Bob Dickey is the President and CEO of Gannett Corporation, which owns a vast and ungodly array of American newspapers, including the USA's largest -- USA Today. While most Americans want to get rid of the Trump presidency, the 80% of decent Americans want that done via the democratic electoral process, meaning The Vote that might create a qualified electable President in January of 2020. But Bob Dickey's Gannett-USA Today media monopoly is aligned in a vast media coup to dethrone President Trump far outside democracy's cherished electoral process. Aligned solidly with Dickey's Gannett-USA Today coup are other media monopolies owned by multi-billionaire individuals and corporations such as the richest man in the world {left-wing Cuban-American Jeff Bezos} and many of the richest corporations in the world {such as Disney, Comcast, etc.}. Thus, conspiring with Bob Dickey's Gannett-USA Today dire urgency to dethrone Trump are: The NY Times, Bezos' Washington Post, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, and ABC.
So, I'll return to the Gannett-USA Today boss Bob Dickey to make my point. While Dickey's empire is engage is a sustained media coup to eliminate President Trump apart from letting the voters do it, Dickey also epitomizes the fact that the mainstream media in the USA, in addition to forsaking journalistic integrity standards, also lacks guts. Yesterday {Sept. 26-2018}, for example, a lying USA Today headline screamed: "Cuba's New President Sticks to Old Script at United Nations." Quite cowardly, while unabashedly lying to the USA's citizens, that article didn't have either the guts or the integrity to point out that Cuba's new President, Miguel Diaz-Canel, is forced to stick to Cuba's "old script" because the United States since 1959, on behalf of the Counter Revolutionary Cuban extremists, have STUCK to the same SCRIPT for over six decades!! In that regard, as an unimportant and non-extremist member of the voiceless 80% of decent democracy-loving Americans, I would like to ask Bob Dickey two questions:
{1} "I am aware, sir, that the top Cuban-American newsman in Miami, Emilio Milian, was car-bombed when he denounced such Counter Revolutionary tactics as the airplane-bombing of a child-laden Cuban civilian plane. Are such warnings your excuse for lying and distorting Cuba issues?"
{2} "Mr. Dickey, Thomas Jefferson was among the Founding Fathers who believed that a free and viable press was even more important to the U. S. democracy than the U. S. government itself. If we discount your 10% left-wing fringe and the 10% right-wing fringe, most of us in the 80% moderate majority seem to wholeheartedly agree that the mainstream media in the USA today, like your USA Today, is nothing more and nothing less than a huge propaganda machine dictating the views of the left-wing and right-wing extremists while ignoring the 80% that can be considered democracy-lovers. If that is not so, Mr. Dickey, why is your media empire engaged in a vast media coup to overturn the 2016 presidential election...and why does your media empire not have either the guts or the integrity to report fairly on Cuban issues, a topic that got the USA condemned by both President Obama AND the entire world via the 191-to-0 vote in the UN in 2016?"
Meanwhile:
This was Cuba's new President, Miguel Diaz-Canel, making an important speech at the United Nations in New York yesterday -- Sept. 26-2018. This was the speech that USA Today and the rest of the mainstream U. S. media typically lied about. But for the record, directly replying to President Trump's earlier Cuban lies at the UN, Diaz-Canel significantly said: "Inequality and poverty around the world are not the result of socialism, as the President of the United States claimed yesterday before this assembly. They are the consequences of capitalism, especially imperialism and neoliberalism." Now on Cubaninsider I am not debating whether Trump or Diaz-Canel is correct regarding whether socialism or capitalism is the primary cause of "inequality and poverty around the world." BUT WHAT I AM DEBATING, with Bob Dickey and the rest of the media elite, is this: There are two sides to the socialism-capitalism debate and two sides to the U.S.-Cuba debate and two sides to the Trump/Diaz-Canel debate. And with that being said, the USA...of all nations...drastically needs a mainstream U. S. media with both the guts and integrity to provide both sides of two-sided issues. Instead, the USA today has a mainstream media that is nothing more and nothing less than a vast propaganda machine. And that, to my mind, makes Bob Dickey and his ilk more of a threat to the U. S. democracy than Donald Trump and his ilk.
The image above depicts the Cuban channel Dominio Cuba providing live television coverage back to Cuba of this week's United Nations session. Primarily, of course, it focused on President Miguel Diaz-Canel's two prime speeches at the UN but also his meetings with many top U. S. business leaders, such as Eric Schmidt of Google; Cuba-friendly politicians like Congresswoman Kathy Castor from Tampa, European Union leader Federica Mogherini, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio; and the leaders of many countries even including Argentina's new USA-backed President Mauricio Macri who supposedly will now support the Trump/Rubio-led assaults on Cuba. Well-educated journalists in Cuba, especially now that Diaz-Canel is President, have outlets such as Dominio Cuba, Cubavision International, etc., that are more-and-more provided the wherewithal to make live televised presentations to the Cuban people even from many foreign nations.
As with the live coverage of President Miguel Diaz-Canel's UN appearances this week being beamed back to Cuba, the island's new leader loves the medium of television. He has told his Ministers: "I want each of you to present yourselves for television news reports in which you tell the people exactly what you are doing to solve their problems, and if you are doing nothing, tell them that too. I want the people to judge if we are dealing with the issues that directly concern them, and television news reports are the means to do that because we are blessed with excellent broadcast journalists."
The most notable broadcast journalist in Cuba is Cristina Escobar, shown here in a photo this week taken by photo-journalist Roberto Garaycoa Martinez. So how good is Cristina? As a television news anchor and interviewer, either in Spanish or English, Cristina is probably the best all-around broadcast journalist in the Western Hemisphere. At least, that reputation has made Cristina a regular source of information on U.S.-Cuban relations to media giants like the BBC and has earned Cristina speaking engagements at U. S. universities on the topics of Cuba and journalism. AND OH YES!! Cristina is the only Cuban journalist to ever ask questions at a White House news conference...so she made history on U. S. soil.
Andrea Mitchell, the long-time top Foreign Correspondent at NBC, as well as former President Barack Obama are among the Americans who admire Cristina Escobar's skills as a broadcaster. That's why she was invited to ask questions at a White House news conference, as shown above. She thoroughly dominated the session, asking four questions plus two follow-ups. One of her questions revealed that President Obama intended to become the first sitting U. S. President since 1928 to visit Cuba.
The White House news conference resulted in Cristina Escobar being interviewed by U. S. journalists. From those interviews came two pertinent quotations from Cristina that, perhaps, Americans should ponder from a Cuban broadcaster that is a star in Cuba and, if she chose, could be a star in America. She said: {1} "Cuba's fate should be decided by Cubans on the island, not Cubans in Miami or in the U. S. Congress;" and {2} "Cuban journalists have more freedom to tell the truth about the U. S. than U. S. journalists have to tell the truth about Cuba."
I am not suggesting that Americans should agree totally with the above two quotations made on U. S. soil by Cuba's brilliant broadcast journalist Cristina Escobar. But what I am suggesting is this: {1} She believes what she said and she knows enough about Cuba and the U. S. to have formed those opinions; and {2} I believe Americans owe it to America to show some open-minded guts and patriotism when it comes to U.S.-Cuban issues, as opposed to being like clapping trained seals who accept and applaud everything Counter Revolutionaries and the U. S. media say about the topic, Cuba, that probably demeans the U. S. more than any other topic.
For example:
While being interviewed live from Havana on an international TV hook-up, Cristina Escobar wondered out loud: "Why is it...you tell me...that Americans are not embarrassed when a UN vote of the world's nations condemns America's Cuban policy by a 191-to-0 vote, and President Obama agreed with that unanimous condemnation?" And to be perfectly honest, as a democracy-loving American, I have wondered the very same thing. Indeed, do the last couple of generations of Americans lack the intelligence, the courage and the patriotism to be "embarrassed" about that vote and about the sheer fact that a small cabal of right-wing thugs have dictated America's Cuban policies since 1952 -- first from Havana and then, since 1959, from Little Havana in Miami and in Republican-controlled Congresses and White Houses? Cristina Escobar, Cuba's well-versed journalist, has the courage to express opinions about the subject, something Americans seem incapable of doing.
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