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Oct. 19, 2019 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
29:37
'US Media in Crisis' - Rick Sanchez

Former US mainstream media anchor - from CNN to Fox News - turned-RT America lead news anchor Rick Sanchez gives a tour-de-force of US regime change policies in Latin America and the mainstream media's fawning coverage of the crimes of the US national security state. The speech is from the Ron Paul Institute's 2019 Washington conference on "Breaking Washington's Addiction to War."

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Time Text
Manuel Zelaya: Former President of Honduras 00:11:21
Thanks very much for that powerful presentation.
You can see kind of where we're going with this.
We're looking at the different aspects of Washington's addictions to war.
We've talked about economics.
We've talked about NATO.
We've talked about a number of issues.
But there's one really important component that we absolutely cannot forget.
And that's the role of the media in perpetuating and propagandizing and turning this into kind of a mindless state of jelly brains in the U.S.
And when we were planning this conference, we could think of no one better who's seen the spectrum, who's seen the totality of the U.S. mainstream media and its alternatives than someone like Rick Sanchez, who has a long and storied career in the U.S. media.
Everyone recognizes his face and has for a long time.
But he's also a brilliant analyst of the media, and he's got a lot of very important things to say.
Rick Sanchez.
So, yeah, I think what he was trying to say is that I have worked for NBC and MSNBC and Fox News.
And here comes the applause line.
I was fired by CNN.
So it's funny because when Dr. Paul and Dan reached out to me and asked if I was willing to come here and speak, I couldn't help but wonder why they wouldn't want, you know, some of the cool kids, man.
I mean, why, you know, listen, you could have Anderson Cooper, you could have Cuomo, Rachel, the Tuckster.
And when I asked Dan and Dr. Paul, they said, no, we actually kind of prefer you on this one.
And I was like, why?
And they were, well, saying to me, you're telling the truth.
And it's a shame that we've got to watch some dude, some Cuban guy on Russian television to get the truth about America.
So thank you.
You know, it is true.
It is true that we end up on our primetime newscast every night telling a lot of things and sharing a lot of the stories that you're not going to hear anywhere else.
That sucks.
I mean, think about it.
Look, recent example.
Last week I interviewed some dude named Manuel Zelaya, former president, true story, former president of Honduras.
He was removed from power by a CIA-backed coup.
By the way, I should mention as an aside that Americans like myself, who descend from other places or know a little bit about what happens in our country historically, know that It's almost laughable to us when we hear these stories about that the meet that the Rachel Maddows of the world are telling us all the time that we should be shocked, shocked, shoot,
that Russia or any other country for that matter meddled or tried to influence in our elections using social media.
I mean, it's kind of hypocritical, right?
And by the way, look, I'm not here to be a Russia apologist by any stretch of the imagination, but whatever the hell Russia seems to have done, as described as Mr. Stockman just noted a while ago by Robert Moeller in his report, is about one one-thousandth of the stuff that we've done in Latin America.
I mean, it's nuts.
I mean, you think if intervening in elections is news in that sense, what we've done in Central and South and America and the Caribbean, we're in the major leagues.
The United States is the major leagues, and everybody else is playing stickball.
It couldn't be more clear.
I mean, you can even, you can do, by the way, and this is maybe a message to those, you know, again, to the guys on the other networks that I compete with every night.
You could even just go to the Associated Press.
They will even compile it for you.
I mean, here, cursory list, ready?
1914, U.S. troops occupy the Mexican court of Veracruz for months to influence the Mexican Revolution and elections there.
I think somebody had mentioned that.
1954, Guatemala elects this guy named Jacobo Arbenz.
The guy comes out and promises land reforms for his people.
The CIA overthrows him with a U.S.-led coup, sparks a civil war.
100,000 people die.
100,000 people died because we didn't like the guy that they democratically elected.
By the way, at the time, and I think most of you guys know this, we had a guy in the CIA named Dulles who had a brother named Dulles.
One guy ran the fruit company.
The other guy ran the CIA.
And he'd say, hey, there's a guy down here, a politician who might hurt my business.
And he'd say, what do you need?
I said, the Marines, and he'd send them.
This is crazy, but this is a part of our history.
And, you know, DR, Dominican Republic, we send the Marines to make sure pro-business side wins a civil war.
1965, 1973, Chile alex Allende, Salvador Allende, who guy liens left, okay, fine.
The CIA foments a coup where Allende is assassinated and we replace him with General La Gusto Pinochet, yes, who imposes one of the most brutal military regimes in Latin American history.
1970s, the U.S. launches Operation Condor in Argentina, Chile, and other South American countries through assassination and repression.
1980s, we know what happened there with the brutal wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador and the political movements that were pushing for land reform and anti-corporate measures were destroyed.
1983, the U.S. forces invade the Caribbean island of Grenada after accusing the government of allying itself with Cuba.
1989, U.S. invades Panama, Alice Manuel Noriega, who later reveals to me when I went to visit him in prison that he worked for the CIA.
And he told me, and then he died.
1994.
So, but think about that.
We had a guy who worked for the CIA, and then we couped the guy who worked for the CIA.
What the hell?
1994, the United States invades Haiti to remove President Rawls Cedrus.
2002, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez ousted for two days by a U.S. coup, U.S.-led coup.
These are the ones we know.
These are the ones the Associated Press.
You can Google, you know, and fine.
And I got to tell you, as I was compiling that list, it suddenly dawned on me.
Isn't that funny?
You know, you do this for a long time and you cover a lot of stories and you start to realize, or you start to forget some of the stuff you've done.
As I was compiling this list to do this story, right, Dan, that I had on last week, Friday, by the way, I think it's up to 700,000 hits on YouTube or something like that, which is pretty cool.
I started realizing that I covered a lot of these as a correspondent for CNN or for NBC, you know, when I was a reporter.
I was in Haiti.
I covered the contra war in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
I was in Cuba.
I was in Venezuela.
I was in Guatemala.
I interviewed Noriega after the invasion.
I went in with the 82nd Airborne during the invasion of Grenada.
So, in many ways, I look back at my own career now as a correspondent, as a news reporter who's, you know, I guess covered a lot of stuff.
You know, and I kind of see my own culpability in covering these stories.
And not because I did anything wrong.
I was a good reporter.
I could get to the scene, interview the right people, and tell you exactly what was going on.
And I could tell you all the stuff about the kill count and the information about where we were.
But you know what I didn't tell it?
You know what I didn't tell?
Context.
That's what we don't do sometimes.
We go in ramshod, but we don't give context as reporters.
And look, I mean, look, in the end, it's not fair to say that everything that we as Americans have done has been a nefarious act.
History happens.
You could argue that there was a time when it comes, especially to Latin America, where the United States felt like we're the big brother, this is the little brother, and we can push him around.
We're doing it for his own good to set him straight.
I get that.
There may be some of that.
But unfortunately, speaking as a reporter, speaking as someone who is a refugee to this country, who was born in Latin America, I can tell you that doesn't excuse the damage that's been done in a lot of countries, countries in Latin America that are ruined to this day because of actions that really had more to do with power and might and greed than just about anything else.
And then you ask yourself, does the United States still engage in this type of meddling, this type of intervention?
You know, do we still secretly remove elected presidents, friggin presidents who were elected?
Do we still remove them by coups backed by the CIA, despite what we promised with the church committee in 1975 when we said we're just not going to be the kind of country that does this anymore?
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you watch my interview with this, with President Zelaya, I mean, we did it in Honduras.
He was removed by a military coup.
2009, we removed somebody with a military coup.
Where the hell is that story?
You know?
Fomented, of course, by the CIA.
And some Secretary of State, I think some of you guys might know her in here.
Her name is Hillary Clinton.
I just did a three-part series of the interviews with this dude, Zelaya, and he took me through what his history is, the history, and what became of his country.
And I think what became of his country has been quoted now as our, I think our president calls it a shithole country.
And here's what maybe Mr. Trump and many in the media won't tell you.
We made it a shithole country.
We made it a shithole country.
Honduras today is one of the most dangerous countries in the world.
And because of that, it sends more immigrants to America per capita than just about any country in the world.
They weren't coming here before we did that.
They were happy there.
In fact, their economy was doing pretty good.
See, those are the unintended consequences of our foreign policy, the unintended consequences of our foreign policy, which isn't good for most of us Americans, but it's good, as we know, for the few, and especially those in the business of war.
Did you know that the military installation that we put in Honduras post-coup is now one of the biggest in the world?
It's huge.
It's or huge, right?
You know why we tell these stories?
Because we should, because we can, because it's the truth, and because I think just about everybody in this room loves this country, you know?
I guess Cooper, Cuomo, Matto, Tucker, those guys love this country too, I think, you know?
Why We Tell These Stories 00:04:12
I'm sure they do.
I wish they'd love it enough to tell us the truth, though.
You know?
That's the real sign of love.
It's like a mom or a dad who disciplines their children.
If they're doing something wrong, if they're bringing Ds and F's, you got to tell them.
Maybe they're not allowed.
By the way, with those guys, it's not about what they tell you.
It's really about what they don't tell you, right?
It's really about what they don't tell you.
You know, it's funny.
I often tried to tell these stories at CNN when I was there because I had like the highest ratings on CNN, which was really weird.
I also had the youngest audience.
And it always gets shot down.
It was always like a fight just to be able to put stories on the air that I knew were important.
And then Penguin came and offered me a book deal, which is really cool.
So I was excited.
I signed a deal to write a book for Penguin.
And I wrote a book.
But in my contract, CNN had the right to review the book before it was released.
They had to go through the entire manuscript and redact and redact.
And they said it was for legal reasons.
And I included a chapter in my book about everything I just told you: the history of the U.S. interventions in Latin America.
They took it out.
He said, you can't say that.
I said, why can't I say that?
They said, we don't talk about that.
This is the guy who runs the ombudsman, the guy who runs standards for CNN.
Some standard, huh?
We don't tell the truth.
Omission, man.
Omission, omission, omission.
The lie of omission.
In journalism, it's what we don't say that becomes our destiny.
It's what we don't say that becomes our destiny.
For example, you want to do a story about Russians trying to influence the elections through social media?
Fine, it's a good story.
We should do that story.
If the Russians tried to somehow influence Americans in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan, as we've heard, it's a good story.
But where's the story about our interference in elections in Iran in 1953?
Where's that story?
That gives you perspective of why we're having the problems that we have today with Iran.
What about the fact that we literally installed Boris Yeltsin, a fall-down drunk, as the president of Russia, and then bragged about it with this big giant cover story on Time magazine saying, essentially, look what we did.
Hey, cool.
We got this drunk in office to be the president of Russia so he can kind of run things over there.
What about the fact that we also tell only half-truths?
Benjamin Franklin said something interesting, right?
He said, providing only half the truth is really a bigger lie.
So where's the mention of the UK interference on behalf of Obama or Israel's meddling on behalf of Romney?
Why weren't those stories that were covered by Rachel Maddow every single night for 50 minutes of her one-hour long show?
I mean, and for that matter, can you be elected for a seat in Congress without the tacit approval or being heavily influenced by Israel in this country?
Where's that story?
I mean, foreign policy is foreign policy, and any country's foreign policy should be criticizable.
Cool word, huh?
Just made it up.
Criticizable.
Wow.
See, English is my second language.
These are the types of stories that I do drill down every night on the newscast that we do on RT.
If you get a chance to check it out, check it out.
Some of the stories are critical of the United States, you know, the country that I love and we all respect.
Because I came here as a communist, as a refugee from a communist country.
I'm here from Cuba, where you also are not allowed to criticize the state.
So that's not a model we want to emulate, right?
I mean, people say, there was a big article a couple of weeks ago in the Miami Herald.
It said, Rick Sanchez, raised in Miami to hate communists, now works for the Russians.
Media Walls Crumbling 00:08:46
It's a great story.
Google it.
It's pretty cool, actually.
Long, too.
And I took her through why I did it.
And she was like, oh, okay.
I get it.
I think it's because in our country we got to speak truths, you know, even troubling truths.
That's why it's so great to be here with so many people who are doing just that.
How many wars are we fighting right now?
I mean, do you know?
I had to look this up.
And I'm a friggin journalist.
I'm supposed to be a, we're in seven wars.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Niger, officially, right?
Military bases, 870 countries.
These are crazy numbers that nobody knows and should know.
And when I say nobody, I mean the media doesn't report it.
How many bombs are we dropping?
Bush was dropping 12,000 a year.
Obama was dropping 20,000 a year.
And Trump has taken it to 44,000.
I mean, David Stockman and I were talking last night about this.
Between 1998 and 2015, the Pentagon says it can't account for $21 trillion.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Where is it?
I don't know.
$21 trillion.
I know how hard I had to work to have that money taken out of my taxes.
I know that.
What'd you do with it?
I don't know.
It's crazy.
Just crazy.
War in Afghanistan, going on 18 years.
The only time that war is mentioned is when a dad comes home to surprise his wife and his kids at a football game.
It's the only time in this country we hear about the Afghanistan war.
And by the way, yay, I love that.
It's a beautiful moment.
It makes me feel good.
I get teary-eyed when I see the daughter who hasn't seen daddy in so long.
But why don't we freaking tell the American people why daddy is there to begin with?
Why don't we tell him anything about that damn war except when he comes home?
It's mind-boggling.
You know, we do, as Americans, have a right to be informed.
You know, we think.
That's all it is, though, a right.
No.
It's a responsibility.
That's why it's so important that our media tell us the truth.
When CNN fired me, I think it was because maybe I was telling too many truths.
Seriously.
By the way, that was painful.
Got to tell you, you lose your salary, you lose your livelihood.
We, you know, my wife and I and my kids, we lost our home.
I had to suddenly try and find a way to make ends meet.
Went back to Miami, like all good Cubans do.
And I taught high school at 7 o'clock, 6 o'clock in the morning.
Actually, I had to wake up.
And I did a radio show on iHeart, sandwiched between Hannity and what's his name? Rush.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, good.
Everybody knew right away.
Oh, yeah, I know what comes after him.
Then I did a show in Spanish, you know, doing my lucka, lucka, lucka thing.
Yeah, because my mom and dad don't speak any English, so it's the first time they've ever been able to like watch me on TV every day.
You know, it's kind of cool.
And while I was at it, I partnered with a couple of doctors and we founded a healthcare company, which was really good.
Four years ago, we started this new company in Miami, helping people.
We started with one clinic.
Now we have more than 50 across the state.
This is really cool.
Last week, Inc. Magazine ranked the company Cano Health, which I'm one of the founders of, the number one fastest-growing healthcare company in America with revenues over $300 million.
I know.
It's pretty cool for a refugee.
So while I was out of the national conversation, I watched the media landscape during those years.
The papers were dying all over the place.
CNN, Fox, MSNBC doing basically what I came to know as or call reality show news.
That's what it is.
It's reality show news and being controlled by corporations and trying to outscream each other with endless panels talking about what Trump tweeted over breakfast that morning.
And it was tough for me to watch.
It was really tough for my wife.
She was like, shut it off.
You're not doing that anymore.
But look what they're doing to our profession.
They're not communicating.
And she was always looking at me like you're a healthcare professional now.
Enjoy it.
You know, if it's in your gut, man, it's in your gut.
You know, what do they say?
Don't die with your music still inside of you.
News didn't used to be that way, by the way, but something happened.
You know what I think?
Something happened.
As an older guy who's done news for many years, as a correspondent and watched it evolve, something happened post-Watergate.
See, after Watergate, all of us guys my age who were starting in the business graduated, University of Minnesota, Go Golden Gophers, journalism degree, ready to go, got my first job.
And then I saw what happened with Watergate.
I think a lot of us went in there and we wanted to be crusaders.
But sometimes you can't be a crusader without context and perspective either.
And I think a lot of reporters pushed too hard.
And I think they tried to turn every business guy into a crook.
Every politician was corrupt.
Not every politician is corrupt.
You know, not every business guy is on the take.
I think the media kind of back then, late, early 70s, overplayed its hand, which is what got the backlash from a lot of people in the business community and from the right who were saying, look, the media is getting crazy.
They do have too much power.
They're being unfair.
And just because you're a businessman, that doesn't mean you're mean or evil or corrupt.
But I think that's where the whole Rush Limbaugh and eventually the whole Fox News thing started.
And I think it had good intentions.
But that then turned us into Fox News from the right.
MSNBC news from the left.
So you have MSNBC and you have Fox News telling their truths, right?
Their truths, not the truth.
And that's in many ways what's happened to our business.
It went from, you know, two guys take down a president, then everybody wants to take down a president.
The media becomes a little too strident.
Somebody comes in and says, wait a minute, we're going to back off.
We're going to create our own media kind of look.
They go far to the right.
The media says, oh, you're going to go to the right.
We're going to go to the left.
Now we've got, you know, what we have.
And on top of all of that, both of them are all pro-war and pro-empire.
So it's so confusing to watch what has happened.
But it's worse, really, when you consider there was a time old enough to remember, where if a salesman, and by salesman, you know, TV station has to sell commercials and all that crap, right?
So if a salesman walked into the newsroom to try and pitch a story from an advertiser or to try and influence the news, he could be fired.
He would literally be fired if somebody found out he did that.
I remember cases where our news director, right, got into a fistfight with a salesman who came into the newsroom.
I mean, he tried to kick his ass because he was coming in there to influence the news because you just don't do that.
There used to be a wall between those two.
Today, sales departments essentially control the news.
It does.
I mean, have you checked to see who sits on the board of companies that own CNN, Fox, the New York Times, CBS, ABC, NBC?
It's going to scare you.
And let's close the loop, right?
You know why they don't want you to, you know why they don't cover endless wars and the waste of your taxpayers' money?
Because they got Raytheon sitting on their board.
Of course, if he's sitting on your board, he's influencing your company.
And yes, it does filter down through interlocking.
If they don't do critical stories on how we're poisoning our kids with chemicals in our foods, it's because there's a guy from Monsanto sitting on the board of these companies.
I mean, duh.
If they don't explain the disastrous effect of our horribly corrupt, in many ways, medical insurance system in this country where we overpay for what the rest of the world gets much more cheaply, it's because conglomerate insurance companies are sitting on the board.
This is interlocking.
And it used to not reach the media in that regard, but it is today.
And it's there for you to see.
None Better Than Me 00:05:05
So if you wonder sometimes, well, why didn't she tell, why didn't he tell me that story about this guy Zalaya who was ousted by a CIA coup in 2009, which is not that far, you know, that far back?
That's why.
Why do they get in trouble for mentioning these stories?
Well, it kind of feeds down, right?
So how did I end up back in the national conversation?
Good question, Daniel.
Just about the time I was getting settled in Miami and I created this healthcare company, some guy reached out to me with a really long, unpronounceable Russian name.
Mikhail Solodovnikov was on the phone.
You say that 20 times, right?
Misha, as I've come to know him.
And he said he was just asking himself, what the heck ever happened to Rick Sanchez, right?
Because I did kind of disappear for a long time.
Misha had already built RT America into what was a legitimate alternative to what I just described.
But last year, he lost his main anchor.
A guy named a fellow named Ed Schultz, good man, decent man, nice guy.
I'd known him throughout my career as a colleague, great communicator, but he passed away.
So Misha reached out to me and I immediately said no.
And I told him my plate was super full.
Deep down, though, I had that music still playing, right?
The music was still playing.
So after a series of meetings, we realized, if not now, when, right?
It's probably never been as bad as it is now.
When are we going to have again the opportunity to create a newscast that actually tells the truth to people about what's really going on?
As imperfect as I am and as imperfect as we are, we really do try to do that and to try and counter the slop that you see on most cable news channels.
Well, since we started this little thing, we're now reaching millions and millions of very engaged viewers a week on the news with Rick Sanchez.
It's mind-blowing.
We have about a 90% approval from viewers who say they're hooked on the program because they truly believe it's giving them the news straight.
When I was at CNN, I was lucky if I can get 40% approval.
Most of the, I mean, really, it's a very divided audience, you know, when you go to social media and stuff like that, and especially when comments on newscasts.
They do tell us every night how bizarre it is that they have to turn on a Russian TV channel to get the news or the truth about America.
Something, Daniel, you've said, which is kind of ironic.
Me, because I've worked in business now, I kind of compare it to a business model, like what I did at Cano Health.
Think about it, though.
If I want a true measure of how my company is doing, I don't ask my finance guys to give me the report, right?
I hire auditors from someplace else and I bring them in and say, look at my books.
Tell me if they're straight.
I'm not going to have the guy who wrote the book tell me if the book's straight, right?
Think about it.
News is the same way, right?
I mean, if you ask yourself, given what I just told you about interlocking, do we trust MSNBC, Fox, and CNN to tell us the truth about our books, about our country, about our news?
So I'm not sure I would trust RT to tell me the truth about Russia, but I'm more apt to trust RT to tell me the truth every night about what's going on in my country because they're like the outside auditors who came in and took a look, you know?
And I think it's, you know, I think we may be on to something with this.
As a journalist, I feel more independent working there than I did working at CNN.
Damn it to hell.
Doesn't that say something?
So I should end with this.
It does feel good to be told by so many people that, you know, you're appreciated for what you're doing, that they watch the show to get the truth that they're not getting from the other networks.
But it's especially nice to hear it from fellow truth tellers, many of which are in this room.
The prolific truth tellers who go out there and like Stockman, you watched him recently on CNBC.
It was fun to behold.
The viewers, I mean, the announcers are like, you can tell they're saying, get them off, get them off, you know?
A little IFB thing we put in our ears.
I know that machine.
So it is nice, but none better.
None better than to me the guy who's created the model about truth telling.
And it's great to hear that from none other than Dr. Ron Paul.
Thank you for having me.
Appreciate it. And thank you.
God bless.
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