, torture and malnutrition. Truth has mocked, ridiculed, and subjected them to abject horrors and indignity.
All because they bear witness to the world around them and dare describe it nakedly and without their government’s official veil.
There are many journalists from around the world in Havana. CNN is there. Reuters, the AP. They live comfortably in hotel rooms and work in comfortable in air-conditioned offices full of amenities. They have the copy machine. They have the faxes and computers and printers and scanners. They have staff and editors. What they don’t have is the security to report the truth. They trade that truth away, to keep a bureau and a staff. They walk on eggshells when they should be stomping the ground beneath them with integrity and zeal. With the hunger to dig, to dig deep enough to get to the real story that needs to be screamed aloud, at the tops of their lungs, for the entire world to hear.
Yet we hear no screams of injustice from the foreign reporter’s pool in Havana. We hear only the chirping. We here the Polly-wannacrackers of fidel castro’s propaganda machinery. It’s more important, you see, to keep a bureau in Havana, just in case the big story breaks, than to report the obvious failure of a system, and the systematic enslavement of a people.
To bear witness to the subjugation of journalism, you need look no further than Cuba.
