Let's all trash the media

No one announced that last week was to be Attack the Media Week, but it sure seemed that way.

On May 21, Cuban culture minister Abel Prieto spoke at a Caracas forum, “The citizen’s right to inform and be informed,” sponsored by Telesur, the Venezuelan government’s international television network. He noted, according to a Cuban news report from the scene, that the major news media “exclude the authentic popular cultures of the Latin American peoples” and only serve “the ideological interests of the hegemonic apparatus.” Hmmm.

The minister then trekked to Cochabamba, Bolivia, where he spoke at the “Fifth Encounter of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity,” where it was decided that a committee should be formed, AP reported, to “observe media conduct” with the mission of “morally sanctioning journalists who disinform the people.” Prieto mused about “jailing a media owner, with pleasure we would put him in jail for life, for lying, for confusing the people.”

Bolivian President Evo Morales, upon receiving the intellectuals’ and artists’ conclusions, noted that the “first adversary that my presidency, my government has, is certain communications media.” We’ll make a note of that, Evo.

Later, back in Caracas, the government terminated the license of RCTV television, forced it off the air Sunday night, seized its equipment, and began broadcasts of Venezuelan Social Television, TVES. Officials criticized the content of a remaining independent news station and CNN.

Then on Saturday in Havana, an article by Maria Julia Mayoral in Granma accused foreign media accredited in Cuba of “manipulation” and linked the media with the U.S. government’s “lies and disinformation” about Cuba. The major media, “including wire services, have for more than four decades participated, by action and inaction, in the media war.”

Mayoral nods to the independence of the international media: “One cannot…ask that any foreign news agency follow the standards of the Cuban revolutionary press, but the marked differences are not coincidental.” She then complains that coverage of “Los Cinco,” the convicted Cuban agents in U.S. federal prison, is sparse and unsympathetic. Coverage of the Luis Posada Carriles case, she writes, lacks detail about Posada’s checkered past. Coverage of Cuban dissidents, she believes, is excessive.

Havana-based correspondents have written about “Los Cinco” and Cuba’s energetic campaign to secure their release. But they have not covered every phase of that campaign, probably because of a judgment that a government campaign, in Havana or anywhere else, is not in itself news.

Regarding Posada, it seems Mayoral has never done a Google news search. Posada’s coverage has not been flattering.

And regarding the dissidents, foreign media have reported Cuba’s accusation that the dissidents are paid agents of the United States. They also report the dissidents’ opinions and their disagreements. In Miami, there are those who lambaste the Havana-based correspondents because, in their long-distance news judgment, the dissidents are a pre-eminent factor in Cuban politics and deserve far more coverage than they get.

Cuban officials know that real reporters don’t participate in campaigns, and they don’t take dictation. I can only assume that this article is directed to the Cuban domestic audience, and to the correspondents themselves, maybe as a shot across the bow.