W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for the ‘Anniversaries’ Category

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Bra-burning: The morphing of a media myth

In Anniversaries, Bra-burning, Debunking, Media myths on September 7, 2010 at 9:01 am

Today is the 42d anniversary of the women’s liberation protest at Atlantic City, the event that gave rise to what I call the “nuanced myth” of bra-burning.

Atlantic City, September 7, 1968

 

Or “bra-smoldering.”

As I discuss in my new book, Getting It Wrong, “bra-burning” is a media myth that has morphed and taken on fresh significance in the years since 1968. “Bra-burning” the epithet has lost some of its sting.

The legend of bra-burning began to take hold in the days and weeks following the women’s liberation protest September 7, 1968, on the Atlantic City boardwalk.

Some 100 demonstrators gathered there, as one participant put it, “to protest the degrading image of women perpetuated by the Miss America pageant,” which took place that night inside the city’s Convention Center.

A centerpiece of the protest was the so-called “Freedom Trash Can” into which demonstrators placed such “instruments of torture” as brassieres, girdles, and high-heeled shoes.

Organizers of the protest have long insisted that nothing was burned during the demonstration.

But my research, as described in Getting It Wrong, found a long-overlooked contemporaneous account in the Press of Atlantic City that said bras and other items in the Freedom Trash Can were set afire that day.

Boucher (1949 photo)

 

That account was written by a veteran reporter named John Boucher and published September 8, 1968. The account was separately endorsed years later by Jon Katz, who in 1968 was a young reporter for the Press and who covered 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 said in an interview with me in 2007. “I am quite certain of this.”

However, the witness accounts of Boucher and Katz don’t lend support to “the far more vivid and popular imagery that many bras went up in flames” in a fiery spectacle that September day, I write.

The legend of bra-burning has endured more than 40 years and, as media scholar Thomas Lieb has pointed out, it seems certain to survive the Baby Boomer generation that propelled it into the public domain.

For many years after 1968, “bra-burning” was a term of scorn and derision, a handy way to dismiss the feminist movement and its goals of gender equality.

As I write in Getting It Wrong:

“Invoking ‘bra-burning’ was a convenient means of brushing aside the issues and challenges raised by women’s liberation and discrediting the fledgling movement as shallow and without serious grievance.”

But as I further write in Getting It Wrong,  the term in recent years slowly “has become associated with female empowerment—a metaphor for assertiveness, audacity, and dedication to women’s rights.”

A recent example appeared in the Guardian of London, which referred to bra-burning as a “brilliant … piece of political theatre.”

Another and more puzzling example of bra-burning’s changing significance took place in February 2008 on the Tyra Banks afternoon television show.

I note in Getting It Wrong how “Banks took members of her studio audience into the chill of a winter’s afternoon in New York for a made-for-television stunt about what women could do with ill-fitting brassieres.

“Banks wore an unzipped gray sweatshirt that revealed a powder-blue sports bra. Most of the other women were clad above the waist only in brassieres. They clutched other bras as they stood before a burn barrel from which flames leapt hungrily. On Banks’ word, the women tossed the bras in their hands into the fire.”

More substantively, it is not that unusual to hear female college students these days describe bra-burning as a powerful metaphor for boldness and cheek.

“For many of them,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “‘bra-burning’ has few negative associations. They find little reason to cringe at the epithet.

“Rather, they view ‘bra-burning’ as bold symbolism that connotes a refusal to conform to standards and expectations set by others— sentiments that certainly echo the views of the women who tossed undergarments into the Freedom Trash Can” 42 years ago today.

WJC

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Remembering bra-burning–er, make that bra-smoldering

In Anniversaries, Bra-burning, Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers on September 6, 2010 at 7:20 am

The legend of “bra-burning” emerged 42 years ago this week in the aftermath of a women’s liberation demonstration on the boardwalk at Atlantic City.

Atlantic City, September 7, 1968

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, my new book debunking prominent media-driven myths, bra-burning is a “nuanced myth.”

Getting It Wrong offers evidence that bras and other items were burned–or at least smoldered–for a short time during the protest September 7, 1968, which was called to denounce the Miss America pageant at Atlantic City as a mindless spectacle that demeaned women.

The demonstration’s organizers have long insisted that nothing was set afire at the Atlantic City protest, which, as scholars such as  Thomas Lieb have noted, is regarded as decisive in the emergence of the women’s movement of the late 20th century.

Feminists have long claimed that “bra-burning” was an injurious turn of phrase, intended to denigrate the women’s movement and belittle its objectives of gender equality.

A centerpiece of the women’s liberation protest at Atlantic City was the so-called “Freedom Trash Can” (see photo, above), into which demonstrators placed what they called “instruments of torture,” such as brassieres, girdles, and high-heeled shoes, as well as copies of Playboy and Cosmopolitan magazines.

My research, as described in Getting It Wrong, found a long-overlooked contemporaneous account in the Press of Atlantic City that said bras and other items in the Freedom Trash Can were set afire that day.

That account was written by a veteran reporter named John Boucher and published September 8, 1968, beneath the headline:

“Bra-burners blitz boardwalk.”

That account, which appeared on page 4, was separately endorsed years later by Jon Katz, who in 1968 was a young reporter for the Press. He also covered the women’s liberation protest.

“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 said in an interview with me while I was researching Getting It Wrong.

“I am quite certain of this.”

Katz also told me:

“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.”

As I point out in Getting It Wrong, the witness accounts of Boucher and Katz “lend no support to the far more vivid and popular imagery that many bras went up in flames” in a fiery spectacle that September day.

Their accounts, I write, don’t corroborate the “widely held image of angry feminists demonstratively setting fire to their bras and tossing the flaming undergarments into a spectacular bonfire.”

Such imagery can be traced to imaginative and sardonic newspaper columns published shortly after the Miss America protest.

Harriet Van Horne, writing in the New York Post a few days after the demonstration, declared:

“My feeling about the liberation ladies is that they’ve been scarred by consorting with the wrong men. Men who do not understand the way to a woman’s heart, i.e., to make her feel utterly feminine, desirable and almost too delicate for this hard world. … No wonder she goes to Atlantic City and burns her bra.”

Van Horne, who was not at the protest, also wrote that the highlight of the demonstration “was a bonfire in a Freedom Trash Can. With screams of delight they consigned to the flames such shackling, demeaning items as girdles, bras, high-heeled slippers, hair curlers and false eyelashes.” (Emphasis added.)

The widely read humor columnist, Art Buchwald, took up the riff a few days later, writing in his nationally syndicated column that he had been “flabbergasted to read that about 100 women had picketed the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City against ‘ludicrous beauty standards that had enslaved’ the American woman.”

Buchwald added: “The final and most tragic part of the protest took place when several of the women publicly burned their brassieres.”

The columns by Van Horne and Buchwald introduced to national audiences the notion that bra-burning was flamboyant at Atlantic City. The columns conjured, I write in Getting It Wrong, “a powerful mental image of angry women setting fire to bras and twirling them, defiantly, for all on the boardwalk to see.”

Didn’t happen.

At most, bras smoldered in the Freedom Trash Can.

So what’s the significance of the Boucher and Katz accounts, as described in Getting It Wrong?

At very least, I write, they “offer fresh dimension to the bra-burning legend.

“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.”

It’s evidence that cannot be taken lightly, dismissed, or ignored, as it signals that the narrative about bra-burning needs to be modified.

WJC

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Katrina and the myth of superlative reporting

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Hurricane Katrina, Media myths, Newspapers on September 1, 2010 at 7:34 am

Five years ago this month, a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast and left much of New Orleans under water, former CBS anchorman Dan Rather went on Larry King Live to extol television’s coverage of the deadly storm.

Rather,  whose early career had been propelled by covering hurricanes, was extravagant in his praise, saying the Katrina coverage was “one of the quintessential great moments in television news,” ranking “right there with the Nixon/Kennedy debates, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate coverage, you name it.”

The coverage, Rather declared, was nothing short of “landmark.”

As I write in Getting It Wrong, my new book debunking prominent media-driven myths, Rather’s praise was “more than a little misleading.”

Rather’s comments also helped give rise to what I call the “myth of superlative reporting”–the notion that coverage of Katrina represented a memorable occasion of the news media’s finding their voice, of standing up to public officials and holding them accountable for an inept and muddled response,  especially in New Orleans.

But the notion the reporting was superlative is inexact and misleading. Katrina’s aftermath, as I write in Getting It Wrong, “was no high, heroic moment in American journalism.

“The coverage was in important respects flawed and exaggerated. On crucial details, journalists erred badly, and got it wrong. In the days following Katrina’s landfall, news reports described apocalyptic horror that the hurricane supposedly had unleashed.”

Five years on, it’s instructive to recall how extreme and over the top the reporting was from New Orleans in Katrina’s aftermath; it’s revealing to revisit what journalists said and wrote.

On CNN five years ago today, Paula Zahn spoke about “very discouraging reports out of New Orleans” about “bands of rapists going from block to block, people walking around in feces, dead bodies floating everywhere. And we know that sniper fire continues.”

She also said:

“We are getting reports that describe it as a nightmare of crime, human waste, rotten food, dead bodies everywhere. Other reports say sniper fire is hampering efforts to get people out.”

Also that day, John Burnett of National Public Radio said on the All Things Considered show: “We understand that there was a 10-year-old girl who was raped in the [New Orleans] Convention Center in the last two nights. People are absolutely desperate there. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

The Associated Press news service reported on September 1, 2005, that New Orleans had “descended into anarchy” as “corpses lay abandoned in street medians, fights and fires broke out, cops turned in their badges and the governor declared war on looters who have made the city a menacing landscape of disorder and fear.”

In her column published September 3, 2005, in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd referred to New Orleans as “a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning.”

International news organizations, I note in Getting It Wrong, were quite “keen to report the horror stories from New Orleans, as if the hurricane had exposed pathologies in American society that otherwise would remain obscure.”

The British press landed with notable eagerness on the Katrina-unleashed-mayhem narrative.

The Sunday Observer of London reported on September 4, 2005, that New Orleans had become “a city … subsumed beneath waves of violence, rape and death.”

And a columnist for London’s Independent newspaper offered a colorful and highly imaginative account that was published five years ago today:

“Reports from New Orleans ring like prophecies of the apocalypse. Corpses float hopelessly in what used to be a thriving and distinctive downtown; coffins rise from the ground; alligators, sharks and snakes ply the poisonous waters ….”

Few if any of the nightmarish accounts of violence, anarchy, and mayhem proved true.

No shots were fired at rescue helicopters. There were no known child rape victims, no bodies stacked like cordwood, no “bands of rapists going from block to block,” no sharks plying the flood waters.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, “the erroneous and exaggerated reporting had the cumulative the effect of painting for America and the rest of the world a scene of surreal violence and terror, something straight out of Mad Max or Lord of the Flies.”

The coverage of Katrina’s aftermath was no “quintessential” great moment in journalism.

Far from it.

As a bipartisan congressional report on Katrina noted in 2006:

“If anyone rioted, it was the media.”

WJC

Related:

Many thanks to Instapundit Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post

Many thanks to the National Review Corner for linking to this post

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Absent in looking back: Katrina’s lessons for the press

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Hurricane Katrina, Media myths, Watergate myth on August 31, 2010 at 6:06 am

The anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall has prompted a fair amount of hand-wringing and knitted-brow discussions about lessons still to be absorbed, five years after the storm’s onslaught on the Gulf Coast.

The Washington Post, for example, carried a lengthy and rather preachy commentary the other day about “Katrina’s unlearned lessons.” The commentary included this warning:

“Barring urgent action, if the gulf region is hit by another big hurricane this fall, its communities will be knocked down–and this time, many will not be able to get back up.”

Possibly. But it’s highly speculative.

Largely absent in the retrospective assessments about the hurricane are discussions about lessons the news media should take, or should have taken, from their often-exaggerated reporting about the nightmarish violence Katrina supposedly brought to New Orleans.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, my new book that debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths, the coverage of Katrina’s aftermath “was in important respects flawed and exaggerated.

“On crucial details, journalists erred badly, and got it wrong. In the days following Katrina’s landfall, news reports described apocalyptic horror that the hurricane supposedly had unleashed.”

Little of it was true.

What’s more, I write, the exaggerated, over-the-top reporting about mayhem and unspeakable violence “was neither benign nor without consequences.

“It had the very real and serious effects of delaying the arrival of aid to New Orleans, of diverting and distorting the deployment of resources and capabilities, of heightening the anxiety of evacuees at the [New Orleans] Superdome and Convention Center, and of broadly stigmatizing a city and its people.”

In the weeks following Katrina’s landfall, leading news organizations produced a brief flurry of reports revisiting, and criticizing, the accounts of mayhem and anarchy in New Orleans.

“The media joined in playing whisper-down-the-lane,” the Philadelphia Inquirer said in late September 2005 about post-Katrina coverage from New Orleans, “and stories that defied common sense were treated as news.”

But as I write in Getting It Wrong, “The news media’s contrition and introspection did not last for long, however. The self-critical articles tended to be one-off assessments that usually received little prominence. The Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Washington Post all placed their retrospective articles on inside pages, for example.

“After the flurry of post-Katrina assessments in late September and early October 2005,” I add, “the news media demonstrated little interest in sustaining or revisiting the self-critique.”

Five years on, Katrina’s lessons and reminders for the news media remain relevant. Among them is the near-certainty that erroneous reports will proliferate in the immediate aftermath of any major disaster.

As Kathleen Tierney of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder told a congressional panel investigating Katrina’s consequences, “misleading or completely false media reports should have been among the most foreseeable elements of Katrina.”

As her comment suggested, the news media’s susceptibility to reporting disaster-related falsehoods and rumors has long been recognized. I cite in Getting It Wrong a prescient article titled “Coping With the Media in Disasters: Some Predictable Problems” that was published in the mid-1980s in Public Administration Review.

The authors–in an observation that anticipated Katrina’s aftermath–noted that news organizations “can spread rumors, and so alter the reality of disaster, at least to those well away from it, that they can bias the nature of the response. They can and do create myths about disasters, myths which will persist even among those with contrary disaster experience.”

The near-complete breakdown of communication networks in Katrina’s aftermath certainly complicated matters for reporters. Telephone service was out across New Orleans after Katrina roared through. Cell phones did not function. Electricity was scarce.

Amid such conditions, stories that at first may have had some factual underpinning became “exaggerated and distorted as they were passed orally—often the only mode of communication—through extraordinarily frustrated and stressed multitudes of people, including refugees, cops, soldiers, public officials and, ultimately, the press,” wrote Brian Thevenot in “Mythmaking in New Orleans,” a fine article published at the end of 2005 in American Journalism Review.

While the communications breakdown helps explain why exaggerated reporting was rampant in New Orleans in Katrina’s aftermath, it does not exonerate the flawed coverage or let journalists off the hook.

In varying degrees, communication disruptions are elements of all major disasters.

And as I write in Getting It Wrong, the collapse of communication networks should have given reporters pause, leaving them “more cautious and more wary about what they heard and reported, and thus less likely to traffic in wild and dubious claims.”

WJC

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Mainstream media ‘fractured’ in covering Katrina

In Anniversaries, Hurricane Katrina, Media myths on August 27, 2010 at 11:27 am

The Nation offered yesterday an incisive assessment of the news media’s coverage of post-Katrina New Orleans that was as thoughtful as any I’ve seen amid the indulgence in “anniversary journalism” in recent days.

The article was not entirely a critique of the media’s performance but sought to reconstruct what it called the “story of the storm.” At times it was predictably dogmatic (i.e., “The levees broke and so did the bulwarks that protected the president,” a reference to George W. Bush’s popularity).

But the article was pretty much spot-on in characterizing the media’s over-the-top reporting about the violence, mayhem, and anarchy that Katrina supposedly unleashed on New Orleans. It’s a topic discussed in the closing chapter of Getting It Wrong, my new book that debunks prominent media-driven myths.

I write in Getting It Wrong that post-Katrina reporting from New Orleans represented “no high, heroic aftermath in American journalism.”  The coverage, I note, “was in important respects flawed and exaggerated. On crucial details, journalists erred badly, and got it wrong.”

The Nation describes the U.S. mainstream media as having “fractured under the pressure of reporting such a huge and complex story. Journalists on the ground often wrote empathic and accurate stories and broke out of their ‘objective’ roles to advocate for the desperate and rail against systemic failures.

“Meanwhile … credulous television, online and print reporters spread lurid rumors about baby rapists and mass murders and treated minor and sometimes justified thefts as the end of civilization. They used words like ‘marauding’ and ‘looting’ as matches, struck over and over until they got a conflagration of opinion going.”

That’s well-put.

As is this passage:

“The stories of social breakdown were quietly retracted in September and October 2005, but the damage had been done. A great many found new confirmation of the old stereotypes that in times of crisis people—particularly poor and nonwhite people—revert to a Hobbesian war of each against each.”

So why does all this still matter, five years on?

The anniversary of Katrina’s onslaught presents an opportunity for journalists to revisit and reexamine the flawed reporting from New Orleans, with an eye toward taking lessons by which to improve coverage of adversity and disasters.

After all, the exaggerated, over-the-top reporting from New Orleans was, I write in Getting It Wrong, “neither benign nor without consequences. It had the very real and serious effects of delaying the arrival of aid to New Orleans, of diverting and distorting the deployment of resources and capabilities, of heightening the anxiety of evacuees at the Superdome and Convention Center, and of broadly stigmatizing a city and its people.”

It’s also useful for journalists covering disasters to hone a pronounced measure of skepticism about pronouncements by senior public officials.

In post-Katrina New Orleans, the mayor and the police commissioner “were sources for some of the most shocking and exaggerated reports about the disaster,” I note in Getting It Wrong.

Mayor Ray Nagin said in a memorable appearance September 6, 2005, on Oprah Winfrey’s television show that “hundreds of armed gang members” were terrorizing storm-evacuees inside the Superdome.

The mayor also said conditions there had deteriorated to “an almost animalistic state” and evacuees had been “in that frickin’ Superdome for five days, watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.”

The police commissioner, Eddie Compass, spoke of other horrors, saying “little babies [were] getting raped” inside the Superdome.

Their accounts were widely reported—and proved to be almost totally without foundation. In all, six people died in the Superdome in Katrina’s aftermath. None of those deaths was related to violent crime.

As the Nation‘s article notes, “Most ordinary people behave remarkably well when their city is ripped apart by disaster. They did in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake; in New Orleans during Hurricane Betsy in 1965; in Mexico City after the 1985 earthquake; in New York City in the aftermath of 9/11; and in most disasters in most times and places.

“Those in power, on the other hand, often run amok.”

And post-Katrina New Orleans was an object lesson for journalists.

WJC

Related:

Many thanks to Instapundit Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post

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Give the press ‘D-minus’ on post-Katrina coverage

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Hurricane Katrina, Media myths on August 26, 2010 at 4:42 pm

Harry Shearer, director of The Big Uneasy, a new film about why levees failed in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina’s onslaught, offered a searing critique the other night about the news media and their coverage of the deadly storm.

Shearer was quoted by AOL’s DailyFinance site as saying the New York Times “did okay” in its post-Katrina coverage five years ago.

“I think the rest of the press gets a D, and probably a D-minus for their efforts at patting themselves on the back about how well they did speaking truth to power,” Shearer said in an interview Tuesday night with Jeff Bercovici, the media columnist for DailyFinance.

Shearer cited the encounter September 1, 2005, between CNN’s Anderson Cooper and U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu.

Cooper on that occasion snapped at Landrieu, telling her: “And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated.”

Shearer said of Cooper’s tongue-lashing the senator: “Like that’s the person you need to lecture.”

Shearer was further quoted as saying: “It was grandstanding and showboating in place of telling a story–partly because they left. They left. Water leaves, story over” in post-Katrina New Orleans.

He noted that the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper won two Pulitzer Prizes for its Katrina-related coverage.  Times-Picayune reporters “couldn’t leave,” Shearer said. “They lived there. They had to stay.”

So, a “D” or “D-minus” overall for post-Katrina coverage? Harsh grades, those.

But certainly not undeserved.

News reporting in the immediate aftermath of Katrina’s landfall represented “no high, heroic aftermath in American journalism,” I write in Getting It Wrong, my new book debunking 10 prominent media-driven myths–among them the myth of superlative reporting in Katrina’s aftermath.

“The coverage,” I write, “was in important respects flawed and exaggerated. On crucial details, journalists erred badly, and got it wrong.”

I further write:

“They reported snipers firing at medical personnel. They reported that shots were fired at helicopters, halting evacuations from the Convention Center [in New Orleans].

“They told of bodies being stacked there like cordwood. They reported roving gangs were preying on tourists and terrorizing the occupants of the Superdome, raping and killing. They said children were victims of sexual assault, that one seven-year-old was raped and her throat was slit. They reported that sharks were plying the flooded streets of New Orleans.”

In the end, none of those reports was verified or substantiated, I note.

I point out in Getting It Wrong that no single news organization committed all those errors. And not all those lapses were committed at the same time, although they were largely concentrated during the first days of September 2005.

In any case, I write, the erroneous and over-the-top reporting “had the cumulative the effect of painting for America and the rest of the world a scene of surreal violence and terror, something straight out of Mad Max or Lord of the Flies.”

Estimates of Katrina’s death toll in New Orleans also were wildly exaggerated.

U.S. Senator David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, said on September 2, 2005, that fatalities in the state could reach 10,000 or more.

Vitter described his estimate as “only a guess,” but it was nonetheless taken up by the then-New Orleans mayor, Ray Nagin, and reported widely.

In all, the death toll in Louisiana from Katrina was around 1,500.

About the inaccurate estimates of fatalities, the Times of London said it had become clear by in mid-September 2005 “that 10,000 people could have died only if more than 90 per cent of them had locked themselves into their homes, chained themselves to heavy furniture and chosen to drown instead of going upstairs as the waters rose.”

But the Times rationalized the flawed reporting, suggesting that it was inevitable: When “nature and the 24-hour news industry collide, hyperbole results.”

A weak excuse, that. Besides, post-Katrina reporting from New Orleans was more than hyperbolic: It described apocalyptic horrors that the hurricane supposedly unleashed.

“D-minus” is none too generous.

WJC

Related:

H/T Jim Romenesko

Many thanks to Instapundit Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post

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NBC’s Katrina retrospective sidesteps media failings

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Hurricane Katrina, Media myths on August 22, 2010 at 9:47 pm

I watched this evening’s NBC Dateline retrospective  about Hurricane Katrina, and couldn’t help but wonder: What’s the point?

The hour-long program lacked a news peg, other than it aired in the run-up to the fifth anniversary of the storm’s landfall on the Gulf Coast.

Recollections of NBC anchorman Brian Williams, who covered Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans, were the centerpiece of the show, which went strong on the images of suffering throngs of people at the New Orleans Superdome and the Convention Center in the days following the hurricane.

But beyond vague references to government incompetence, there was little explanation as to why the suffering there was so intense. Without analysis, such images seemed gratuitous, and voyeuristic.

New Orleans, post-Katrina

In his recollections, which were recorded in 2005, Williams veered close to embracing what I call the myth of superlative reporting–the notion that news coverage of Katrina’s aftermath was little short of heroic, that journalists stood tall in telling truth to power.

“People say, on this crisis, the media found their voice,” Williams said on Dateline, adding, “We owed it to these people [suffering in New Orleans] to ride herd of these officials.”

I write about the myth of superlative reporting in my new book, Getting It Wrong, and note:

“Journalists did confront incompetent government officials who seemed to dither in the face of the disaster. Journalists did let their emotions show. Many of them took great risks in New Orleans to report a demanding, multidimensional story in a city that was 80 percent under water. Some journalists there went days without much of a break, sleeping little and toiling amid despairing conditions.”

But I also write that “Katrina’s aftermath was no high, heroic moment in American journalism.

“The coverage was in important respects flawed and exaggerated. On crucial details, journalists erred badly, and got it wrong. In the days following Katrina’s landfall, news reports described apocalyptic horror that the hurricane supposedly had unleashed.”

The Dateline show addressed none of that–none of the exaggerated descriptions of Mad Max-like violence and mayhem that many news reports said gripped post-Katrina New Orleans.

The exaggerated reporting, I write, “had the cumulative the effect of painting for America and the rest of the world a scene of surreal violence and terror.” And little of it was true.

I also write in Getting It Wrong that reports of “nightmarish violence and wanton criminality in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina’s landfall … defamed a battered city and impugned its residents at a time of their deep despair.”

Moreover, the over-the-top reporting “had the very real and serious effects,” I write, “of delaying the arrival of aid to New Orleans, of diverting and distorting the deployment of resources and capabilities, of heightening the anxiety of evacuees at the Superdome and Convention Center.”

I cite in Getting It Wrong a nearly 600-page report about Katrina’s aftermath, prepared by a bipartisan select committee of the House of Representatives. The report, titled “Failure of Initiative,” stated that  “accurate reporting was among Katrina’s many victims.

“If anyone rioted, it was the media.”

The House report also declared:

“Many stories of rape, murder, and general lawlessness were at best unsubstantiated, at worst simply false. And that’s too bad because this storm needed no exaggeration.”

I suspect in the days ahead, as the news media indulge in “anniversary journalism” about Hurricane Katrina, that we’ll read and hear little about their failings five years ago in covering the deadly storm.

WJC

Related:

Many thanks to Jim Romenesko for linking to this post

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Nixon quits–36 years on

In Anniversaries, Cinematic treatments, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on August 9, 2010 at 8:40 am

Richard Nixon resigned the presidency 36 years ago today–the only American president to have done so.

Nixon leaves, August 9, 1974

He left the White House on August 9, 1974, to avoid certain impeachment and conviction. By then it had become clear that Nixon had ordered senior aides to cover up the Watergate scandal’s signal crime, the burglary in June 1972 at Democratic national headquarters.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, my new book about media-driven myths, forcing Nixon’s resignation “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.”

But in the years since 1974, the dominant popular narrative of the Watergate scandal has become the heroic-journalist meme, the widely held notion that the investigative reporting of two young, tireless reporters for the Washington Post led the way in bringing down Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

Such claims appear often in the news media, both in the United States and abroad.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, “The heroic-journalist has become the most familiar storyline of Watergate: ready short-hand for understanding Watergate and its denouement, a proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity.”

Indeed, 19 men associated with Nixon’s administration or his reelection campaign in 1972 went to jail for crimes in the Watergate scandal–a revealing marker of the scandal’s reach and complexity.

I write in Getting It Wrong that 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.”

So why has the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate become the dominant popular narrative?

Three related reasons offer themselves, I write in Getting It Wrong.

They are:

  • the well-timed release in June 1974 of All the President’s Men, the best-selling book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about their Watergate reporting
  • the cinematic version of the book, which was released in 1976 to very favorable reviews, and
  • the decades-long guessing game about the identity of the helpful and anonymous high-level source, code-named “Deep Throat,” with whom Woodward surreptitiously met while investigating Watergate. The secret source was introduced in All the President’s Men and immediately prompted considerable speculation as to who he was.

“These factors,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “combined to place Woodward and Bernstein at the center of Watergate in popular consciousness, and project the notion that the scandal’s outcome pivoted on disclosures reported by the news media.”

This is especially so in the movie All the President’s Men, which, I write, “offers an unmistakable assertion of the power and centrality of the press in Nixon’s fall.”

The movie also 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.

However, to explain Watergate through the lens of the heroic-journalist is, I note, “to abridge and misunderstand the scandal and 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”–the special Watergate prosecutors, the federal judges, bipartisan congressional panels, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Supreme Court.

Even then, I argue, Nixon probably would have survived in office and served out his term–albeit as a wounded and weakened chief executive–had it not been for the existence of the audiotapes he made of many of his conversations in the Oval Office.

Only when ordered by the Supreme Court in late July 1974 did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up and authorizing payments of thousands of dollars in hush money.

Interestingly, Woodward and Bernstein did not uncover the defining and decisive element of the Watergate scandal—the existence of the audiotaping system that Nixon had installed in the Oval Office.

And the tapes were decisive in ultimately forcing his resignation.

WJC

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What was decisive in Watergate’s outcome?

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on July 25, 2010 at 1:34 pm

“Without the Watergate hearings, surely Nixon would have escaped judgment.”

So wrote Jeff Stein the other day, at his “Spy Talk” blog, for which the Washington Post is host.

While Stein didn’t focus his commentary on Watergate and the factors accounting for Richard Nixon’s fall, his observation invites reflection about what ultimately ended Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

Were the Watergate hearings–those of the Senate Select Committee on Watergate–indeed pivotal, as Stein suggests? What were the other factors?

I note in Getting It Wrong, my new book about prominent media-driven myths, that the dominant popular narrative of Watergate has long been the notion that dogged investigative reporting of two Washington Post journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, was what exposed the crimes of Watergate and brought down Nixon.

“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,” I write in Getting It Wrong, adding:

“But to explain Watergate through the lens of the heroic-journalist is to abridge and misunderstand the scandal and 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.”

Among the more decisive forces and factors were hearings of the Senate Select Committee in the summer 1973–the “Watergate hearings,” to which Stein refers.

The hearings were most memorable for the stunning disclosure that Nixon had secretly and routinely tape-recorded conversations in the Oval Office.

The disclosure was to prove decisive to Watergate’s outcome. It set off intensive efforts by the special federal prosecutor on Watergate, as well as other subpoena-wielding authorities, to gain access to tapes relevant to their inquiries.

Citing “executive privilege,” Nixon resisted releasing them until ordered to do so by the U.S. Supreme Court–in an 8-0 decision handed down 36 years ago yesterday, July 24, 1974. He complied.

One of the recordings revealed Nixon’s active role in attempting to cover up the signal crime of Watergate, the break-in in June 1972 at the Democratic National Headquarters in Washington, D.C. That recording–the so-called “smoking gun” tape–made resignation inevitable.

The “smoking gun” tape showed that Nixon “had instituted a cover-up and thus had participated in an obstruction of justice almost from the outset” of the scandal, Stanley I. Kutler, Watergate’s foremost historian, wrote in his fine book, The Wars of Watergate.

If not for the Supreme Court’s order, it is my view that Nixon never would have released the tapes revealing his guilt in Watergate and likely would have served out his term, albeit as a badly wounded chief executive.

Interestingly, as I note in Getting It Wrong, Woodward and Bernstein wrote in All the President’s Men, the book about their Watergate reporting, that they received a lead about the Oval Office tapes shortly before their existence was revealed.

Woodward said he called Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee about the tip; Bradlee suggested not expending energy in pursuing it.

Had they pursued the tip, Woodward and Bernstein might have broken the pivotal story about Watergate. Had they done so, the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate–the media-centric view that they uncovered the scandal–would be somewhat more plausible.

WJC

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Movies, and a myth, for the Fourth

In Anniversaries, Cinematic treatments, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on July 4, 2010 at 12:28 pm

The online site movieviral.com today offers a top 10 listing of what it terms the “best movies that involve July 4th, politics, and other historic events in US history.”

The list–yes, another list of favorite movies–merits attention here principally because of the inclusion of All the President’s Men. The movie–as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, my new book debunking prominent media-driven myths–helped solidify the notion that two young and intrepid reporters for the Washington Post brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency in the Watergate scandal.

The movieviral.com post says that All the President’s Men “follows Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) as they uncover what would become known as Watergate, thus ending the political career of President Nixon.”

Woodward and Bernstein did not “uncover” the Watergate scandal, although the notion they did, I write in Getting It Wrong, “is deeply ingrained in American journalism as one of the field’s most important and self-reverential stories.”

And as Edward Jay Epstein wrote years ago in a superb essay about the news media and Watergate, “the FBI, the federal prosecutors, the [federal] grand jury, and the Congressional committees … unearthed and developed all the actual evidence and disclosures of Watergate.”

Indeed, Woodward and Bernstein did not uncover the defining and decisive elements of the Watergate scandal—the cover-up and the payment of hush money to the burglars who were arrested at Democratic national headquarters in June 1972. Nor did Woodward and Bernstein uncover the existence of the audiotaping system that Nixon had installed in the Oval Office, which proved so critical in forcing the president’s resignation.

The Senate Select Committee on Watergate–not Woodward and Bernstein–disclosed the existence of the White House tapes that captured Nixon’s complicity in the coverup. Special federal prosecutors on Watergate pressed for their release. And the U.S. Supreme Court in 1974  unanimously ordered Nixon to turn over key tapes that had been subpoenaed by the special prosecutor.

Those were pivotal events that led to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, against the tableau of prosecutors, courts, federal investigators, and bipartisan congressional panels, “the contributions of Woodward and Bernstein were modest, and certainly not decisive.

“Principals at the Post have acknowledged as much. Katharine Graham, the newspaper’s doughty publisher, often insisted the Post did not topple Nixon.”

Indeed, as Graham said at a program in 1997 marking the scandal’s 25th anniversary, “The processes that caused [Nixon’s] resignation were constitutional.”

Woodward has concurred, albeit in earthier terms.  “To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit,” he said in 2004 in an interview with American Journalism Review.

The movieviral.com roster includes a particularly fine selection in the musical comedy 1776, which, as the site says, “follows the Second Continental Congress for the three months in the hot 1776 summer [when] it deliberated and eventually signed the Declaration of Independence.”

1776 is engaging and entertaining, and I always try to find time to watch at least a portion of the movie on the Fourth. I’ll do so today.

WJC

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