W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for April, 2010|Monthly archive page

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Remembering big: Another April anniversary

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on April 4, 2010 at 5:56 pm

April 3 not only was the seventh anniversary of the Washington Post‘s botched report about the mythical battlefield heroics of Jessica Lynch. The date also marked the 150th anniversary of the first run of the legendary Pony Express–a short-lived institution that is impressively steeped in myth.

As Christopher Corbett wrote in an engaging commentary published Friday in the Wall Street Journal:

“We remember the Pony Express as one of the most enduring and endearing of American stories, a tale of the frontier, a story of bold entrepreneurs, daring young horsemen, true riders of the purple sage and all that.

“In truth, the venture hemorrhaged money from day one, was doomed by technology (another particularly American story), lasted a mere 78 weeks, ruined its backers and then disappeared into what historian Bernard DeVoto called ‘the border land of fable.'”

Corbett noted: “It was all over in 18 months. The service was shut down in the flash of a telegrapher’s key when the transcontinental telegraph was completed in October 1861.”

But for years afterward, “the West was aswarm with old men who claimed to be ‘the last of the Pony Express riders,'” Corbett wrote.

The tall tales and exaggerations that grew up around the Pony Express were in large part promoted by the cinema and the entertainment industry–factors akin to those that contribute to the rise and tenacity of media-driven myths, which are stories about and/or by the news media that are widely believed and often retold but which, on close inspection, prove to be apocryphal or wildly exaggerated.

The filmmaker John Ford incorporated the Pony Express into the 1948 Western, Fort Apache, where, Corbett noted, “the brave rider thunders into the fort to bring news of Custer’s Last Stand, which, alas, took place some 15 years after the Pony stopped running.”

It’s faintly reminiscent of the classic cinematic treatment of the Watergate scandal: Easily the best-known Watergate movie is All the President’s Men, a screen adaptation of the best-selling book by the same title.

The cinematic version of All the President‘s characterized the book’s authors, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, as central and essential to the scandal’s unraveling.

The upshot of that misrepresentation, I write in  Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book about media-driven myths, has been “to solidify and elevate the heroic-journalist myth” of Watergate, to give it dramatic power, and sustain it in the collective memory.

I further note in Getting It Wrong that the film offers an unmistakable and unambiguous statement about “the power and centrality of the press in Nixon’s fall. All the President’s Men allows no other interpretation: It was the work Woodward and Bernstein that set in motion far-reaching effects that brought about the first-ever resignation of a U.S. president,” Richard Nixon.

What’s more, the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate minimizes or ignores the more decisive contributions in Nixon’s fall by agencies and organizations besides the Washington Post.

In his fine commentary, Corbett noted “the person who immortalized the Pony was William Frederick Cody, or Buffalo Bill. (He also claimed he had been a rider. Not true.)

“The [Pony Express] fast-mail service may have lasted only a year and a half, but it thrived for four decades in Cody’s Wild West show, seen by millions in the U.S. and Europe. To add drama to his re-enactment, Buffalo Bill might throw in a war party of savage Indians chasing a heroic rider who always managed to escape.

“It would become one of the most enduring images of the Pony Express, but it was not true; the actual riders rarely tangled with Indians,” Corbett wrote, adding:

“Why would a Paiute want a two-week-old copy of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune?”

Corbett noted in closing:

“If the Pony Express continues to thrill and baffle us, consider the words of an old horseman in western Nebraska who advised me when I expressed some concerns about the pedigree of this yarn. ‘We don’t lie out here,’ he explained kindly. ‘We just remember big.'”

“Remember big.” A great line. And it’s certainly applicable in understanding why media-driven myths can be so tenacious and enduring.

WJC

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‘War means profits’? It didn’t for Hearst’s papers

In 1897, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on April 3, 2010 at 9:05 am

William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain in the late 1890s may be the anecdote most often told in American journalism.

Hearst

It’s a woolly tale that’s been in circulation since 1901, and it lives on despite repeated and thorough debunking. It’s one of the ten media-driven myths examined in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong.

“Furnish the war” is so tenacious because it offers a tidy summary of the news media at their worst. And it’s a pithy quotation, easily digested and readily recalled.

The anecdote reemerged the other day, in a commentary posted at TheCitizen.com, an online news site of Fayette Publishing in Fayetteville, GA. The commentary stated:

“William Randolph Hearst in 1897 [told] the artist Frederic Remington: ‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.’ Think for a minute what that statement means. War means business, war means profits and war means death.”

Hearst’s purported message to Remington is almost certainly apocryphal–as is the notion that war meant profits for Hearst’s newspapers. In their intensive coverage of the four-month Spanish-American War of 1898, his papers lost money.

As I wrote in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, the Spanish-American War generally boosted newspaper circulation. But advertising revenues fell, as advertisers feared the war would undercut the nascent recovery from the hard economic times of the 1890s.

In addition, newsprint costs soared, as did news-gathering expenditures.

The trade journal Fourth Estate estimated in 1899 that Hearst’s New York Journal had spent $50,000 a week—the equivalent these days of more than $1 million—on cable tolls, reporters’ salaries, and dispatch boats that ferried correspondents’ reports from the war’s principal theater in Cuba to Jamaica and elsewhere for transmission to New York.

Hearst's 'New York Evening Journal'

The Journal scoffed at claims that it helped foment the conflict in a cynical scheme to build circulation and boost profits.

“Would you like to know what effect the war had on the money-making feature of this particular newspaper? The wholesale price of paper was greatly increased. Advertising diminished, expenses increased enormously,” the Journal said, adding that its expenses related to covering the conflict exceeded $750,000—the equivalent these days of more than $20 million.

During the war, which lasted 114 days, the Journal‘s racy sister publication, the Evening Journal,  produced as many as forty extra editions a day–a late 19th century manifestation of what contemporary journalists would recognize as the unrelenting, 24-hour news cycle.

WJC

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Seven years after ‘fighting to the death’: Who was the Post’s source?

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post on April 2, 2010 at 10:49 am

It will be seven years tomorrow since the Washington Post published its erroneous front-page report about Jessica Lynch, the Army private whom the newspaper had said “fought fiercely” in an early engagement of the Iraq War.

“‘She Was Fighting to the Death,'” the Post‘s headline said of Lynch, then a 19-year-0ld supply clerk in the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company.

The Post cited “U.S. officials” who otherwise were unidentified as saying Lynch had “continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting” at Nasiriyah on March 23, 2003.

The Post further cited the unnamed sources in reporting that Lynch had “shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed” the 507th and kept “firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition.”

None of it was true, however.

Lynch never fired a shot at Nasiriyah; her rifle jammed during the attack. She suffered shattering injuries when a rocket-propelled grenade struck her Humvee, causing the vehicle to crash. But she wasn’t shot.

Lynch was taken prisoner and treated at an Iraqi hospital, from where she was rescued April 1, 2003, by a U.S. special operations team.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book about media-driven myths, “The Post’s erroneous hero-warrior tale thrust Lynch into an international spotlight that has never fully receded.”

The Post, though, has never disclosed identity of the source or sources for its bogus “fighting to the death” report, which was published April, 3, 2003.

Over the years, speculation has been that the U.S. military leaked the hero-warrior tale about Lynch. But one of the reporters on the story, Vernon Loeb, has said the Pentagon wasn’t the source.

“I could never get anybody from the Pentagon to talk about those reports at all,” Loeb said on an NPR program in late 2003. “I got indications that they had, in fact, received those intelligence reports, but the Pentagon was completely unwilling to comment on those reports at all. They wouldn’t say anything about Jessica Lynch.”

He added that “we wrote a story that turned out to be wrong because intelligence information we were given was wrong.”

So who were the Post‘s sources? Who supplied the erroneous details about Lynch?

When I reached him by phone in 2008 to talk about the Lynch case, Loeb hung up on me.

The author Jon Krakauer claimed in a book published last year that a former White House operative named Jim Wilkinson “arranged to give the Washington Post exclusive access to classified intelligence that was the basis for the now-discredited ‘She Was Fighting to the Death’ story that ran on the front page of that newspaper.”

Krakauer, writing in Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, called Wilkinson a “master propagandist” and said he “deserves top billing for creating the myth of Jessica Lynch.”

Krakauer’s book identified no specific sources for its claims about Wilkinson, who at the time of Lynch’s capture and rescue was director of strategic communications for General Tommy Franks, then the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.

I recently spoke by phone with Wilkinson, now a managing partner for the Brunswick Group in San Francisco. He vigorously disputed Krakauer’s account as “factually incorrect” and insisted that “not one shred of evidence” links him to leaking the erroneous report to the Post.

Wilkinson also said:

“Tommy Franks would have killed me” had he been the Post’s source for the erroneous report about Lynch.

Wilkinson’s denial has the ring of authenticity, especially so his point about Tommy Franks. The tenor of Franks’ memoir, American Soldier, makes it clear that Wilkinson’s subordinate and advisory role would have ended abruptly had he crossed the general.

So seven years on, the Post‘s bogus report about Jessica Lynch reverberates still.

WJC