On September 8, 2006 a Miami Herald reporter named Oscar Corral wrote an article about several south Florida journalists that were moonlighting at Radio Martí and TV Martí (two U.S. government sponsored information outlets that target Cuba like the Voice of America targeted eastern Europe during the cold war). Some of the journalists named in the article were Corral’s colleagues at the Miami Herald Media Company, they worked for the Spanish language sister of the paper, El Nuevo Herald. Those journalists were fired as a result.
The Herald justified the firings by claiming that such moonlighting violated journalistic ethics. An excerpt from the Corral article:
Journalism ethics experts called the payments a fundamental conflict of interest. Such violations undermine the credibility of reporters to objectively cover key issues affecting U.S. policy toward Cuba, they said.
The episode was embarrassing for the Herald because it turns out that at least one of the fired journalists had obtained permission to do the moonlighting work from a previous editor and another one of the fired journalists had been featured in a Herald article several years earlier that mentioned the fact that she contributed to Radio and TV Martí.
The point is that the Herald went to great lengths to cleanse itself of perceived ethics violations by some of its employees. The sin the journalists committed was to be on the U.S. government payroll.
If we take the Herald’s pronouncements from that time seriously then what are we to make of Herald.com posting entire items from a Cuban government information agency as if it were coming from a legitimate independent news organization like Reuters or the Associated Press?
Is the Herald actually telling us between the lines that the U.S. government can’t be trusted but the Cuban government can?
The Miami Herald was listed as number 3 on Time Magazine’s list of The 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America. I can’t imagine why.
The herald is an unreadable commie poopsheet.
Isn’t it understandable why the Miami Feral employs Hiassen his fellow pink hacks to smear so-called ‘exile hardliners’ when one sees it from the perspective of freedom vs. communist tyranny?
Aren’t the Miami Feral and its drones, if not communist, at least far leftos?
Don’t the Miami Feral’s trained seals lie against anti-cagasstro ‘hardliners’ because they know they must? Look, doesn’t every scam artist first smear the innocent to shift scrutiny and blame away from himself? Isn’t that why crooks always cry about the cops picking on them? And isn’t communism just a criminal gang writ large, to quote the late Murray Rothbard?
The Miami Feral’s team of monkeys smear Exiles and the rest of we anti-communists because they can’t say anything good about their own philosophy – because it happens to be communism.
If the Feral closes, wouldn’t Hiassen and the rest of his blue-gummed baboons merely set up in some dumpster and crank out their marxist gibberish?
What else can they do? Nothing.
These people never grew past their 60s student radical days.
Do they realize how irrelevant they are to most of us?
Paul Vincent Zecchino
Manasoviet Key, Florida
28 March, 2009
Maybe Rupert Murdoch will agree to buy the rag and turn it into a rational, common sense paper. Could we resurrect the former Miami News, anything has to be an improvement. Cuanto me alegro….
Stay tuned. A year ago I wrote the following at Herald Watch:
The reason why most cities only have one or two newspapers is because of the relatively high barriers to entry. The cost of the printing presses and the actual distribution of the newspapers (trucks, fuel, laborers) are exorbitant. But as all readers migrate away from the dead-tree editions those barriers that the old-line newspapers used as a moat will turn into anchors around their necks. What’s to prevent a small or mid-sized media company from setting up a 100% ad-supported online only news web site in Miami? Nothing
This day is coming soon. I’m already hearing rumblings from one group.
Awesome, I truly pray it arrives!