Early on September 7, TMH Editor Fiedler contacted Díaz to let him know that a story about Radio Martí would appear the next day, and that the story named three El Nuevo Herald writers. As Fiedler described it to Díaz, the story was about how the Broadcasting Board was “using Spanish-speaking, Spanish media journalists in Miami to carry out what would be US policy toward Cuba… The larger story was that there are journalists who are on the payroll of the US government.” Fiedler firmly believes that, even had they received no compensation, the journalists’ actions contravened generally accepted reporting ethics guidelines. “You are in effect giving a contribution in kind, your time and your expertise, to carry out the mission of the US government, a propaganda mission. Whether you agree with it or not, that’s what you are doing,” notes Fiedler.

That three of the named journalists worked for El Nuevo Herald made for a difficult situation internally. But Fiedler observes that “we couldn’t not include those three if we were going to write the larger story, and then name eight others.” Fiedler told Díaz that “we intend to treat them as we are treating all the others.” Recalls Fiedler:

I told the publisher what we were doing, and what the justification was. His response as I expected was, ‘This is a legitimate story, and let the chips fall where they may,’ and that was it. He didn’t attempt to intervene in any way… It would have been inappropriate for him to tell me not to publish a story that was ready for publication.

Later that day, Fiedler learned that Díaz had taken the initiative to ask Castelló to fire the reporters—before Corral and his team had a chance to seek their comments on the story. “In some ways,” says Fiedler, “it was I thought a breach of faith [by] the publisher, but I could understand the situation I think he felt he was in. How could he take that knowledge and not act on it?” Unfortunately, says Fiedler, “our ability to tell them what we were doing was thwarted by the action that happened. The result was the story that ran, to my great dismay, didn’t include comment from them because we hadn’t gotten ahold of them.”