Wasn’t I just blogging about celebrities pushing media myths?
Today brought another entry to that dubious lineup.
On his “Writer’s Almanac” podcast that airs on NPR, Garrison Keillor blithely retold the hoary media myth of William Randolph Hearst’s vow to “furnish the war” with Spain.
The occasion for Keillor’s myth-indulgence was the 152d anniversary of Hearst’s birth in San Francisco.
“In 1898,” Keillor smugly told listeners, “Hearst sent the artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to cover the war. And Remington wrote home, ‘There is no war. Request to be recalled.’
“And he was told, ‘You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.’ And the Hearst newspapers did their best to promulgate what came to be called the Spanish-American War.”
The tale is one of the best-known in American journalism. And it is almost certainly apocryphal, for reasons discussed in my 2010 media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong.
Let’s revisit some of the many reasons.
For starters, Hearst denied sending such a message (a denial usually overlooked or ignored) and Remington apparently never discussed it.
Hearst: Denial ignored
What’s more, as I point out in Getting It Wrong, the anecdote lives on despite the absence of supporting documentation: The telegrams that Remington and Hearst supposedly exchanged have never turned up.
Not only that, but the Spanish authorities who controlled incoming and outbound telegraphic traffic in Cuba surely would have intercepted and called attention to such an incendiary message, had it been sent.
The sole original source for the “furnish the war” anecdote was On the Great Highway, a slim volume of reminiscences published in 1901. The author was James Creelman, a portly, cigar-chomping journalist prone to hyperbole and exaggeration.
Creelman did not explain in On the Great Highway how or where he learned about the purported Remingt0n-Hearst exchange.
Nor did he say exactly when the presumed Remington-Hearst exchange took place, writing only that it was “some time before the destruction of the battleship Maine in the harbor of Havana” in mid-February 1898. The only time Remington was in Cuba before the explosion that destroyed the Maine was in January 1897, on assignment for Hearst’s flamboyant New York Journal to draw sketches of the Cuban rebellion against Spain’s colonial rule.
The rebellion was the antecedent to the Spanish-American War of 1898.
The timing of Remington’s trip to Cuba in early 1897 further undercuts the “furnish the war” anecdote: It presents an irreconcilable internal inconsistency, as it would have been absurd for Hearst to have vowed to “furnish the war” because war — specifically, the Cuban rebellion — was the very reason he sent Remington to Cuba in the first place.
As Keillor’s podcast suggests, the “furnish the war” anecdote is a delicious tale, easy to retell, and easy to believe. Like nearly all media myths, it resides on the cusp of plausibility; it corresponds well to the superficial and misleading image of Hearst as war-monger, as the unscrupulous newspaper publisher who fomented the Spanish-American War.
And that, too, is a tenacious media-driven myth.
More from Media Myth Alert:
- Remembering the ‘Maine,’ Hearst, and Remington
- The Remington-Hearst media myth invoked anew
- Yellow journalism: A sneer is born
- Obama, journalism history, and ‘folks like Hearst’
- No, Politico: Hearst did not cause the Spanish-American War
- ‘Furnish the war’ media myth infiltrates NPR tribute to Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Scoop’
- Two myths and today’s New York Times
- 1897 flashback: Committing ‘jailbreaking journalism’
- ‘War Lovers’: A myth-indulging disappointment
- Halberstam the ‘unimpeachable’? Try myth-promoter
- Katharine Graham, the ‘Economist,’ and bringing down Nixon
- Getting It Wrong goes on Q-and-A
Media Myth Alert 
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