THE SAGA OF ELIAN GONZALEZ has been a gripping one for everyone, it would seem, except members of the press. They have almost universally loathed the story, reserving special contempt for Cuban-Americans. Thomas Friedman, for one, could barely contain himself last week. In fact, he didn’t: “Yup, I gotta confess,” said the New York Times columnist, “that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elian Gonzalez warmed my heart.” Cuban-Americans, he said, believed “they could get away with kidnapping Elian. America is a lot better off today because Janet Reno taught them otherwise.”
When asked by the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz what sort of impact the photo of Elian at gunpoint might have, James Warren, Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, said “It will ignite all the crazies. . . . ” Warren explained that he would be arguing against front-page coverage in his paper of “the crazy family running around here all day and bitching on television.”
That’s probably an accurate assessment of how most reporters view the case: not as a struggle to keep a six-year-old boy in a free country but as an embarrassing waste of time that could otherwise be devoted to high-toned political analysis. “It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever covered,” New York Times Miami bureau chief Rick Bragg confessed to Knoxville’s Metro Pulse. “Some people think hell is a place where you wake up in the morning in a bed of coals. I think it’s where you wake up and find out you’ll be writing about Elian for the next 643 days.”
The New York Daily News, meanwhile, is relieved that the boy is away from “the Miami mob scene,” safe from those “anti-Castro fanatics” and relatives who “used him so shamelessly.” The newspaper mocks Elian’s cousin Marisleysis — who took leave from her job to care for the boy after he almost drowned off the Florida coast last Thanksgiving — joking that “One waits for [her] to see the face of the Virgin in the Potomac.”
Legal scholars — even liberal ones like Laurence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz — may argue that the Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect Americans against executive-branch home invasions, but for editorialists, Janet Reno deserved the benefit of the doubt: After all, those crazy relatives were just asking for it.
“If Elian’s Miami relatives had cared more about the boy’s welfare than in using him as a political trophy in the propaganda war against Fidel Castro, they would have sent him back to his father weeks ago,” the St. Petersburg Times intoned. Elian, it went on, “was manipulated and brainwashed by his Miami relatives. . . . [They had] abused this child long enough.” The San Francisco Chronicle, too, thought it was about time someone stamped out public dissent: “Given the circumstances — recalcitrant relatives vowing to defy the law, feverish crowds in Little Havana blockading the streets and local authorities with questionable resolve to prevent civil unrest — Reno had little choice.” Though the effect of the Justice Department raid was to alter by force the facts of a pending federal court case only two weeks before a ruling, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution still managed to defend the raid as a reminder that “this is a nation of laws, not of guns or mobs.”
Given the extent to which the media shared Bragg’s view that hell meant having to cover the Elian beat, there was no doubt a measure of self interest in reporters’ sympathy for the Clinton administration’s armed raid. The Early Show’s Bryant Gumbel, in a fawning interview with INS representative Robert Menendez, asked what, if anything, congressional hearings would accomplish “besides just so much Reno bashing?” His fellow CBS newsman Dan Rather simply concluded, “It’s hard to see how [Reno] could get criticized for the way the operation was carried out.”
On Evans, Novak, Hunt & Shields, the Wall Street Journal’s Al Hunt insisted the issue was “whether you believe in law” and even cast doubt on the now-famous Associated Press photo of Elian in Donato Dalrymple’s arms before a gun-pointing INS officer. When Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart began to mention the photo, Hunt interjected, “Did you see that?” and, “You were in the house when they pointed [the gun]?” And since he was not, in fact, there, Hunt dismissively stated, “It’s your interpretation.”
It’s a lose-lose situation for the Cuban-Americans. The media have branded them fanatics. Janet Reno is praised for her heroism, Marisleysis is seen as a religious freak, and even the picture of Elian and Donato Dalrymple at gunpoint is viewed with suspicion. The New York Daily News had this advice for what they called “the Little Havana cadre”: “Get over it. You lost.” And when it comes to garnering sympathy from the media, they’re right. Whatever happened to afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted?
Victorino Matus is an associate editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
