Habla el padre de periodista de Globovisión secuestrada

AmericaTeVeCanal41

Meneo de culo periodístico

Juan Abreu

Bueno, mi querido Jordi, para empezar Cuba no es un país socialista, es una dictadura militar. De ti esperaba otra cosa, francamente. Así que unos por allí te dijeron que hasta 1990 sí claro la construcción del Socialismo, pero ahora peor. ¿En serio? ¿Qué es esto, un cursillo rápido de historia de Cuba para idiotas? Datos, hechos, estadísticas. ¿Recuerdas? De eso va el periodismo. En fin. Aunque ahora pienso que tal vez todo sea una broma de la que se me escapa el sentido. Una pieza cómica, una bufonada. ¿Aperitivo cubano? Por San Fidel. Batista dictador, bien, pero el otro qué, ¿presidente?

“La diferencia básica para los cubanos es que los sueldos en los primeros treinta años de la Revolución alcanzaba para cubrir las necesidades básicas: la educación era libre y universal”. ¿De dónde has sacado eso? Me gustaría saberlo porque me pasé los primeros veintiocho años de mi vida en ese paraíso donde el sueldo del mes te alcanzaba apenas para comer una semana la porquería de la Libreta de racionamiento, que por cierto era obligatoria y universal. Dímelo a mí que pasé los primeros veintiocho años de mi vida hambriento y trabajando en el campo y sirviendo como esclavo en los cañaverales para pagar mi educación libre y universal. ¿Cómo puedes soltar esas tonterías, esas falsedades como si hablaras de verdades comprobadas?

Pero. Espera. Creo que ya sé por qué. Porque estás hablando de Cuba y cuando los periodistas europeos hablan de Cuba no hay que guardar ningún respeto por la verdad, ya vale con el meneo de culo periodístico, la musiquita folklórica y el qué rico es el cubata.

Santocielo. Hoy ha sido un día triste para mí. ¡Tú también!

Destination Cuba: Alongside empty seat 17A

Photographers Blog

By Maxim Shemetov

I’ve never been to Cuba before. Frankly speaking, today is my first visit. It’s a very short one of only 24 hours, of which now I have only half left to walk around Old Havana and to swim in the ocean while the global hysteria over the uncatchable Edward Snowden carries on.

For me, this story started on Sunday when I woke up and slowly went to the office. It was supposed to be a usual working weekend when almost nothing happens. Almost… Incoming calls suddenly started to light up my cell phone. The big story with Snowden as the lead actor flying somewhere via Moscow began. It is hard to describe all of the next 24 hours spent in the airport, with expensive tickets booked to get inside the transit zone at Sheremetyevo and disappointment that a lot of energy was wasted on information that turned out to be wrong.

The next morning I headed to the airport again to take the same flight as Snowden. It looked suspicious that everyone knew when and how a top secret target was going to leave Russia. The flight number, even the fugitive’s seat on the plane, was known 24 hours ahead of departure! I met around 30 reporters flying to Cuba near gate 28. All were filming a newly arrived plane while arguing with airport security.

An hour and a half before the flight, security blocked the gate and the windows, brought in tables and metal detectors to check all passengers who wanted to get aboard. “The situation is extraordinary, stop shooting if you don’t want to be kicked off the plane,” a policeman said with anger. People were starting to get nervous and security blocked the way to the gate. I didn’t even try to get my professional camera out, shooting on an iPhone and feeling an angry look from a security guard pretending to be a regular passenger. I smiled stupidly and pretended nothing had happened.

Boarding was delayed for a while. Row 17, where Snowden was expected to be seated, was full with cameras and Aeroflot staff. Ordinary passengers asked flight attendants to be re-seated. All were closely watching everyone getting aboard. It was 2:10 pm and the flight was being delayed. A flight attendant ran past us murmuring “Only three left, there is no Snowden among them”. People were stuck in their nervousness and hysteria was at its peak. All ended within 15 minutes when the flight attendant closed the door and the plane started to move.

Seat 17A was empty. Someone started to applaud, someone was smiling. Half of business class, and a quarter of economy class, was taken up by reporters. I managed to take a couple of frames of the empty seat which became a story in itself with the lack of Snowden. I transmitted it just before the plane started to taxi. I see now that it became a key picture in the story and was widely published by many newspapers and online. Aeroflot received wonderful PR and a nice increase in sales. We opened a small bottle of whiskey and blessed Snowden who gifted us this trip to Cuba.

I only have eight hours left here and I need to get a taxi and have a swim in the ocean.

Peter Worthington: "If you are reading this, I am dead"

Toronto Sun

torontoist.com

By Peter Worthington 

If you are reading this, I am dead.

How’s that for a lead?

Guarantees you read on, at least for a bit.

When the Sun’s George Gross died suddenly in March 2008, at age 85, there were few of his contemporaries left alive to recall the old days, when he was in his prime and his world was young. I was one of the few who knew him then.

After attending his funeral I half-facetiously remarked to the Toronto Sun’s deputy managing editor, Al Parker, that I had been around so long that no one was left who knew me back then, and I had better write my own obituary.

“Good idea!” said Parker with more enthusiasm than I appreciated.

I mentioned it to my wife, Yvonne, who approved.

So here it is, not exactly an obit but a reflection back on a life and a career that I had never planned, but which unfolded in a way that I’ve never regretted.

Journalism never entered my mind when I was younger. I suppose my father’s colourful life before entering the army in the First World War affected my outlook. He had been orphaned at age 10, worked as a water boy in a Mexican silver mine and witnessed his half-brother, superintendent at the mine, killed by the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa. My dad went to sea, became a ship’s engineer, was in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, fought in Central American wars (Nicaragua, Honduras) before heading off to serve in the First World War. Passing through Montreal, he enlisted in the Black Watch as a private, and returned in 1919 as a captain with a Military Cross and Bar, and a Military Medal and Bar.

As a kid, there was no way I could match that for adventure, and in my teens dreaded anything that was mindful of a staid, inside job. I worked on construction sites during the war and at 15 ran away from home to join the merchant navy, but was rejected. At 17, my mother signed consensual papers for me to enlist in the navy — Fleet Air Arm, as it turned out. I later got a commission and at 18 was the youngest and least competent sub-lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve.

On discharge in Vancouver, I used veteran credits to attend the University of British Columbia. I hadn’t finished high school in Ontario, but, by the time UBC learned that, I had passed the first year, so they let me continue. I spent more time missing classes than I did studying, and by the time the Korean War started in 1950, my only achievement was winning the university’s light-heavyweight boxing title and the Golden Gloves.

I joined the army as a lieutenant and went to Korea as a platoon commander, later became battalion intelligence officer, and then went on loan to the U.S. Air Force to join a Mosquito squadron, flying in the rear seat of Harvard planes to direct air strikes onto Chinese targets. It was felt infantry officers could read maps better than pilots, and understood ground defensive positions better.

When the war ended, I had mild depression. What to do now? I still yearned for an adventurous life, but the world had changed since my father’s youth.

Rumour was that the French were hiring experienced infantry officers to serve in Indochina at $1,000 a month. I applied through the French embassy in Tokyo, and got a terse “Cher Lieutenant” letter that said the rumour was false, but I could join the Foreign Legion for five years as a private. In time for Dien Bien Phu, perhaps. I returned to Canada, took parachute training, joined the Princess Pats Mobile Strike Force, then quit the army.

What to do? I returned to UBC (on veteran credits), got a Bachelor of Arts degree and applied to the Vancouver Province to be a sports writer. I was considered unqualified for that, but was hired as a news reporter at $35 a month. I spent the summer of 1954 trying to get a byline and failed, until the city editor, Tom Hazlitt, took pity and re-wrote my story with my byline.

I went east to Ottawa’s Carleton College for a journalism degree, won a couple of graduation prizes and was hired by the Toronto Telegram as a reporter by the paper’s acerbic city editor, Art Cole, who seemed to expect every reporter to have an excuse not to cover an assignment, and was suspicious of those who were eager to work.

Shortly after joining the Tely, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, and the Suez War erupted. When the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) was authorized to go to Gaza, I took courage in hand and asked managing editor J. Douglas MacFarlane to send me.

He refused outright, and said a rookie reporter would never be sent on such an assignment. I replied that I had recently left the army, that I knew many of the soldiers involved, could get exclusive stuff, that I’d go on my holidays, charge no expenses, arrange my own way. Everything free for the Tely.

It was an offer MacFarlane couldn’t refuse. I went, and the stories worked out.

It set the pattern for my future at the Tely, and was an argument for enterprise.

Soon after my return, the U.S. Marines landed in Lebanon to prevent a coup.

As the Tely reporter who had most recently been to the Middle East, I was the automatic choice this time, since my UNEF stuff had been acceptable (and cost nothing).

In the middle of the Lebanon crisis, Baghdad erupted with King Faisal and his family being assassinated. With another reporter, I hired a taxi in Damascus and we headed east across the roadless desert to Baghdad. I was first to report from Iraq.

At the same time, British paratroopers had landed in Jordan to protect King Hussein from a coup, supposedly being planned by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.

I headed to Amman, after interviewing Brig-Gen. Abdul Karim Kassem who staged the coup in Iraq.

An hour after arriving in Amman, I went to the king’s palace to apply for an interview and got mixed up with a group of German businessmen who were to meet King Hussein. I joined them, and by the time the king realized I was an interloper, it was too late and he tolerated my presence.

My success started a stampede of other journalists, who had been waiting weeks for an interview, to the palace. For me, it was a realization that for journalists, reconnaissance can be valuable, and that it’s better to be lucky than good.

For the next 15 years, I covered every major war, crisis or revolution in the world. I was reluctant to take holidays for fear of missing a foreign crisis. Not in any particular order, I covered the Algerian war of independence, the Congo, Angola insurgency, Jews fleeing Morocco, the Dalai Lama’s escape from Tibet, the coup in Laos, the Vietnam War, Indonesia’s invasion of Dutch New Guinea, India versus Pakistan, China’s invasion of India, Israel’s 1967 defeat of Egypt, China shelling Taiwan, riots in Belgium, civil disturbance in France, the mutiny of the Foreign Legion in Algeria, and so on.

In the early days, when attending a crisis, my method was to start with a colour story, like getting roughed up by angry crowds, or confronting the police or the army, and gradually learning the politics of what was happening. At the end of each assignment, I liked to do a five-part series on what it all meant, ending with a prediction of what the future would bring — which I still feel is important, as the reporter learns to analyze.

Those years were enormously stimulating and satisfying — being at the centre of the hurricane, or most newsworthy story of the moment. I relished being in the centre of action, with adrenalin flowing, and motivated by being able to write about it the same day, and going to another adventure the next day.

All at the publisher’s expense. A huge privilege.

The endless travel cost me my first marriage, since the job took precedence — especially when I went to Moscow to open the bureau for the Toronto Telegram in the mid-1960s. Before that, the Tely wanted to open a bureau in China. The Chinese had indicated approval, and I spent a couple of months in Hong Kong waiting for a visa.

The Chinese eventually rejected me — not, as I had feared, because I had been a soldier in the Korean War but because I showed too much enthusiasm and had co-operated with the Americans in bombing Chinese troops.

My wife, Helen, understandably didn’t want an absentee husband. We divorced and she bettered herself by marrying a judge, and living happily. I later married a Tely reporter, Yvonne Crittenden, whose husband had run off with another Tely staffer (Caligula’s court in those days), and we all benefitted accordingly.

When President John Kennedy was assassinated, I was one of a team of Tely reporters dispatched to Washington. I went on to Dallas for the arraignment of Lee Harvey Oswald, accused assassin of JFK.

An hour after arriving in Dallas on the redeye flight from Washington, I checked out the Dallas police station and inadvertently stumbled into the underground garage where the cops (who mistook me for an FBI agent) were ready to transport Lee Harvey Oswald to the jail. I was there when Jack Ruby emerged from the crowd and shot Oswald. I appear briefly on TV shots of the killing, but it doesn’t stand out in my memory as a watershed moment.

When the Tely folded in 1971 and the Sun started, I was one of the lucky ones who had been offered a job at The Toronto Star. “You’ll never like it — you’re not a Star person,” said Yvonne, who had worked at The Star and been reamed out by the city editor (Bill Drylie) for using shorthand, which he called “chicken tracks.” He’d tolerate no reporter “who did chicken tracks.”

Instead of joining the Star, I teamed up with Doug Creighton and Don Hunt in starting the Toronto Sun, with me as executive editor and then editor-in-chief. I nursed no desire to be editor, and always felt reporting was an honourable job. To me, good reporters were more valuable than mediocre editors, and should get paid accordingly. As editor, I had strong views on what editorials should be — one handed (no on this, that or the other hand), a strong point of view, marshal your arguments, and let others challenge them.

If, later, you change your mind, acknowledge it and inform the reader. I liked irreverence, eccentricity, controversy, cheerfulness, mischief and independent thinking. These could be found in columnists if one knew where to look.

Editorially, the Sun challenged the policies of Pierre Trudeau — his dislike of the military, his empathy for communism, his admiration of dictators (Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro), his lust for a written constitution and so on. The Sun became a lightning rod for those uneasy about Trudeau, at a time when Trudeaumania was rampant.

Trudeau’s dislike of the Sun overflowed when I was charged with violating the Official Secrets Act for revealing 16 cases of Soviet subversion of Canadians at a time when Trudeau insisted the Soviet Union was Canada’s friend. After a year of preliminary hearings, the judge dismissed the case.

I had been looking forward to the trial, which I thought was winnable. Publisher Creighton quipped at the time that he was pleased the charges were dismissed “but my co-accused is going to appeal.”

During this tense period, the Sun’s circulation rose by some 30,000. Hitherto leftist critics evidently felt we couldn’t be all bad if the RCMP were taking aim at us.

In 1982, I quit the Sun’s board of directors and gave up the editorship when we voted — with one dissenting voice (mine) — to sell ourselves to Maclean-Hunter, thus trading our independence for financial security. I stayed at the Sun, writing a column, until my erstwhile partner, Publisher Creighton, fired me because The Star ran a front-page item quoting me on a book tour in Edmonton saying rival papers covered hard news better than the Sun.

What I had said was that the Sun ran opinion columns and had diversity, and let readers decide what they want to read, but if it’s only hard news one wants, buy a rival paper. I always felt Doug had acted impetuously, and then couldn’t back down. This was 1984. I went to the Financial Post as a columnist — until Doug was quoted in The Globe and Mail in 1988 saying I’d be the first editor of the new Ottawa Sun that was due to start.

Yvonne and I were in Nova Scotia at the time. More impetuousness from Doug.

I went back to the boy scout stuff — three times to Angola with the Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA movement, fighting the Soviet-Cuban Marxist regime; attending Eritrea’s war of independence from Ethiopia in 1988, and then returning in 1998 for another border war with Ethiopia.

In short, I’d argue I had a glorious, stimulating and rewarding life — maybe not the same as my father’s, but longer, and in its way, more varied.

I feel a bit as one of the characters in the great movie The Man Who Would Be King who says that he and his friend may not have amounted to much, but think of the things they’ve seen, and the memories they have. I feel similarly.

Looking back, it was a privilege to have stayed at the jungle hospital of Dr. Albert Schweitzer in Gabon and conferred with the great man; also interviewing and visiting the Dalai Lama, first when he escaped from Tibet in 1959, and later at his Indian retreat of Dharamsala in 1962; and interview the likes of Nasser, Nehru, Chiang Kai-shek, Lumumba, Jomo Kenyata, Indira Ghandi, Alan Paton, Joe Louis and such.

I treasure being with Heinrich Harrar, author of Seven Years in Tibet, in Dutch New Guinea where the stone-age Dani people had only recently been discovered. They used seashells as money and had not yet invented pottery.

It was nerve-wracking in 1967 to be mistaken for an Israeli prisoner by a Cairo mob and punched and battered until rescued by a brave Egyptian who defied the mob.

There were the lethal streets of Algiers, where daily assassinations took place, and occasionally the French army opened fire on civilians. One afternoon a bullet went through the sleeve of my jacket and I didn’t know it until others pointed it out.

Prague, when Soviet tanks invaded, and the great distance runner, Emil Zatopek, ran the streets, preaching resistance to the Soviets, and then racing to the next rallying point, always a pace ahead of the Red Army.

Being jailed in Luanda and deported to Mozambique, at a time when Portuguese reprisals were underway in Angola.

There is the image of Patrice Lumumba being hustled out of the Ghanaian officers mess in Leopoldville, to save him from assassination by a raging mob. And then Lumumba giving a press conference while under house arrest — and escaping at night to attend rallies in his name.

More memories: Ojukwu, in Biafra, with brand-new shoes and smoking State Express cigarettes, as Ben Wicks was scolded for having his hands in his pocket while in the presence of “His Excellency.”

Of Albert Schweitzer whacking a leper not-so-gently on the head for not chipping faster at a huge rock from which he was making gravel.

Of Laos, boasting proportionately the most Mercedes cars in the world in a country with only 24 km of paved roads — and a dead king being preserved in a tree trunk filled with honey for one year until burial.

Of Dr. Tom Dooley, sick with terminal cancer, wanting me to rent an aircraft for him to fly to his jungle hospital for a farewell visit.

Of meeting the Beatles in Hong Kong — and not knowing who they were or why the city was going berserk over their presence there.

A fond memory is the RCMP searching my cluttered office for a letter by the head of RCMP security to then-prime minister Trudeau complaining against the PM’s dictum that security checks of Quebecers should not include questions about separatism.

Bob Johnstone of the CBC, looking through the glass window with other TV journalists, quipped that the office was so cluttered “the RCMP may not find a letter, but they may lose a Mountie.”

After checking under the coffee table, chairs, behind pictures on the wall, rifling through books for the letter, they found it a couple of hours later in the upper left hand drawer of my desk.

These, and more, are the products of a career in journalism, and are part of what made it worthwhile. And I’ve not even mentioned Olga, the exotic defector from the KGB in Moscow, or the rewarding aberration of running for a seat in parliament and having the distinction of losing in the greatest Tory sweep in Canada’s history.

I’ve never been much afraid of dying — scared, at times, yes. But I never expected to reach 80, much less 86!!

Of course, there is the Toronto Sun, which was never as good a newspaper as it could have been, but which was always a fun place to work, with good people who seemed to be forever being replaced by other good people.

The Sun was always pretty tolerant of me and, I must say, I was pretty tolerant of it from time to time. We both served each other’s purpose.

My greatest regret is causing pain or sorrow for those left behind — Yvonne, Casey, Guy and Dani and the grandkids — all of whom made life worthwhile.

I regret, too, the nuisance for them of a funeral which they may hope will be well attended, but which I know won’t be, because I tend to be a loner who treated most people decently, but who never encouraged intimacy.

My reservations are meaningless and will be ignored.

Pity I wasn’t a drinker, then everyone could feel superior and forgive a weakness.

Peter Worthington dies

GlobalToronto

Canada has lost a legendary journalist. Peter Worthington -- a veteran newspaper whose hard-hitting writing not only informed Canadians, but won him multiple awards -- has died at the age of 86.

Bob Woodward is a White House Appeaser

NewZeal
By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

If the White House will push Bob Woodward around on such a mundane matter as Obama’s role in a budget stand-off, what else will they do? A look at Wikipedia’s page on Obama’s communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis might give us some indication. It is apparent that Obama supporters and Internet “trolls” have sanitized the page in order to eliminate any hint that Obama’s Marxist policies are being driven by the relationship he had for almost 10 years with a Communist Party operative under surveillance by the FBI.

In the current controversy involving Washington Post reporter Woodward and Obama White House official Gene Sperling, the email exchange publicized by Politico shows Woodward referring to “Gene” and being called “Bob” in return. This is a friendly exchange of views.

Alluding to how “Gene” had yelled at him and apologized, Woodward said, “You do not ever have to apologize to me. You get wound up because you are making your points and you believe them. This is all part of a serious discussion. I for one welcome a little heat; there should [be] more given the importance. I also welcome your personal advice. I am listening.”

Can you imagine famed Watergate reporter Woodward referring to Nixon Administration officials in such friendly terms?

This exchange has all the earmarks of a “journalist” who, rather than being threatened, is being fed a line by the Obama White House and wants more of it. Woodward comes across not as a tough reporter engaged in an adversarial relationship with the White House but rather a whiner who wants more access to Obama.

Sadly, it is all too typical of how the liberal media do Obama’s bidding. The treatment of Frank Marshall Davis is a case in point.

The 600-page FBI file on Frank Marshall Davis covers the years 1944-1963, meaning that he was under investigation or surveillance for at least 19 years. One document refers to Frank Marshall Davis having CPUSA affiliations dating back to 1931. Davis was included in the FBI’s security index, meaning that Davis could be arrested or detained in the event of a national emergency. The FBI material also documents Davis’s anti-white and pro-Soviet views, and the Communist infiltration of the Hawaii Democratic Party.

Wikipedia’s page on Davis ignores Obama’s relationship with Davis, except in a footnote on the bottom, and does not mention Davis’s CPUSA membership. It also ignores Paul Kengor’s authoritative 2012 book on Davis, The Communist.

Wikipedia says Davis’s “actions were tracked” by the FBI. But without the facts about Davis’s involvement in a subversive Soviet intelligence network on the island of Hawaii, a major strategic target of the Soviets, this makes it seem as though Davis was an innocent victim of government authorities.

Wikipedia refers to Davis as an “avid photographer” without noting that the FBI was suspicious of Davis taking photographs of the Hawaii coast, an activity that suggested espionage on Davis’s part.

One of the most disturbing FBI documents refers to information that Davis “was observed photographing large sections of the [Hawaii] coastline with a camera containing a telescopic lens.” The FBI information states:

“Informant stated that DAVIS spent much of his time in this activity. He said this was the third different occasion DAVIS had been observed photographing shorelines and beachfronts. Informant advised that it did not appear he was photographing any particular objects.”

AIM’s original piece on Davis, Obama’s Communist Mentor, was published on February 18, 2008, about nine months before Obama was elected for his first term. Trevor Loudon, a New Zealand-based writer and activist, had noted evidence that the mysterious “Frank” in Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father, was Frank Marshall Davis, in a posting in March of 2007.

There was plenty of time for the major media to “vet” Obama. But they were not interested. And that includes Bob Woodward and his Washington Post colleagues. Now, all of a sudden, there is a controversy over Woodward reporting something that seems negative about Obama’s position on the sequester. This is so minor in the overall scheme of things that you wonder if it is all just a diversion from the big picture.

The big picture is that Obama operatives have been actively trying to suppress the truth about Obama’s relationship with Frank Marshall Davis and a Soviet-sponsored network in Hawaii since Jerome Corsi, in his 2008 book, The Obama Nation, cited some of the facts during the presidential campaign. As we noted at the time:

“Barack Obama’s 40-page so-called ‘rebuttal’ to Jerome Corsi’s book, The Obama Nation, acknowledges for the first time that the senator once had a personal relationship with identified Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member Frank Marshall Davis, a key high-level operative in a Soviet-sponsored network in Hawaii.
“But the 40-page report, advertised and sold to the media as a refutation of Corsi’s ‘lies,’ doesn’t identify Davis as a hard-core communist and it dishonestly edits an article about Davis to eliminate references to his admitted involvement in CPUSA activities and make the black revolutionary writer and ‘poet’ look like a civil rights activist.”

Corsi had largely drawn the facts about Davis from blogger Trevor Loudon and this columnist, who confirmed Davis’s identity and obtained the 600-page FBI file on Davis. All of this information was available in 2008.

Incredibly, Wikipedia continues the essential cover-up that began during the 2008 campaign. Here’s how the entry begins:

“Frank Marshall Davis (December 31, 1905 – July 26, 1987) was an American journalist, poet, and political and labor movement activist.”

In fact, he was also a Communist, pornographer, a pedophile, heavy drinker and dope smoker. Davis, who was black, was a racist who blamed white people and corporations for much of what was wrong in the U.S. and the world. His influence on Obama helps explain his policies as President.

While Wikipedia quotes Davis as saying that he worked with “all kinds of groups,” including some “labeled Communist, Socialist or merely liberal,” it makes no mention of the fact that he was actually a member of the Communist Party USA. The only other reference to Communist activities was a charge that Davis wrote for what appeared to be a Communist front publication.

While Wikipedia confirms that he “authored a hard core pornographic novel,” Sex Rebel: Black, its page on Davis, a self-described sex “specialist,” makes no mention of the fact that Davis, using a pseudonym, refers to having sex with children.

In an analysis of Sex Rebel: Black, Andrew Walden wrote:

“Children are a target of the sex ‘specialist.’ Davis explains: ‘Undoubtedly an individual’s sexual patterns can be traced back to early childhood experiences.’ (p 35) Davis later writes of a threesome between himself, his first wife and a thirteen year old Jamaican girl. (p 71-78) His account begins, ‘Spring: warmer weather, children playing on the sidewalk in front of our building. An unusual looking child stared solemnly at me each day as I approached the entrance, then turned away when she caught my eye. I knew she was a niece of dad’s former landlady, but that was all. Someday she’d be brightly beautiful; she now had it in miniature.’ The next seven pages are a detailed description of their sexual encounters.”

Footnote number 25 on the Wikipedia page on Davis refers to an August 22, 2008, Toby Harnden story from the London Telegraph, “Frank Marshall Davis, alleged Communist, was early influence on Barack Obama,” as the source of the information about the novel. Harden also wrote that Davis “had been suspected of being a member of the Communist Party in the 1950s,” though Davis’s membership was confirmed in his FBI file, which we had publicized in August of 2008.

Trevor Loudon says Wikipedia’s treatment of the Obama-Davis relationship demonstrates that “It is a waste of time adding something about a contemporary politician’s socialist ties or communist background… it will be deleted faster than you can type it. The left has armies of trolls, surfing the net, purging all information that reflects badly on their heroes.”

Loudon analyzes the Wikipedia page on Davis and comments:

“Zero about Davis’s long time membership of the Communist Party USA. Zero about the FBI’s 600 page file on the man. Zero about Davis’ mentorship of the young Barack Obama. The two most important features of Davis’ life get ZERO coverage in Wikipedia. Woefully inadequate and misleading to put it mildly! Dangerous even, because many people swear by Wikipedia.”

By contrast, the page on Davis maintained by KeyWiki, a site established by Loudon, goes into substantial detail about the Communist and other activities of Davis. It also examines his relationship to Vernon Jarrett, who was later to become the father-in-law to Valerie Jarrett, now a senior advisor to President Obama.

While Bob Woodward’s spat with the White House makes for interesting reading and gets headlines, the famed Watergate reporter has barely scratched the surface of what Obama and his people will do to suppress the truth about the nature of this administration and its policies.

On one level, it seems too late, since Woodward was asleep on these matters as Obama won the presidency and re-election. But at least he could now begin to set the record straight.

The Davis-Obama relationship was a Watergate-type story which, if told by Woodward and his colleagues in the “mainstream media,” could have spared America from the domestic and foreign policy catastrophes that now grip the United States.

Woodward should not be praised for standing up to the Obama White House’s alleged “threats.” Rather, he should be asked what he was doing for the last several years as Obama and his allies ruthlessly suppressed the truth about his Marxist background and agenda for America and the world.

-------------------------

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.

O'Reilly: Is the President threatening reporters?

Warning signal from Venezuela: The harassment of Jorge Lanata

By Chris Simmons

Jorge Lanata

by Robert Cox, in today's Buenos Aires Herald

Secret Police Target Lanata

The harassment in Venezuela of Jorge Lanata, the journalist who has become an unofficial leader of the political opposition to the government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is more significant than it might seem at first sight.

Lanata, who was travelling with a camera crew to cover the presidential elections for the Clarín Group, was detained for questioning by state intelligence agents both going into and out of Caracas. The procedures used to harass him and his colleagues are familiar, reminding me of the time when I travelled to Cuba to represent a human rights non-governmental organization at a United Nations conference in Havana.

Upon arrival, I had my first encounter with the men from the Minint, the somewhat sinister name given to the Ministry of Interior. They wanted to send me back to Miami. But as a condition for holding the conference in Havana, which gave Castro-Communist Cuba a token of international prestige, the United Nations secured a guarantee that everyone from organizations affiliated with the UN must be allowed into Cuba to attend the conference. A journalist who travelled on the same plane was sent back because his US passport revealed that he had been born in Cuba.

Once in Cuba, I was followed and harassed in ways both picaresque and menacing. A colleague from the human rights organization got the jitters and left early.

When I finally left Havana my bags were searched and my notes and documents reporting the human rights situation were seized at the José Martí international airport.

It was routine police state procedure and it was exactly what Lanata and the other Grupo Clarín journalists were subjected to at the Simón Bolívar airport in Caracas. (How galling it is that two countries that restrict freedom of expression have airports named after genuine advocates for freedom.) Lanata, José Gil Vidal and Nicolás Wiñazki, of Clarín, and Gabriel Conte, editor of MDZOL, a digital newspaper in Mendoza, were given special attention by secret police who erased their reportage from their electronic equipment, alleging espionage, a charge that was not followed up.

The significance of this quasi-totalitarian attempt to restrict freedom of information by the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service is that it is an indication of what could happen in Argentina if President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner should decide to imitate her friend President Hugo Chávez by trying to silence dissident voices and establish state control of the media.

It was clear from the start that the late president Néstor Kirchner and his widow viewed a free press as an enemy. Both the Kirchners set out to continue on the national stage the same policies restricting freedom of information that were imposed in their native province of Santa Cruz, which Néstor Kirchner dominated for almost two decades.

In my view, this caudillo-like attitude has kept the Kirchner administrations in the dark. Without a free flow of information from varied media outlets, any government is bound to lose touch with reality.

Freedom of information is not the same as freedom of expression. In Argentina today there is no limit on the latter, but there is a severe lack of public information. Instead of interplay between the government and the press, which requires not only frequent news conferences called by the President and her ministers, but also access to them by individual reporters, Cristina, like her husband, speaks over the heads of journalists. Instead of allowing the press to be a bridge to the people, the Kircher style of government bypasses the media. Without an established right to know, similar to that secured by the US Freedom of Information Act, the press and the people are locked out. Another consequence of the Kirchner “dog in a manger” attitude is a deepening estrangement from mainstream international thought. That is partially explained by the refusal of the President to give interviews to foreign correspondents. Their requests are not even acknowledged.

President Fernández de Kirchner pays lip service to freedom of expression but does not “walk the walk” by encouraging an exchange of views. The result has been a polemical cacophony of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Because of the lack of leadership and no identified common cause that brings politicians together, the place that, in a democracy, is occupied by the political opposition has been filled by journalists.

The opposition press, which prefers to call itself the independent press, has become like a political alliance, a coalition that has formed around key issues that the traditional parties have so far failed to communicate effectively to the public. These issues are, in no particular order but in line with my own preference: the defence of democracy; indignation over corruption; and concern about personal safety.

The star role has been filled by Jorge Lanata, who, in response to the government’s programme 6,7,8, came up with Periodismo para todos (“Journalism for everyone” which is also a jibe at the government’s Fútbol para todos, which provides free coverage of Argentine Soccer League matches.) Lanata has assumed the leading role in opposing the government with his popular Sunday night programme. It is a mixture of stand-up comedy, which Lanata does fairly well, exposure of corruption, which he does brilliantly, and saucy satire at the expense of official idiocy.

The satire is delivered by Fátima Florez, who does a devastating impersonation of Cristina Fernández http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=IE-OCDexYrU&feature=endscreen and Martin Bilyk, who is hilarious as former Cabinet chief Aníbal Fernández and as Hugo Chávez. Florez reminded me of Tina Fey’s exquisite send-up of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live.

I have followed Lanata’s career from afar since 1983 when he was the founder with Gabriel Levinas of the magazine El Porteño, which was the first serious journalistic challenge to the military dictatorship.

Returning for four months every year since 2010, I was here when he announced on the eve of his 50th birthday that he had decided that he would celebrate his half century by speaking out, never holding anything back.

He has been able to keep that promise with even greater effectiveness by joining the Clarín Group, which has provided the resources that have allowed him to reach a larger audience.

He has been critical of Grupo Clarín which, while far from being a monopoly, became the biggest media organization in Argentina by buying up newspapers and buying out radio and television stations. However, in a country where the state owns radio and television networks, no rival can ever achieve a monopoly. Additionally, the Kirchner administration has built up a network of private media that support the government.

Ten years ago, the expansion of Grupo Clarín was a problem because independent media were being squeezed out. Today the problem is the expansion of media that is either state-controlled or aligned totally with the government.

The fact that Jorge Lanata was targeted in Venezuela and that the Argentine ambassador sided with the secret police should serve as a warning that totalitarianism is a temptation that authoritarian governments and their officials find hard to resist.

That is why it is important to defend both media and journalists that oppose the imposition of a quasi-totalitarian state like Venezuela or a totally totalitarian state like Cuba, both of which would probably get an “I like” on their Facebook pages from many in the Kirchner administration.

Bobc59@gmail.com

Top periodista canadiense se muda a Cuba

if he likes kaxtroz brother's dictatorship then living as a Cuban on foot ["cubano de a pie"] but not as a foreigner. maybe what he likes are teenage prostitutes and/or big and strong blacks guys. who knows?

-----------------------------

by Ezra Levant

Stephen Wicary

Until this summer, Stephen Wicary was The Globe and Mail’s online editor.

He would choose what would and wouldn’t go on the website. He would write headlines. He would choose photos. These are all political decisions.

Sometimes he would move from the behind the scenes and come out publicly with his own editorials denouncing Stephen Harper — accusing Harper of being anti-democratic, and heavy-handed, and even censorious.

So he was a left-winger, who claimed to care about freedom.

But then he moved to Cuba. Not a vacation. He’s moving there for two years.

Someone who had for years condemned Harper as being too authoritarian was moving to the country that the human rights NGO, Reporters Without Borders, calls the most repressive country in the western hemisphere.

I asked Wicary a dozen questions about this — and he refused to answer.

The Media Party all knew Wicary was going to Cuba, a land without press freedom. The Ottawa press gallery even threw a goodbye party for him and none seemed conflicted with a reporter going to an island of censorship.

A lot of other journalists answered my questions to Wicary for him. They were acting as his lawyers. They said he didn’t really believe in Communism. They said he was just there to support his wife, who got a promotion to work there for an NGO. The suggestion was that Wicary didn’t really love Cuba, he just loved his wife, so it was an act of marital solidarity, not political solidarity.

Wicary has been in Cuba for a few weeks. Miraculously, he has been able to get an Internet connection. No ordinary Cuban has that privilege — but Wicary somehow got Castro’s permission.

It was weird right away. There he is in Cuba — a controversial, newsworthy place, with scandals and corruption and violence and repression, with a cholera outbreak right now, with a Spanish human rights activist held hostage — but all he kept writing about on Twitter was Canadian politics, publicizing left-wing political commentaries.

But then Wicary wrote this from Cuba last week: “Have been reading up on Canada-Cuba relations and it seems Sun papers have a long tradition of asshattery with regard to the island … During the 1999 Pan-Am Games in Winnipeg, they published a how-to guide for athletes seeking to defect.”

Wicary has never criticized Cuba or, aside from a couple retweets, even reported on its scandalous news.

But he just comes right out and engages in Communist propaganda, denouncing Canada’s Sun newspaper — we’re asshats, he says — because in 1999 we wanted to help Cuban athletes come to Canada? Who would possibly object to that? Other than someone who is working under the restrictions of the Communist Party? Is he also working under its direction?  Read More >>

 

In Memoriam: Andrew Breitbart (1969-2012)

Trials of an American reporter in Cuba

'Cubadebate' pide a la policía española que me detenga

El periodista espanol Joan Antoni Guerrero, administrador del blog  Punt de vistaha sufrido un estupido ataque por parte de Cubadebate, pensando que el mundo funciona como lo hace el regimen.

"Lo que les cuento es casi un chiste. El periodista oficialista cubano Iroel Sánchez ha instado a la policia española a que me detenga, en un artículo publicado en Cubadebate. Dice que lo deberían hacer por haber apoyado desede este blog la iniciativa del Levantamiento popular en Cuba, que no fue otra cosa que animar a los cubanos a que se planten pacíficamente ante un régimen que viola sus derechos fundamentales..."  Leer mas >

Condenan a 7 años a ex periodista español que realizo documental sobre la prostitucion

Leer >

Entevista al hombre que vivio demasiado/ Armando Lopez

Formidable entrevista de Armando López en Diario de Cuba al recientemente fallecido periodista Luis Ortega  AQUI

Entrevista a Carlos Hernando tras orden de expulsión de #Cuba

La seguridad cubana llevaba siguiéndole desde que llegó a Cuba en 2010, varios agentes le han interrogado sin parar durante 5 horas, le acusan de contrarrevolucionario y tiene 48 horas para abandonar la isla asegura que no le han tocado, sólo ha sido cacheado 'a conciencia'.

#Gaddafi Use Journalists as Human Shields

EXCLUSIVE:  An attack on the compound of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi on Sunday had to be curtailed because of journalists nearby, Fox News has learned.

British sources confirmed that seven Storm Shadow missiles were ready to be fired from a British aircraft, but the strikes had to be curtailed due to crews from CNN, Reuters and other organizations nearby. Officials from Libya's Ministry of Information brought those journalists to the area to show them damage from the initial attack and to effectively use them as human shields.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/03/21/exclusive-libyans-use-journalists-human-shields/#ixzz1HH1U9zQ4

Angolan journalist gets year in prison for defamation

Chicoca, right. (Armando Chicoca)

New York, March 3, 2011--A court in Angola's southwestern province of Namibe sent a journalist to prison today without due process over his coverage of a sexual harassment scandal that implicated the province's top judicial official, according to local journalists and news reports.
Judge Manuel Araujo sentenced Armando José Chicoca, a freelancer who reports for U.S. government-funded broadcaster Voice of America (VOA) and private Angolan newspapers such as Folha 8, Agora, and O Apostolado, to one year in prison and a fine of 200,000 kwanza (US$2,100), according to news reports.
More

Angolan journalist gets year in prison for defamation