W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for the ‘Debunking’ Category

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

False parallels: bin Laden slaying and bogus tale about Jessica Lynch

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post on May 5, 2011 at 8:00 am

Lynch: No hero-warrior

The discrepancies and shifting details about the takedown of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden have reminded some commentators of the case of Jessica Lynch and the bogus tale of her battlefield heroics in the Iraq War.

Among those invoking such parallels was Ben Smith who, at a Politico blog the other day, examined the erroneous report that bin Laden used his wife as a human shield before being fatally shot during the U.S. commando raid on his lair in Pakistan.

“Every American war has been defined, in no small part, by mythmaking,” Smith wrote. “It was at its most egregious in the cases of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman, when the military establishment seemed, more or less, to have fed the press lies.”

The Guardian newspaper in London also brought up the Lynch case, in an article posted yesterday that carried the headline, “US military’s history of backtracking on initial reports.”

The Guardian said of Lynch: “Despite being badly wounded when her company came under attack near the town of Nasiriyah in March [2003], the soldier kept her finger on the trigger of her gun until her ammunition ran out. … The only problem with the official account is that it was untrue.”

But parallels between the Lynch and bin Laden cases are inexact and misleading. The heroics attributed to Jessica Lynch weren’t “lies” spread by the U.S. military; the account of her battlefield derring-do was no “official account,” either.

Far from it.

As I discuss in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, the tale about Lynch was thrust into the public domain prominently and exclusively by the Washington Post.

The Post published an electrifying story on April 3, 2003, that declared that Lynch had been “‘fighting to the death'” when she was overpowered by Iraqi attackers  and taken prisoner.

The Post reported that Lynch, a supply clerk in the 507th Maintenance Unit, “continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting” at Nasiriyah.

The newspaper also said Lynch was “stabbed when Iraqi forces closed in on her position.”

But the Post’s dramatic hero-warrior tale was utterly wrong: Lynch never fired a shot in the fighting at Nasiriyah: Her rifle jammed.

She was neither shot nor stabbed; she suffered severe injuries in the crash of her Humvee as it sped away from the ambush.

As for sources, the Post vaguely cited “U.S. officials” who otherwise went unidentified. (And as I’ve said at Media Myth Alert, the Post has an obligation to the public to set the record straight by disclosing the identity of those sources.)

We do know that the Post’s sources were not Pentagon officials.

We know this from Vernon Loeb, one of the Post reporters who shared a byline on the “‘fighting to the death'” tale about Lynch.

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, Loeb went on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air program in December 2003 and made clear that the Post’s sources weren’t Pentagon officials.

Loeb said: “They wouldn’t say anything about Jessica Lynch.”

He dismissed the interviewer’s suggestion that the Post’s “fighting to the death” report was the Pentagon’s result of clever and cynical manipulation.

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

He also said: “Our sources for that story were not Pentagon sources.”

Moreover, the then Defense Department spokeswoman, Victoria Clarke, was quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying in June 2003: “We were downplaying [the Lynch hero-warrior story]. We weren’t hyping it.”

The exaggerated tale about Lynch wasn’t a story that the Pentagon concocted, pushed, or embraced. It wasn’t an “official account” by any means.

It was solely the product of the Post’s over-eager journalism, an episode in flawed reporting for which the newspaper has never fully accounted.

Indeed, the Post has tried to dodge responsibility for its erroneous tale about Lynch.

In a follow-up story about Lynch published in June 2003, the Post had the temerity to fault the U.S. military and the administration of President George Bush for failing to correct the error for which the Post was responsible.

“Neither the Pentagon nor the White House publicly dispelled the more romanticized initial version of her capture,” the Post said, “helping to foster the myth surrounding Lynch and fuel accusations that the Bush administration stage-managed parts of Lynch’s story.”

It was, I write in Getting It Wrong, “an astounding assertion: The Post, alone, was responsible for propagating the ‘romanticized initial version’ that created the hero-warrior myth. To claim the Pentagon and the White House should have done more to dispel that report was, in short, exceedingly brazen.”

In his 2005 book, Misunderstimated, Bill Sammon, now a Fox News executive in Washington, D.C., said the Post’s attempt at blame-shifting represented “a new low, even for the shameless American press.”

He added:

“One of the most influential newspapers in the nation was now holding the Bush Administration responsible for correcting the paper’s own gross journalistic misdeeds. Instead of just coming clean and admitting its initial story was utterly bogus, the Post called it ‘romanticized,’ as if someone other than its own reporters had done the romanticizing.”

Appalling.

WJC

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

A cautionary note on early coverage of dramatic events

In Debunking, Hurricane Katrina, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post on May 3, 2011 at 8:17 am

Amid yesterday’s jubilation about the slaying of terror leader Osama bin Laden, the media critic at slate.com, Jack Shafer, posted a timely and telling reminder that initial news reports of major events seldom are reliable.

This is especially so, I would add, in covering disasters: The early accounts almost always are erroneous.

Got it wrong in New Orleans

The coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, which I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, is instructive: News reports about the surreal violence that the storm supposedly unleashed on New Orleans in late summer 2005 were highly exaggerated and wildly inaccurate.

“Katrina’s aftermath was no high, heroic moment in American journalism,” I write, adding, “On crucial details, journalists erred badly, and got it wrong. ”

In his column about the coverage of the killing of bin Laden, Shafer noted that “the fog of breaking news almost always cloaks the truth, especially when the deadline news event is a super-top-secret military operation conducted by commandos halfway around the world and the sources of the sexiest information go unnamed.”

He pointed out the wide variance in the early reports about bin Laden’s violent end, noting such discrepancies as these:

  • ABC News: “He was shot in the head and then shot again to make sure he was dead.”
  • The Atlantic: “One of the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double tap—boom, boom—to the left side of his face.”
  • The London Sun: “Elite troops opened fire when the 9/11 terror chief refused to surrender, hitting him in the head and chest. …”
  • MSNBC.com: “[H]e was shot in the left eye.”

Shafer added: “At some point, after reporters have time to independently report the events behind the raid, we’ll have a verified picture of who did what when instead of the official versions we’re reading and viewing today. Until then, it’s caveat emptor for news consumers.”

Journalists would do well to offer such reminders more frequently than they do.

Cautionary notes ought to be routine, as should specific reference to the challenges of reporting military operations from afar.

Such distance-reporting, after all, can give rise to errors that are both memorable and acutely embarrassingly. The Jessica Lynch case, which unfolded during the early days of the Iraq War in 2003 and which is discussed in Getting It Wrong, is memorable in that regard.

The Washington Post, drawing on sources it has never identified (but should), offered the world a sensational report about the battlefield heroics of Lynch, then a 19-year-old Army supply clerk who never expected to see combat.

Elements of her units fell under ambush in Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq on March 23, 2003.

According to the Post’s front-page article — which was mostly reported by journalists based in Washington — Lynch “continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting” at Nasiriyah.

The newspaper also said Lynch was “stabbed when Iraqi forces closed in on her position.”

The Post’s sensational report about Lynch was picked up by news outlets around the country and the world. But it was wrong, utterly wrong.

Lynch never fired a shot at Nasiriyah. Her rifle jammed during the ambush. She suffered shattering injuries when a rocket-propelled grenade struck her Humvee, causing the vehicle to crash.

But she was neither shot nor stabbed.

Lynch was taken prisoner and treated at an Iraqi hospital where she lingered near death before being rescued on April 1, 2003, by a U.S. special operations team.

The Post report offers another reminder about covering combat — the passage of time is no guarantee of accuracy in reporting. The sensational account about Lynch appeared on the Post’s front page of April 3, 2003, 11 days after the ambush at Nasiriyah.

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News media indispensable to democracy? Some evidence would be nice

In Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post, Yellow Journalism on May 1, 2011 at 9:49 am

The Washington Post ombudsman invokes in his column today the defining conceit of American journalism: That without truth-telling reporters and editors, democracy would be imperiled.

Or, as he puts it, rather simplistically:

“What we do is report, write and edit stories. We take and publish photographs (and now video, too). We publish the stories and images as news through compelling design and graphics. And, in columns and blogs, we analyze the news. Through this painstaking process, we reveal truths. The country cannot long survive as a democracy, or as a capitalist economy, without this kind of independent journalism.”

But how does the ombudsman, Patrick B. Pexton, know that? What evidence does he offer to buttress the notion that the news media are indispensable bulwarks of democracy and capitalism?

None. He presents the self-congratulatory claim about journalism’s value as self-evident.

It is true that robust journalism and media pluralism are hallmarks of democratic governance.

But democratic rule typically enables independent journalism rather than the other way round.

We see this phenomenon across the world: Whenever the heavy hand of authoritarian rule is lifted, non-official news media flourish, usually as partisan platforms. It’s a point I made in my first book, The Emergent Independent Press in Benin and Côte d’Ivoire, which examined the rise of media pluralism in two states in Francophone West Africa.

But emergent independent journalism, or well-established journalism, isn’t a variable essential to a thriving democracy. I’m reminded of a superb essay on this topic that the inestimable media critic Jack Shafer wrote in 2009 for slate.com.

As Shafer correctly pointed out:

“Democracy thrived in the United States in the 1800s, long before the invention of what we call quality journalism. Between 1856 and 1888, when most newspapers were crap and controlled by, or beholden to, a political party, voter turnout hovered around 80 percent for presidential elections. Compare that with the 55.3 percent and 56.8 percent turnouts in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections.”

And party-oriented journalism lasted well beyond 1888. It stretched through the period of the yellow press at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century. The leading newspapers of those days were often overtly partisan.

The leading practitioner of yellow journalism, William Randolph Hearst, turned his newspapers into a platform for his mostly unfulfilled political objectives. He unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for president and the governorship of New York, ambitions that were boosted by, but not contingent upon, his activist-oriented newspapers.

Shafer’s column also noted:

“Could it be that deep-dish reporting that uncovers governmental malfeasance and waste … doesn’t promote activism or participation? Could it be that such exposés end up souring the public on democracy and other institutions?”

It’s an interesting point. Aggressive, searching journalism that offers a stream of reporting about the flaws, shortcomings, and corruption in democratic institutions also may be a reason many adult Americans have tired of the news and have turned it off completely.

According to data compiled by the Pew Research Center and released last year, 17 percent of adult Americans go newsless on a typical day. That is, they eschew the news despite ready access to a variety of news-delivery options and platforms, both traditional and digital.

The going-newsless phenomenon in a news-drenched society is highest among 18-to-24-years-old; 31 percent of those young Americans go without the news on a typical day.

“Large numbers of Americans are beyond media influence,” I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which addresses and debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths.

So how are news outlets so vital to American democracy when so many Americans ignore them completely? Pexton’s assertion about the indispensable character of the media ignores such complexity.

Pexton’s claim is the kind of thin platitude that serves to reassure journalists in a time of great upheaval in the field, a time when the direction of the profession is uncertain, when the longevity of once-superior newspapers like the Washington Post is in doubt.

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds, and Little Miss Attila,
for linking to this post

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

CounterPunch embraces bogus Lynch narrative

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post on April 30, 2011 at 7:46 am

Private Lynch, before Iraq

The Pentagon concocted a tale about the battlefield heroics of Jessica Lynch, a waiflike Army private then 19-years-old, and fed it to the news media in order to boost popular support for the Iraq War.

Voilá,  the dominant popular narrative about Lynch, the conflict’s single most famous soldier.

CounterPunch, a muckraking newsletter, embraced that bogus narrative yesterday in a lengthy essay posted online about the supposed effects of careerism in the U.S. military.

In invoking the Lynch case, CounterPunch asserted:

“The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan … have severely tested and frequently compromised the U.S. officer corps’ traditional values of duty, honor and country. This is obvious in the selective careerist- and agenda-ridden assertions to portray a false picture of events to the American public about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.”

Several examples followed, including this claim about Lynch: “Americans were told Army Spc. Jessica Lynch fired her M16 rifle until she ran out of bullets and was captured. It was a lie.”

In fact, that statement offers “a false picture of events”: The Pentagon did not put out the story about Lynch’s supposed derring-do in the ambush of her unit at Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq, in the first days of the conflict.

As I point out in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, which came out last year, the Pentagon was not the source of the false narrative about Lynch.

It was the Washington Post that thrust the hero-warrior tale about Lynch into the public domain.

The Post did so April 3, 2003, in a sensational front-page article that appeared beneath the headline:

“‘She was fighting to the death.'”

The Post’s report said that Lynch, a supply clerk in the 507th Maintenance Unit, “continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting” at Nasiriyah.

The newspaper also said Lynch was “stabbed when Iraqi forces closed in on her position.”

The Post cited as sources “U.S. officials” whom it otherwise has never identified. As it should, to help dismantle the false narrative.

The Post’s sensational report about Lynch was picked up by news outlets around the country and the world.

For example, a columnist for the Hartford Courant newspaper in Connecticut suggested that Lynch was destined to join the likes of Audie Murphy and Alvin York in the gallery of improbable American war heroes. Lynch, the columnist noted, “does share qualities and background with her illustrious predecessors. Like them, she is from rural America, daughter of a truck driver, raised in a West Virginia tinroofed house surrounded by fields and woods.”

But the hero-warrior story about Lynch was thoroughly wrong.

Lynch never fired a shot at Nasiriyah. Her rifle jammed during the ambush. She suffered shattering injuries when a rocket-propelled grenade struck her Humvee, causing the vehicle to crash.

But she was neither shot nor stabbed.

Lynch was taken prisoner and treated at an Iraqi hospital where she lingered near death until rescued April 1, 2003, by a U.S. special operations team.

Meanwhile, the real hero of Nasiriyah, an Army cook-sergeant named Donald Walters, has received nothing that was remotely comparable to the attention given the false story about Lynch and her purported derring-do.

Walters is believed to have fought to his last bullet at Nasiriyah before being take prisoner by Iraqi irregulars. Soon afterward, he was executed.

It’s quite probable that Walters’ heroism was misattributed to Lynch.

And how do we know the Pentagon was not the source for the Washington Post’s bogus Lynch story?

We know from Vernon Loeb, who shared a byline with Susan Schmidt on the “‘Fighting to the Death'” article.

Loeb, now the Post’s top editor for local news, said in December 2003 on NPR’s  Fresh Air show program that he “could never get anybody from the Pentagon to talk about” the Lynch case.

“They wouldn’t say anything about Jessica Lynch,” he said.

“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.”

Loeb also said:

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

He described them as “some really good intelligence sources” in Washington, D.C. , and added:

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

Loeb on another occasion was quoted by the New York Times as saying:

“Far from promoting stories about Lynch, the military didn’t like the story.”

Despite Loeb’s insistent exculpatory remarks, the false narrative that the Pentagon made up the story about Lynch lives on, in large measure because it corresponds so well to the view that the war in Iraq was a thoroughly botched and dodgy affair.

WJC

Many thanks to Little Miss Attila
for linking to this post

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , , ,

Glib and sanctimonious: Woodward likens Trump to Joe McCarthy

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on April 29, 2011 at 8:55 am

McCarthy in 1954

Bob Woodward, he of Watergate fame, says Donald Trump’s persistent questioning about President Barack Obama’s place of birth is akin to the tactics of the odious Joe McCarthy, the Republican senator infamous for his communists-in-government witch-hunt during the early 1950s.

The probing by Trump, the billionaire developer and prospective presidential candidate, prompted Obama this week to release the long form of his birth certificate, which clearly showed he was born in Hawaii in 1961.

“Trump, I think, was or may be still aspiring to be the new Joe McCarthy,” Woodward said yesterday on the MSNBC talk show, Morning Joe.

But why should anyone care what Woodward thinks about Trump and McCarthy? Woodward’s no expert on 1950s America.

Besides, his claim about McCarthy was little more than glib and sanctimonious hyperbole: Trump’s aggressive badgering of Obama may have been hardball politics. It was nothing akin to McCarthy’s wild accusations about communist infiltration of government, nothing like the senator’s bullying of witnesses under oath in closed session.

Woodward’s a fine one to talk, anyway: It’s not as if his reporting on Watergate for the Washington Post — the reporting that won him lasting acclaim — was free of dubious technique. Far from it.

Woodward and his Post colleague, Carl Bernstein, acknowledged in their book, All the President’s Men, to having committed ethical lapses during their Watergate reporting in the early 1970s.

Notably, they recounted failed attempts to encourage federal grand jurors to violate oaths of secrecy and discuss Watergate testimony. Woodward and Bernstein conceded their efforts were “a seedy venture” that nonetheless had the approval of top editors at the Post, including the then-executive editor, Ben Bradlee.

According to All the President’s Men, Woodward “wondered whether there was ever justification for a reporter to entice someone across the line of legality while standing safely on the right side himself.” Such qualms notwithstanding, they went ahead with what they described in the book as a “clumsy charade with about half a dozen members of the grand jury.”

Their efforts to entice grand jurors to violate their oaths of secrecy were soon reported to federal prosecutors who in turn informed John Sirica, chief judge of U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia.

“John Sirica is some kind of pissed at you,” the Post’s lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, told the reporters, according to the book. “We had to do a lot of convincing to keep your asses out of jail.”

Bernstein also acknowledged in All the President’s Men that he sought and obtained information from otherwise private telephone records.

McCarthy-esque their lapses certainly weren’t. But weren’t trivial, either. Adrian Havill, author of Deep Truth, an unauthorized biography of Woodward and Bernstein, wrote that “part of the methodology Bob and Carl used … was unethical or bordered on criminality.”

Their missteps represented serious misjudgments, which are rarely recalled these days, when the hero-worship of Woodward and Bernstein seems as intense as ever.

WJC

Many thanks to Little Miss Attila
for linking to this post

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

‘Follow the money’: You won’t find that line in the book

In Anniversaries, Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on April 27, 2011 at 4:00 am

The most famous line about Watergate reporting — “follow the money” — appears nowhere in the most famous book about Watergate reporting, All the President’s Men.

Not in this book

It’s often thought that it does. The Post and Courier newspaper in Charleston, S.C., said so, for example, in an editorial posted online yesterday.

The editorial referred to the stealthy Watergate source of Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and declared:

“‘Deep Throat,’ finally identified in 2005 as former FBI associate director Mark Felt, gave Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward the inside dirt on the Nixon administration’s attempt to cover up its dirty tricks.

“He also gave them, as chronicled in their book ‘All the President’s Men,’ this tip: ‘Follow the money.'”

Felt was Woodward’s source; he never met Bernstein until late in Felt’s life.

And Felt never offered Woodward the advice of “follow the money.”

That line doesn’t appear in All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein’s book about their reporting on Watergate. Nor does it appear in any Watergate-related article or editorial published in the Washington Post before 1981.

The passage was, though, written into the screenplay of All the President’s Men, the 1976 cinematic version of Woodward and Bernstein’s book. The movie came out 35 years ago this month, and has aged quite well.

The acting was notably strong and included a memorable performance by Hal Holbrook, who played a shadowy, tormented “Deep Throat.”

Holbrook delivered his lines about “follow the money” with such certainty and quiet insistence that it sounded as if it really were guidance vital to rolling up Watergate.

But in the real-life investigation of Watergate, “follow the money” wouldn’t have taken investigators to the point of determining Nixon’s guilty role in the crimes of Watergate.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, my media-mythbusting book that came out last year, some 20 men associated with Nixon’s administration or his 1972 reelection campaign went to jail for crimes linked to Watergate.

Rolling up a scandal of such sweep, I write 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,” I add, “Nixon likely would have served out his [second] 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 and authorizing payments of thousands of dollars in hush money.”

What cost Nixon the presidency wasn’t of the improper use of campaign monies but his efforts to obstruct justice and deter the FBI’s investigation of the scandal.

Still, it’s curious why “follow the money” crossed so seamlessly from the silver screen to the vernacular.

One reason no doubt are proximate release dates of the book and movie of All the President’s Men, allowing the two versions to become confounded.

The book came out in June 1974, just as Watergate was nearing its endgame with Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. The movie was released in April 1976, as the wounds of Watergate were only beginning to heal.

Another reason for the persistent appeal of “follow the money” lies in its pithiness. Like many media-driven myths — those dubious or apocryphal tales about the news media and their power — “follow the money” is neat, tidy, succinct. It’s easy to remember, and it seems almost too good not to be true.

But probably the most compelling explanation for its tenacity lies in the power of the cinema to propel media myths and to offer plausible if greatly simplified versions of history.

Richard Bernstein addressed this tendency quite well in a memorable essay published in 1989 in the New York Times.

He wrote that “movies-as-history” tend “to construct Technicolored and sound-tracked edifices of entertainment on the slender foundations of what appear to be actual events, or, at the very least, to mingle fact with fancy, history with imagination, in such a way that the average viewer has no way of sorting out one from the other.”

Quite so.

I note in Getting It Wrong that the cinematic version of All the President’s Men helped ensure that Woodward, Bernstein, and the Post would be regarded as vital and central to the unraveling of Watergate.

The mediacentric version of Watergate — or what I call the heroic-journalist interpretation — allows audiences to sidestep the scandal’s off-putting complexity and engage in a narrative that is entertaining and reassuring.

WJC

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fact-checking ‘Mother Jones’: A rare two-fer

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, New York Times, Spanish-American War on April 26, 2011 at 7:07 am

The most prominent media-driven myths — those dubious or apocryphal stories about the news media that masquerade as factual — include William Randolph Hearst’s vow to “furnish the war” and the so-called “Cronkite Moment” of 1968.

Mother Jones magazine, in the cover story of its May/June number, cites both tales as if they were genuine, in a rare, myth-indulging two-fer.

In an article written by Rick Perlstein and titled “Inside the GOP’s fact-free nation,” Mother Jones says of Hearst (who was no Republican):

“In a fearsome rivalry with Joseph Pulitzer, he chose as his vehicle the sort of manly imperialism to which the Washington elites of the day were certainly sympathetic — although far too cautiously for Hearst’s taste. ‘You furnish the pictures,’ he supposedly telegraphed a reporter, ‘and I’ll furnish the war.’ The tail wagged the dog.”

“You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” Couching it with “supposedly” allows no free pass for myth-telling.

It’s quotation most often attributed to Hearst. And as I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, it’s a durable media-driven myth that has survived “concerted attempts to discredit and dismantle it.”

It is, I add, “succinct, savory, and easily remembered. It is almost too good not to be true.”

The purported recipient of Hearst’s telegram was not “a reporter,” as Perlstein writes, but Frederic Remington, the famous artist of the American West.

Remington, Davis in Cuba

Hearst had assigned Remington and the correspondent Richard Harding Davis to Cuba to cover the insurrection against Spanish colonial rule. They arrived in Havana in early January 1897, and Remington six days later.

He parted ways with Davis in Matanzas, Cuba, and, before leaving Havana for New York, supposedly cabled Hearst, saying:

“Everything is quiet. There will be no war. I wish to return.”

Hearst, in reply, cabled his famous vow, telling Remington:

“Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”

Remington didn’t stay. He promptly returned to New York, where his sketches were given prominent display in Hearst’s New York Journal, appearing beneath such headlines as:

“Cuban War Sketches Gathered in the Field by Frederic Remington; The Gifted Artist, Visiting Cuba Especially for the Journal.”

That’s hardly an accolade Hearst would have extended to someone who had so brazenly disregarded instructions to remain on the scene.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, “the anecdote lives on despite a nearly complete absence of supporting documentation. It lives on even though telegrams supposedly exchanged by Remington and Hearst have never turned up.”

What’s more, I note in Getting It Wrong, the Remington-Hearst anecdote “lives on despite an irreconcilable internal inconsistency: It would have been absurd for Hearst to vow to ‘furnish the war’ because war — specifically, the Cuban rebellion against Spain’s colonial rule — was the very reason Hearst sent Remington to Cuba in the first place.”

Anyone who read U.S. newspapers in early 1897 “would have been well aware,” I write, “that Cuba was a theater of a nasty war,” which gave rise in April 1898 to the Spanish-American War.

The tale about the Remington-Hearst exchange is surely apocryphal.

So, too, is the presumed effect of the “Cronkite Moment” which, like the story about Hearst’s famous vow, is “succinct, savory, and easily remembered.”  It reputedly demonstrates the potency of broadcast journalism.

The “Cronkite Moment” was, I point out in Getting It Wrong, purportedly “an occasion when the power of television news was unequivocally confirmed,” a rare, pivotal moment when a truth-telling broadcast demonstrated the folly of a faraway war.

Perlstein writes in Mother Jones:

“Walter Cronkite traveled to Saigon after the Tet Offensive in 1968, saw things with his own eyes, and told the truth: The Vietnam War was stuck in a disastrous stalemate, no matter what the government said. That was a watershed.”

Well, no, it wasn’t.

Cronkite did indeed travel to Vietnam in February 1968 and upon his return to the United States aired an hour-long special report about the war, in which he concluded that the American military was “mired in stalemate” and suggested that negotiations offered the best way out.

But “mired in stalemate,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “was neither notable nor extraordinary” by February 27, 1968, when Cronkite’s report aired. As Mark Kurlansky wrote in his study of the year 1968, Cronkite’s assessment was “hardly a radical position” for the time.

Indeed, months before the program, the New York Times had been using “stalemate” to describe the war in Vietnam.

On July 4, 1967, for example, the Times said this about the war effort:

“Many officers believe that despite the commitment of 466,000 United States troops now in South Vietnam … the military situation there has developed into a virtual stalemate.”

And in a front-page analysis published August 7, 1967, the Times declared “the war is not going well.” Victory “is not close at hand.”

The Times published the analysis beneath the headline:

Vietnam: The Signs of Stalemate.

And in an editorial published October 29, 1967, the Times offered this assessment:

“Instead of denying a stalemate in Vietnam, Washington should be boasting that it has imposed a stalemate, for that is the prerequisite – on both sides – to a negotiated settlement. That settlement, if it is to be achieved, will have to be pursued with the same ingenuity and determination that have been applied to fighting the war.”

Cronkite’s “mired in stalemate” represented no watershed, no assessment of exceptional and stunning clarity. Cronkite said as much in his memoir, which was published in 1997. He wrote that his special report represented for President Lyndon B. Johnson “just one more straw in the increasing burden of Vietnam.”

In fact, public opinion had begun shifting away from supporting the war months before the “Cronkite Moment.”

It’s often said that Johnson watched Cronkite’s program and, upon hearing the “mired in stalemate” interpretation, snapped off the television set and said something to the effect of:

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

LBJ: Not watching TV

But as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, Johnson did not see the Cronkite report went it aired. The president at that time wasn’t in front of a television set. And he certainly wasn’t lamenting the loss of Cronkite’s support. Indeed, it is hard to fathom how he could have been much moved by a show he did not see.

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

“Today,” the president said, “you are 51, John. That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for — a simple majority.”

WJC

Many thanks to Little Miss Attila
for linking to this post

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Woodward, ‘tombeur de Nixon’

In Anniversaries, Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on April 25, 2011 at 7:18 am

That headline — which appeared with an item posted yesterday at Les In Rocks, a slick, Paris-based arts and music blog — translates to:

“Woodward, the guy who brought down Nixon.”

Which is hyperbole.

Bob Woodward and the Washington Post did not bring down Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal of 1972-74.

But as the headline and accompanying interview with Woodward suggest, Wooward-hero worship can be surprisingly intense and deep-seated abroad.

The article’s opening paragraph declared:

“Not many people can boast of having been played in the movies by Robert Redford. In fact, there’s only one. His name is Bob Woodward. He’s a journalist, and with his colleague Carl Bernstein, in life as in the film All the President’s Men, brought down Richard Nixon in 1974 in the Watergate affair.”

(Here’s the original French version: “Peu d’hommes peuvent se vanter d’avoir été incarnés au cinéma par Robert Redford. En fait, il n’y en a qu’un. Il s’appelle Bob Woodward. Il est journaliste et, avec son collègue Carl Bernstein, dans la vie comme dans le film Les Hommes du Président, il fit tomber Richard Nixon en 1974 avec l’affaire du Watergate.”)

Redford, of course, played Woodward in the motion picture, All the President’s Men, which was released 35 years ago this month.

It is easily the most-viewed film about the scandal and, as I point out in Getting It Wrong, my media-mythbusting book that came out last year, All the President’s Men effectively sealed the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate.

The heroic-journalist interpretation has it that the scandal’s disclosure pivoted on Woodward and Bernstein’s dogged reporting for the Post, that they exposed the crimes of Watergate and forced Nixon’s resignation.

That’s an interpretation not even the Post — and not even Woodward — buy into.

As Woodward declared in an interview in 2004 with American Journalism Review:

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

Less indelicately, the Post’s then-ombudsman, Michael Getler, 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.”

But the movie — which has aged impressively well — offers another, simpler, less-accurate interpretation.

As I write in Getting It Wrong:

“All the President’s Men placed Woodward and Bernstein at the center of Watergate’s unraveling while denigrating the efforts of investigative agencies such as the FBI. The effect was to solidify and elevate the heroic-journalist myth, giving it dramatic power, and sustaining it in the collective memory.”

The film closes with the Woodward and Bernstein characters (played by Redford and Dustin Hoffman, respectively) at their respective desks in the Post’s brilliantly lighted newsroom, pounding away at their typewriters.

The newsroom is otherwise empty. Woodward and Bernstein remain oblivious to their colleagues as they slowly drift in. It’s Inauguration Day 1973 and the Post editors and reporters are shown gathering at television sets in the newsroom to watch as Nixon is sworn in to a second term. Woodward and Bernstein, however, remain at their desks, focused on their work.

The television sets show Nixon smiling as he completes the oath of office. The first volleys of a twenty-one gun salute begin to boom. Woodward and Bernstein continue their frantic typing and the cannonade resounds ever louder. The newsroom scene dissolves to a close-up of an overactive teletype machine, noisily battering out summaries about indictments, trials, and convictions of Nixon’s men.

The clattering machine spells out “Nixon resigns, Ford sworn in,” and stops abruptly. The movie’s over.

It’s an imaginative and effective ending which, as I write in Getting It Wrong, “pulls together the many strands of Watergate. But more than that, it offers an unmistakable assertion of the power and centrality of the press in Nixon’s fall.”

Indeed, it is perhaps the most powerful and vivid assertion of Watergate’s heroic-journalist myth. Who else but Woodward and Bernstein?

WJC

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

That’s rich: Woodward bemoans celebrity journalism

In Anniversaries, Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on April 24, 2011 at 11:33 am

The country’s foremost celebrity journalist, Bob Woodward of the Washington Post and Watergate fame, has deplored what he called the “curse” of celebrity journalism, which he reportedly said has infected the news media.

Woodward, celebrity journalist

Woodward was speaking the other night at a panel in Austin, Texas, that was convened to mark the 35th anniversary of All the President’s Men, the motion picture about the Watergate reporting of Woodward and his Post colleague, Carl Bernstein.

According to a report posted online by ABC News, Bernstein, who also was on the panel, complained that the culture of journalism has shifted dramatically since the Watergate era of the early 1970s. Woodward, according to the ABC post, characterized this shift the “curse” of celebrity journalism — the “Paris Hilton factor and Kardashian equation.”

Even if he was referring to excessive media attention to the likes of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, it’s still pretty rich for Woodward to bemoan celebrity journalism — given that All the President’s Men established the cult of the contemporary celebrity journalist.

By “celebrity journalist,” I mean the journalist who has attained outsize prominence or who is regarded as more important than the people and the events he or she covers.

Sydney Schanberg, writing in the Village Voice in 2005, pointed out that the Watergate era of the early 1970s “can be fairly marked as the starting point of the age of journalists as celebrities. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein weren’t celebrities when they cracked the story for The Washington Post, but they soon would be, and a wave of emulators quickly began applying to journalism schools.”

Schanberg was incorrect about the Watergate effect on journalism schools: The surge in enrollments was well underway before Watergate, before Woodward and Bernstein became household names.

But he was quite correct about Watergate’s having represented a demarcation of modern celebrity journalism. (Alicia Shepard referred to this phenomenon in 1997, writing in American Journalism Review in 1997: “The Watergate affair changed journalism in many ways, not the least of which was by launching the era of the journalist as celebrity.” She also claimed in the article that Woodward and Bernstein “brought down a president.” Not so.)

More than any other single factor, the movie All the President’s Men propelled the media myth of the heroic journalist — the beguiling notion that Woodward and Bernstein’s investigative reporting of the Watergate scandal exposed the corruption of Richard Nixon and forced his resignation in disgrace in 1974.

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, my media-mythbusting book that came out last year, All the President’s Men placed the characters of Woodward and Bernstein squarely if inappropriately “at the center of Watergate’s unraveling while denigrating the efforts of investigative agencies such as the FBI.

“The effect,” I write, “was to solidify and elevate the heroic-journalist myth, giving it dramatic power, and sustaining it in the collective memory.”

The heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate 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,” I note in Getting It Wrong, adding:

“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 further note in Getting It Wrong that the notion Woodward and Bernstein “exposed Nixon’s corruption is a favored theme in textbooks of journalism and mass communication.” And that offers a wholly inaccurate misleading reading of the history of Watergate.

Woodward and Bernstein didn’t bring down Nixon’s corrupt presidency. That was the effect of the collective if not always the coordinated efforts of the Justice Department, the FBI, special Watergate prosecutors, bipartisan panels of both houses of Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Against that tableau, the contributions of Woodward and Bernstein recede in significance.

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Something exaggerated in hero-worship of Woodward

In Anniversaries, Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on April 21, 2011 at 9:55 am

There’s something exaggerated, and a bit cloying, about the recent spasm of adulation of Bob Woodward, he of the Washington Post and Watergate fame.

Movie that solidified the myth

Early this week, Woodward and former Post executive editor Ben Bradlee received a standing ovation from the nearly 1,000 people at a program at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California.

The library recently opened a gallery about the Watergate, the  scandal that cost Nixon the presidency in 1974.

The new exhibit replaced a display that offered a dubious and seriously distorted interpretation of Watergate, which declared among other things that Woodward and his reporting colleague, Carl Bernstein, “used anonymous sources exclusively to try and convict the President in the pages of the Post….” Nixon wasn’t a specific target of their award-winning Watergate reporting.

The replacement exhibit was undertaken after the National Archives took over the library from a private foundation. Woodward and Bradlee went to the library for what was billed as a conversation about Watergate.

Politico reported that Woodward and Bradlee attracted an audience that “listened with rapt attention and regular laughter as the two men traded wisecracks and reminisced about their roles in bringing down the 37thpresident.”

Left unaddressed by Politico was just what were those “roles in bringing down” Nixon. The implication was that their work for the Post was central in forcing the resignation of a corrupt president.

But not even Woodward and Bradlee go so far as to embrace that misleading interpretation of Watergate.

Bradlee asserted in 1997, at the 25th anniversary of Watergate’s signal crime, the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic national committee:

“[I]t must be remembered that Nixon got Nixon. The Post didn’t get Nixon.”

And in 2004, Woodward told American Journalism Review:

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

The Politico piece noted that Bradlee “marveled at how many people still care about a decades-old conflict — one that turned Woodward, his reporting partner Carl Bernstein and Bradlee into the most famous journalists of their era.”

Why people still care is not especially difficult to fathom. It’s largely because Woodward, Bernstein, and to a lesser extent, Bradlee, are living reminders of the unmasking of America’s greatest political scandal — one that sent to jail nearly 20 men associated with Nixon’s presidency or his 1972 reelection campaign.

As I point out in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong:

“The complexity of the Watergate scandal— the lies, deceit, and criminality that characterized the Nixon White House; the multiple lines of investigation that slowly unwound the scandal, and the drama of what was an exceptional constitutional crisis — are not routinely recalled these days.

“The epic scandal [of 1972-74] has grown so distant that few Americans can accurately describe what took place.”

I further write in Getting It Wrong:

“What does stand out amid the scandal’s many tangles is the heroic-journalist version of Watergate — the endlessly appealing notion that the dogged reporting of two young, hungry, and tireless Washington Post journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, brought down Nixon and his corrupt presidency.

“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.”

The heroic-journalist myth — and the celebrity cult of Watergate — were solidified by the cinematic version of All the President‘s Men, Woodward and Bernstein’s book about their Watergate reporting.

The movie came out 35 years ago this month — and is to be a topic of discussion tonight when  Woodward, Bernstein, and movie star Robert Redford gather at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library & Museum in Austin, Texas.

Redford played the Woodward character in All the President’s Men.

The event no doubt will be the occasion for more standing ovations, more cloying hero-worship.

WJC

Recent and related: