Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.9.1.0162
• Published date: 01 April 2017
• Date: 01 April 2017
• Pages: 162264-163
• Author: David Grantham

162 BOOK REVIEWS

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CUBAN STUDIES 9.1 SPRING 2017

Leonard Ray Teel, Reporting the Cuban Revolution: How Castro

Manipulated American Journalists (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University

Press, 2015) hb 264pp. ISBN: 978-0-8071-6092-3

Reviewed by David Grantham

The 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 cover-

age 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 impartial-

ity. 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 attor-

ney’ 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).