11 days after the bombshell Oscar Corral article that appeared in the Miami Herald, its editors are finally getting around to publishing some of the responses from the protagonists.
Today Juan Manuel Cao's letter was published in The Herald. It was published in El Nuevo Herald last Thursday the 14th. And also in today's Herald appeared a letter from Miguel Cossio, another one of the implicated journalists (His letter the Spanish version had been published in El Nuevo Herald on Friday Semptember 15th). He says, among other things:
It is not fair to judge journalists working for other entities by the internal policies of The Miami Herald.And I suppose that's right. Who died and made the Herald the arbiter of journalistic ethics for any entity outside of 1 Herald Plaza?
Likewise today a column by Frank Calzon appeared in the Herald defending the implicated journalists.
Perhaps my email exchange with Tom Fiedler and Joe Oglesby yesterday made them re-think the lopsided coverage they were giving the affair relative to El Nuevo Herald. Today's Herald has a much more balanced approach, at least in the opinion pages.
In addition to these and other letters that were sympathetic to the journalists, a column by Sam Terrilli, a professor of journalism at the University of Miami, also ran in today's Herald. Terrilli expounds on why it was wrong for the journalists to to work for an agency of the federal government. He blames the government for the mess but makes no mention of how long this has been going on, not just with Cuban-American journalists and Radio Marti, but with VOA and other government-funded media.
3 comments:
Terrilli's argument is flawed at best, deliberately misleading at worst.
Fact of the matter is that no reporter working at the Miami Herald is part of an independent press. As long as they are employed by the Miami Herald and are paid by the Miami Herald they are a de facto voice of the Miami Herald. Their reports are assigned by the Miami Herald for the Miami Herald and edited by editors of the Miami Herald.
And the Miami Herald isnt in business just to provide the community with news, they are in business to make money. Thus, the nes is, in essence, a product they manufacture since it is they who choose what stories to cover, it is they who decide who covers said story, it is they who edit said story, it is they who decide where said story gets placed in said paper, it is they who provide the headline for said story and it is they who are competing, as any business does, with other news manufacturers not to get the news out first, but to reap the economic rewards via the prestige that breaking news stories garners.
The plain and simple fact is that the Marti Moonlighters worked for a cause thy believed in - a free Cuba and the Miami Herald works to make people richer.
Plus, being that the Miami Herald is the only major newspaper in Miami, when a story like the DeFede firing occurs, do you really trust the Herald itself to report the entire story without covering up certain aspects of same?
Claro que no.
I also noticed the Herald's delayed publishing of more balanced views.
If they would have been as cautious and deliberate with the handling of the Marti Moonlighters as they were in publishing differing viewpoints, we probably wouldn't be talking about this right now.
I'd love to see how many people who signed the El Nuevo blog petition also signed DeFede's last year.
Benigno Dou; El Jefe de Redaccion El Nuevo Herald is on the list of Sexual Offenders for the State of Florida, this is the paper that talks about etics....
see the link
http://offender.fdle.state.fl.us/offender/flyer.do?personId=25280
Post a Comment