Better Off Red?
Table of Contents:
- Better Off Red?
- Introduction
- Before the Fall:Seeing Communism as a "Success Story"
- The Liberation of Eastern Europe: Missing the "Safety" of Communism
- "The Workers' Paradise Has Become a Homeless Hell"
- Whitewashing the Communist Record on Human Rights
- Journalists Distressed by China's Shift Towards Capitalism
- North Korea: Singing Along With Diane Sawyer
- Enthralled with Fidel Castro's Communist Paradise
- Scorning the Anti-Communists: "Nobody Likes a Snitch"
- Journalistic Gorbasms Over the Last Soviet Dictator
- Conclusion: Nostalgic for Totalitarian Communism
Introduction
Exactly 20 years ago, the world rejoiced as the suffocating grip of
communism in Europe was finally broken. The pivotal year was 1989, as
Soviet-installed dictatorships in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
Bulgaria and East Germany all retreated in the face of largely peaceful
democratic revolutions; the Romanians also threw off their shackles
that year, but in a spasm of violence that killed more than a thousand
people. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall, which had imprisoned the
people of East Berlin for 28 years, was finally opened. Two years
later, the Soviet Union itself fell apart, four months after an
attempted coup against party boss Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved in the
face of popular opposition.
The media fancy themselves as those
who give voice to the voiceless, who stand as a check on those in
power. But looking back at the media’s track record on communism, one
sees a press that was too willing to act as a mouthpiece for the
world’s worst dictatorships, and too accepting of the perverse claim
that communism meant safety and security for its people. The evils of
communism are well documented. According to The Black Book of Communism,
even Hitler’s Holocaust pales in comparison to the human toll of the
world’s communist dictators: 65 million killed by Mao, another 20
million killed by Stalin, and millions more who perished in Eastern
Europe, North Korea, Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa.
What
follows is the record of the media’s communism coverage, as compiled
by the Media Research Center over the past 22 years. Before, during and
after those momentous events two decades ago, the liberal media too
often whitewashed the true nature of communism, or suggested capitalism
was somehow worse. Even as European communism was gasping its last
breaths, reporters touted its supposed success stories. After the Iron
Curtain lifted, the media disparaged the uncertainty of life without the
“guarantees” and “safety net” provided by the former communist
masters. Journalists kept singing the praises of the remaining
communist police state of Cuba, and a few even offered propaganda
opportunities to the lunatic dictatorship in North Korea. And liberals
continued to heap scorn and ridicule on American anti-communists,
obviously unembarrassed by their own blindness to the reality of the
20th century.