W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for May, 2013|Monthly archive page

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Ignoring nuance in the bra-burning myth

In Bra-burning, Debunking, Error, Media myths on May 30, 2013 at 9:01 am

“Myths die hard.”

So says the latest issue of the Economist magazine, in an article that addresses the nuanced myth of bra-burning.

bra-burning_freedomtrashcan

At the ‘Freedom Trash Can,’ 1968

Only there’s not much nuance in the Economist’s description.

“When a handful of feminists protested at the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City,” the Economist says, “they burned no brassières. They did, however, dump a few (and make-up and high-heeled shoes) into a ‘freedom trash can,’ while also crowning a sheep.”

The syntax of that paragraph is certainly awkward. But what most interests Media Myth Alert is the assertion “they burned no brassières.”

And that’s not quite right.

As I discuss in my myth-busting book, Getting It Wrong, there is compelling evidence that bras were indeed set afire, briefly, during a women’s liberation protest on the boardwalk at Atlantic City.

That protest took place September 7, 1968, and denounced the Miss America pageant as a degrading spectacle. Demonstrators carried placards that expressed such unsubtle sentiments as: “Up Against the Wall, Miss America,” “Miss America Sells It,” “Miss America Is a Big Falsie,” and “Miss America Goes Down.”

A centerpiece of the demonstration was what the organizers called the “Freedom Trash Can.” The Economist is correct in noting that high-heel shoes and other items were tossed into that converted burn barrel.

Bras went into the Freedom Trash Can, too. And according to a first-hand account published the following day in the Atlantic City newspaper, the Press, “bras, girdles, falsies, curlers, and copies of popular women’s magazines [were] burned in the ‘Freedom Trash Can.'”

The Press account appeared beneath this headline:

“Bra-burners blitz boardwalk.”

That account was endorsed by Jon Katz, who in 1968 was a young reporter for the Press and who wrote a sidebar article about the women’s liberation demonstration.

“I quite clearly remember the ‘Freedom Trash Can,’ and also remember some protestors putting their bras into it along with other articles of clothing, and some Pageant brochures, and setting the can on fire,” Katz told me in my research for Getting It Wrong.

“I am,” he added, “quite certain of this.”

Katz also said:

“I recall and remember noting at the time that the fire was small, and quickly was extinguished, and didn’t pose a credible threat to the Boardwalk. I noted this as a reporter in case a fire did erupt.”

When the fire flickered out, Katz said, the police dragged the trash bin to the sand.

The reference to bra-burning in the Press article the day afterward as well as Katz’s recollections “offer fresh dimension to the bra-burning legend,” I write in Getting It Wrong, noting:

“They represent two witness accounts that bras and other items were burned, or at least smoldered, in the Freedom Trash Can. There is now evidence that bras and other items were set afire, if briefly, at the 1968 Miss America protest in Atlantic City.

“This evidence cannot be taken lightly, dismissed or ignored.”

However, these accounts do not support the much more vivid and popular notion that bras went up in flames that day, in a flamboyant protest on the boardwalk.

The witness accounts, I write, do not corroborate the “widely held image of angry feminists demonstratively setting fire to their bras and tossing the flaming undergarments into a spectacular bonfire.”

And yet, as the evidence presented in Getting It Wrong makes clear, “bra-burning” is an epithet not entirely misapplied to the women’s liberation demonstration at Atlantic City.

WJC

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Still hardy after 40 years: The myth that Woodward, Bernstein ‘brought down’ Nixon

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Error, Media myths, Scandal, Washington Post, Watergate myth on May 17, 2013 at 10:30 am

Forty years ago today, a Senate select committee convened public hearings into the then-emergent Watergate scandal. The hearings stretched into the summer of 1973 and helped make “Watergate” a household term.

More important, the panel’s inquiry produced the disclosure that President Richard Nixon had secretly taped many of his private conversations at the White House — a revelation that was to prove decisive to the scandal’s outcome.

The most incriminating tape, released under Supreme Court directive in July 1974, captured Nixon plotting a coverup of the FBI’s investigation into the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington in June 1972.

If not for the tapes, Nixon likely would have remained in office — a wounded and hobbled president, but one who would have completed his term.

So the Senate select committee was vital in the array of subpoena-wielding forces that produced evidence that eventually compelled Nixon’s resignation.

And yet, on this anniversary, the simplistic, media myth circulates anew — that two dogged reporters for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, exposed the crimes of Watergate and brought down Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

The latest to invoke what I call the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate was the executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, Carol Rose, who declared in a commentary for Boston’s NPR station, WBUR:

“Nixon himself was brought down by two enterprising young reporters at the Washington Post and a whistleblower by the name of ‘Deep Throat.'”

Rose’s commentary, posted yesterday at the “Cognoscenti” page of WBUR’s Web site, focused on and rightly took issue with the Justice Department’s snooping into phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors in Washington, New York, and Hartford, Connecticut.

“Lest there be any confusion: This is a big deal,” Rose says of the Justice Department’s activity. (She also writes, “Dismantle the free press, and you pretty much dismantle democracy,” which probably is to put it backwards: A free press is a marker and byproduct of democratic government, not an essential precondition.)

But what most concerns Media Myth Alert is the blithely offered claim about the work of Woodward and Bernstein — those “enterprising young reporters” to whom Rose refers.

Simply put, Woodward and Bernstein did not bring down Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

Their Watergate reporting for the Post as the scandal slowly unfolded in the summer and fall of 1972 did win a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. But Woodward and Bernstein were not central to the major disclosures of Watergate.

Notably, they did not reveal the existence of the Nixon’s tapes.

Nor did they describe the extent of the Nixon administration’s coverup of the crimes of Watergate.

Interestingly, authorities at the Post over the years have scoffed at claims that Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting took down Nixon.

Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher during Watergate, said in 1997:

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

Woodward, himself, has pooh-poohed the notion, too. He once told an interviewer:

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

More delicately, Woodward said in an interview with the PBS “Frontline” program that “the mythologizing of our role in Watergate has gone to the point of absurdity, where journalists write … that I, single-handedly, brought down Richard Nixon. Totally absurd.”

As for the “whistleblower” Rose mentions, the shadowy “Deep Throat” source?

He turned out to be W. Mark Felt, a senior FBI official motivated not so much by whistleblowing as by high-stakes, inter-office politics.

Felt wanted the FBI top job after the death in May 1972 of the agency’s director, J. Edgar Hoover. Leaking to Woodward (Felt never met Bernstein during Watergate) was a way to pursue those ambitions — and to undercut the official who was appointed acting FBI director, L. Patrick Gray.

Felt was no noble figure. As I note in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, he authorized burglaries as part of the FBI’s investigations into leftists associated with the radical Weather Underground.

Felt was convicted in 1980 on felony charges related to the break-ins, but was pardoned the following year by President Ronald Reagan.

WJC

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Obama’s ‘Cronkite Moment’? ‘Salon’ dials up a media myth

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Error, Media myths, Quotes, Scandal, Television on May 14, 2013 at 6:48 pm

The online news and commentary site Salon today invokes the mythical “Cronkite Moment” of 1968 in mulling TV comedian Jon Stewart’s obscenity-laced criticism last night about the scandals battering the administration of President Barack Obama.

Salon logoStewart’s remarks on his Daily Show are evocative, Salon declares, of “one of the most famed moments in broadcasting, when CBS News legend Walter Cronkite delivered an editorial opinion after the Tet Offensive in February 1968,” in which he suggested that negotiations could offer a way out of Vietnam.

Salon adds the media myth, stating:

“Apparently watching at the White House, President Johnson, who had lost the left long ago, reportedly turned to an aide and said, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.’ Just a few weeks later, Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.”

Salon then injects a muddled caveat, stated parenthetically: “Critics say the event has been widely misreported and overblown, but it still looms large in the American consciousness of the era, even if apocryphally.”

How’s that? It “looms large … even if apocryphally”?

Simply put, the “Cronkite Moment” is apocryphal.

And here are a few of the reasons why:

  • Johnson did not see the Cronkite program when it aired on February 27, 1968. He wasn’t at the White House, either. He was in Austin, Texas, at a black-tie party marking the 51st birthday of a longtime political ally, Governor John Connally. About the time Cronkite was intoning his commentary about Vietnam, Johnson was making light of Connally’s age, saying: “Today, you are 51, John. That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for — a simple majority.”
  • Cronkite’s on-air remarks had little to do with Johnson’s decision, announced at the end of March 1968, not to seek reelection. Far more decisive was Johnson’s eroding political support: By mid-March 1968, the president was confronting intra-party challenges from Democratic senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy. And Johnson may have decided well before then against another term. He wrote in his 1971 memoir, The Vantage Point, that well before March 1968, he “had told a number of people” of his “intention not to run again.”
  • Cronkite for years rejected the notion that his on-air comments about Vietnam had had much effect on Johnson. The anchorman characterized his observations as akin to “another straw on the back of a crippled camel.” Evidence is scant, moreover, that Cronkite’s commentary had much influence on popular opinion, either. Polls had detected shifts in public sentiment against Vietnam months before Cronkite’s on-air remarks. Which means the anchorman can be said to have followed rather than have precipitated deepening disenchantment about the war.

What’s more, as I discuss in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, Cronkite’s commentary — he also said the U.S. war effort was “mired in stalemate” — was far less emphatic than the on-air remarks not long afterward by a rival network newsman, Frank McGee of NBC News.

On March 10, 1968, McGee declared: “The war is being lost by the administration’s definition.”

Lost: No hedging there about a stalemate.

Not only does Salon indulge in media myth, its commentary probably overstates the impact of Stewart’s segment about the scandals.

The comedian was hardly direct or unrelenting in criticizing Obama. His frustration was aimed primarily at IRS and the agency’s stunning recent acknowledgement that it had singled out conservative organizations for detailed scrutiny.

As such, Stewart’s remarks are unlikely to be remembered as much of a turning point in popular views about the Obama administration.

WJC

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PBS set to embrace ‘mass hysteria’ myth in anniversary show on ‘War of Worlds’?

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Error, Media myths, Media myths and radio, Newspapers, Television, War of the Worlds on May 13, 2013 at 12:20 pm
Welles and 'War of the Worlds'

Orson Welles and ‘War of the Worlds’: No panic

PBS plans to air an “American Experience” program in October about the famous War of the Worlds radio adaptation, which starred Orson Welles and cleverly told of Earth’s invasion by Martians wielding deadly heat rays.

The PBS description sounds as if the program will embrace a hoary media-driven myth — that The War of the Worlds show of October 30, 1938, set off widespread panic and mass hysteria.

As I discuss in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, “the panic and mass hysteria so readily associated with The War of The Worlds program did not occur on anything approaching nationwide dimension.”

In overwhelming numbers, I write in referring to contemporaneous polling data, most listeners “recognized it for what it was — an imaginative and entertaining show on the night before Halloween.”

But here’s the PBS summary of an hour-long “American Experience” program, to be aired October 29, on the eve of the radio show’s 75th anniversary:

“AMERICAN EXPERIENCE ‘War of the Worlds’ Orson Welles’ infamous radio dramatization of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds set off one of the biggest mass hysteria events in U.S. history 75 years ago. The film examines the elements that made America ripe for the hoax. Tuesday, October 29, 9:00-10:00 p.m. ET.”

The reference to “one of the biggest mass hysteria events in U.S. history” raises eyebrows — and commanded the attention of Media Myth Alert.

(Asked for details about the content of the “American Experience” show, Cara White, a spokeswoman, said by email: “We don’t have additional information at this time since the program isn’t premiering until October. But we should have more information closer to the broadcast.”)

The 1938 radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds may have produced fleeting, localized fright and confusion. But there’s no persuasive evidence that it stirred anything approaching panic of nationwide dimension.

This is more than an academic argument: Listener reaction to The War of the Worlds program in 1938 speaks to whether the media have the capacity to create powerful, immediate, and unnerving effects.

I point out in Getting It Wrong that “the notion that The War of the Worlds program sent untold thousands of people into the streets in panic, is a media-driven myth that offers a deceptive message about the influence radio wielded over listeners in its early days and, more broadly, about the media’s potential to sow fright, panic, and alarm.”

I’m not alone in my conclusions about The War of the Worlds program, an hour-long adaptation that aired on CBS radio.

Robert E. Bartholomew, an authority on mass hysteria and social delusions, has noted there is scant evidence that many frightened listeners acted on their fears that night in 1938.

Michael J. Socolow wrote in a fine essay in 2008 that “panic was neither as widespread nor as serious as many have believed at the time or since.”

Socolow also noted:

“The streets were never flooded with a terrified citizenry” during or after the radio program.

Moreover, had Welles’ show “set off one of the biggest mass hysteria events in U.S. history,” the resulting turmoil and trauma certainly would have resulted in serious injuries and deaths, including suicides.

But none were linked to the program.

The erroneous notion that The War of the Worlds dramatization had convulsed the country in panic and mass hysteria certainly was afoot in 1938 — and for U.S. newspapers of the time, that misleading interpretation offered a delicious opportunity to assail an upstart rival medium, radio.

By the late 1930s, radio had become an important source for news and advertising, and American newspapers had, as I write in Getting It Wrong, “competitive incentives to denounce radio, and characterize it as irresponsible and unreliable.

“Many newspapers seized the chance to do with enthusiasm,” I note. “It was as an opportunity they could not fail to let pass.”

The New York Times, for example, declared in an editorial titled “Terror by Radio”:

“Radio is new but it has adult responsibilities. It has not mastered itself or the material it uses.”

The Times and other American newspapers in 1938 seemed eager to chastise radio. And their overwhelmingly negative commentary helped seal the lingering and erroneous view that The War of the Worlds dramatization set off panic and hysteria across the country.

Judging from its news release, PBS seems ready to embrace that media myth.

WJC

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