And, as we learn in Anthony DePalma's fascinating and admirably dispassionate book "The Man Who Invented Fidel," today's tussles over the "liberal media" in general, and The New York Times in particular, are merely an extension of an old story from the precomputer age - a story that helped create Castro and, even now, illuminates the enduring power of bias and myth.

Matthews's first big story for The Times was the 1935 Italian invasion of Abyssinia, where he openly sympathized with Mussolini's Fascists.

To the end of his life, members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, made up of American leftists and Communists who took part in the Spanish Civil War, considered him a sympathetic friend.

By 1958, Times editors were already growing uncomfortable with Matthews's pro-Castro bias