Cuban people have a long history of displacement and oppression that continues to this day. This topic is close to my heart as a Cubana, but I digest the politics surrounding my family’s home country as unbiasedly and ethically as I can. 

Recently there has been several articles going around about a statement made by President of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He publicly shamed the United States for its economic sanctions against countries like Cuba because he feels it causes more Cuban immigrants to travel through Mexico to reach the U.S. 

The information that is included in each article I read differs in how thorough it is, causing the type of impact to vary between them, though the information is similar. In an article published in AP News, the focus is heavily on migrants. The displacement of many Cubans, leading to their migrant status, was forced upon them because they did not want to experience suffering such as imprisonment. Ethics for the immense majority is arguably not something the government applies to its policies in Cuba, which is interesting since it is a Marxist–Leninist one-party socialist state. 

The ethics the U.S. government uses to justify their lack of economic aid to countries like Cuba is arguably not for the majority either. Funds from this country could potentially help a country like Cuba a great deal, but there is no guarantee that leadership in Cuba would appropriately use those funds or sign any stipulation agreement. 

The article also brings up how López Obrador thinks that the U.S. misused funds when aid was sent to Ukraine, when it could have been used to help economically develop Latin America. This also assumes that if that money would be used appropriately in each of these countries. 

Of course, I want the U.S. to help the poverty that exists in Latin America and the Caribbean, but I am not confident that the same government that took my families land would turn around and give provide financial support or equitable opportunities. 

Cubans who have been displaced are met with many challenges that most immigrants experience. There is the language barrier, the economic barrier, the barrier that you get by being any Latine ethnicity in the U.S. because of stereotypes and discrimination. But one that is less talked about is the personal barrier of how it feels to have the politics of your own country work against you and your own government be the one who displaces you. That sounds like ethics for the few to me. 

The article also chose to mention that while Mexico condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they are acting on a policy of neutrality and are not participating in sanctions against Russia. For the Mexican president to condemn the U.S. for not aiding Cuba but not condemn Russia for what they are doing to Ukraine, it seems like he is less concerned with the ethics of liberation for the benefit of the majority, and more concerned about garnering aid from the United States. 

An article in PBS about the same subject was much quicker to introduce López Obrador’s qualms against the United States in aiding Ukraine and not Latin America and the Caribbean. It also pointed out that no other official present for the statement chose to address it, but instead, continued their conversation on the flow of fentanyl into the United States from Mexico. 

“Although Friday’s talks focused on commerce issues, Blinken will lead a U.S. delegation to Mexico next week with Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that will focus on border security and migration,” said PBS. 

According to unnamed experts (the article does not specify) the ethics of economics and political repression happening in countries like Cuba and Venezuela right now is to blame for the “tide of migrants leaving Venezuela and Cuba.” When economic and political ethics are tailored toward the few and not the many, there is bound to be instability in a country. And this is where the issue lies. The issue is larger than where the U.S. chooses to spend its money.

The Business Standard used the same language as the other two articles and cemented the inkling I had that information on this topic is limited. All three use the quote from López Obrador: “They (the US) don’t do anything,” he said. “It’s more, a lot more, what they authorize for the war in Ukraine than what they give to help with poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

The ethics of liberation, especially by Enrique Dussel’s definition, is not present in the way these articles describe the economic and political climate of Latin America and the Caribbean. The fact that the United States’ choice to aid Ukraine is thrown under the bus further speaks to motives developed with the ethic of the few in mind. 

Each article portrays López Obrador as a man who is critical of the way the United States uses its funds, but he does not supplement that statement with any solutions or acknowledgements of nuance at the time of his statement. If the ethics of liberation are meant to be for everyday life from the perspective and interest of the immense majority, then arguably almost no political decision made of late is for the majority in an ethical sense. 

Click to access universal_declaration_of_ethics.pdf

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43545-022-00350-7

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK210003/

“Mexico’s President Says 10,000 Migrants a Day Head to US Border; He Blames US Sanctions on Cuba.” AP News, AP News, 3 Oct. 2023, apnews.com/article/mexico-migrants-us-border-sanctions-6b9f0cab3afec8680154e7fb9a5e5f82. 

“Mexico’s President Slams U.S. Sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 29 Sept. 2023, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/mexicos-president-slams-u-s-sanctions-on-venezuela-and-cuba. 

“Mexico’s President Slams Us Aid for Ukraine and Sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba.” The Business Standard, 30 Sept. 2023, http://www.tbsnews.net/world/mexicos-president-slams-us-aid-ukraine-and-sanctions-venezuela-and-cuba-709314. 

The overarching understanding that was further established by intaking these two pieces of media Control Room and “The Fog of War, and the Deadly Toll of Reporting from Gaza and Israel” is that this current war between Israel and Palestine is the culmination of many decades, if not centuries, of conflicts around the same topic: ownership and possession of land. While that description may be a gross simplification, it is the fear of displacement, or frustration of current displacement, coupled with the desire of possession that fuels hatred and war in this instance. 

You don’t just have a few problems with a group of people if you are okay with blockading them, as with Gaza, or by initiating a gruesome attack, as with the initial attack from the Hamas. This seems more like an underlying display of hatred on both sides. I am not educated enough on the origins of this feud to speak much further on the reasonings behind the war and unfortunately, I do not have the mental capacity to deep dive into that research right now because of personal reasons. 

Beyond personal reasons, I am intensely overwhelmed by the never-ending cycle of war and the destruction and chaos it brings. In Control Room the narrative that is threaded throughout the entire film is that each side, the USA and Arabs, frequently insist that the media from the other side is propaganda and largely staged. 

“We know that Al Jazeera has a pattern of playing propaganda over and over and over again. What they do is when there’s a bomb that goes down they grab some children and some women and pretend that the bomb hit the women and the children and it seems to me that it’s up to all of us to try to tell the truth to say what we know to say what we don’t know and recognize that were dealing with people that are perfectly willing to lie to the world to attempt to further their case…” Donald Rumsfeld said. This is a perfect example of a US representative slandering an entire news organization just to make the USA look like the good guys, or maybe he truly believes that which is just as unsettling. 

Media Analyst Abdallah Schleifer tried insisting to Eid Al-Shammre, coorespondant of Abu Dhabi Television, that it was his job to put all personal feelings aside and report on the war with a smile on his face. Al-Shammre became frustrated saying “how could I smile when my people are being killed.” 

I believe that in situations like war, the ability to be completely objective becomes impossible, no matter what anyone says.  Joanne Tucker, manager of Al Jazeera.net said in an interview that having objectivity in an event like this is a mirage, when talking about the 2003 invasion of Iraq. For example, Lt. Josh Rushing, Press Officer, Central Command, said when they saw images of dead us soldiers it affected them a lot more than when they saw images of dead Arabs. This speaks to that unintentional lack of objectivity. 

Rushing also said, “when I watch al Jazeera and I can tell what they are showing and then I can tell what they are not showing by choice, same thing when I watch fox on the other end of the spectrum.” You see this happening now with the Israel Palestine war. Different news outlets are reporting on different pieces of the whole image based on the target audience and values of the news outlet, rather than steering away from sensationalism and reporting all sides and only reporting facts. 

“History tells us that human beings have short memories. Who thinks now in the United States about what happened in Somalia in 1993, nobody. Who thinks about what happened in Bosnia, nobody thinks about that. History is written by the victors. All what will be left from this war are just scrips and some history books and that’s it,” Samir Khader, senior producer Al Jazeera said. “We wanted to show that any war has a human cost, okay, we focused on that there is a human cost because we care for Iraqi people, we are not like Rumsfeld who says we care for the Iraqi people. He doesn’t care at all okay, we care for them, we are Arabs like them, we are Muslims like them.”

In “The Fog of War, and the Deadly Toll of Reporting from Gaza and Israel” Brooke Gladstone says that “there’s a sense that the world is unraveling,” when speaking about the current Israel-Palestine war and other conflicts. I feel that the disparities between reports on the story regarding decapitated babies and the hospital bombing, for example, are so immense and no one has answers. “All sides have lied before,” said Gladstone. Journalists seem to be quickly eating up information released without fact checking or even having a way to fact check. So many reporters/journalists are sensationalizing news surrounding this war.

“There hasn’t been a lot of international journalists inside Gaza for a while. There is a dwindling number because of the high risk and the calculation made covering that conflict over the years,” Sherif Mansour, Middle East and North Africa program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. At the end of the day, it is up to each journalist to decide how much they will risk telling a story. In the case of any war, without people on the ground reporting, it is challenging to get the facts, so the people who do put themselves in harm’s way to report the truth the best they can have all of my respect. 

Situations like this make the grey area of ethics become even more muddled. Arguably, the only way to ethically consume media in cases like this is to take the immense amount of time to vet out sensationalized news and do a large amount of independent research to discern what the truth even is. This is a wildly taxing task, both mentally and emotionally. It is supposed to be the journalists job to provide this information, to do that research for the average person, but when journalists succumb to sensationalism, informational disaster ensues. 

Tareq Bacori talked about how this war could have a domino effect around the region as Palestine becomes a vehicle for “people in the region to begin to express their anger and dismay at regimes who are aligning themselves in ways that are ideologically opposed to their own people.” Places such as Jordan and Egypt have a “cold peace” with Israel. Lebanon is still formally at war with Israel and has aligned itself with the Hamas. 

Bacori said it was a huge miscalculation on the part of the Israeli government to assume that the blockading of over two million people in Gaza was sustainable, also underestimating the anger and passion with regard to the plight of Palestinian people throughout the region. “To think that this is something that is limited to Palestine is to miss the possibility that Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Iran could very quickly be embroiled in this just because of the politics around Israel-Palestine. In a global reality where we also have a European war, and we also have major geopolitical realignments happening, this is more explosive than it’s ever been in my lifetime, at least.”

https://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/680

https://www.betterhelp.com

https://www.spj.org/ethicswartime.asp#:~:text=The%20Code%20of%20Ethics%20of,”%20and%20“Be%20Accountable.”

Writing in a fair and balanced way is a cornerstone of being a journalist. This is a fundamental idea that is drilled into us as journalists by every mentor we’ve had. That is the traditional way to do journalism and it is an overarching agreed upon pillar of the profession. The idea of being balanced and fair revolves around the concept that a person can be completely unbiased. I argue that anyone who claims to be completely unbiased is living behind a façade. As the human condition is studied further, it is becoming common knowledge that while an individual may feel they are completely unbiased, biases in actuality have the potential to be completely unconscious and hidden.

One important component of balance and fairness in journalism, in my opinion, is the concept of false balance. The idea behind this concept is that some journalists may cover a side of a story that is undeniably untrue. This reality poses the question: should the value of a point of view be taken into consideration? If so, are we not delving into the grey area between opinion and fact? Or is it prudent regardless, to create parameters in which some things are truly absolute, and therefore an opposing perspective is only necessary if it is particularly relevant to the article? At what point does a statement not need a source because it is so widely accepted?

Another topic that intrigues me greatly is the various parameters of an accurate quotation. Selection and extraction, necessary components of quote selection, is an inherently subjective action. When you are wading through a sea of run-on sentences, repeating words, and sounds like “uh” and “um” what is ethical to remove? These practices cross a line when any editing affects what the person intended the meaning of their statement to be or if you change it to the point that it loses the person’s character. Some news organizations opt to not edit quotes in any way. Some allow the use of ellipsis.

One argument against ellipsis is that it gives space for the argument that a quote was taken out of context. If the quote needs excessive editing, it should ideally be paraphrased, or another quote should be chosen. Arguments in favor of ellipses are that they can make a non-succinct quote flow better and help to convey the point of the interviewee better. The only cases where I personally feel an ellipsis is acceptable is when a quote says the same exact word over and over, or they start to say a sentence one way and then restart in an entirely different way without pausing. Even then, they should only be used when the quote is essential to the article. 

Something that is up for discussion is whether or not mass shooters and murderers should be named and made visible through photographs. I am in favor of not doing either of those things in my writing because it is well-documented that other mentally unwell people may find an attachment to the assailant. Someone may still become consumed by reading about such evil but at least it takes some of the personal element out of it. I will do anything I can to prevent such evils. 

When it comes to vulgarities and obscenities, the reading on this topic was very informative for me. I do not have much experience having to navigate whether or not to quote something obscene. I do appreciate that some news organizations are much freer with publishing obscenities when it is relevant to the story. I think that destigmatizing curse words is good. When it comes to racial, ethnic and sexual slurs, I am less inclined to feel comfortable when they get published. I feel it gives the slur less attention when it is not stated verbatim and puts more focus on the moral implications of it being used in the first place. It is not prudent to report in a sensationalized fashion. 

Another thing that falls under the umbrella of sensationalism in my opinion is when identifiers are unnecessarily referenced in articles. For me, this goes back to the idea that gender, race, religion, and many other “identifiers” are social constructs that are most often irrelevant to a story. Unless their identification is specifically necessary for making a point, they should not be brought up for the sole purpose of making it known. Achievements are one area where identifiers may be relevant to the story. One rule of thumb is that journalists should not introduce an identifier if it is not mentioned in another aspect of the story. The opposing school of thought is that the reader should not be deprived of this information, but I argue that if it is truly relevant to the story, they won’t be, but if it isn’t, they aren’t missing out on anything essential to understanding the information.

There are many other topics in this week’s reading that I would like to touch on, but this post is getting alarmingly long and I will save them for another day. In short, all of these readings further illustrate how complex it can be to convey information to the public in a way that is not harmful, sensational or biased. 

https://www.ap.org/about/news-values-and-principles/telling-the-story/quotations

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/unconscious-bias-14822310/why-identify-your-bias

https://diversity.ucsf.edu/programs-resources/training/unconscious-bias-training

I chose an article that covers a topic I have been following for many years: the murder of Elijah McClain. The New York Times article https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/us/elijah-mcclain-verdict-officers.html focuses on the duel trial of Jason Rosenblatt and Randy Roedema, two of the three officers who were involved in McClain’s death. This is the first trial of three trials that will be held. The other two will be for the third police officer and two paramedics who were also charged with his death. 

The fault lines in this story regard race/ethnicity, gender, class and generation. You could propose that geography is a factor as well, but unfortunately at his point, there is arguably no state in this country where a young black man has not been murdered by police officers. 

The authors Audra Burch and Kelley Manley make a point to note that the jury was mostly white. The anger and surprise felt by many is that the jury only convicted Roedema guilty of criminally negligent homicide and assault. Rosenblatt left a free man although many feel that he is just as responsible for McClain’s murder.

“How do you convict one and acquit the other? How can you call this justice?” said Candice Bailey, an Aurora activist who led many of the early marches and demanded police reform. This quote is the first one presented in the article. I feel they did that because it pointedly highlights the frustration felt within activist communities who are fighting for justice for McClain. 

Shortly after, the article quotes McClain’s mother, who stated “None of them did their job that night the way they were supposed to. The police didn’t do their job that night and neither did the paramedics. They worked as a team to murder my son.” You can hear the grief and frustration through this quote of a mother who has had her son stolen from her. It is mentioned that when the officers were first indicted, the Aurora Police Association was vocal that they felt their officers did nothing wrong. 

“This is the divided states of America, and that’s what happens,” his mother said. When you hear this quote her message is clear and you can feel it. When the writers of the article retell the story of McClain’s murder, you feel the suffering to its full extent all over again. He was unarmed. He was on his way home. He was vocal about the fact that he couldn’t breathe. He begged for his life. None of that was taken into consideration. 

The most insidious and horrific part of this case, to me, is that this case was all but dismissed until the murder by cops of another unarmed Black man, George Floyd. Only then did the Colorado governor intervene. Must humans unfailingly wait to make up for their mistakes until after the damage is done? Or can we act with grace, compassion, morality and humility before mistakes are made that cannot be undone, like taking another person’s life?  

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/5/31/mapping-us-police-killings-of-black-americans

Fighting Police Abuse: A Community Action Manual