By the weekend of September 30, after consultations with the McClatchy leadership team, Weaver had decided it was time to go to Miami in person. He and Vice President-Operations Whittaker made reservations to fly out Monday, October 2, and convene the Miami Herald Media Company’s executive committee Monday evening. They had much to discuss. Had the situation gone too far? What would too far look like, and what could McClatchy do about it? Who was responsible for what? “What was difficult was the interplay between the various forces at work here,” recalls Weaver. “Some journalistic, some individual, some personnel, some legal.” Weaver understood that Díaz and Fiedler had both done what they considered right. He also understood that the Nuevo Herald journalists had perceived nothing wrong in their behavior, and thought they had permission to freelance for Radio/TV Martí.

If some journalistic sin had been committed in doing the story, then I would have had an altogether different agenda. Or if I’d found that this was really the tip of the iceberg and it turned out everybody on the [ Nuevo ] staff was being paid by somebody else, that would have been different… [But I wanted to know] what’s the journalism here? What was the reason for doing it? What was the way in which it was done? Do both of those match the standards that we want to hold ourselves to for journalism? That’s not unique to a multicultural, intramural sort of flare-up like this. But it took on extra intensity because it was intramural, or intra-familial, and because it was multicultural.

It had been hard enough to extract the story of what happened from the participants. Now, says Weaver, “we had to balance contradictory stories… This was unusual. I had not been through anything like it.” It was, he recalls, “pretty painful.”

All this didn’t happen in a low, dispassionate, quiet voice. There were people in this who cared passionately about it, who felt personally aggrieved in various ways, who thought the consequences of one behavior or another on our part was going to be cataclysmic… This was a kind of harmonic convergence, where you had a lot of things comes together: journalistic questions, multicultural questions, community relations questions, authority questions. It brought a lot of tough things together.

The McClatchy executives had a number of options, none ideal. They could decide to reinstate the fired journalists. If that happened, the Miami Herald newsroom would be outraged. “I knew that rehiring those journalists would piss off the Miami Herald newsroom. They felt like they’d done a very legitimate story about a grievous journalistic sin,” remembers Weaver. If, on the other hand, the company upheld their firing, the already low Nuevo Herald newsroom morale would stagnate. Plus the community would remain unassuaged. “You wonder, oh God, if we do this, and another 6,000 people cancel their subscriptions… You’ve got to be willing at some point to take that, but it doesn’t mean you don’t lose sleep over it,” says Weaver.

Or was the publisher at fault? Should Díaz be encouraged to resign? Would his resignation accomplish anything? McClatchy would not want Díaz to be perceived as a sacrificial lamb. “I really don’t believe any publisher has ever been thrown overboard for people with the pitchforks and the sputtering torches,” jokes Weaver. After all, it was part of Díaz’ job to make his own judgment calls; he had broken no laws.

At a more philosophical level, was this an instance of two different styles of journalism, or two different standards of ethics? Had there been a bona fide conflict of interest? If so, what constituted sufficient disclosure? Should journalists always acknowledge if they reported for several news outlets? How often should such disclosures be made? Was broadcasting to Cuba necessarily propaganda? Did a valid distinction exist between the laudable promotion of democracy and truth, versus a blameworthy transmittal of propaganda? What rules should McClatchy propose going forward?

Weaver and Whittaker were well aware that any decision they took would reverberate across all McClatchy newspapers. They would be sending signals on numerous levels: about journalistic ethics, about management structure, about a publisher’s prerogatives. On the flight, Whittaker and Weaver would have to come to an agreement about what to do.