W. Joseph Campbell

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CNN launches ‘Race for White House’ series with hoary myth about 1960 debate

In Debunking, Error, Media myths, Television on March 7, 2016 at 12:01 pm

CNN touts its new, six-part series about memorable races for the White House as presenting “the drama of how a high-stakes presidential election can turn on a single issue and so much more.”

Screen Shot 2016-03-07 at 11.14.06 AMA better way to put it is that it offers up a hoary media myth. That at least was a fundamental flaw of last night’s first installment of the quasi-documentary series known as “Race for the White House.”

The hour-long debut was a superficial, even cheesy take on the 1960 campaign between Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon, a race that  CNN claimed turned on the first-ever televised debate, which took place in Chicago on September 26, 1960.

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WaPo: Now drinking the Watergate Kool-Aid?

In Debunking, Error, Media myths, Scandal, Washington Post, Watergate myth on February 21, 2016 at 1:07 pm

The dominant narrative of the Watergate scandal is that dogged reporting by the Washington Post uncovered evidence that toppled Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

wapo-logoIt’s a tempting if reductive media-centric myth that principals at the Post have routinely rejected over the years. Katharine Graham, the newspaper’s publisher during the Watergate period, once said, for example:

“Sometimes people accuse us of bringing down a president, which of course we didn’t do.”

Graham added, quite accurately: “The processes that caused [Nixon’s] resignation were constitutional.”

Bob Woodward, one of the Post’s lead reporters on Watergate, concurred, if less eloquently. He told the American Journalism Review in 2004:

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

'To say the press brought down Nixon ...'

Woodward: ‘To say the press brought down Nixon …’

But occasionally in recent years, the Post’s myth-avoidance on Watergate has slipped. In July 2014, for example, John Kelly, a local columnist for the newspaper, referred to Woodward’s reporting partner on Watergate, Carl Bernstein, as “the former Washington Post reporter famous for his role in bringing down a president.”

And today, the front page of the Post’s “Outlook” section features an essay about the appeal of conspiracy theories; the essay closes with this passage:

“It’s worth remembering that, very occasionally, conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Just ask the two cheeky journalists at this newspaper who followed a crazy conspiracy theory and brought down a sitting president.”

The reference to “cheeky journalists,” of course, is to Woodward and Bernstein. And “crazy conspiracy theory” means the Watergate scandal (which indeed may have been a bit “crazy”). But “brought down a sitting president”? That was far beyond the power of the Post, or any newspaper, to accomplish.

As I discussed in my 2010 myth-busting book, Getting It Wrong, rolling up a scandal of Watergate’s dimensions of  “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 noted, “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” of the burglary in June 1972 that was Watergate’s seminal crime.

It’s an interpretation that essentially endorsed the view of Michael Getler who, as the Post’s ombudsman, or in-house critic, wrote in 2005:

“Ultimately, it was not The Post, but the FBI, a Congress acting in bipartisan fashion and the courts that brought down the Nixon administration. They saw Watergate and the attempt to cover it up as a vast abuse of power and attempted corruption of U.S. institutions.”

The Post’s contribution to Watergate’s outcome was marginal, the mythology notwithstanding.

Given the evidence — and the traditional reluctance of principals at the Post to embrace the mythical narrative of Watergate — it’s puzzling why “Outlook” editors allowed the erroneous “cheeky journalists” passage into print.

We’ll see if the Post publishes a correction.

WJC

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No, ‘Politico’ — Nixon never said he had a ‘secret plan’ for Vietnam

In Debunking, Error, Media myths, New York Times, Quotes on February 12, 2016 at 9:53 am

The mythical tale that Richard M. Nixon ran for president in 1968 touting a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War is a dubious bit of political lore that has proven quite resistant to debunking. William Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter and columnist for the New York Times, once called the “secret plan” chestnut a “non-quotation [that] never seems to go away.”

Quite so.

Politico logoThe chestnut made an appearance yesterday in a Politico Magazine essay ruminating about the foreign policy smarts of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

What intrigued Media Myth Alert was this passage:

“Candidate Nixon said he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam but never said what it was.”

It’s a claim that Nixon never made — a claim he even tried to knock down.

But it lives on, irresistibly, as presumptive evidence of Nixon’s fecklessness and his scheming ways.

The tale’s derivation can be traced to March 5, 1968 and a speech in Hampton, New Hampshire, in which Nixon said that “new leadership” in Washington — a Nixon administration, that is — would “end the war” in Vietnam.

The wire service United Press International noted in reporting Nixon’s remarks  that the candidate “did not spell out how” he would “end the war.” The UPI dispatch also said “Nixon’s promise recalled Dwight D. Eisenhower’s pledge in 1952, when Nixon was his running mate, to end the war in Korea.” Eisenhower was elected president that year.

What 'secret plan'?

What ‘secret plan’?

The New York Times account of Nixon’s speech, published March 6, 1968, quoted the candidate as saying he “could promise ‘no push-button technique’ to end the war. He said he was not suggesting ‘withdrawal’ from Vietnam.” A brief, follow-on report that day in the Times quoted Nixon as saying he envisioned applying military pressure as well as diplomatic efforts in ending the war.

Nixon may have been vague in describing his ideas about Vietnam.

But clearly he was not touting a “secret plan.”

That he wasn’t is underscored by the search results of a full-text database of leading U.S. newspapers in 1968, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. The search terms “Nixon” and “secret plan” returned no articles during the period from January 1, 1967, to January 1, 1969, in which Nixon was quoted as saying he had a “secret plan” for Vietnam. (The search period included all of Nixon’s presidential campaign and its immediate aftermath.)

Surely, had Nixon promised or campaigned on a “secret plan” in 1968, the country’s leading newspapers would have picked up on it.

Moreover, an article published March 28, 1968, in the Los Angeles Times reported that Nixon addressed the notion, saying he had “no gimmicks or secret plans” for Vietnam.

Nixon further stated:

“If I had any way to end the war, I would pass it on to President [Lyndon] Johnson.” (Nixon’s remarks were made just a few days before Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.)

Nixon may or may not have had a “secret plan” in mind in 1968. But he did not make such a claim a feature of his campaign that year.

Nixon’s political  foes, however, tried to pin the “secret plan” calumny on him. For example, supporters of Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey took out a large display advertisement in the New York Times on October 23, 1968; the ad included this statement: “Last March he said he had a secret plan to end the war.”

The ad included no reference about exactly when or where Nixon had made such a statement. And it carried the headline, “Trust Humphrey.”

WJC

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NYTimes invokes Watergate myth in writeup about journalists and movies

In Anniversaries, Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Error, Media myths, New York Times, Newspapers, Scandal, Washington Post, Watergate myth on January 3, 2016 at 2:03 pm

There’s no doubt Hollywood is an important reason why Watergate’s dominant narrative has it that Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and the Washington Post toppled Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

Not the Post's doing

Not the Post’s doing

It is a heroic narrative that found mention today’s New York Times, in an article discussing two movies about journalists that could be contenders this year for Academy Awards.

One of them is Truth, a perversely titled film that celebrates former CBS News anchor Dan Rather and producer Marla Mapes who in 2004 used bogus documents to claim President George W. Bush dodged wartime service in Vietnam. No way does that movie deserve Oscar consideration. The other contender-film is titled Spotlight.

But what most interests Media Myth Alert is the Times article’s blithe and mistaken reference to “the investigation by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that led to Richard M. Nixon’s resignation.”

Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate reporting for the Post had no such effect, however much the cinematic version of their book, All the President’s Men, encouraged that notion. As I noted in my 2010 book, Getting It Wrong, the movie promotes an “unmistakable assertion of 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. And it is a message that has endured.”

Indeed, this year marks the 40th anniversary of the movie’s release and the notion that Woodward and Bernstein toppled Nixon remains the principal way Watergate is understood, a version that disregards and diminishes the far more accurate interpretation of what led to Nixon’s fall in August 1974.

To roll up a scandal of Watergate’s dimensions, I wrote in Getting It Wrong, “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 did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” of the burglary in June 1972 that was Watergate’s seminal crime.

Principals at the Post have, over the years, rejected the simplistic notion that the newspaper’s reporting led Nixon to resign.

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

“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.”

In 2005, Michael Getler, then the Post’s ombudsman, or in-house critic, wrote:

“Ultimately, it was not The Post, but the FBI, a Congress acting in bipartisan fashion and the courts that brought down the Nixon administration. They saw Watergate and the attempt to cover it up as a vast abuse of power and attempted corruption of U.S. institutions.”

Not even Woodward has embraced the heroic-journalist myth. He once told an interviewer for American Journalism Review:

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

And in an interview with the PBS “Frontline” program, Woodward said “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.”

Today’s article wasn’t the first time the Times has turned to the mythical claim about the Post’s Watergate reporting.

In a cover article in 2014, the Times Sunday magazine mentioned Woodward and Bernstein, saying they “actually managed to take down a mendacious American president, and in doing so they came to symbolize the hope and heroism of a new generation.”

And in 2008,in an article about Woodward’s finally introducing his high-level Watergate source to Bernstein, the Times referred to the “two young Washington Post reporters [who] cracked the Watergate scandal and brought down President Richard M. Nixon.”

WJC

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