Bozell: Jay Leno Knows More About What's News than the "News" Networks

The ABC, CBS and NBC evening new shows have yet to notice Fidel Castro's astonishing admission that Cuban Communism does not work. "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore," the longtime dictator was quoted as telling The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg in a September 8 posting.

But non-journalist Jay Leno brought the news to his Tonight Show audience on Thursday, joshing: "Most Cubans heard this announcement on a 1954 RCA Deluxe console TV - beautiful black-and-white, all mahogany...." (Video at right)

MRC President Brent Bozell issued the following statement to address the broadcast networks' lack of interest:

"Jay Leno knows more about current events than do the "news" networks. Newsflash to the liberal media: Communism Fails! Period. You've had 50 years to report the abuses, suffering and oppression in Communist Cuba. But instead, you "journalists" were so infatuated with Fidel Castro that instead you did his bidding, continuously feeding Americans a steady diet of disgraceful propaganda. Aren't you thoroughly ashamed it took the dictator himself to admit what you should have been reporting all along?"

For a review of the decades of Fidel-fawning coverage documented by the Media Research Center, check out our 2007 Special Report: "Fidel's Flatterers - The U.S. Media's Decades of Cheering Castro's Communism."