W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for December, 2010|Monthly archive page

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Recalling Mark Twain and the ‘calamity of calamities’

In 1897, Debunking, Media myths, Reviews, Year studies, Yellow Journalism on December 21, 2010 at 10:18 am

The first volume of Autobiography of Mark Twain–published 100 years after his death–has been a best-seller for the University of California Press, the publisher that brought out my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

The Twain volume has received largely favorable reviews, although the New York Times did say, in a critique the other day by the insufferable Garrison Keillor, that “there’s precious little frankness and freedom here and plenty of proof that Mark Twain, in the hands of academics, can be just as tedious as anybody else when he is under the burden of his own reputation.”

A more generous review, posted online yesterday by the North County Times in California, caught my eye–mostly for its reference to Twain (Samuel Clemens) and yellow journalism. The review quoted this passage from Twain’s autobiography:

“I was converted to a no-party independence by the wisdom of a rabid Republican. This was a man who was afterward a United States Senator, and upon whose character rests no blemish that I know of, except that he was the father of the William R. Hearst of to-day, and therefore grandfather of Yellow Journalism–that calamity of calamities.”

The reference was to George Hearst, an adventurer-miner who struck it rich in the silver fields of the 19th century American West. After securing his fortune, George Hearst became a U.S. senator from California, serving from 1886-1891.

Twain’s reference to “a rabid Republican” is puzzling, though, because George Hearst was a committed Democrat, as was his son, William Randolph Hearst.

More interesting was Twain’s characterization of yellow journalism as “that calamity of calamities.”

It’s an amusing line, but it ignores the generosity young Hearst extended to Twain in 1897, when the writer was down on his luck in London.

Hearst by then was running the provocative and activist-oriented New York Journal — the newspaper that helped give rise in 1897 to the sneer, “yellow journalism.”

The Journal preferred the term “journalism of action” and asserted that a newspaper had an obligation to inject itself routinely and conspicuously into civic life, to address the ills that government wouldn’t or couldn’t.

As I wrote in my 2006 year-study, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, Hearst arranged for Twain, then 51, to report for the Journal on Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee in June 1897.

Lining up Twain to cover the Jubilee was emblematic of Hearst’s willingness to spend money lavishly to recruit big-name talent, if only for spot assignments.

In Twain, though, Hearst must have been disappointed.

As I wrote in The Year That Defined American Journalism:

“Twain’s reporting about Victoria’s jubilee seemed half-hearted and hardly inspired. The spectacle was easily the most regal international story of 1897, and came at a time when the British empire at or near its height. But Twain found the celebration overwhelming—’a spectacle for the kodak [camera], not the pen,’” as he wrote in a dispatch published June 23, 1897.

Twain’s dispatch to the Journal included this odd observation:

“I was not dreaming of so stunning a show. All the nations seemed to be filing by. They all seemed to be represented. It was a sort of allegorical suggestion of the Last Day, and some who live to see that day will probably recall this one if they are not too much disturbed in mind at the time.”

Twain’s association with the Journal in 1897 did give rise to one of his most memorable lines–and allowed the newspaper to puncture rumors about the writer’s health.

In early June 1897, the New York Herald reported that Twain was “grievously ill and possibly dying. Worse still, we are told that his brilliant intellect is shattered and that he is sorely in need of money.”

The Journal promptly exposed the Herald report as erroneous, and published Twain famous, if often-misquoted, denial:

“The report of my death was an exaggeration,” Twain said.

He lived until 1910.

WJC

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Mythmaking on Blu-ray?

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on December 20, 2010 at 11:11 am

All the President’s Men, the most-seen movie about the Watergate scandal, may be released on Blu-ray early next year, according to a post yesterday at a blog sponsored by a Canadian newspaper.

“Word is that Warner Bros. will release the Watergate movie … in a feature loaded  Blu-ray book in February,” said the item at the Leader-Post newspaper in Saskatchewan.

Now at best, the Blu-ray version of All the President’s Men is of mild interest to Media Myth Alert. What caught the  eye, though, was this characterization in the Leader-Post item:

“The 1976 movie is perhaps the greatest ever on newspaper journalism. It tells the true story of how Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward exposed the real story behind the break-in at Democratic Party offices in the Watergate building by Republican political operatives. Their exposé, fed by a mysterious source called ‘Deep Throat,’ led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.”

I placed the words in bold for emphasis.

As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, Woodward and Bernstein didn’t expose the Watergate scandal. It was at first a police beat story that spiraled into an intricate and sprawling scandal that sent to jail nearly 20 men associated with Nixon’s presidency or his 1972 reelection campaign.

And the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein didn’t lead to Nixon’s resignation.

As I point out in Getting It Wrong:

“To roll up a scandal of such dimension [as Watergate] required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

“Even then, Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House. Only when compelled by the Supreme Court [in 1974] did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up and authorizing payments of thousands of dollars in hush money.”

Against the tableau of subpoena-wielding investigative authorities, the work of Woodward and Bernstein for the Washington Post fades into relative insignificance.

Even so, as I write in Getting It Wrong, the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate–the endlessly appealing notion that the  reporting of Woodward and Bernstein did bring down Nixon’s  presidency–“has become the most familiar storyline of Watergate.”

The heroic-journalist interpretation is, I note, “a proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity.”

Perhaps the factor most important in propelling and solidifying the heroic-journalist meme of Watergate was the movie All the President’s Men, an adaptation of Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 book by the same title.

“The book in fact had been written with the cinema in mind,” I write in Getting It Wrong, noting that the actor Robert Redford “had taken keen interest in the Woodward-Bernstein collaboration in reporting the scandal and encouraged the reporters to structure the book around their experiences.”

Redford paid $450,000 for the rights to All the President’s Men, and he played Woodward in the movie.

The cinematic version of All the President’s Men focuses on the work of Woodward and Bernstein while mostly ignoring, and even denigrating, the efforts of investigative agencies like the FBI.

I further note that the movie All the President’s Men allows no interpretation other than 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.

The movie, I write, helped ensure the heroic-journalist myth “would live on by offering a neat, tidy, and vastly simplified account the Watergate scandal, one that allowed viewers to sidestep the scandal’s complexity while engaging in an entertaining storyline.”

The myth is solidly entrenched in popular culture. It is one of the heartiest of media-driven myths, those dubious, media-centric tales that masquerade as factual.

The Blu-ray version of All the President’s Men may serve to introduce the myth of Watergate to yet another generation of movie-goers.

WJC

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‘Yes, Virginia,’ on CBS: No classic

In 1897, Anniversaries, Debunking, Media myths, New York Sun, Newspapers, Year studies on December 18, 2010 at 7:44 am

I wrote a year ago about the charmless CBS animated Christmas special, Yes, Virginia, a show based on Virginia O’Hanlon’s famous letter to the New York Sun in 1897 that prompted American journalism’s best-known editorial.

The show aired again last night; watching it was headache-inducing.

It utterly lacks the serendipity, anticipation, disappointment, and surprise that characterized the real back story to Virginia’s 1897 letter.

Her appeal to the Sun — “Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?”–gave rise to an editorial published beneath the headline, “Is There A Santa Claus?”

The editorial’s most memorable and most-quoted passage declared:

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias.”

As I noted last year at Media Myth Alert, CBS took great liberties with the back story in offering up a tedious half-hour show that was neither accurate nor entertaining. It’s a distortion of a charming story.

Francis P. Church

The animated Virginia is waddling, round-headed, and unaccountably obsessed with the existence of Santa Claus. Francis P. Church, the retiring journalist who wrote the famous editorial, is depicted–no, misrepresented–as scowling, dismissive, and hard-hearted.

Neither character is convincing. Neither is realistic.

The animated Church is identified as the editor of the Sun, which is shown as a tabloid newspaper. Church was not the editor; he was an editorial writer. And the Sun was no tabloid.

The CBS show also had Virginia writing her letter, and the Sun publishing its reply, in December, as Christmas approached.

In fact, the letter was written in the summer of 1897, and the Sun published the editorial on September 21, 1897 — obscurely, in the third of three columns on editorials on an inside page (and not in big, sensation-stirring headlines across the front page, as the CBS show had it).

As I discuss in my 2006 book–a year-study titled The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms–Virginia O’Hanlon said that she addressed her letter to the Sun’s question-and-answer column, and waited impatiently for the newspaper to publish a response.

She recalled that the Sun did not promptly take up her inquiry. Far from being obsessed, little Virginia stopped thinking about it after a while.

“After writing to the Sun,” she told an audience in Connecticut many years later, “I looked every day for the simple answer I expected. When it didn’t appear, I got disappointed and forgot about it.”

At the Sun, Virginia’s letter probably was overlooked, or misplaced, for an extended period.

That there was such a gap seems certain, given O’Hanlon’s recollections about waiting and waiting for a reply, and the accounts that say Church wrote the editorial in “a short time” or “hastily, in the course of the day’s work.”

Virginia O'Hanlon

What reconciles the two accounts—O’Hanlon’s prolonged wait and Church’s quickly written response—is that the Sun for a time had misplaced the letter that inspired a classic editorial, one that would recall the newspaper long after it folded in 1950.

The real back story to Virginia’s letter is far richer than the cheerless, vapid fare that CBS offered up.

Unlike the 1897 editorial, the wretched animated show is destined to be no classic.

WJC

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Not off the hook with ‘reportedly’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times on December 17, 2010 at 10:08 am

“Reportedly” is a squishy weasel word that journalists use to deflect immediate responsibility or as a buffer against blame.

LBJ at time of 'Cronkite Moment'

In invoking “reportedly,” journalists in effect are saying: “I can’t vouch for this statement first-hand, but others have used it. It’s in wide circulation.” So they slap “reportedly” before the claim and go with it.

The mythical “Cronkite Moment” of 1968–when the on-air assessment of CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite supposedly altered U.S. policy in Vietnam–invites such usage.

Today’s Dallas Morning News invokes the r-word in a column on the entertainment page that parenthetically recalls the “Cronkite Moment.”

The column referred to CBS newsman Bob Schieffer and his comments about Afghanistan, offered at a recent luncheon in Dallas. It states:

“Schieffer took a page out of Cronkite’s book and expressed his skepticism about our approach to the war in Afghanistan. (After Cronkite’s 1968 editorial on Vietnam, LBJ reportedly said, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.’)”

“Reportedly” doesn’t let the journalist off the hook of responsibility. It’s a thin cover, a vague caveat. Its use doesn’t make the claim about the “Cronkite Moment” any less assertive.

Or any less the media myth.

I address and debunk the “Cronkite Moment” in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, pointing out that until late in his life even Cronkite pooh-poohed the notion his program on Vietnam had much effect on U.S. policy.

The program that gave rise to the “Cronkite Moment” was an hour-long special report that aired February 27, 1968. Near the close of program, Cronkite declared the U.S. military in Vietnam was “mired in stalemate” and suggested that negotiations might eventually lead to a way out.

At the White House, President Lyndon Johnson supposedly watched the Cronkite program and, upon hearing the anchorman’s assessment, switched off the television set and muttered to an aide or aids:

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Or something to that effect. Versions vary markedly.

But as I point out in Getting It Wrong, Johnson wasn’t at the White House that night. He did not see the Cronkite program when it aired, and there is no solid evidence he later watched the show on videotape.

And as Cronkite was intoning his “mired in stalemate” assessment, Johnson was in Texas, making light-hearted comments at the 51st birthday party of Governor John Connally, a longtime political ally.

“Today you are 51, John,” the president said. “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.”

It wasn’t the funniest presidential joke ever told. But the comment makes clear that Johnson that night wasn’t lamenting his having “lost Cronkite.”

The show was no epiphany for Johnson; it offered no flash of insight that his war policy was a shambles. Indeed, it is difficult to fathom how the president could have been much moved by a television program he had not seen.

What’s more, Cronkite’s “mired in stalemate” assessment was hardly a stunning interpretation in early 1968. It was neither notable nor extraordinary for the time.

Indeed, nearly seven months before Cronkite’s program, the New York Times had cited “disinterested observers” in reporting that the war in Vietnam “is not going well.”

Victory, the Times reported, “is not close at hand. It may be beyond reach.”

This analysis was published on the Times’ front page in August 1967, beneath the headline:

“Vietnam: The Signs of Stalemate.”

Given the that earlier reporting, Cronkite might well have said on his program about Vietnam that the U.S. war effort was “reportedly mired in stalemate.”

WJC

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Watergate and its hardy myths

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on December 16, 2010 at 1:38 pm

The heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate is one of those hardy media-driven myths to have produced its own spinoff or subsidiary myth.

The heroic-journalist myth has it that the investigative reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post exposed the Watergate scandal and forced President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

But as I point out in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, not even the Post buys that interpretation. Plus, I note in debunking the myth:

“The heroic-journalist interpretation minimizes the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office.”

Those forces included special Watergate prosecutors, federal judges, bipartisan panels of both houses of Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

To explain Watergate through the lens of the heroic-journalist, I write in Getting It Wrong, is to short-change and “misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth.”

The myth, though, is endlessly appealing–as suggested anew by the comment posted yesterday at the eWeekEurope online site. In a discussion about legal troubles facing Wikileaks founder and frontman Julian Assange, eWeekEurope declares that the Washington Post “played a major part in bringing down Nixon with its Watergate exposé.”

As I noted often at Media Myth Alert: No, the Post didn’t.

Woodward himself noted a few years ago:

“To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.”

The heroic-journalist myth has given rise to what I call “a stubborn subsidiary myth of Watergate—namely, that the exploits of Woodward and Bernstein were a profound stimulus to enrollments in collegiate journalism programs.”

Journalism supposedly was made sexy by the reporters’ exploits, as recounted in their best-selling book, All the President’s Men, and the cinematic version by the same title.

“After Watergate, colleges were swamped with kids wanting to study journalism and find the next big government scandal to expose,” as a commentary at the online site of the Herald News in Fall River, Massachusetts, put it the other day.

But there is no evidence to support the notion that “enrollments in journalism programs surged” in any meaningful way in Watergate’s aftermath, I write in Getting It Wrong, noting:

“The subsidiary myth lives on despite its thorough repudiation in scholarly research.”

One such study was financed by the Freedom Forum media foundation and conducted by researchers Lee B. Becker and Joseph D. Graf. They reported in 1995 that “growth in journalism education result[ed] not from specific events as Watergate … but rather to a larger extent from the appeal of the field to women, who ha[d] been attending universities in record numbers. The growth also in part reflect[ed] the applied nature of the field and its link to specific job skills.”

Becker and Graf added:

“There is no evidence … that Watergate had any effect on enrollments.”

Regrettably, there is little evidence that such fine research has put much of a dent at all in the subsidiary myth of Watergate.

WJC

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As inevitable as ‘Yes, Virginia,’ at the holidays

In 1897, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, New York Sun, New York Times, Newspapers, Year studies, Yellow Journalism on December 15, 2010 at 8:59 am

The approach of the year-end holidays brings inevitable reference to American  journalism’s most famous editorial, “Is There A Santa Claus?”

Virginia O'Hanlon

The lyrical and timeless tribute to childhood and the Christmas spirit was first published in 1897 in the old New York Sun, in response to the inquiry of an 8-year-old girl, Virginia O’Hanlon.

“Please tell me the truth,” she implored, “is there a Santa Claus?”

The Sun in reply was reassuring:

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.”

Almost as inevitable as the editorial’s reappearance this time of year are sightings of myths and misconceptions associated with “Is There A Santa Claus?”

Today, for example, an online reference site for journalists, Followthemedia.com, says in an essay that “Is There a Santa Claus?” was published on the front page of the Sun, on September 21, 1897.

The date is correct. But the famous editorial was given obscure placement in its debut. As I wrote in my 2006 book, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms:

“‘Is There a Santa Claus?’ appeared inconspicuously in the third of three columns of editorials in the New York Sun on 21 September 1987. It was subordinate to seven other commentaries that day, on such matters as ‘British Ships in American Waters,’ the ambiguities in Connecticut’s election law, and the features of the chainless bicycle anticipated in 1898.”

“Is There A Santa Claus” appeared on page six, the editorial page of the Sun.

Interestingly, the oddly timed editorial about Santa Claus–appearing as it did more than three months before Christmas–prompted no comment from the many newspaper rivals to the Sun.

That’s somewhat curious because the New York City press of the late 19th century was prone–indeed, eager–to comment on, and disparage, the content of their rivals.  That’s how the enduring sneer “yellow journalism” was coined, in early 1897.

In its headline today, Followthemedia suggests the editorial’s most-quoted passage — “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” — are the words most famous in American journalism.

Maybe.

But a stronger case can be made for  the New York Times logo, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” which in 1897 took a permanent place in the upper left corner of the newspaper’s front page, a spot known in journalism as the “left ear.”

As I noted in a blog post nearly a year ago: “The ‘Yes, Virginia,’ passage is invoked so often, and in so many contexts, that no longer is it readily associated with American journalism. ‘Yes, Virginia,’ long ago became unmoored from its original context, the third of three columns of editorials in the New York Sun on September 21, 1897.”

I also suggested then that the famous vow attributed to William Randolph Hearst–“You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war“–may be more famous in journalism than “Yes, Virginia.”

The Hearstian vow, as I write in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, is almost certainly apocryphal. But like many media-driven myths, it lives on as an anecdote too delicious not to be true.

What is striking and perhaps exceptional about “Is There A Santa Claus?” is its timeless appeal–how generations of readers have found solace, joy, and inspiration in its passages.

A letter-writer to the Sun in 1914 said, for example: “Though I am getting old,” the editorial’s “thoughts and expressions fill my heart with overflowing joy.”

In 1926, a letter-writer told the Sun that “Is There A Santa Claus?” offered “fine relief from the commercialism and unsentimental greed” of the Christmas season.

In 1940, a writer to the Sun likened the editorial to “a ray of hope on the path to human understanding in our troubled times.”

WJC

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‘Spiegel’ thumbsucker invokes Watergate myth

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on December 14, 2010 at 10:20 am

In the fallout from the Wikileaks disclosure of 25o,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, commentators seeking a point of reference sometimes have turned to what I call the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate.

The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel is the latest to do so, offering up the Watergate myth in a thumbsucker about Wikileaks, posted in English yesterday at its online site. The commentary–titled “Is Treason a Civic Duty?”–included this passage:

“The Washington Post, whose reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein once exposed the Watergate affair, describes WikiLeaks as a ‘criminal organization.'”

That passage has two significant problems.

First, searches of the LexisNexis database produce no reference to the Post or its online affiliate washingtonpost.com having taken an editorial view that Wikileaks is a “criminal organization.”

Indeed, just last Sunday the Post declared in an editorial that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange acted “irresponsibly” in releasing the cache of diplomatic cables. “But that does not mean he has committed a crime,” the Post added.

The newspaper did run a column in August by Marc A. Thiessen who called Wikileaks “a criminal enterprise. Its reason for existence is to obtain classified national security information and disseminate it as widely as possible–including to the United States’ enemies.”

But Thiessen is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who writes a weekly op-ed column for the Post. As such, he hardly sets or expresses the newspaper’s editorial policy.

Second, and far more pertinent to Media Myth Alert, is the reference in the Spiegel essay to Woodward and Bernstein’s having “once exposed the Watergate affair.”

They didn’t.

The seminal crime of the Watergate scandal was a break-in at Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. The crime was thwarted by local police and word of the arrest of five Watergate burglars began circulating within hours.

The Post reported on June 18, 1972:

“Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. yesterday in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here.”

Woodward and Bernstein were listed as contributors to that report, which carried the byline of Alfred E. Lewis, a veteran police reporter.

The reporting of Woodward and Bernstein didn’t expose the cover-up of crimes linked to the break-in or the payment of hush money to the burglars, either. As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, Woodward was quoted as saying in 1973 that those crucial aspects of the scandal were “held too close. Too few people knew. We couldn’t get that high.”

Nor did Woodward and Bernstein expose or disclose the existence of the White House audiotaping system that proved so pivotal to Watergate’s outcome.

Audiotapes secretly made by President Richard Nixon captured his approving a plan to impede the FBI investigation into the Watergate burglary and related crimes. The taping system was disclosed by investigators of the Senate select committee on Watergate, which convened hearings during spring and summer 1973.

The U.S. Supreme Court in July 1974 ordered Nixon to surrender the tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor; he complied. The tapes’ contents forced him to resign the presidency.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, against “the tableau of prosecutors, courts, federal investigations, and bipartisan congressional panels, the contributions of Woodward and Bernstein [in exposing the Watergate scandal] were modest, and certainly not decisive.”

I also point out that principals at the Post “have acknowledged as much” over the years. They have sought from time to time to dispute the notion the newspaper brought down Nixon.

So Watergate is indeed a misleading point of reference in assessing the Wikileaks fallout.

Especially wrong-headed is the eagerness to ascribe great significance in the Wikileaks disclosures, including those of last summer. There was interest then in characterizing the leaks of Afghanistan war logs as another “Cronkite Moment.” Which they weren’t.

After all, the original “Cronkite Moment” of 1968 was a media-driven myth.

The Wikileaks disclosures–especially the recent release of diplomatic cables–have proven to be remarkably unshocking.

The cables have tended to confirm what many people who follow (and teach) foreign affairs and foreign policy have long known or suspected: The Saudis are fearful of the Iranian nuclear program and want it dismantled; the Chinese aren’t too keen about Kim Jong Il and his ilk in North Korea; Russia under Vladimir Putin has become a mafia regime; Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is a buffoon.

None of that comes as a shock or surprise.

If Assange and Wikileaks meant to sabotage U.S. foreign policy in the disclosure of the diplomatic cables, they’ve failed.

WJC

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‘Follow the tenspot’

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on December 12, 2010 at 10:39 am

I’ve noted at Media Myth Alert how Watergate’s most memorable made-up line — “follow the money” — finds surprising and unexpected use in news media abroad.

Further confirmation of that observation came yesterday, in a whimsical, travelogue sort of story in London’s Guardian newspaper.

In 3,300 words, a writer for the Guardian recounted how tracked the movement of a single $10 bill across six heartland states in October this year. The article was framed as a way of gathering insight into the ailing U.S. economy–and it invoked the made-up Watergate line in its opening paragraph, which read:

“What do you do if you want to test the mood of a country as it emerges from the deepest recession for almost a century? You can delve into banking reports or believe what you hear from politicians. You can spend endless hours with academics and accountants. Or you can take the advice Bob Woodward was given by his Watergate source Deep Throat: ‘Follow the money.'”

Following a single tenspot as it moves from the place to place is intriguing if gimmicky.

While light-hearted and amusing in places, the Guardian article offers little telling insight. (The American heartland suffers from rural flight as well as blight in places: Not much new, there. There are 1.6 billion $10 bills in circulation: Interesting, but mildly.)

In the end, the over-long article invites such questions as: “So what?” and “Why bother?”

It’s more than a little gimmicky, and self-absorbed.

What’s of particular interest to Media Myth Alert is the casual and erroneous reference to “the advice” the stealthy anonymous source “Deep Throat” offered Woodward of the Washington Post during the newspaper’s Watergate investigation.

“Follow the money.”

It is, as I’ve noted, one of the most memorable phrases of Watergate-era American journalism. But the phrase never figured in the Post in its Watergate coverage–the topic of a chapter in my mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong.

A search of the electronic archive of issues of the Post from June 1, 1972, to October 1, 1974, the period embracing the Watergate scandal, turned up no returns for the phrase “follow the money.”

Indeed, no Post article or editorial invoked “follow the money” in a Watergate-related context until June 1981–long after Richard Nixon had resigned the presidency, well after the successor who pardoned him, Gerald Ford, had lost reelection. (And the occasion then noted the line’s use in a fifth grade play.)

“Follow the money” was made for the movies, specifically the cinematic version of All the President’s Men, Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book about their Watergate reporting.

The line was uttered, and rather insistently, by Hal Holbrook, the actor who played “Deep Throat” in All the President’s Men.

Holbrook-“Deep Throat” tells Woodward: “I have to do this my way. You tell me what you know, and I’ll confirm. I’ll keep you in the right direction, if I can, but that’s all. Just follow the money.”

The line’s most likely author was William Goldman, the screenwriter of All the President’s Men. He told a New York Times columnist in 2005 that he had invented “follow the money.”

So let’s return those questions raised about the Guardian article–“so what” and “why bother”–and apply them to “follow the money.” So what difference does it make if “follow the money” is a made-up line? Why bother tracking down its derivation?

A number of reasons offer themselves–notably that “follow the money” contributes to a simplistic interpretation of what was a sprawling scandal that sent nearly 20 of Nixon’s men to jail.

As I write in Getting It Wrong:

“Media myths … tend to minimize or negate complexity in historical events and offer simplistic and misleading interpretations instead. Edward Murrow no more took down Joseph McCarthy than Walter Cronkite swayed a president’s views about the war in Vietnam. Yet those and other media myths endure, because in part they are reductive: They offer unambiguous, easily remembered explanations about complex historic events.”

So it is with “follow the money”: The line is easily remembered, yet undeniably reductive and misleading.

It is recalled nowadays as having represented crucial guidance, as a key to unraveling the scandal: Follow the money trail and you will lay bare the crimes of Watergate.

Were it only that easy.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, rolling up a scandal of the dimensions of Watergate “required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

“Even then,” I add, “Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House. Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up and authorizing payments of thousands of dollars in hush money.”

WJC

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‘You might bring down a government’: Sure, that happens

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on December 11, 2010 at 7:49 am

From time to time, the Washington Post has sought to dismiss the notion that its Watergate reporting was decisive in bringing down the corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon.

Not the Post's work

In 1997, at the 25th anniversary of the break-in at Democratic headquarters–the scandal’s seminal crime–the newspaper’s publisher during the Watergate period, Katharine Graham, insisted it was not the Post that toppled Nixon.

“Sometimes people accuse us of bringing down a president, which of course we didn’t do,” she said on that occasion. “The processes that caused [Nixon’s] resignation were constitutional.”

In 2005, Michael Getler, then the newspaper’s ombudsman, wrote in a column: “Ultimately, it was not The Post, but the FBI, a Congress acting in bipartisan fashion and the courts that brought down the Nixon administration.”

Still, the notion that the Post was decisive in Wategate’s outcome pops up occasionally. Political writer Dana Milbank, for example, referred in a column early this year to how the newspaper “took down a president.”

And yesterday, a blog item at the Post online site asserted that the newspaper’s Watergate reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, had brought Nixon down. (Update: The item, an essay, was published Sunday, December 11, in the book section of the Post.)

The essay praised the cinematic version of Woodward and Bernstein’s book, All the President’s Men, and stated:

“I just re-watched ‘All the President’s Men,’ which I do every year or so, and, every time, I marvel at how interesting Woodward and Bernstein’s lives were at The Post, and how well the film explains the reporting process, its doggedness and randomness, and how great an excuse it is to get out in the world and ask every seemingly obvious question you can think of (What books did the man check out?), because you never know, you might bring down a government that has it coming.

“When I watch that movie,” the writer added, “I also think about how mundane my own ‘writing life’ can be.”

As it often is for journalists.

But to write “bring down a government that has it coming” — that’s to indulge in a media-driven myth, the beguiling heroic-journalist myth of Watergate.

As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong:

“The heroic-journalist interpretation minimizes the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office” in 1974.

Even so, that interpretation has become the dominant popular narrative of Watergate–a David vs. Goliath storyline in which the courageous reporting of Woodward and Bernstein exposed the crimes of the Nixon administration.

The movie All the President’s Men is a central reason the heroic-journalist trope lives on.

All the President’s Men, which starred Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, was released in April 1976, as the wounds of Watergate had slowly begun to close.

“The movie,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “suggested their reporting was more hazardous than it was, that by digging into Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein exposed themselves to not insignificant risk and peril.

“To an extent far greater than the book, the cinematic version of All the President’s Men placed Woodward and Bernstein at the center of Watergate’s unraveling while denigrating the efforts of investigative agencies such as the FBI.”

The effect, I add, “was to solidify and elevate the heroic-journalist myth, giving it dramatic power, and sustaining it in the collective memory.”

And it has become a particularly tenacious and defining media-driven myth.

WJC

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My thanks to Jim Romenesko for linking to this post.

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Saturday at Newseum: Telling the back story to ‘Yes, Virginia’

In 1897, Media myths, New York Sun, Newspapers, Year studies on December 10, 2010 at 4:44 pm

I’ll be discussing American journalism’s best-known, most-reprinted editorial at a program tomorrow afternoon at the Newseum, the $450 million museum of news on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.

The editorial is, of course, the timeless tribute to childhood and the Christmas spirit that ran 113 years ago in the old New York Sun beneath the headline, “Is There A Santa Claus?”

I’ll be speaking about the back story to the classic editorial at 3:30 p.m. in the Newseum’s Knight studio, near the close of what is billed as “‘Yes, Virginia,’ Family Day.” The essay often is referred to as “Yes, Virginia,” owing to its most famous passage–“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”

As I note in my 2006 book, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, the editorial was rather obscure and inconspicuous in its first appearance.  “Is There A Santa Claus?” was published in the third of three columns of tightly packed commentaries on topics that ranged from the ambiguities in Connecticut’s election law to the features of the chainless bicycle anticipated in 1898.

The editorial’s timing was odd and incongruous, too. “Is There A Santa Claus?” first appeared in the Sun on September 21, 1897–more than three months before Christmas.

As I write in The Year That Defined American Journalism, the best explanation for the puzzling timing “lies in the excited speculation of a little girl who, after celebrating her birthday in mid-summer, began to wonder about the gifts she would receive at Christmas.”

The little girl was Virginia O’Hanlon who, in her excited speculation, wrote to the Sun, saying:

“Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. … Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?”

Virginia O'Hanlon

As she recalled years later, the letter was sent soon after her 8th birthday in July 1897. But the editorial reply in the Sun didn’t appear until more than two months had passed.

“After writing to the Sun,” she told an audience in 1959, “I looked every day for the simple answer I expected. When it didn’t appear, I got disappointed and forgot about it.”

Apparently, the Sun had misplaced or overlooked her letter. It eventually turned up on the desk of Edward P. Mitchell, the editorial page editor, who asked Francis P. Church to craft a reply.

Years later, Mitchell wrote that Church, a retiring, taciturn journalist, “bristled and pooh-poohed” at the request but finally “took the letter and turned with an air of resignation to his desk” to write.

It took Church less than a day to draft the editorial that would ensure him enduring posthumous fame. (His authorship wasn’t disclosed by the Sun until shortly after his death in 1906.)

“Virginia,” Church wrote in the editorial, “your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds.”

After ruminating about the dimensions of human imagination, Church opened a new paragraph and wrote the editorial’s most memorable passages:

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias.”

It sometimes is claimed that “Is There A Santa Claus?” was an instant sensation. In fact, it attracted no immediate attention. As I write in The Year That Defined American Journalism:

“Although it was published at a time when newspaper editors routinely commented on—and often disparaged—the work and content of their rivals, the oddly timed editorial prompted no comment from the Sun’s rivals in New York City.”

But “readers noted it and found it memorable,” I add. “In untold numbers over the years, readers asked the Sun to reprint the essay.” While it took years, the newspaper grudgingly acquiesced.

From 1924 until the newspaper’s last Christmas before folding in 1950, “Is There A Santa Claus?” was the lead editorial in the Sun on December 23 or 24.

“Ultimately,” I note, “the newspaper gave in—tacitly acknowledging that editors are not always as perceptive as their readers in identifying journalism of significance and lasting value.”

WJC

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