On September 15, 2006, celebrated columnist Carl Hiassen submitted his weekly column to the Miami Herald . It was a send-up of the entire ENH/Radio Martí incident. Hiassen quipped: “Now we find out that the U.S. government-run stations are actually running a charity for needy journalists, at least 10 of whom have been paid to appear on their programs.” [1] He bemoaned the fact that he had never earned a cent, despite lifelong opposition to Cuban leader Castro. When Publisher Díaz read the copy, he grew alarmed. The column, he felt, was inflammatory. To run it would only exacerbate the community tensions unleashed by the firing of the Nuevo Herald reporters a week earlier. He ordered that the column not be published.

“Usually the thought of a publisher threatening to spike a column because it might be incendiary is unheard of,” says Corral. “Jesús Díaz must have been under tremendous pressure.” At the same time, he comments that “many of the people who were outraged never read the [September 8] story… That’s what Jesús Díaz was up against. Basically, the Spanish-language media declared war on the Herald for a good two or three months.” TMH Editor Fiedler concurs that the Hiassen column has to be considered in context: “It was because the hostility between the Cuban community and the Miami Herald was reaching such a crescendo. When Carl weighed in and was kind of going to make light of the whole thing… the publisher tried to stop it, tried to spike the column.” But Hiassen had his own views. Told the column would not run, he threatened to resign.

That was where matters stood on September 16, when Weaver got wind of it. He decided to call Hiassen’s boss, the editorial page editor, to ask for an overview of the situation. The editor explained that “the publisher has seen it and doesn’t want to run it, and he thinks it would inflame the situation, and that it doesn’t break any new ground. You know, there were several plausible reasons,” recalls Weaver. Weaver had considerable sympathy for that viewpoint. “It’s not inconsequential to think of what was going on in the community at this point,” he recalls. “There had been a significant, and overwhelmingly negative, reaction to this. Thousands of people cancelled [subscriptions]. The talk radio [criticism] was constant.”

But Weaver went one step further and asked the editor what he thought should happen. The editor said he thought it should run. Weaver called his colleague Frank Whittaker, vice president of operations (to whom all publishers reported), as well as CEO Pruitt, to say “this looks like a bad situation to me.” Based on Weaver’s assessment, Whittaker made a decision: he phoned Díaz to say the column should run in its usual slot on Sunday, September 17. [2] Weaver explains:

That gave us a chance to say very early on, at McClatchy we really like the editors to make the journalistic decisions, not the publishers... Frankly, we like strong voices in our papers. They obviously don’t want to be irresponsible, to pour gasoline on a fire. But you’re allowed to say that’s a big fucking fire.

Executive committee . Following the Hiassen incident, Publisher Díaz on Wednesday, September 20 called a meeting of the company’s executive committee to discuss the snowballing controversy. [3] At the meeting were Díaz, ENH Editor Castelló, TMH Editor Fiedler, and five Miami Herald managing editors. One of the managing editors, recalls Castelló, made the argument that the September 8 story had been a “witch hunt.” But the others defended the story. “They were trying to justify why they published the story, why they didn’t talk to me,” recalls Castelló. “They tried to justify everything that has no justification.” The discussion was “very hot,” says Castelló, and did not calm tempers.