Castro Headlines/Labeling Watch
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…
CBS ‘Early Show’ Focuses on Hillary More than Republicans in Flori
On Tuesday’s CBS "Early Show," co-host Maggie Rodriguez reported from "Little Havana" in Miami, Florida at the top of the 7am hour, mentioning the tight Republican race only briefly before moving on to Hillary Clinton’s recent photo ops and fundraising efforts in the state:This is the biggest state to vote to date with the most delegates up for grabs for the Republican winner, 57. This morning it…
Financial Times: 'Castro Keeps World Guessing on Retirement
Writing in the January 16 Financial Times, reporter Marc Frank takes a look at Cuban politics as though it were an actual liberal democracy, not a Marxist dictatorship. Frank finds no irony or contradiction-in-terms in the way he qualifies the election as a public ratification of a pre-determined outcome. And in what amounts to a laughable print edition subheading, Frank's editor wrote this in…
WaPo Notes CIA Traitor's Death in Cuba, Fails to Note He Was Castro Ap
Yesterday fellow NewsBuster Matthew Balan and I wrote about media bias in Reuters and Associated Press reporting on the death of CIA turncoat Philip Agee. Today the Washington Post devoted a 23-paragraph obituary to Agee that was also somewhat lacking. The Post's Joe Holley did relay to readers that former President George H.W. Bush believes Agee's role in divulging the names of covert operatives…
Reuters Headline Labels CIA Traitor ‘Whistle-Blower
Reuters, in its headline for a story reporting the death of Philip Agee, a former CIA agent turned traitor, labeled Agee a "CIA whistle-blower" ("CIA whistle-blower Philip Agee dies in Cuba"). As the blog Little Green Footballs put it, Agee was "the traitor who exposed fellow CIA agents to violence and murder by revealing their names" in his 1975 book "Inside the Company: A CIA Diary."Agee, who…
AP Obit Paints Traitorous Ex-CIA Agent, Castro Apologist As Travel Age
Update (17:35): Paul Colford with AP e-mailed me with an updated obit posted at 14:40 EST that had more information. See more at bottom of the post. Philip Agee, a leftist who exposed fellow CIA operatives by name in a book he published in the 1970s has died in Cuba. Agee's perfidy was one reason Congress in 1982 passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. If that doesn't ring a bell, that…
Reuters Calls Cuban Refugees 'Migrants,' Faults US for Their Exodus
Reuters injected bias into this December 24 article about 40 missing Cuban “migrants” who never arrived in America after being smuggled out of Cuba. The article minimized Castro's oppression and faulted the US for the Cubans' flight. The wire service began by deliberately mischaracterizing the Cubans as “migrants” instead of calling them “refugees” or even “passengers.” Labeling them “migrants”…
Stunning! NYT Exposed Cuba's Socialist Poverty Without Blaming US
Is the New York Times changing? In an article about Old Havana's rebuilding, NYT reporter John C. McKinley, Jr. bucked the media habit of inserting leftist messages into articles about Cuba. Instead, he exposed the average Cuban's poverty, giving the state-run socialist economy as the cause--all without mentioning “free” health care or the US embargo.The NYT's December 6 article even described…
Penn, Glover Demand Travel Ban Lift; Ignore Cuban Oppression
Dictator-groupies Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover are at it again. They are among the “artists, scholars and performers” calling themselves “representatives of the cultural sphere in the US,” who sent a letter to President Bush asking him to “end the travel ban,” allowing a cultural exchange between nations. Most troubling is the group did not address Cuba's lack of freedom and…
Sean Penn: Hugo Chavez Is 'Much More Positive' for Venezuela Than Nega
Dictator-groupie Sean Penn told Australia's The Age that Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chavez is “much more positive for Venezuela than he is negative” and the Chavez-crafted constitution is “a very beautiful document.” Yes, that's the same leader who is a student of the Robert Mugabe School of Economics, shut down a TV station that criticized him and just installed himself El Presidente for life. …
