As the editorial pages editor of the Miami Herald, Tom Fiedler has been caught in the middle of the contrversy over Elian Gonzalez.
This past weekend, as television cameras focused on angry demonstrators protesting the federal agents’ removal of Elian from his Miami relatives, Fiedler went to work to craft another editorial aimed at addressing the concerns of his community while holding firm to the paper’s position that the boy should be returned to his father.
With police in riot gear on the streets and with the world watching what would happen next on the Miami streets, Fiedler carefully composed an editorial message to be published on the front page of the Sunday edition — the most prominent spot in the newspaper.
Under the headline that said, “A Shocking Raid, a Call for Calm,” the editorial urged that Miamians remain calm while calling for a “complete accounting of the events preceding the raid.” The editorial asked whether the government “raid” was necessary, while repeating the Herald’s support of Juan Miguel Gonzalez’s decision to be reunited with his son.
But, in what some might read as support for the Miami family and as a slap at the government’s position, the editorial also declared: “The evidence clearly suggests that the Miami relatives were at last prepared to voluntarily deliver Elian to his father within a very short time. A full and independent investigation of this matter is warranted.”
In a conversation with Poynter.org, Fiedler discussed the ethical issues involved in the Elian story, the decision-making that went into the Herald editorial and the reaction to what the paper has published.
Tom Fiedler is The Herald’s Editorial Pages Editor.
April 23 editorial on The Miami Herald Sunday front
April 24 opinion roundup in The Miami Herald with summaries of editorials that appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times
April 24 story by Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post on Elian
April 23 editorial on Elian in the Los Angeles Times on Elian
April 14 column by Al Neuharth commending The Herald’s coverage of Elian
April 7 transcript of PBS’ Washington Week in Review with Fiedler as guest discussing the Elian story
How would you characterize the ethical issues embedded in this story and the way it has been covered?
There probably could be ethical debates over whether the family crossed the bounds in allowing Elian to be filmed, to be interviewed by Diane Sawyer and so on. All of these are worthy questions, but I don’t fault the family for trying to get out its side. I think there is a question here that comes back to whether the media has forfeited its editorial judgment. The all-news-all-the-time programs — MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, and the all-news radio stations — are hungry for virtually everything out there.
But consider what the media has been doing to this little boy, virtually holding him prisoner inside the house. He couldn’t go anywhere without cameras following him. He learned to play to the media. All these things are troubling, and I don’t know whom to blame. I could blame local authorities for not putting a boundary around the house and keeping the media away, but given the opportunity, every news media was willing to set up an office outside the house and train a spotlight on the house and that is really horrible. I think people ought to think about this. If there is a way for the media to get together and make an agreement to stay two blocks away, for instance, maybe that would be one approach. It is a real problem.
What was behind the Herald’s decision to put this weekend’s editorial about the Elian removal from the Miami family on the front page?
There are two explanations for why the editorial ran on the front page of the Sunday newspaper: One is pragmatic. The other was based on the importance of the story.
First, let me explain that our Sunday editorials now appear in our Focus section – it used to be called Viewpoint. This section goes to press early on Friday. So we had done the editorials and the columns for Sunday and they were already locked up when the federal action took place on Saturday morning.
So the practical problem was: Do we throw out hundreds of thousands of copies of the Focus section and redo the editorial page, which we could have done. Or do we run an editorial out of its regular position in the paper. To my knowledge, we have run an editorial out of position only twice before at the Herald. Once after Hurricane Andrew, and second, after the House of Representatives impeached President Clinton on a Saturday. But then, we ran the editorial on the back of the A-section, not on the front page.
The decision to keep the Focus section that was already printed and to put the editorial on Page One was the result of our belief that the magnitude of this event warranted our commenting on the front page. It was a decision that we were comfortable making, but it wasn’t easily made in that it set off a lot of other questions.
What other questions?
When you put an editorial on the front page, you want to make sure that what you have to say is worth the space. The front page is prime real estate. We thought it imperative that there be a message in that space that conveyed our appeal for calm and for the need for the community to react with a great deal of restraint. We also thought it important for us to signal the community that we shared a cause for concern and that we shared the concern of people that this (federal action) was something worth looking into.
It is one thing to say those things on the editorial page, where we are less concerned about what is in the columns abutting our editorials, and on the front page, where the editorial is next to a news story. If the Sunday editorial had been written for the editorial page, we would have felt more free to be critical.
Please explain why you think there is a difference in what you can say in an editorial on the editorial page and in what you can say in an editorial that runs in the news section?
We feel our news stories on Elian Gonzalez have been completely free of bias. But we thought we had to make sure that the tone of our editorial signaled our concern without challenging those things appearing in the news side. So that editorial was much more modulated in tone than it would have been if it had been in the editorial section.
I had never before felt the need to make sure that people didn’t come to the conclusion that our news columns were biased in favor of our editorial. So those were the factors we debated. But we are very comfortable with doing what we decided to do.
Let me put it another way: We would have felt less restrained about drawing conclusions about the facts as we knew them if the editorial had been destined for its usual position in the paper. But we wanted to be respectful of the real estate we were occupying. Had the editorial been written for the editorial page, we have felt more free to draw the conclusion, for instance, that the level of force used in the federal action was not appropriate.
What reaction have you had?
There are extremes on both ends, but by and large it has been very positive. The publisher sent me an e-mail saying that the priest at one of the Sunday Easter services had told the people in his homily that the most important message he could convey was the Herald editorial and he read it aloud.
Another measure of reaction — we had 914 e-mails on this story in the first 24 hours — e-mails on our news coverage as well as our editorial. And we have probably had 1,500 direct responses to this event this weekend.
Do you think some people reading the editorial might conclude that you were supporting the family?
We were not supportive of the family. We made it clear that the reunion of the father with the son was the correct thing to have occurred. Our question was: Was this the right way to have carried it out? And clearly our feeling is that we don’t know all the facts now but we are troubled by what we saw and what we do know.
Do you think the coverage of the Elian story has been excessive?
I do agree that the coverage has been excessive and that the family has taken advantage of it. But the family couldn’t take advantage of it without the help of a partner — the media and the all news coverage that has been given to this story. The government has the ability to put its story out in lots of ways — through President Clinton, through his spokesman, Joe Lockhart, through Attorney General Janet Reno and so forth. The family had only one way to fight this — through the media. And they postured and sometimes they went overboard and sometimes I wanted to hose down that woman and throw a net over the fisherman, but the only way they could fight the government was through the media. So I would give them a pass on that. At any time, the media could have turned off the cameras and walked away.
— Molly Sinclair McCartney is a veteran journalist who has worked at the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, and other papers.
