Corporate Whitewash! More proof of the sorry state of journalism in South Florida in 2012 -the Miami Herald as Corporate Publicist: Yet ANOTHER negative story about Arison family-owned, Miami-based Carnival Corp. being ignored by the Herald -brutal gang-rape of 15-year old passenger on trip to The Bahamas. For months the Herald has looked the other way and gone out of its way to NOT REPORT on the story or the trial in Orlando that led to federal conviction in Orlando on Friday for the heinous crime.

Corporate Whitewash! More proof of the sorry state of journalism in South Florida in 2012 -the Miami Herald as Corporate Publicist. Yet ANOTHER negative story about Miami-based Carnival Corp. was completely ignored by the Herald -gang-rape of 15-year old passenger on trip to The Bahamas. Herald looks the other way and never reports on original story nor the subsequent trial in Orlando, that led to federal conviction in Orlando on Friday.

I first heard about this particular incident over the summer when I was over at Panera Bread one afternoon, drinking some coffee and reading some newspapers I'd picked-up at Publix on the way over.

New York Daily News

Carnival Cruise takes nasty turn as 15-year-old alleges she was gang-raped on voyage to Bahamas 

Teen says another passenger supplied her and a group of underage boys with alcohol and then led sexual assault.

By Erik Ortiz, New York Daily News

August 22, 2012, 11:54 PM

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/carnival-cruise-takes-nasty-turn-15-year-old-alleges-gang-raped-voyage-bahamas-article-1.1142533

After I first read this, and then saw the WFTV news video from Orlando, the first thing I thought was, well, predictable.

But predictable based not on my thinking, but rather based on the Herald's own behavior over many years.

As I've written here before, unfortunately, unlike what would be best for the entire community, rather than act like a reasonable-but-occasional critical observer of cruse line industry practices when appropriate, the Herald has allowed years of perpetual corporate logrolling and shilling in its own pages to warp its view of what its role is.
Rather than with the arms-length relationship that would show that the newspaper knows how to separate editorial from advertorial functions, the Herald has acted almost exclusively like a corporate pep squad for the cruise line industry and the South Florida tourism industry,.

When you know the story involves details about the alleged gang-rape of a 15-year old abord the Carnival ship Sensation, that's all you need to know in advance that the Miami Herald would not touch that story.

Below is one of the many screen grab I did the next day, on August 23rd, of the various searches I performed on the paper, trying to figure when and where the Herald could've possibly put something about the story in the paper.
Eventually, it became clear that the reason one could not find anything about the story is because the very people at the Herald who determine what appears in the paper, would NOT allow anything about it to appear in the Herald in the first place.

Since August, I've known that eventually a trial would be held and when It did, I would post the story about the result of the trial here on the blog.
I was also fully-confident in my intuition that given the very sad and almost unethical fact patterns that have emerged over the recent years about what the Miami Herald was and was NOT willing to make public in their pages, if someone was indeed found guilty of this crime, the powers-that-be at the paper would STILL consciously decide that the gang-rape of a teenage girl aboard a Carnival ship was too negative for the Miami-based cruise line, therefore they would consciously ignore the story.

Well, the last show dropped yesterday.

Orlando Sentinel

Man convicted in rape of 15-year-old on Carnival cruise

Casey Dickerson was convicted on two sex abuse charges.

By Jeff Weiner, Orlando Sentinel

2:43 PM EST, December 14, 2012

A Central Florida man accused of participating in the rape of a 15-year-old girl on a cruise ship in August was convicted by a federal jury Friday afternoon.

Casey Dickerson, 31 at the time of his arrest, was accused of having forcible sex with a girl in a cabin on the Carnival Sensation.

Court records show Dickerson was on the cruise, which left from Port Canaveral on Aug. 16, with his wife.

The victim told federal agents she and a friend went to one of the cabins with Dickerson and four teenage boys.

There, the girl said, Dickerson and the boys held her down and took turns having sex with her.

When questioned by agents, Dickerson said he was drunk and didn't know when anything got "sexual," records show. Dickerson denied having sex with the girl.

After just more than two days of testimony, jurors deliberated less than three hours before returning a guilty verdict on the two sex abuse charges Dickerson faced.

orlandosentinel.com/news/local/breakingnews/os-cruise-rape-verdict-guilty-carnival-20121214,0,7455885.story


Okay, so what does the Herald have on Casey Dickerson, the defendant convicted by a federal jury on Friday up in Orange County?

That's strange, it ought to be there, shouldn't it?
Yes, it SHOULD.
If this area was a normal part of America where basic aspects of journalism exist.
But it isn't.
Nothing about the case has EVER been there, and here's the proof below.
http://www.miamiherald.com/search_results?aff=1100&q=Casey+Dickerson


I'm quite sure that Micky Arison and the executives of Carnival Corp  out in Doral must surely appreciate that cover-up of the news by their friends at the Herald.