Reporting the Cuban Revolution: How Castro Manipulated American Journalists

Abstract

Leonard Ray Teel, Reporting the Cuban Revolution: How Castro Manipulated American Journalists (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015) hb 264pp. ISBN: 978-0-8071-6092-3The release of Leonard Ray Teel's latest treatise, Reporting the Cuban Revolution, comes at a period of increased scepticism toward journalists as, according to a September 2016 Gallup poll, only 32% of Americans trust the mass media to report news accurately and fairly. This registered as the lowest approval rating for the media in the history of Gallup polling. Apparently, consumers, by and large, do not trust the media to follow through on its claims of objectivity. The work of 13 correspondents who covered the Cuban Revolution suggests that impartiality was an issue long before Americans considered it a problem.Famed journalist Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz studied the New York Times reporting on the Russian Revolution from 1917 to 1920 and concluded it was 'nothing short of disaster . . . seeing not what was, but what men wished to see' (35). This characterization reflects Teel's overall argument concerning the coverage of the Cuban Revolution. Teel surveys 'this cohort of thirteen' to find that adventure reporting rather than impartiality once again dominated coverage of events in another country. Reporting from a foreign land when meshed with 'timeliness, prominence, conflict, proximity and human interest', - what Teel tongue-and-cheek calls journalism's 'tests' for news value - came together to create a narrative of news.This cohort and their abandonment of the code of impartiality in a war zone 'served Castro's purpose' (5). Teel goes on in Chapters One and Two to describe how that code began in 1923 with the American Society of Newspaper Editors, who formalized a national journalistic ethos, prizing objectivity and impartiality. This code of objectivity lost its way once reporters left the US. Echoing media critic Herbert Altschull, Teel concludes that 'ideal of objectivity evidently applied to American journalists "only within the geographic limits of the United States"' (5).In Chapters Three and Four, Teel walks through the media competition that inspired the first four correspondents to risk much at a chance with Castro who was holed up deep inside the Sierra Maestra Mountains of southeast Cuba. By 1957, Herbert Matthews, Jules Dubois, Robert Taber, and Wendell Hoffman had 'projected a positive image of [Castro]' as the 'freedom-loving young attorney' who sacrificed comforts for the cause of democracy and free elections. Teel argues that the four helped glamorise Castro for the marketplace by 'basically reporting straight from Castro's script' (68).In Chapters Five and Six, Teel recounts how journalist Andrew St. George was lured by the adventure saga, the novelty and shock of the first four journalists. Intoxicated by the thought of similar exploits, St. George ended up with everything he needed for adventure, other than impartial reporting. …