On Feb. 5, the New York Times gave a 160-word "brief" on page A20 to one of the bizarre moments in the case of 6-year-old Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez. The Times noted that his two grandmothers had admitted to "playfully biting the boy's tongue and unzipping his pants" during their reunion with Elian in Miami. Now, that's a nice way of putting it. What the grandmothers did, and joked about on Cuban television, was pull the boy's penis out of his trousers to examine whether it had "grown" since he'd been on American soil. And if the Times knows any grandmothers who bite their grandchildren's tongues -- "playfully" or otherwise -- we'd be surprised. The snippet closed with a quote from one Uva de Aragon of Florida International University who said such behavior was "the same as if she were tickling him or trying to see his muscles."
There could be an explanation for this weird behavior. ( Santeria, maybe?) But until we've heard it, we'll merely note that the last time Attorney General Janet Reno heard of such treatment of children, she ordered an attack on a religious compound that killed 80 people.
Three days later, the Times ran a mammoth front-page "news" story by Peter Kilborn, complete with three photos and a pull-quote, called "A Bumpy Path for Cuban Boy's Miami Kin." The story had little to do with Elian. No -- it was a mere laying-out of the police records of those of Elian's relatives who want to keep him in the United States, including the drunk-driving convictions of two great uncles and the robbery convictions of two first cousins once removed. It closed with a quote from a professor that Elian's Cuban father "should win [the custody battle] hands down."
Kilborn's story was effectively a legal brief for returning Elian to Cuba. At least, there was no evidence of any attempt to discover the criminal records of Elian's family still in Cuba. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that "public records" aren't open to the public in Communist dictatorships. Ignoring that fact made the story reminiscent of the worst journalism of the Cold War, in which gullible journalists treated the tyranny of the Communist world as an excuse for incuriosity, and the freedom of the West as a tool-kit for beating up on it.