To the dismay of Vice President Weaver and other McClatchy executives, the situation in Miami was not settling. Weaver got a personal taste of its ramifications when he was obliged to deny to a New York Times reporter a rumor that McClatchy had authorized the September 8 story as part of a secret deal with Castro to open a Havana bureau. “It gave [me] an insight into how the community operated down there,” he recalls.

When Jesús would say, "You’ve got to recognize that handling this kind of controversy in this kind of community is tough and difficult and nuanced," I believed that.

Clearly there was an important human resources dimension to the continued anger: three people had lost their jobs. But that was not Weaver’s area of responsibility. He was more concerned about the editorial judgment which had gone into the September 8 story, not to mention the handling of the Hiassen column. Had there been bias, unconscious or otherwise, in the reporting of the September 8 story? How could one judge this case on its merits?

Weaver appreciated the descriptions Díaz and Fiedler had given him of the deliberations in the Miami Herald newsroom before the September 8 story was published. “We were trying to find out what happened, who makes these kinds of decisions, why didn’t you talk to them earlier?” recalls Weaver. The executive team had explained that “the two newsrooms don’t talk, they don’t trust each other, and you couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t have run it first.” Weaver’s next step was to seek a better understanding of the Nuevo Herald position. On Saturday, September 23, Weaver called Castelló at home. Castelló remembers the day because his wife had an interview to become a US citizen. Weaver asked Castelló to tell the story from his point of view.

“I told him everything. I remember that I broke into tears because, you know, I was that tense,” says Castelló. “And he was very kind. He told me… I appreciate that you acted with dignity.” Weaver asked permission to share what Castelló had told him with McClatchy top management, as well as its legal counsel. He asked Castelló to keep the conversation confidential, and promised to get back to him as soon as possible.

The problem, as Weaver saw it, was cultural but also ethical. He had expected the two newspapers to look and read differently. “You’ve got a Latin American newspaper, it’s probably going to have more soccer in it than the Anglo papers. It seems, just from an outsider’s vantage point, to have more cleavage,” he says.

All of that is, I think, appropriate and interesting and great. But you can have, I believe, independent cultures and perspectives without having a different set of ethical values and baseline journalistic touchstones. That’s the part we wanted to be sure the papers shared.

What had finally begun to sink in was the depth of animosity between the two publications. “I had no idea the level of animosity, mistrust and active ill will was anywhere near as strong as it was. I mean, I had no idea really that there was any, at first,” he says. When others started telling him that “these newsrooms are at war, that was shocking and very, very discouraging.”

Because it suggested to me that we don’t have a little knitting-up to do here. We have to really reweave this fabric, because… they were really dramatically at odds in an unacceptable way. For them to be competitive, that’s fine… [But] I didn’t anticipate… the degree to which these two newsrooms were in this genuinely dysfunctional condition of antagonism toward one another. There were unacceptable levels of distrust and antagonism between the two newsrooms… It was toxic in this situation.

At the same time, Weaver had faith in the editors of both papers. Both Fiedler and Castelló assured him that they had a high regard for one another. Fiedler “told me he thought Humberto [Castelló] was a good journalist, that he was an honorable guy, that they got along fine. And vice versa.” While Castelló confessed that he felt ambushed by Garcia and Corral, “he said, ‘I don’t think Tom’s [Fiedler’s] got any bad motives. I don’t think he’s out to get us or anything.’”

On the morning of Sunday, October 1, Weaver called Castelló to request his participation in a conference call at 2:30 p.m. that afternoon. Weaver asked Castelló to go to the office of the Miami Herald’s lawyer, Beatty. HR VP Vanaver was also there, but not Díaz. “I thought, what is this? There is no publisher?” recalls Castelló. On McClatchy’s end of the conversation were Weaver, Vice President and General Counsel Karole Morgan-Prager, and HR Vice President Heather Fagundes.

For about 90 minutes, the McClatchy team interviewed Castelló, mostly on procedural and personnel matters but also on his understanding of the story and how it was reported. The McClatchy team wanted to know “were there standards to hold [the reporters] accountable to? What was the past practice?” recalls Weaver. After the conference call, Castelló called Díaz because “I was worried… I tell him, ‘You know, they are manipulating you. They don’t like you, Jesús, because you are a Cuban-American.’ He resisted believing that… He was very naïve.” Díaz had moved to the US as a child, was raised in Georgia, and had married an American. Díaz assured Castelló that he had not attended the conference call because he did not feel well. He expressed continued full confidence in his decision to fire the Nuevo Herald reporters.

After listening to Castelló, Weaver says it was clear that “there were lots of folks at El Nuevo who don’t believe that there was anything wrong with having worked for Radio Martí.” Newspapers commonly encouraged their reporters to appear on such media outlets as Fox News or CNN, because it was good publicity for the newspaper. What was different about this? Mulls Weaver:

I don’t consider this revealed wisdom from God. I think this is the kind of thing you have to work through and figure out. So I tried to do that in my sphere of influence here on the journalism side… You have to ask now, what were the rules? Were they well understood?

At the same time, the rules which the Miami Herald had borne in mind in judging the Miami reporters’ actions unethical were widely accepted and followed throughout the industry, not least at McClatchy publications. “If it means anything to be a McClatchy newspaper, it has to be rooted in things like fairness, like accuracy, like ethical behavior. And so we wanted to work through that with them,” remarks Weaver.

Weaver felt that in some ways his career up to now had been a preparation for this situation. In the run-up to the first Gulf War, when he was editor of the Anchorage Daily News , the paper ran a story on whether or not the trans-Alaska oil pipeline was safe from saboteurs, including a graphic of the most vulnerable parts. “It just caused a conflagration in Anchorage,” remembers Weaver. “I got calls from US senators and oil company presidents and the governor… The truth was that nobody that was going to sabotage the pipeline was going to learn anything from our story. The blueprints for the Trans-Alaska pipeline are on file at every federal repository library in the country… But it was definitely an error in judgment to have run that graphic that way.” He observes:

I didn’t start out knowing what to do in all these situations. I made some bad calls and I agonized over things that it turned out didn’t need agonizing. But in some sense that was all by way of paying your dues, so when you come to something like this, you go into it on a fairly steady footing... It was an ethically loaded situation.