Herbert L. Matthews, a veteran journalist for the "New York Times," traveled to Cuba in 1957 to interview Fidel Castro, then a revolutionary seeking the overthrow of the Batista regime. This monograph considers the impact of Matthews' newspaper articles about those interviews and of his subsequent articles about the Cuban situation and…

This paper describes an episode in the history of journalism that reveals a continuing tension in news reporting. Dating from the invention of the telegraph in the late nineteenth century, news reports have been increasingly patterned after either a "scientific" or a "literary" model. The scientific report is based on irreducible facts, high-speed…