Fidel Castro

It's good that we live in a country where citizens feel free to criticize elected officials to their face.  Just wondering, though: when was the last time that freedom was exercised on MSNBC to tell a Dem official that something he said was "inane?" On today's Morning Joe, Donny Deutsch angrily asked Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Miami "why do you say an inane thing like that?" Deutsch's…

In the lead editorial for Thursday’s paper, The Washington Post blasted President Barack Obama’s decision to move toward normalized relations with the communist regime in Cuba as “naive” in awarding “an undeserved bailout” and “new lease on life” to “a 50-year-old failed regime.”

Following the trend set when news broke early Wednesday, the major broadcast networks continued their praising of the move by President Obama to seek normalized relations with Cuba on their Wednesday night newscasts.  Between the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC, they made only a few, brief mentions over the course of their 30-minute programs that Cuba was both a communist country and brutal in…

During Wednesday’s NBC Nightly News, correspondent Mark Potter reported from Havana, Cuba on the news that President Obama was altering U.S. relations with the communist state and parroted a long-standing liberal argument as to why Cuba’s economy has struggled for over half a century. Speaking about the regime of Fidel and Raul Castro, Potter chose not to blame the policies of the Castros, but…

Ed Schultz one-upped colleague Chuck Todd on his MSNBC program on Wednesday. Hours after Todd likened President Obama's policy announcement on Cuba to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Schultz compared the Democrat's address to a famous 1987 speech given at the Wall by his predecessor, Ronald Reagan: "Isn't this Barack Obama's 'tear down this wall, Mr. Castro' – that kind of a moment? I mean, if…

Twelve years after interviewing communist leader Fidel Castro, Barbara Walters is still mesmerized by the "charismatic" dictator.

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell’s love affair with former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro reared its ugly head once again on Wednesday, August 13 when she hyped the socialist’s 88th birthday.  Appearing on her daily Andrea Mitchell Reports program, the MSNBC host gushed at how “Cuba is celebrating Fidel Castro's 88th birthday today, starting the party early with a special concert last night. The opening…

Do Gaza civilians support Hamas' military operations that use them as human shields and store weapons in their schools and mosques?  Ayman Mohyeldin would have you think so.  On today's Morning Joe, the NBC reporter claimed that among Gazans, Hamas' military wing is "very highly revered." To which Israeli spokesman Mark Regev had a stunning comeback: "I mean, if you walk down the street in…

MRC's Scott Whitlock found a newsy tidbit from an April article in Variety magazine. Former Newsweek writer Ramin Setoodeh reported from a Barbara Walters interview that "The View" lost both its edgier political personalities -- right-leaning Elisabeth Hasselbeck and leftist insult comedienne Joy Behar -- due to network pressure on her and the show's producer Bill Geddie. “These are not…

Nowhere in her 15-paragraph March 11 obituary of Melba Hernandez did Associated Press writer Andrea Rodriguez find space to cite a critic of the late Cuban Communist revolutionary. In her story  -- headlined "'Heroine of the Cuban Revolution' was lifelong Castro loyalist" in the Washington Post -- Ms. Rodriguez paid significant attention to the role Hernandez played in aiding Castro's rise to…

The December 23 edition of People magazine looks through old pictures with Barbara Walters as she "looks back on her most memorable moments" in five decades of television interviews. During her 1977 interview with Fidel Castro "I spent 10 days with him, traveled through the mountains and held his gun in my lap,"  she said. "People thought we had a romance, but we never did." There was no…

On the Friday, December 6, All In with Chris Hayes show on MSNBC, during a discussion of Nelson Mandela's support for violent resistance, the Daily Beast's Michael Moynihan admitted that the former South African leader had a "moral failing" because he "associated with" dictators who "did the same things to their people" as "was done to him." Referring to an article by Moynihan on the subject…

At the Daily Beast, Michael Moynihan attempted to overcome the tendency of journalists and celebrities to make Nelson Mandela a secular saint. Moynihan recalled that when Margaret Thatcher died, these same people denounced her for here "indulgence" of right-wing dictators like Agosto Pinochet in Chile, who allowed his country to become a democracy. ABC called her reign an “elective…

With the 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis approaching and new documents surfacing about just how close to World War III the United States and the Soviet Union came in 1962, it’s interesting to look at how the incident is regarded in the media and, especially, how it’s taught as history. The Cuban Missile Crisis is commonly portrayed as a firm display of President John F. Kennedy’s…