A witch-hunt gone wrong

A witch-hunt gone wrong

By Henry Louis Gomez
September 18, 2006

On September 8th, 2006, Miami Herald reporter Oscar Corral launched a
witch-hunt against eleven fellow journalists with the full consent of
his bosses Jesus Díaz Jr., the president of The Miami Herald Publishing
Company and Tom Fiedler, the Herald’s executive editor. The headline
read, “10 Miami journalists take U.S. pay” (apparently the Herald’s
headline editor can’t count). The sin they were accused of committing
was violating a ''sacred trust'' between journalists and the public
according to Díaz Jr.,

You see, these eleven soldiers of truth had been moonlighting for the
Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB), the governmental office that operates
Radio Martí and TV Martí, two stations that are the only source of
credible uncensored news and information that many Cubans have access to.

Using anonymous “experts on journalistic ethics” as their cover, Corral
and his superiors alleged that the objectivity of the eleven journalists
would, by necessity, be in question since they cover Cuba and Cuba-U.S.
relations and were being paid by an agency of the U.S. government. It
looked like an open and shut case for Corral and his masters, a clear
conflict of interest. Two El Nuevo Herald journalists (the
Spanish-language sister publication of The Miami Herald) were fired and
a third who was a freelancer was also terminated. Soon the official
Cuban press picked up on the story and so did the rest of the
America-hating international media. Even anti-Castro Cuban Americans
were left shaking their heads.

But Corral et al did not realize that they had sprung open a Pandora’s
box of scrutiny on themselves. As the facts of Martí Moonlighters have
come out, it has been one embarrassment after another for The Miami Herald.

Let’s start with Corral’s original shoddy reporting. Photographs of 10
journalists were on display, yet the names of two of the faces in the
‘gallery of the accused’ were not mentioned anywhere in the body of the
article, while the 11th defendant was named but not pictured. Are you
following me?

Corral also failed to make a distinction between reporters and
columnists/commentators. There are obviously different standards of
objectivity for the two jobs. Most egregious was the inclusion in the
article of the brilliant syndicated columnist Carlos Alberto Montaner,
whose column the Herald purchases. Montaner is neither from Miami nor is
he employed by any media outlet. He writes columns, which are then sold
to numerous outlets worldwide by his agency. Montaner has no obligation
to disclose who purchases his material or otherwise pays him to expound
on the subject of his expertise, Cuba. Montaner explained this quite
clearly in a letter he wrote to El Nuevo Herald’s executive editor,
Humberto Castelló which was published in that paper the next day and not
in The Miami Herald, the newspaper responsible for the hatchet job,
until 3 days after that. Obviously The Miami Herald agrees that Montaner
did nothing wrong because he is still listed as a contributing columnist
on the Herald’s web site and the paper continues to run his columns.
When I asked Díaz Jr., via email, if Mr. Montaner deserved an apology I
received no comment.

Olga Connor was a freelance culture reporter for El Nuevo Herald. The
paper terminated its relationship with her after Corral “discovered”
that she was being paid to host a radio show for OCB. There was one
problem though, an enterprising reporter from The Miami Herald had
written a story about Radio Marti in 2002 in which it was mentioned that
Ms. Connor hosted a twice-weekly radio show for the station and was paid
$440 per show. Ms. Connor was working as freelancer for El Nuevo Herald
at the time too. For four years Ms. Connor continued to moonlight for
Radio Marti without any complaint from her supervisors. That is until
September 8th when her bosses apparently had a crisis of conscience.

Then there’s the case of Omar Claro, one of the faces that appeared in
the September 8th condemnation without any charges. On September 9th The
Herald, apparently realizing its gaffe, published a follow-up article by
Corral to level the appropriate accusations. Omar Claro is a
sportscaster for the local Univisión station. Mr. Claro’s violation was
that he was also a sportscaster for Radio/TV Martí. That’s right,
because of his part-time job with OCB, his objectivity about why Alex
Rodríguez, the third baseman for the New York Yankees, was slumping, and
other such important issues in the world of sports, was now in question.
Of course this was the conflict of interest of utmost importance in a
city where the voice of Miami Dolphins, Jimmy Cefalo (a paid employee of
the team), is also the sports director and lead sports anchor for one of
the leading television stations.

As the days passed, things only got worse for Corral and the top brass
at the Herald. On September 12th, a columnist for El Nuevo Herald named
Ernesto Betancourt, who happened to be the first director of Radio Martí
back in the 80s, resigned his position but not before revealing in his
final column that Radio Martí faced the same issues, regarding the
compensation part-time journalists to round out the station’s personnel,
as the venerated Voice of America (VOA) did with its worldwide network
of “stringers”. He said the VOAs controversy ultimately died down and
payments to journalists that contributed reports or sat in on panels
were deemed acceptable by all involved.

I’m assuming that Josh Gerstein of The New York Sun sensed a bigger
story was still untold when he scooped Corral’s “scoop” and reported on
September 12th that many Washington journalists accept appearance fees
for participating in VOA broadcasts. Among them are Martin Schram, a
columnist for the Scripps Howard newspaper chain and David Lightman of
the Hartford Courant. The two journalists tried to distance themselves
from the OCB “scandal” by saying that the stations run by OCB are
“ideological” and that VOA is “nothing like Radio Martí.” But they
couldn’t be more wrong. You see, VOA and OCB are both under the
authority of International Broadcasting Bureau. Not only that, Radio/TV
Martí are, by federal statute, required to adhere to the same code of
journalistic ethics as VOA, a code that, unlike The Miami Herald’s, is
public record. The aim of OCB is identical to that of VOA, namely to
provide credible and uncensored information to people that would
otherwise have no access to it. Lightman’s bosses apparently didn’t see
the distinction either as it was reported in his paper on September 16th
that he would no longer be a contributor on VOA programs.

Surely the higher-ups at 1 Herald Plaza were thinking to themselves “But
still, the Martí Moonlighters had a connection to the federal government
and that can’t be right. Right?” Yet they should have known that they
themselves did not have clean hands in the matter, because it turns out
the top man at The Herald, Jesus Díaz Jr., sits on the advisory board of
the Cuba Transition Project (CTP), a government funded group. When asked
why that is not a conflict of interest, Mr. Díaz Jr. told me in an email
that he is neither a “reporter nor an editor” nor does he “work in the
newsroom.” But his subordinate Humberto Castello, the executive editor
of El Nuevo Herald is an editor and, while his office might not be in
the newsroom, he is the man responsible for its output, and he too sits
on the advisory board of the Cuba Transition Project. Castelló did not
respond to my questions about his role on the advisory board but Díaz
Jr. claims that he has never attended a meeting and only received
materials from the CTP. When asked what was expected of him as a member
of an advisory board, apart from reading materials, Mr. Díaz Jr.
declined to respond. Díaz Jr. and Castelló should have remembered the
old saw about people living in glass houses with a propensity for
throwing stones. I hear a shattering sound.

About three weeks before Corral’s article was published, Reinaldo
Taladrid, one of Fidel Castro’s flacks, said on Cuban TV that members of
the Miami press were being paid by the federal government. The Herald
claims they had made Freedom of Information Act requests, that yielded
the “smoking gun” from OCB about two weeks before the article was
published. You do the math.

In an effort to discredit distinguished Cuban-American journalists,
Oscar Corral and his superiors managed to: show themselves to be
incompetent, besmirch the reputation of the Voice of America (whose
stringers are among the most persecuted journalists in the most
dangerous parts of the world), and manage to alienate a large portion of
its declining readership by becoming a tool of the most despicable
regime in the hemisphere. The good news is that we found the witches.
They weren’t the ones we thought they were, but we found them.

Bravo!

http://www.babalublog.com/archives/003994.html