PressEthic

Most major dailies mentioned nothing of the FBI shooting death—some call it assassination—of 72 yr. old Puerto Rican revolutionary Filiberto Ojeda Rios. So why has the Hartford Courant run 17 articles about him?

Race and money are the easy answers. Nearly a third of Hartford’s population is Puerto Rican, and 20 years ago Rios—along with several other members of Los Macheteros—stole $7.2 million from an armored car there.

Yet the Courant’s stories (five are original, the rest were picked up from AP) were hardly that simple. They tackled the news as well as the more difficult questions of independence, colonialism, violence and patriotism. Editorials were nuanced and thoughtful, and showed a succinct understanding of what Rios meant not only to the independence movement, but to Puerto Rico in general.

The lack of coverage elsewhere personifies PR’s strange place in the national psyche.The Times, the Post and the Daily News have done pitiful jobs covering the story—perhaps because they've left it up to the Spanish-language papers. Regardless, I find it strange since they serve the city with largest concentration of Puerto Ricans in the country.

New Yorkers of every ethnicity deserve to know more about a man who was not only quoted as “a committed patriot” and “an urban legend” by just about every journalist covering the story, but whose death might have very well reinvigorated an independence movement in what is, essentially, an American colony.