The Miami Herald’s mediaocracy

MIAMI – I was stumped. It was 5:30 p.m. on Sunday and I still hadn’t decided what I wanted to write about for Progreso this week. Then I searched Google news and learned the terrible news that a plane from Malaysia to China with 239 people aboard was missing. The circumstances made it plain that what this really meant was 239 dismembered corpses lying in the middle of the ocean.

Although I usually don’t write about disasters, the scale of the tragedy piqued my curiosity. I immediately searched the web site of the three American newspapers I consult regularly.

The New York Times not only had the story placed in the prime news hole, its article was already discussing “disparate theories” about the causes of the crash.

The Washington Post site also featured the crash as the top story of the day, including some late breaking information.

Then I went to the site of my hometown newspaper. In the Herald, at that hour there was no mention at all of the catastrophe. There was a lot about Calle Ocho, troubles in Venezuela, and the anger of the usual Cuban exile dinosaurs over a cultural exchange between Cubans who live in this country and those still on the island. But nothing about the real news of the day.

If this were an isolated event, I would be more charitable. After all, the transition of newspapers from private-owned companies to just another commodity traded on Wall Street – plus the huge challenge of the Internet – has resulted in brutal cuts from top to bottom. Then, too, the Herald still has some excellent reporters and at least one or two regular columnists worth reading. Before the invasion, Knight-Ridder reporters in Washington did a much better job in questioning Bush’s snow job on Iraq than either those at the Times or the Post.

But lately things at the Herald seem to be getting worse. A decade ago, most of the worst offenses were limited to the pages of El Nuevo Herald, a Spanish-language publication controlled by the same people that oversee the Herald. In the 1990s, El Nuevo Herald, under the leadership of newcomer publisher Alberto Ibarguen and his whiz geezer editor Carlos Castañeda, pioneered the combination of bottom-line priorities, mediocre journalism, abject pandering to the most vociferous local constituencies, and selective reporting that has increasingly infected the Miami Herald itself.

Ibarguen, a lawyer, had no journalistic credentials or commitment, but had worked for a big northeastern newspaper where his main task was to ruthlessly improve the bottom line. In contrast, Castañeda did have a background in journalism. But his claim to fame was running a Puerto Rican newspaper and making it very profitable through big doses of yellow journalism. It was a marriage made in corporate heaven and journalistic hell.

The journalistic outrages at El Nuevo under the Ibarguen/Castañeda regime could be the subject of a lengthy doctoral dissertation. The most memorable is the story featured in huge headlines on page one of the Sunday edition featuring the tale of a purported Cuban neurologist/neurosurgeon who claimed to have treated a very ill Fidel Castro in a top Havana hospital. Castro, according to the El Nuevo story, had to be placed in an induced coma to save his life. The piece, which appeared with a picture of the female doctor sporting very long nails, was so detailed and documented that even I was almost taken in. The reporter, Pablo Alfonso, a former Cuban political prisoner, claimed he had checked out the story with doctors in exile in Miami who had worked with the neurologist/neurosurgeon at the CIMEX hospital.

What a scoop for El Nuevo Herald! But, as was subsequently revealed, there was a small problem with the sensational piece. As reports in other news media and numerous reports from people in the Miami Cuban community, it was nothing but a pack of lies from start to finish, everything from the fake doctor’s name to her medical credentials to Castro’s confinement and treatment at CIMEX, as well as numerous other alleged facts in the story.

It turned out the “neurologist” was actually a nursing school dropout. News reports from the time Castro was supposed to be in the hospital in a coma showed that instead he had been meeting with dignitaries, including the Papal Nuncio.  Worse than the paper swallowing the hoax hook, line and sinker was the fact it defended it for two days and never apologized to its readers.

Yet, despite or because of the abysmal standards of the paper’s journalism, sales increased and the bottom line improved. Naturally, for this feat, Ibarguen was promoted to publisher of The Miami Herald, replacing David Lawrence, a journalist with courage and commitment to the best traditions of the profession.

Ibarguen told the Herald staff gathered to hear the news that the Knight-Ridder executives who interviewed him asked only one question. Could he turn a profit of 20 percent a year? He said he could and was hired. Eventually, Ibarguen left the Herald – not before wreaking havoc – and was rewarded with the job of head of the Knight-Ridder Foundation. As in the Mafia, in corporate capitalism today, opportunism plus ruthlessness apparently are highly valued.

Since then, there have been many twists and turns at the Herald, including the sale of the paper to McClatchy. Along the way, in the wake of 9/11, Leonard Pitts, one of the better Herald columnists, was awarded a Pulitzer for an article based on a colossal lie: “We don’t kill civilians; they do.” Really? Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, the carpet bombing of Vietnam would argue otherwise, not to mention the subsequent slaughter of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, as the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who lived through the firebombing of Dresden, used to say, and so it goes.

What has struck me most about the Herald lately, however, is its nearly monolithic stance on Cuba. There was a time when the Herald published columns from critics of U.S. policy toward Cuba, even some written by Cuban intellectuals on the island. I haven’t seen that kind of opinion expressed in the paper for a long time. Instead, the most strident, hard-line voices monopolize the debate. I am talking about the Frank Calzons of this world and the boys at UM’s Center for Cuban and Cuban American Studies, an anti-Castro propaganda mill masquerading as a think tank. They now own “expert” commentary on Cuban affairs thanks to the annihilation of the North-South Center and the neutering of FIU’s Cuban Research Institute.

And so it goes: In Miami today, whether in the pages of the city’s sole daily or in the work of the most lavishly funded center on Cuba in the country, the clash of ideas has ceased to exist and the discourse is both mediocre and monolithic.