In Sunset Boulevard you couldn’t help but sympathize with Norma Desmond. She made nostalgia, senility and decrepitude slightly pitiable, but also charming.
The New York Times, its stock value in the cellar while squirming under the thumb of a foreign robber baron, makes the same thing shabby, malodorous and pathetic, especially as recently dramatized by its former senior editor, the embittered Howell Raines, wheezing piteously against his former competition. “Ed Koch once told me he could not have been elected mayor of New York without the boosterism of the New York Post,” writes Raines in his Washington Post piece.
Raines implies that boosterism for a New York mayoral candidate is hideously tacky. A truly world-class paper’s boosterism should be employed (apparently) to help Stalinists set up their killing fields and gulags. To wit:
A foreign reporter — preferably American (meaning the New York Times’ Herbert Matthews) — was much more valuable to us at that time (1957) than any military victory. Much more valuable than rural recruits for our guerrilla force, were American media recruits to export our propaganda.
— Ernesto “Che” Guevara in his diaries.
“Why has our profession, through its general silence– or only spasmodic protest–helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in its conclusions and biased in its gestalt?” wonders Raines.
Apparently, a truly world class paper’s “style of journalism” should serve to make it truly “trustworthy” as a propaganda arm for a Stalinist regime’s KGB-trained secret police, hunting-down and character-assassinating those on the regime’s enemies-list. To wit:
One day in May 1959, only five months after the triumph of Castro’s glorious Revolución, proclaimed as “democratic and anti-communist,” by the New York Times, Castro’s own Air Force Chief, Major Pedro Diaz-Lanz, told his friend Eddie Ferrer, “I’ve got to tell the Americans and the world what’s going on here and start the fight against these communists. Everybody seems asleep!”
A week later Diaz-Lanz resigned his post and declared publicly that Castro’s civilian government was a hollow sham, nothing but a front for Soviet-trained Communists who were running the show behind the scenes, especially in the crucial functions of the military and police. Diaz-Lanz then bundled his wife and kids onto a small boat and escaped to Miami just ahead of a firing squad.
After weeks of frantically knocking on doors and hoarse from phone calls, Diaz-Lanz finally appeared at a public hearing before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. The date was July 14, 1959.
Mr. SOURWINE (Chief Counsel). Is Castro friendly to the United States?
Major DIAZ. No.
Mr. SOURWINE. But Fidel Castro has said on many occasions (as dutifully transcribed and transmitted by the New York Times) that he is friendly to the United States. You are saying that this is not true?
Major DIAZ. He is lying.
Mr. SOURWINE. Have you yourself seen instances of anti-American propaganda in Cuba under the Castro regime?
Major DIAZ. Yes, Sir.
Mr. SOURWINE. You know there are many [the New York Times foremost among them] who say that Fidel Castro is not himself a Communist.
Major DIAZ. I am completely sure that Fidel is a Communist.
Mr. SOURWINE. You are completely sure that Fidel Castro is what?
Major DIAZ. That Fidel Castro is a Communist. Also, I’m prepared because the Communists have a well-known system of trying to destroy the reputations of anyone who disagrees with them…
After Diaz-Lanz testimony, Castro’s U.S. media auxiliaries (who earlier, like their boss, ignored Diaz-Lanz, hoping he’d fade away) got their marching orders and spit on their hands. They suited up, slid down the pole, and gunned the engines. Naturally the New York Times revved up first: “This is not a communist revolution in any sense of the word,” quickly wrote the senior Timesman man in Cuba, the redoubtable Herbert Matthews, from Havana itself. “In Cuba there are no communists in positions of control,” he stressed. “The accusations of Major Pedro Diaz-Lanz are rejected by everybody.”
But as Diaz-Lanz warned, when outing Communists, their denial is only half the story. The truth-teller must also be slandered, smeared, defamed, and his character assassinated — as surely as the hundreds of men and boys then being physically assassinated by Che Guevara’s firing squads.
Not to worry! The New York Times was eminently worthy of the task!
“Sources (Castro or his henchmen) tell me that Major Diaz-Lanz was removed from his office for incompetence, extravagance and nepotism,” continued Herbert Matthews’ front-page article in the New York Times in July of 1959. “Fidel Castro is not only not a Communist — he’s decidedly anti-communist.”
And Castro’s U.S. propaganda minions were just warming up. The Times had sounded her bugle. Now the rest of the media pack rushed in behind her (remember, this was 1959), yapping and howling and wagging their tails, panting to join the hunt. They were all too eager for a chance to mob and maul a man who risked his life and went stone-broke to warn America about what turned out to be the gravest threat in her history.
“It’s an outrage that Congress should give a platform for a disaffected Cuban adventurer to denounce the Cuban revolution as Communist!” barked Walter Lippmann a few days later in The New York Herald Tribune. “It would be an even greater mistake even to intimate that Castro’s Cuba has any real prospect of becoming a Soviet satellite,” Lippmann stressed in a Washington Post piece a week later.
Lippmann’s Pulitzer Prize the year before, by the way, noted “his distinction as a ‘farsighted and incisive’ analyst of foreign policy.”
The Atlanta Constitution yapped next. “Major Diaz-Lanz is simply a disgruntled soldier-of-fortune,” wrote its chief editor and publisher Ralph “Conscience of the South” McGill (who was in Havana at the time, schmoozing it up with Fidel and Raul). “Reliable sources tell me that Major Diaz-Lanz has been involved in clandestine money-making activities,” McGill continued. “Diaz left Cuba because he was involved in black-marketing.”
In 1964, LBJ decorated this propagandist and smear-artist with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “The desire for individual dignity and freedom is in the genes of all mankind,” proclaimed McGill during the solemn ceremony. Yes, Mr. McGill — and amazingly enough, even in Cuban genes. Ask the thousands of Cubans riddled by firing squads yelling ” VIVA CUBA LIBRE!” while you and the New York Times carried water for their murderers.
In wistful moments, I imagine Rush, Beck, Hannity, Breitbart, etc. on the U.S. media scene when Pedro Diaz-Lanz burst upon the U.S. political scene with some pretty important revelations. Might his revelations have gotten more and better airplay? Might they have influenced the idiotically Castro-friendly U.S. policy of the time?
Well, ask yourselves what traction O’Keefe’s expose of ACORN and Glenn Beck’s of Van Jones might have gotten if “all that news that’s fit to print” was still being decided by Howell Raines long-time employers.
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