W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for January, 2010|Monthly archive page

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Slaying the McCarthy dragon? It wasn’t Murrow

In Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth on January 10, 2010 at 2:46 pm

Few lessons in American journalism are as inspiring — but, in the end, as misplaced — as the notion of Edward R. Murrow’s slaying the dragon of McCarthyism in a single television program in 1954.

It’s a great story, how Murrow, the legendary figure of American broadcasting, stood up to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, when no one else would, or dared, and in so doing, brought an abrupt end to senator’s witchhunt for communists in the U.S. government.

Murrow in 1954 (Library of Congress)

It’s a tale that dates to the evening of March 9, 1954, and Murrow’s “Special Report on Joseph R. McCarthy,” which aired on the CBS television show, See It Now.

The epic confrontation of Murrow and McCarthy was recalled the other day in a commentary posted at the online edition of a Philipine newspaper, the News Today.

The commentary invoked the dragon metaphor, stating in part:

“Edward Murrow slew the dragon that was McCarthyism, ushering in the pure air of freedom enjoyed by his fellow Americans be they from the left, right, or center. Witch-hunting was thrashed to damnation, and Joseph McCarthy exited in ignominy.”

It is a great story; indeed, it’s one of the most treasured in American journalism.

But as I write in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong, the notion that Murrow took down McCarthy and ended the senator’s witchhunting ways is a tenacious media-driven myth, one that obscures the more important contributions of journalists other than Murrow in McCarthy’s demise.

As I also write in Getting It Wrong:

“Long before the See It Now program” in March 1954, “several prominent journalists—including the Washington-based syndicated columnist Drew Pearson—had become persistent and searching critics of McCarthy, his record, and his tactics.”

Pearson’s contributions to unraveling the scourge of McCarthyism are, however, little recalled these days.

Interestingly, the media myth of Murrow v. McCarthy took hold despite the protestations of its central figures.

In the days and weeks following the See It Now program on McCarthy, Murrow said he recognized his accomplishments were modest, that at best he had reinforced what others had long said about McCarthy.

Jay Nelson Tuck, the television critic for the New York Post, wrote that Murrow felt “almost a little shame faced at being saluted for his courage in the McCarthy matter. He said he had said nothing that … anyone might not have said without a raised eyebrow only a few years ago.”

Murrow told Newsweek magazine: “It’s a sad state of affairs when people think I was courageous.”

Murrow’s collaborator and co-producer, Fred W. Friendly, also rejected claims the program was pivotal or decisive, writing in his 1967 memoir:

“To say that the Murrow broadcast of March 9, 1954, was the decisive blow against Senator McCarthy’s power is as inaccurate as it is to say that Joseph R. McCarthy … single-handedly gave birth to McCarthyism.”

So why has the Murrow-McCarthy myth become so tenacious?

There are several reasons. A particularly persuasive explanation, in my view, is that mythologizing Murrow’s See It Now program on McCarthy serves, as I write in Getting It Wrong, “to affirm television’s sometimes-tenuous claim to seriousness of purpose.

“Enveloping the program in heroic terms is a way to identify and celebrate the potential of broadcast journalism, which often has been criticized for superficiality and a taste for the trivial. As it became an inescapable presence in American living rooms in the 1950s, television needed a hero and a heroic moment. Murrow and his ‘Report on Joseph R. McCarthy’ were both ….”

This is a point that communications scholar Gary Edgerton has addressed notably well, having written in 1992:

“In a deep and heartfelt sense, Murrow is the electronic media’s hero for self-justification. Commemorating a ‘patron saint of American broadcasting’ is also an act of testimony to the tenets of fairness, commitment, conscience courage, and social responsibility which compose the Murrow tradition for broadcast journalism.”

Besides, it wasn’t as if Americans in early 1954 were hoping for someone to step up and expose McCarthy, or waiting for a white knight like Murrow to tell them about the toxic threat the senator posed. It was quite well-known by then.

WJC

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The ‘Cronkite Moment’: That famous, dubious turn of phrase

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths on January 8, 2010 at 6:57 pm

I blogged not long ago about what may be the most famous words in American journalism, offering a couple of media myths as examples.

One was the enduring anecdote about William Randolph Hearst’s supposed vow to “furnish the war” with Spain. That one’s been retold many, many since it first appeared in print in 1901.

It is arguably American journalism’s most tenacious myth. Those words attributed to Hearst surely are some of the most famous in journalism. Even though it’s quite unlikely he ever made such a vow.

Another example I cited was the so-called “Cronkite Moment,” the occasion in 1968 when the views of CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite were supposedly so powerful and persuasive they swiftly altered U.S. policy in Vietnam.

That anecdote centers around Cronkite’s special program on the Vietnam War, a show that aired February 27, 1968. Near the end of the program, Cronkite declared the U.S. war effort was “mired in stalemate” and suggested negotiations with the communist North Vietnamese to end the conflict.

At the White House, President Lyndon Johnson supposedly watched the Cronkite program and snapped off the television set when he heard the anchorman’s dire assessment, telling an aide, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” Or something to that effect.

The point is that Cronkite was such a trusted figure that his views could sway the opinions of countless thousands of Americans. With Cronkite gone wobbly on Vietnam, the Johnson White House supposedly reeled. At the end of March 1968, Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.

The “Cronkite Moment” made yet another appearance the other day in a blog of the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The blog comment, posted by an editorial writer for the newspaper, stated:

“One of the standard views of why America turned on the Vietnam War focuses on CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite’s increasingly obvious pessimism about President Lyndon Johnson’s statements about and management of the war. LBJ reportedly told an aide, ‘That’s it. If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.'”

As I’ve noted several time at Media Myth Alert, and as I write in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong, Johnson did not see the Cronkite program on Vietnam when it aired. The president that night was in Austin, Texas, at the 51st birthday of a political ally, Governor John Connally.

When Cronkite was intoning his downbeat assessment of the war, Johnson was offering light-hearted banter about Connally’s age, saying:

“Today you are 51, John. That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for—a simple majority. Throughout the years we have worked long and hard—and I might say late—trying to maintain it, too.”

Earlier that day, Johnson delivered a rousing speech in Dallas, invoking Churchillian language at one point.

“There will be blood, sweat and tears shed,” he said, adding:  “I do not believe that America will ever buckle” in pursuit of its objectives in Vietnam.

Even if the president had seen the Cronkite program, it is exceedingly difficult to imagine how his mood could swing so abruptly, from vigorously defending the war effort to throwing up his hands in despair.

But if the “Cronkite Moment” is to be believed, that’s what happened: A swift, dramatic and decisive change of heart that occurred within hours of the hawkish speech in Dallas.

Not likely.

Even so, the frequency with which the quote attributed to Johnson is invoked certainly has made it among the most famous, if most dubious, turns of phrase in American journalism.

As I also write in Getting It Wrong, “Seldom, if ever, do the news media exert truly decisive influences in decisions to go to war or to seek negotiated peace. Such decisions typically are driven by forces and factors well beyond the news media’s ability to shape, alter, or significantly influence.

“So it was in Vietnam, where the war ground on for years after the ‘Cronkite moment.’”

WJC

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A media myth tamed — or at least controlled

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths on January 3, 2010 at 4:58 pm

Many media-driven myths seem to defy debunking.

The tale of William Randolph Hearst’s supposed vow to “furnish the war” with Spain is a telling example. So is the notion that Walter Cronkite’s downbeat report in 1968 about the U.S. military effort in Vietnam forced President Lyndon Johnson to rethink American war policy.

Both media myths live on and on.

As I write in my forthcoming book Getting It Wrong, these “and other media myths endure, because in part they are reductive: They offer unambiguous, easily remembered explanations about complex historic events. Similarly, media myths invite indulgence in the ‘golden age fallacy,’ the flawed but enticing belief that there really was a time when journalism and its practitioners were respected and inspiring.”

While many media myths are indeed tenacious, the efforts of the Annenberg Public Policy Center over the past 10 years suggest that some myths can be curbed or contained, if not defeated entirely.

The Phildelphia-based Annenberg Center has worked to debunk the notion that suicides rise during the year-end holidays.

Such a connection may seem logical, given the stresses of the holiday season. But the data point otherwise: Suicides most often peak in the United States during the spring and fall, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

(See the CDCP’sl 2009 data sheet on suicides here.)

The Annenberg Center tracks newspaper reports for mentions of a holiday season-suicide link. Its analysis of reporting during the 2008–09 holiday season found that 37.5 percent of 64 newspaper articles asserted such a linkage. A majority, 62.5 percent, disputed or challenged the presumed holiday season-suicide connection.

The difference over 10 years is quite dramatic. In 1999–2000, the first year of the Annenberg Center’s study on the topic, 77 percent of 101 newspapers articles asserted a holiday season-suicide link.

The pattern has been a bit erratic in the intervening years, Annenberg Center data show.

In 2006–07, for example, just 9 percent of 32 articles asserted a holiday season-suicide link. The following season, however, 51 percent of 43 articles claimed there was such a connection.

Data for the 2009–2010 season are still being compiled. But a quick check of the LexisNexis database suggests that newspaper articles published in late 2009 more often challenged than claimed a holiday season-suicide link.

A notable example was an article in USA Today in late November which noted:

“You could blame George Bailey” for the myth. “In the 1946 holiday film It’s a Wonderful Life, that fictional character contemplated suicide on Christmas Eve, possibly giving birth to the idea that suicides climb during the winter holidays.”

The Washington Times suggested a similar explanation in an article published two days before Christmas.

Like many media-driven myths, the dubious holiday season-suicide link is neither harmless nor trivial.

The Annenberg Center says:

“Perpetuating the myth not only misinforms readers but it also misses an opportunity to educate the public about the most likely sources of suicide risk, including major depression and substance abuse.”

Still, the Center’s data offer a measure of encouragement that media-driven myths are not entirely beyond taming.

WJC

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The debunking of the year, 2009

In Debunking, Photographs on January 2, 2010 at 1:22 pm

The nod for the most impressive debunking of 2009 has to go to the Spanish researchers who’ve seriously challenged the authenticity of Robert Capa’s famed “Falling Soldier” image, taken during the Spanish Civil War in September 1936.

It purports to show a charging loyalist militiaman at the very moment he is shot to death.

Capa's iconic and dubious image (Robert Capa/Copyright 2001 by Cornell Capa)

The earnest research of a university lecturer in northern Spain, José Manuel Susperregui, as well as that of historian Francisco Moreno, show fairly persuasively that Capa’s photo was shot about 35 miles from Cerro Muriano, where Capa claimed it was taken.

Susperregui, who last year published Sombras de la fotografía (Shadows of Photography), a book in Spanish about his research, maintains that “The Falling Soldier” was taken in Llano de Banda, near the village of Espejo.

The most compelling evidence is the horizon, which shows a ridgeline that nearly matches that in Capa’s photos, which were first published in Vu, a French magazine.  (See the Vu spread here.)

“The landscape around Cerro Muriano looks nothing like that in the photographs,” the London newspaper Guardian quoted Susperregui as saying in  July 2009. “I have no doubt that this was taken in Llano de Banda.”

Susperregui was further quoted as saying:

“My theory is that Capa went to Espejo because he knew it had been an active front. He found nothing going on there, so did the posed photographs. Then he went on to Cerro Muriano, which was active, and took a different set of photographs there of people fleeing the fighting.”

The Guardian has posted an audio slideshow that vividly describes the landscape around Llano de Banda and dramatically underscores the arguments of the Spanish researchers. (It should be noted that doubts about the authenticity of Capa’s “Falling Solider” were raised as long ago as 1975, in Phillip Knightley’s The First Casualty. Knightley’s account quoted an associate of Capa’s as saying the photographer told him the “Falling Soldier” photos were staged.)

As I wrote in a Media Myth Alert posting November 22, “the apparent debunking is a delicious one, given the status and standing that Capa’s photograph has gained over decades. It is considered among the most dramatic wartime photos ever made.”

Not only that, but “Falling Soldier” helped launched Capa’s fabled career in photojournalism. Capa was killed in Indochina in 1954.

The efforts of Susperregui and colleagues may not have received in the United States as much attention as they deserved. But they’re imaginative and intriguing — and they represent the debunking of the year 2009.

WJC