A month ago, I wrote that Big Sugar may have used its muscle to suppress the showing of a documentary film at the Miami International Film Festival--closing today. The film, depicting abject conditions for workers and children at the Dominican Republican sugar plantation owned by the uber-wealthy, socialite Fanjul family, had been invited to appear at The Miami International Film Festival.
Just days before the festival was to begin, without adequate explanation, the invitation was withdrawn by festival organizers.
On Saturday, the Associated Press reported the story. The film maker, Amy Serrano, alerted interested readers in an email. She wrote, "It looks like this story will emerge in Sunday's Miami Herald."
Well, so far as I can tell, it didn't. The fact that it didn't is worth comment.
The story did appear as an AP feed on the Saturday edition of The Miami Herald website. But it did not appear in either day's print edition. That's a shame, but an understandable one.
There are long-standing ties from Big Sugar to the The Herald front office and backroom: Joanna Wragg was an associate editor of The Miami Herald for many years, before consulting to the industry that continues to pollute so much of the Everglades.
In light of today's editorial by The Miami Herald publisher, Anders Gyllenhaal, "Website comments provide a forum for vital debate", what is one to say about the city's only daily newspaper?
Gyllenhaal professes gratitude for public participation in the Herald website and its own blogs, that have received "hundreds of thousands of readers... posting comments or following along at the end of online stories..." Shelley Acoca, The Herald's editor devoted to reader exchange says, "This community really benefits from the discussion, particularly on things where we don't agree with each other... we have so many people who've come from places where freedom of expression isn't allowed."
Yes, some people have come from the Dominican Republican, for instance, where criticism of private industries, like the Fanjul's, puts people in danger. Some people, in Miami, who read the Herald might be interested to understand why the paper, itself, stopped itself from printing a story from its print pages that it printed online.
In context of top Herald executives professing to embrace free speech, this issue should rise to the level of interest for The Columbia Journalism Review, Media Matters, or 60 Minutes.
The former publisher of The Miami Herald, Alberto Ibarguen, is chair of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation--a multibillion dollar non-profit that invests in advancing free speech, independent journalism throughout the world and also is a major sponsor of The Miami International Film Festival.
The Knight Foundation should withdraw its funding of the film festival because of the events surrounding the festival's rejection of Sugar Babies, tantamount to a violation of the foundation's core principles.
The Herald decision not to report or to print in its print edition the AP story about Big Sugar, the Miami International Film Festival, and Amy Serrano's film, contradicts the Herald's own publisher when he writes: "It's all the more important that we find a way to provide a place at the center of the community for all kinds of opinion."
The problem is: that is not the Miami Herald.
Anders Gyllenhaal can be reached at: andersg@miamiherald.com
6 comments:
Big Sugar and its primary beneficiaries the Fanjul family are very powerful. There is a reason they have gotten away with polluting the Everglades for so long. And there is a reason Americans pay so much for sugar.
Well I would sum it up like this - they and the Miami Herald could burn in Hell !!!
Or how about Seth Gordon's Letter to the Editor in the Miami Herald this morning, taking Ana Menendez to task for her weekend editorial. Mr. Seth "I love Big Sugar and take as much money from it as I can" Gordon asserting "ethical" decision-making by the festival organizers.
Should Seth Gordon disclose he is being paid by Big Sugar?
Should the Herald disclose Seth Gordon is being paid by Big Sugar?
Filmmaker charges Florida sugar barons blocked documentary
By Laura Wides-Munoz | The Associated Press
March 10, 2008
MIAMI - From their perch atop Florida's sugar industry, the Fanjul family wields political and cultural power from the sunny sands of Palm Beach to the corridors of Washington.
Now filmmaker Amy Serrano believes the family has used that power to block the showing of her documentary critical of their umbrella company, Flo-Sun Inc., at the Miami International Film Festival. And she says her project about the Fanjuls is not the only one to run into trouble in recent months. She points to a film Jodie Foster wanted to make about them that was scrapped and the fight the CBS-TV series Cane faced before it was aired.
"I feel like my film has been blackballed," Serrano said of her documentary, The Sugar Babies. It's about the plight of Haitian sugar workers in the Dominican Republic, where the Fanjul family and other companies harvest cane.
Gaston Cantens, a spokesman for the Fanjuls' West Palm Beach-based Florida Crystals Corp., called ridiculous any accusation that the Fanjuls exerted undue pressure.
Serrano's film was rejected from the festival, which ended Sunday, days before the final lineup was announced. The rejection came despite initial support from the festival's organizers and acclaim at more than a dozen other festivals worldwide.
Serrano said she has no proof the Fanjuls were behind the decision but maintains explanations for her film's rejection and the subsequent response from another Miami festival were suspicious.
"Miami stands at the epicenter of the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Florida sugar happenings," said Serrano. She called the decision "a missed opportunity to transform injustice into consumer consciousness."
Films about other sugar families are running into direct opposition from their subjects.
The Dominican Republic's Vicini sugar family recently hired a Washington, D.C., law firm to sue the makers of another documentary, The Price of Sugar, claiming defamation.
Cantens said the sugar industry is tired of one-sided portrayals of "big sugar."
"For years we kind of took it on the chin," he said of stories alleging worker mistreatment and environmental pollution. "We're tired of taking it on the chin, and we're fighting back."
The Fanjuls' political influence is no small thing. Cuban-American patriarch Alfie Fanjul's telephone call interrupted President Clinton during an indiscreet moment with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office. The family and its network have already given more than $300,000 so far in the 2008 election cycle to political committees and candidates from both major parties.
Serrano, a Cuban-American and Miami native, said festival officials gushed over her film last November. Back then, she told organizers she had already exhibited it elsewhere, including for students at Florida International University in Miami-Dade County. It was a private showing but made local headlines when media showed up with the Dominican consul, who denounced the portrayal of his country.
Film festival officials originally said the FIU showing was fine, according to e-mail exchanges with Serrano. But, on Jan. 25, she got another letter telling her the showing was a problem because of the media coverage, which disqualified it.
Festival director Patrick de Bokay denied the Fanjuls pressured him, saying, "You have to make hard decisions, and you cannot take all the films."
Bokay said he offered to hold a special screening for The Sugar Babies at a later date and even conduct forums to discuss the plight of sugar workers in the Dominican Republic.
That would mean much less publicity — and less controversy, Serrano said.
Days after the film festival's rejection, the Women's International Film Festival in Miami, which opens March 26, also began to backpedal on its invitation to show the film, Serrano said. Eventually the organizers offered a small theater with a forum to bring in various views on the issue.
Serrano, who has lined up other festivals, plans to decline.
Foster dropped plans last year to produce and star in Sugarland, based on a 2001 Vanity Fair expose. Robert De Niro was also reported to have signed onto the project, which would have been the actors' first reunion since Taxi Driver. Foster was in talks with Universal at the time the project was dropped. She and De Niro declined to comment. Universal spokeswoman Stacey Ivers said the company considers many proposals that take years to make, if they are made at all. She declined to comment specifically on Sugarland.
Cantens said the Vanity Fair story, which focused on a series of lawsuits by Jamaican sugar workers, is out of date because the Fanjuls successfully appealed the cases.
The Fanjuls dropped their lawsuit against Cane, a Cuban-flavored mix of Dynasty and Dallas set among South Florida's sugar fields, only after producers changed details, including morphing the family business from simply harvesting sugar to producing rum
The Knight Foundation owns a sugar plantation in Florida. Seriously. They have someone else running it for them, but the foundation owns it. As a wise man once said, it's all about the Benjamins.
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