W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for January, 2011|Monthly archive page

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The ‘defining moment’ in investigative journalism? Wasn’t Watergate

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Watergate myth, Yellow Journalism on January 8, 2011 at 9:03 am

The “defining moment” in investigative journalism? Well, that had to be the Watergate reporting of the Washington Post in the early 1970s.

So says Britain’s serious-minded Financial Times in a commentary published yesterday.

The newspaper, however, offered no persuasive evidence for the Post-Watergate claim beyond asserting:

“Investigative reporting has been one of the strongest developments of postwar journalism, illuminating government deceit, corporate fraud and criminal activity. The reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for The Washington Post in the early 1970s on the illegal efforts of Nixon’s White House to destabilise the Democratic party remains its defining moment.”

Was it, really, the “defining moment”? The Post certainly practiced some solid journalism in reporting the unfolding Watergate scandal; its coverage after all won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1973.

But the defining moment of investigative reporting?

I argue “no, not at all,” in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which addresses and debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths–among them the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate.

The heroic-journalist meme has it that Woodward and Bernstein’s dogged reporting about the Watergate scandal brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency. (Nixon resigned in 1974, in the face of certain impeachment and conviction for his role in seeking to coverup the Watergate scandal.)

“The heroic-journalist has become the most familiar storyline of Watergate,” I write in Getting It Wrong. That interpretation, I add, is “ready short-hand for understanding” Watergate, “a proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity. How the Post and its reporters uncovered Watergate is deeply ingrained in American journalism as one of the field’s most important and self-reverential stories.”

But that doesn’t make it the “defining moment” in investigative reporting.

The reporting by the Post certainly did not bring down Nixon’s presidency. To embrace that interpretation is, I write, “to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth.

“The heroic-journalist interpretation minimizes the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office”–including the collective efforts of such subpoena-wielding agencies and entities as the FBI, federal grand juries, special prosecutors, bipartisan congressional panels, and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court.

Not even the Post embraces the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate.

For example, the newspaper’s publisher during the Watergate period, Katharine Graham, insisted the Post did topple Nixon. In 1997, at a Newseum program marking the 25th anniversary of the break-in at Democratic headquarters–the Watergate’s seminal crime–Graham declared:

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

And in 2005, Michael Getler, then the newspaper’s ombudsman, declared in his 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.”

I note in Getting It Wrong that Woodward and Bernstein “did not uncover defining and decisive elements of the Watergate scandal—the cover-up and the payment of hush money to the Watergate burglars.”

Those aspects of the scandal, Woodward was quoted as saying in 1973, were “held too close. Too few people knew. We couldn’t get that high.”

Nor did they disclose the secret audiotaping system that Nixon had installed at the White House; the recordings of his private conversations about Watergate proved decisive in the scandal’s outcome.

If not Watergate, then what was the “defining moment” in investigative reporting–the genre’s most decisive and lasting contribution?

I’ll take up that question tomorrow at Media Myth Alert.

WJC

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WaPo journo on Jessica Lynch story rejoins paper

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post on January 6, 2011 at 8:50 am

Vernon Loeb, one of the Washington Post reporters who in 2003 wrote the botched story about Jessica Lynch’s purported battlefield heroics in Iraq, is returning to the newspaper as its local editor.

Washington Post, April 3, 2003

The electrifying but erroneous story about Lynch, then a 19-year-old Army private, turned her into the single most recognizable soldier of the Iraq War.

In a front-page report published April 3, 2003, the Post anonymously cited “U.S. officials” in saying that Lynch “fought fiercely” in the ambush of her unit in southern Iraq, that she had “shot several enemy soldiers,” and that she had fired her weapon “until she ran out of ammunition.”

But the hero-warrior narrative–published beneath the bylines of Loeb and Susan Schmidt–was untrue.

Lynch did not fire her weapon in the ambush. Nor was she shot and stabbed, as the Post reported.

I examine the Lynch case in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, noting how the Post account of her supposed derring-do “became a classic illustration of intermedia agenda-setting: News organizations around the world followed the Post’s lead by prominently reporting the supposed heroics of young Jessica Lynch and contemplating their significance.”

Not surprisingly, the Post in announcing yesterday that Loeb was returning neither mentioned nor hinted at his role in reporting the Lynch story. The Post memo did describe Loeb as “a tremendously talented, high-energy journalist, whose enthusiasm for what we do is infectious.

“In his new job, he will drive our coverage of the region, ensuring we are serving our readers, both print and digital, the smartest, freshest and most authoritative news and features on the issues that matter most to them. It’s a good match: this is a highly competitive market, and Vernon is an intensely competitive editor.”

The memo also said Loeb has run marathons and is an ardent fan of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team. (The DCist blog noted that Loeb’s Twitter account has been silent for several months.)

Loeb returns to the Post on February 1, following a stint as deputy managing editor for news at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He had left the Post in 2004 to become an investigations editor at the Los Angeles Times.

I once tried to speak with Loeb about the Lynch case. I called him at the Inquirer in 2008, while I was researching Getting It Wrong; he abruptly hung up on me.

I wanted to ask Loeb about the sources behind the Lynch story. I also wanted to ask him about the interview he gave to the NPR Fresh Air show in late 2003, during which he said the Pentagon was not the source for the Post story.

In the years since, the dominant narrative has become that the Pentagon concocted the story about Lynch’s heroics and fed it to the Post in order to boost American support for the war.

But in the interview on Fresh Air, Loeb said he “could never get anybody from the Pentagon to talk about” the Lynch case.

“They wouldn’t say anything about Jessica Lynch,” Loeb said on the show.

“I just didn’t see the Pentagon trying to create a hero where there was none,” he added. “I mean …they never showed any interest in doing that, to me.”

Moreover, he declared:

“Our sources for that story were not Pentagon sources.”

Loeb described them as “some really good intelligence sources” in Washington, D.C.

And he added:

“We wrote a story that turned out to be wrong because intelligence information we were given was wrong. That happens quite often.”

And yet, the false narrative about the Pentagon’s having made up the story about Lynch’s heroics endures, and has become dominant. It fits well with a curdled popular view about the war in Iraq.

I’ve called before at Media Myth Alert for the Post to knock down the false narrative about the Lynch case and disclose the identify of its sources on that story.

If they weren’t “Pentagon sources,” then who were the “U.S. officials” who supplied the erroneous account about Lynch? Why should they be continue to be protected with anonymity, given that they clearly provided inaccurate information?

Loeb should say, especially since his new job at the Post will include “ensuring [that] we are serving our readers” in an “authoritative” way.

WJC

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Murrow, Cronkite myths cited in Poland’s top paper

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, New York Times, Newspapers, Watergate myth on January 4, 2011 at 10:25 am

I’ve discussed from time to time at Media Myth Alert how media-driven myths about the U.S. news media have a way of traveling well and finding expression in news outlets overseas.

Watergate-related myths are notable examples of this tendency.

A couple of prominent media myths popped up yesterday in an article posted at the online site of Gazeta Wyborca, the leading daily in Poland and a newspaper with a remarkable past.

Gazeta Wyborca traces its lineage to what was the leading underground newspaper in Poland of the 1980s, Tygodnik Mazowsze. The clandestine title appeared under the noses of Poland’s communist authorities, week after week, from 1982 to 1989–some 290 issues in all.

Tygodnik Mazowsze was run almost entirely by women affiliated with Poland’s then-banned Solidarity opposition. When the country’s communist rulers permitted Solidarity candidates to stand in elections in 1989, one of the conditions was that the movement be permitted to publish an above-ground newspaper.

So the staff of Tygodnik Mazowsze moved up from the underground to launch Gazeta Wyborca, which means “electoral newspaper.” In the years since, Gazeta has become the dominant news outlet in Poland, which now is a thriving democracy.

Gazeta yesterday referred to the debate that bubbled last week in U.S. news media over a New York Times article that likened TV comedian Jon Stewart to legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow.

Gazeta noted that U.S. news media “triumphantly” mentioned “cases in which journalists have changed the course of history” and referred to Murrow’s “instrumental” role in ending Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communists-in-government witch-hunt.

It also noted CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite’s criticism of the Vietnam War in 1968, which supposedly forced President Lyndon Johnson to realize his war policy was a shambles.

It’s too bad Gazeta didn’t point out that both cases are media-driven myths.

As I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, Murrow was quite late in confronting McCarthy, doing so most prominently in a half-hour television program that aired March 9, 1954.

That show came months, even years after other American journalists–notably, syndicated columnist Drew Pearson–had reported critically, closely, and often about McCarthy and his exaggerated charges.

“To be sure,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “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.”

By then, they knew all too well.

Nor was Cronkite at the cutting edge of criticism of the U.S. war effort in Vietnam.

Far from it.

The CBS anchorman declared in a televised special report on February 27, 1968, that the U.S. military was “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam.

LBJ in Texas, February 27, 1968

But that scarcely was a remarkable assertion.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, “stalemate” had been appearing as early as the summer of 1967 in New York Times editorials and analyses about the war.

What supposedly made the Cronkite characterization stand out is that President Johnson saw the program and, as it ended, said to an aide or aides, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Or something to that effect.

But in fact, Johnson wasn’t in front of a television set that night. He didn’t see the Cronkite program when it aired.

At the time Cronkite was intoning his “mired in stalemate” assessment, Johnson was offering light-hearted banter in Austin, Texas, at the 51st birthday party of one of his longtime political allies, Governor John Connally.

So it’s difficult to fathom how Johnson could have been much moved by a program that he hadn’t seen.

WJC

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Excess praise for Edward R. Murrow

In Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, New York Times on January 2, 2011 at 10:59 am

Edward R. Murrow, the legendary CBS newsman who died in 1965, has been back in the news of late, owing to the facile suggestion by the New York Times that TV comedian Jon Stewart is Murrow’s “modern-day equivalent.”

Murrow the legendary

Absurd though it was, the comparison in the Times served to train attention anew on Murrow and on his famous 30-minute television program of March 9, 1954, which supposedly helped end the communists-in-government witch-hunt of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

The latest iteration of that theme find expression today in a commentary in South Bend Tribune in Indiana, which revisits the Times-Stewart-Murrow tempest and asserts that “in broadcast journalism history, Murrow was a giant of his time, honored for turning the spotlight in 1954 on the witch-hunt excesses of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, ‘McCarthyism,’ and helping to bring the demagogue’s downfall.”

Murrow certainly was a preeminent figure in American broadcast journalism, having won fame for his radio reports from London during World War II and for his weekly, documentary-style television program, See It Now, which was launched in 1951.

But to argue that Murrow turned the spotlight on the excesses of McCarthyism, and to claim Murrow helped bring about McCarthy’s downfall–well, that’s excess praise.

As I point out in Getting It Wrong, my mythbusting book published last year, the See It Now program on McCarthy in 1954 was neither pivotal nor decisive, in part because Murrow was following the spotlight when he turned attention to McCarthy and his excesses.

That is, Murrow was quite late in taking on McCarthy, doing so long after other journalists–among them muckraking columnist Drew Pearson–had become persistent and searching critics of the senator, his record, and his tactics.

As I write in Getting It Wrong,  Murrow’s friend and CBS colleague Eric Sevareid chafed at the misleading interpretation attached to the See It Now program on McCarthy which, he noted, “came very late in the day.”

Sevareid said in 1978:

“The youngsters read back and they think only one person in broadcasting and the press stood up to McCarthy and this has made a lot of people feel very upset, including me, because that program came awfully late.”

And in the days and weeks following the See It Now program on McCarthy, Murrow acknowledged the show’s contributions were modest, that it had at best reinforced what others had long said about McCarthy.

Jay Nelson Tuck, the television critic for the New York Post, wrote in April 1954 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.”

And Murrow’s collaborator and co-producer, Fred W. Friendly, rejected claims the See It Now program was decisive. Friendly wrote in his memoir, Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control:

“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.”

These were not assertions of false modesty. McCarthy’s tactics, after all, had become quite well-known by March 1954. As I write in Getting It Wrong, it wasn’t as if Americans then “were waiting for a white knight like Murrow to tell them about the toxic threat the senator posed.”

From the work of Pearson and other journalists, they already knew.

'Best of Person to Person'

While Murrow may have been a giant in American broadcasting, he did a fair share of puff-ball journalism, too. Besides the See It Now program, Murrow conducted mushy interviews with the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, and other celebrities of the 1950s on his highly rated Person to Person show on CBS.

As Jack Shafer of slate.com has argued: “If we’re going to praise Murrow for producing fearless TV news, we should also be ready to damn him for paving the way for Barbara Walters, Oprah Winfrey, and all the celebrity bootlickers on red carpets.”

It should be noted that Murrow was no white knight, either. He privately tutored Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1956, on speaking to the TV camera. In addition, Murrow claimed a master’s degree that he never earned, and inflated his speech major at Washington State University to a degree in international relations and political science.

I mention this not to dismiss Murrow’s contributions, but to argue for context about an important though flawed figure in American journalism–and to challenge as one-dimensional and misleading the mythic image of Murrow as “a giant of his time.”

WJC

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Anniversary journalism and media-driven myths in 2011

In Anniversaries, Bay of Pigs, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times, Newspapers on January 1, 2011 at 7:21 am

NY Times front page, April 7, 1961

“Anniversary journalism” has the appeal of being irresistible and easily done.

Typically, a reporter targets an upcoming anniversary (preferably, the occasion is divisible by 5 or 10), sells the idea to an editor, and cobbles together a story recalling the event. Easily done, but as the Independent newspaper in London has observed, not always very compelling.

We’ll surely see a lot of “anniversary journalism” in 2011.

The year, after all, brings the 10th anniversary of terrorist attacks of September 11, the 100th anniversary of the death of Joseph Pulitzer, and the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War.

Media Myth Alert will be especially interested in 2011 in the 50th anniversary of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which gave rise to the durable New York Times-Bay of Pigs suppression myth.

In the run-up to the anniversary in April of the Bay of Pigs invasion, we’ll no doubt see frequent references to this media-driven myth.

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, my mythbusting book that came out in 2010, the suppression myth has it that the New York Times bowed to pressure from the White House of President John F. Kennedy and “spiked,” or self-censored, its detailed report about the pending Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

The purported self-censorship took place about 10 days before the invasion– which failed utterly in its objective of toppling the Cuban revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro.

But as I point out in Getting It Wrong, the Times did not suppress its reports about the pending invasion of Cuba.

It did not censor itself.

The Times’ reports about preparations for the invasion were in fact fairly detailed–and prominently displayed on the front page in the days before the invasion.

The run-up to the Bay of Pigs was no one-day story. A succession of articles before the invasion “kept expanding the realm of what was publicly known about a coming assault against Castro,” I write.

To be sure, not all pre-invasion news reports were accurate or on-target. Much of the reporting was piecemeal.

But overall, the reports in the Times and other U.S. newspapers let readers know that something was afoot in the Caribbean, that an assault on Castro was in the works.

“Indeed,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “the coverage helped strip away the fiction circulated by the Kennedy administration that the invasion was strictly a Cuban affair.”

The suppression myth largely centers around a dispatch that a veteran Times correspondent, Tad Szulc, filed on April 6, 1961.

Supposedly, the Kennedy administration learned of the contents of Szulc’s dispatch about the pending invasion and urged that it be suppressed.

In his book The Powers That Be, David Halberstam offered a graphic, though exaggerated, account of Kennedy’s calling James Reston of the Times, saying the newspaper risked having blood on its hands were the article published.

Such a conversation never happened, according to Reston and others quoted in Harrison Salisbury’s Without Fear or Favor, an insider’s account of the Times and its history.

Moreover, as I note in Getting It Wrong:

“The Kennedy Library in Boston says that the White House telephone logs reveal no calls were placed to Reston” or other Times executives on April 6, 1961.

Szulc’s story was published on the front page on April 7, 1961 (see image, above).

I argue in Getting It Wrong that that the suppression myth likely stems from confusion over an episode in October 1962, when Kennedy did ask the Times to delay publication of a sensitive report.

That came during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Reston was prepared to report that nuclear-tipped Soviet weapons had been deployed in Cuba. With the prospect of a nuclear exchange seemingly in the balance, the Times complied with the president’s request.

Kennedy took office in 1961–a year with more than a few significant anniversaries. In 1961, Berlin Wall went up, the Soviets put the first man into space, Hemingway killed himself, and Adolf Eichmann‘s war-crimes trial was convened in Israel.

And the Times suppression myth took hold.

WJC

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