imothy Graham is a media analyst at the Media Research Center.

National Review: What’s your assessment of this weekend’s Elián coverage?

Graham: Clearly, the live parts struck a blow for the family. The overtly aggressive use of force, the AP photo, and the live press conferences on cable gave them a chance to speak unedited. As usual, however, when you get this sort of wall-to-wall coverage, you’re going to get more of the family’s point of view or more of the point of view that perhaps the media would rather mediate down to nothing. And, clearly, when you have a situation like Dan Rather live, you’re going to get, on the other hand, some intense bias of Fidel Castro’s abiding love for the Cuban people.

NR: We had our share of that this weekend?

Graham: We had plenty of that this weekend. We have a media which, unlike in past presidencies, doesn’t seek to scrutinize this administration, it seeks to justify it.

NR: What are some examples of that justification?

Graham: Well, they were trying to correct the family. They would try to rebut anything that the family said by saying something like, "Well, Marisleysis said this, but isn’t it true that ‘blank?’" This was the sort of the formulation that I kept hearing.

NR: Which it sort of "had" to do because the family was unrehearsed and unsophisticated?

Graham: We can play the game that we always play as conservative media critics and say, "Let’s turn the tables and say this is a Republican president and this is a Haitian problem or something and the Republican INS sends the cops in to take this little minority child out and threatens him with guns." I don’t think there is any question that it wouldn’t get the kind of coverage that this is getting. It would be presented as the storm troopers breaking in.

There doesn’t seem to be any skepticism as to why this timing. Was there a reason? Was this a way for Clinton to overcome the news about being interviewed by the Justice Department about fundraising? None of these skeptical questions were asked.

We have had weeks of the media describing the family as paranoid, crazy, and so on. Were they really that paranoid after their house was broken into by 100 federal officers in combat gear? These are the sorts of concerns and issues that the media don’t raise.

I guess the ironic thing about this weekend was that it totally wiped Earth Day off the map. One of the networks gave it 15 seconds on Saturday.

I think that there still is among the press a very serious, latent anti-anti-Communism. It manifests itself in this kind of coverage that presents, for example, that the father of this boy is somehow a free agent or that this is just a normal everyday international custody dispute. They wouldn’t accept the idea of the father going to Miami. It all had to be in Washington where the Cubans have their interest section. And, there just really is no scrutiny there of the question of, is this man free to make his own decisions?

NR: A lot of us got sucked into the coverage on Saturday and Sunday and it seemed that there were a lot of blatant lies thrown out there that went unquestioned for a day or two, like the discrepancy between deputy attorney general Eric Holder, who said that they didn’t need a warrant, and Doris Meissner, the INS chief, who said that they had one. And Eric Holder saying that this "wasn’t done at the barrel of a gun."

Graham: I believe that Janet Reno said this morning that it wasn’t a "use of force," it was a "show of force." As if breaking down the door is not a use of force. This whole case since November has had some Orwellian overtones. When the Cuban Americans were trying to form a "human chain" around the house about a week ago, MSNBC had one of these news-chat afternoon headlines that said, "Human Chain: Captors or Saviors?" You could call it obtuseness, but they are probably not obtuse. There has been some very serious moral equivalence that somehow there are the totalitarians in Havana and there are the totalitarians in Little Havana. It’s sort of insincere Clinton-administration publicity-agent kind of coverage.

NR: Speaking of the tyranny of Little Havana, and Cuban rioting. This morning there was a story about a Los Angeles Times reporter who faced charges because he started a riot in Miami and then reported on it. It seems like a lot of that was created or focused on out of lack of balance. Is that the case as far as you can tell?

Graham: Well, it’s interesting. Again, one of the reasons this did become such a big story is that I think that it really heated up with the arrival of the father, but then it became a 24-hour news cycle, cable-news phenomenon — this one particular case. There are other parts of the story that are interesting also. For example, that you have one of the women who survived the same boat ride as Elián has a daughter she left in Cuba on the beach because she was afraid the boat wasn’t seaworthy enough or something. Well, there we have the daughter in Havana and the mother in Miami and do you think anybody’s going to focus on that custody battle? Doesn’t the child belong with the parent? Well, their utter ignorance of that, again, shows you that they have the power to select the stories that they want to select. Sometimes, events intervene and throw them off. I think again the AP photo, the live press conferences and statements of the family — these were things that sort of forced balance into the picture.

But, I think, again, give it time. I think even as we’ve shown over the weekend that everybody was suddenly calling Janet Reno a very principled person and so on, which is the wrong approach — considering that there were so many questions raised that there was obviously some deception here in what they told reporters. There was obviously some deception in what they told the family as they negotiated with them while they had the troops massing around the house. There was plenty of deception involved and there doesn’t seem to be any outrage on the part of the media about either being deceived themselves or having the family be deceived. That, I would argue, has been typical of this administration, typical of the coverage of this administration, sadly.

NR: Do you think the nearly 24-hour coverage of this story on some of the cable channels this weekend explains in part the poll numbers that show the American people in favor of Reno’s actions?

Graham: When were the polls done? They were probably instant polls, and I would be curious to see how they feel a week from now. I think that what the administration is trying to do is say, "Move on, move on. Next news story." Lord knows what they’ll try to do now to avert the story away from this. But they don’t want a second poll. They don’t want to see how opinion changes. They don’t want to have a congressional investigation as to why this happened. And so, they are already trying to squash and destroy any continuing focus on this story. I think they are going to have a hard time with that since they obviously have to wait for the court procedures to see it through to its legal end. They’re going to try now to drive the story back out of the spotlight.

NR: Do you think a second poll after a couple more days will uncover different results? Do you think that people will actually change their minds if those pictures they woke up to on Sunday morning didn’t outrage them?

Graham: It might and it might not. I do believe that the American people have had six months of the media softening them up. I think there is a parallel in some sense to the impeachment/Monica Lewinsky scenario where the Clinton administration took seven months to tell the truth because by that time they had effectively demonized the opposition. And the public opinion damage had been done. They may have decided what they were going to do was wait for things to happen and prevail upon everybody to demonize the Cuban Americans and the family. Then, when they are at the peak of their unpopularity, go in and take the kid. I can’t say that events are going to suddenly turn the American people anti-Communist. I think that the media is doing absolutely nothing that could be called "anti-Communist." They are very, very reluctant. It’s all there in the New York Times headline from a week or two ago that read, "Communism Still Looms as Evil to Miami Cubans." There is such a The-Cold-War’s-Over-Who-Cares-Anymore sort of attitude. The fact of the matter is that for the people of Cuba the Cold War is still on, for the people of China the Cold War remains. And, until those regimes join the Soviet Union on the ash heap, the Cold War is alive and well. The media seems to not have any interest in that at all. They’re trying to sell accommodation with Castro and accommodation with Communist regimes. They’re still singing from the same song sheet they did 10-15 years ago. You have to applaud them for remaining valiantly wrong. They’re stubborn. They never see the light.

There was serious demonization of the Cuban Americans and their protests were presented as embarrassing, hard-line. I can’t get over Time basically suggesting that they’re a privileged imperialist elite who set themselves up as slaves. Well, what do you call it? The reporters here seem to think that there’s a difference between slaves on the plantation during the ante-bellum era and Castro’s Cuba. Somehow what the blacks suffered through in America was worse. There’s the obtuseness in action. It’s either obtuse or calculatingly Marxist. The idea that there would be sort of this sulfurous coverage of the Cuban Americans and basically even questioning their patriotism.

If anything, as a conservative media critic, I think my feeling is this story started out according to the playbook which was the Cuban Americans were hardline militants and the attorney general was "principled." That’s how the media sets the stage. They’ve been doing it throughout this whole process and they’re still doing it. All we can do is point to it and say, "There’s another side of the story that you’re not being told and here it is."