...while the media snooze.
By Deroy Murdock, Senior Fellow, Atlas Economic Research Foundation. National Review, 4/28/00 10:45 a.m.
One of the beauties of television is that it shows exactly what the facts are," Attorney General Janet Reno declared shortly after the April 22 federal seizure of Elian Gonzalez. Reno's words may help explain why the highly controversial pre-dawn raid was not videotaped from inside the
Gonzalez family's Little Havana home.
The whole world, of course, has seen Associated Press photographer Alan Diaz's frightening image of a Border Patrol agent pointing his machine gun at Elian and his fisherman-savior, Donato Dalrymple. Video and audio of that scene would have been far more bone-chilling. But when an NBC News crew
tried to capture such footage, they instead found themselves knocked to the ground.
"We got Maced, we got kicked, we got roughed up," Cuban-born NBC camera man Tony Zumbado told MSNBC. He said that as the incursion began, federal agents kicked him in the stomach and yelled, "Don't move or we'll shoot." Zumbado added on NBC's Dateline: "My sound man got
hit with a shotgun butt on the head, dragged outside — he was halfway in — and he was dragged out to the fence and left there and they told him if he moved they'd shoot."
Zumbado explained that federal gunmen also disabled his camera and yanked out its audio cable. By the time Zumbado and sound man Gustavo Moller stood back up, Elian had been whisked away in a white van.
NBC News vice-president Bill Wheatley told the AP, "we believe that the agents went further than they had to and prevented him [Zumbado] from taking pictures." NBC News President Andrew Lack wrote INS Commissioner Doris Meissner April 26 asking for an explanation.
Gustavo Moller called the raid "the unjust way of gaining justice." The Cuban native — who fled Castro in 1960 at age 11 — told me the agents, "did a terrific job. Their purpose was to scare the s**t out of everybody, and they did."
Meanwhile, an ambulance took Zumbado from his home to Miami's Baptist Hospital on April 26 after he fainted from back spasms. He suffers chronic back trouble, and thinks "the roughing around didn't help it." As he spoke to me by phone from his hospital bed, he was awaiting further
spinal tests. Earlier, he said, "my muscles were too swollen to get a clean MRI."
Zumbado said that the federal officers were behaving as he would expect. "They're trained to be forceful and intimidating. The media is not excused, especially when you're trying to video tape them."
Zumbado, however, disputed the Justice Department's post-raid claims that they welcomed news coverage. "We were definitely not invited in like Janet Reno has stated we were," Zumbado said. "If we were, we would have had a head's up. We would have been inside and I would not have
been kicked."
As Team Clinton hatched "Operation Reunion," they appeared obsessed with containing images of Elian's abduction. "The Justice Department had been in angst over this," CBS correspondent Jim Stewart reported soon after the offensive. "They knew a photographer — a
still or video man — would be in the house."
Two days before the feds snatched Elian, Gregory Craig — Juan Miguel Gonzalez's attorney and President Clinton's impeachment counsel — wrote the major network and cable news channels and asked them to "refrain from broadcasting" the anticipated "full camera coverage of
any effort by federal authorities to take Elian Gonzalez into custody."
Craig continued that Elian's father "does not consent to this kind of exploitative television coverage of his child," and added: "to broadcast to the public what will doubtless be an extremely difficult and emotional moment in this young boy's life will only add to that damage and
increase that [emotional] suffering."
Zumbado and Moller were in no position to "damage" Elian, the INS officers, Marisleysis Gonzalez or anyone else. News cameras don't shoot bullets. They shoot videotape. They also preserve the truth, something that occasionally scares the powerful. Interestingly, the Gonzalez family —
who Justice Department spokeswoman Carol Florman suggests may have been armed — was left physically unharmed, albeit traumatized by the federal gunmen. The only people in the Gonzalez home who sustained bodily injury were two members of the press corps trying to do their duty.
All of this worries human-rights activists, to say the least.
"We object to any kind of interference when the news media is doing its job, and a physical assault is one of the most outrageous examples of interference possible," says Gregg Leslie, Legal Defense Director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington, D.C. "We
will be working with NBC or on our own to protest this."
Freedom House's Leonard R. Sussman said of the NBC crew's abuse, "There's no excuse for it, and we find it deplorable." He continued: "That letter from the attorney for the president does not suggest an understanding of what a free press is all about."
As if the beating of American journalists on American soil by American government officials were not outrageous enough, consider the reaction from the establishment media. "Yaaaaawn."
According to the Alexandria, Virginia-based Media Research Center, NBC's Zumbado was interviewed on his own network and its sister-channel, MSNBC. However, he has yet to appear on either ABC, CBS or CNN. While the AP has followed the story, the Nexis news database and three on-line search
engines indicate that Zumbado's and Moller's manhandling was only covered by the New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post, but just early and briefly.
Elian's abduction and its aftermath are huge, ongoing stories. One might have imagined that reporters and commentators would have unleashed unrelenting facts and fire on a physical attack upon two fellow journalists by taxpayer-funded federal agents.
What could be more maddening than a government that stomps on the First Amendment? When those it protects know of such an atrocity and shrug.
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