W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for the ‘Debunking’ Category

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Turning a spotlight again on Jessica Lynch

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post on May 6, 2010 at 3:54 pm

It’s striking how a measure of fame still attaches to Jessica Lynch, the Army private thrust into the international spotlight seven years ago by an erroneous report in the Washington Post about her heroism in Iraq.

The Post's erroneous story

As I write in Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book about media-driven myths, the “international spotlight … has never fully receded” from Lynch, a waif-like 19-year-old whom the Post misidentified as having fought fiercely after supposedly being shot and stabbed.

As it turned out, Lynch never fired a shot in anger in Iraq. She suffered neither gunshot nor stab wounds. She was severely injured, in the crash of a fleeing Humvee.

Lynch was taken captive by Iraqis and placed in a hospital, from where she was rescued by a U.S. special operation team.

The Post‘s botched report about her derring-do on the battlefield appears to have been a case of mistaken identity: It wasn’t Lynch who had fought heroically; it was most likely Sergeant Donald Walters, who was in Lynch’s unit and who was captured by Iraqi irregulars, and executed.

Walters never received anything near to the attention that was bestowed upon Lynch.

Further evidence of that came yesterday, with reports of a new show on cable’s Bio Channel that will feature William Shatner of Star Trek fame catching up with people who had won sudden fame and attention. (Bio formerly was the Biography Channel.)

Lynch was mentioned by name in writeups about the program, to be called Shatner’s Aftermath and to premiere in the fall. TV Guide said today that six episodes of Shatner’s Aftermath have been ordered.

The Post’s erroneous article about Lynch was published in early April 2003—and was picked up by news organizations around the world.

Lynch’s photograph appeared on the cover of Time and Newsweek magazines.

She insisted she was no hero. But no matter.

She accepted a book deal estimated at $1 million, half of which reportedly went to her biographer, Rick Bragg, a former New York Times correspondent. She went on morning and evening  television shows to promote the book, I Am a Soldier, Too, which Bragg completed in time for publication on November 11, 2003—Veterans Day.

Lynch inspired a television movie, Saving Jessica Lynch. She was offered tuition-free education at West Virginia University. And she was named “West Virginian of the year” in 2003.

Although the frenzy long ago subsided, Lynch still pops up in the news from time to time. She still attracts a spotlight.

For example, NBC’s Today show in December 2009 featured the Lynch as one of the “buzziest” people in the news during the first decade of the 21st century.

In 2007, Lynch testified at a much-publicized hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. And she later wrote a first-person article for Glamour magazine.

She said in the Glamour article: “I don’t know why the military and the media tried to make me a legend.”

As I point out in Getting It Wrong, the story of Lynch’s heroics was a media-driven myth. The U.S. military was loath to promote the case. In fact, one of the Post reporters who worked on the erroneous article told NPR’s Fresh Air program in late 2003:

“I could never get anybody from the Pentagon to talk about those reports [of Lynch’s supposed heroism] at all. I got indications that they had, in fact, received those intelligence reports, but the Pentagon was completely unwilling to comment on those reports at all. They wouldn’t say anything about Jessica Lynch.”

WJC

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NPR revisits ‘crack baby’ panic, ignores media role

In Debunking, Media myths, Media myths and radio, Washington Post on May 4, 2010 at 1:21 pm

NPR’s “Tell Me More” program yesterday became the latest national news outlet to revisit the “crack baby” scare of the late 1980s and 1990s, and pronounce it all had been overblown.

As in the recent Washington Post retrospective about “crack babies,” NPR failed to confront the news media’s central role in promoting and spreading what one leading researcher has called a “fantasy panic.”

Washington Post, 1989

That turn of phrase inspired the title of the chapter about “crack babies” in Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book that confronts and debunks 10 media-driven myths.

Getting It Wrong is being published this summer by University of California Press.

The crack-baby myth centers around the notion that women who took cocaine during pregnancy would give birth to children so mentally and physically deficient that they would constitute a helpless, dependent “bio-underclass,” as syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer put it in 1989.

In Getting It Wrong,  I call attention “to the risks of anecdote-driven reporting, which characterized news coverage of the crack baby phenomenon.

“Disturbing images and heart-wrenching descriptions of helpless newborns supposedly damaged by their mothers’ toxic indulgence were,” I write, “frequent and irresistible elements of the coverage. Anecdotes were fuel for a powerful but misleading storyline.”

Yesterday’s “Tell Me More” segment on “crack babies” overlooked all that, referring vaguely to “all manner of pronouncements about how children who were exposed to crack in utero were destined to a life of physical and mental disability.”

The program’s description at the “Tell Me More” online site ignored the news coverage, saying instead that “the nation’s health specialists panicked over the growing number of so-called ‘crack babies’—children exposed to crack cocaine in utero. These children were said to be doomed to lives of physical and mental disability.”

The panic, though, was largely media-driven, as I discuss in Getting It Wrong.

The “Tell Me More” segment–which noted that “children who [had been] exposed to crack cocaine before birth are proving these worst case scenarios were all wrong”–did include an intriguing, media-related passage.

That came late in the show, when Dr. Carl Bell, a clinical professor of psychiatry and public health at the University of Illinois-Chicago, spoke of “media epidemiology.”

He said:

“I think it’s important for society to move away from what I refer to as media epidemiology and media hypotheses and making all these generalizations about things because frequently they’re flat out wrong, as it shows.”

I asked Bell by email to elaborate on “media epidemiology.”

He replied, stating:

“‘Media epidemiology’ is a term I began using about two years ago to describe how the public gets its understanding about epidemiology of various public health issues from the media, which of course is the absolutely wrong place to get such information as the media does not report on the common but on the uncommon which is defined as news.

“For example, ten years ago the homicide rates in Chicago were 1,000 but because of a lot of work done in public health in the city the homicide rates are down to 500, but the media keeps referring to the ‘homicide epidemic’ in Chicago; thereby misleading the public with their ‘media epidemiology.'”

It, too, is’ an interesting turn-of-phrase–and may help explain why the news media sometimes get it wrong in reporting on issues of science and public health.

WJC

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‘Bra-burning feminists’: Who were they?

In Bra-burning, Debunking, Media myths on May 3, 2010 at 1:58 pm

A commentary today at the Huffington Post blog salutes trailblazing, rule-breaking American women–including the elusive “bra-burners” of the 1960s.

The commentary reads in part:

“From Revolutionary War icon Betsy Ross to World War II’s Rosie the Riveter, from sexually liberated 1920s femme fatale Louise Brooks to bra-burning feminists in the 1960s, from anti-slavery orator Sojourner Truth to controversial civil rights activist Angela Davis, American history is filled with female archetypes who pushed against the barriers of repression and social convention.”

True enough: History indeed counts many “female archetypes who pushed against the barriers of repression and social convention.”

But as for those “bra-burning feminists in the 1960s”–just who were they?

The commentary doesn’t say, leaving an implication that bra-burning was widespread, and even commonplace, during the 1960s.

Which just isn’t so.

I devote a chapter to bra-burning in Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book about media-driven myths.

In that chapter, I trace the diffusion of the “bra-burning” epithet to the aftermath of the Miss America pageant at Atlantic City, N.J., on September 7, 1968.

That afternoon, about 100 women gathered on the Atlantic City boardwalk to protest the pageant as degrading to women.

A highlight of the afternoon came when demonstrators tossed into a barrel what they called “instruments of torture,” including brassieres, girdles, high-heeled shoes, and such magazines as Playboy and Cosmopolitan. The protesters dubbed the barrel the Freedom Trash Can.

The protest organizers, who included the feminist and former child actor Robin Morgan, have long insisted that the bras and other contents of the Freedom Trash Can were not set afire during the protest.

But the notion that bras had been set ablaze in flamboyant protest became a misleading legacy of that long-ago afternoon–an image promoted and spread by columnists Harriett Van Horne and Art Buchwald.

Neither of them was at the protest.

Two days afterward, Van Horne wrote in her column that there had been a bonfire in a Freedom Trash Can.

“With screams of delight,” she said of the protesters, “they consigned to the flames such shackling, demeaning items as girdles, bras, high-heeled slippers, hair curlers and false eyelashes.”

As I write in Getting It Wrong, this highly imaginative characterization was taken up a few days later by Art Buchwald in his nationally syndicated column.

Buchwald, who by then was American journalism’s leading humor columnist, wrote with tongue in cheek 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.’”

He also wrote:

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

And he closed the column by writing:

“If the women in Atlantic City wanted to picket the Miss America beauty pageant because it is lily-white, that is one thing, and if they wanted to picket because it is a bore, that is also a legitimate excuse. But when they start asking young American women to burn their brassieres and throw away their false eyelashes, then we say dissent in this country has gone too far.”

And an embryonic media-driven myth had begun to emerge.

WJC

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On columnists and burning bras

In Bra-burning, Debunking, Media myths on May 1, 2010 at 9:16 am

Two dozen men and women bared torsos and marched in Farmington, Maine, yesterday, prompting a snarky commentary in the Bangor Daily News about social protests–and bra-burning.

“In the 1960s and 1970s there was that whole Vietnam War issue and the sexual revolution to boot. There were lots of things to protest and stand for,” the commentary declared, adding:

“During that time I believe there were more than a few college-age women who burned their bras. Some believe young women tossed their bras into burning trash cans as a protest of the Vietnam War, but others stand firm that the first ‘bra burning’ incident actually occurred in 1968 at a demonstration against the Miss America contest.”

Like many discussions about bra-burning–a topic addressed in Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book about media-driven myths–the commentary is more than a bit tangled and confused.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, the notion of bra-burning took hold in the days after the Miss America pageant at Atlantic City, N.J., on September 7, 1968.

“Early that afternoon,” I write, “about 100 women from New York City, New Jersey, Boston, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere arrived by bus at the Atlantic City boardwalk.

“They were, according to the New York Times, ‘mostly middle-aged careerists and housewives’ and they set up a picket line at Kennedy Plaza, across from the Convention Center. They were there, as one participant declared, ‘to protest the degrading image of women perpetuated by the Miss America pageant,’ which took place that night inside the Convention Center.”

A highlight of their protest came when the demonstrators tossed into a barrel what they called “instruments of torture,” including brassieres, girdles, high-heeled shoes, and magazines such as Playboy and Cosmopolitan. The protesters dubbed the barrel the Freedom Trash Can.

The protest organizers, who included the activist and former child actor Robin Morgan, have long insisted that bras and other contents of the Freedom Trash Can were not set afire during the protest.

But the notion that bra-burning was a dramatic element of the demonstration at Atlantic City was driven by syndicated columnists, including Harriett Van Horne.

Soon after the protest, Van Horne wrote that the protesters had 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 was not at the protest, however. Nor was Art Buchwald, then American journalism’s preeminent humorist, who played on the bra-burning trope in a column published in the Washington Post and other newspapers.

With tongue in cheek, Buchwald wrote 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.’”

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

As I note in Getting It Wrong, Buchwald’s “characterization of the protest at Atlantic City introduced the notion of flamboyant bra-burning to a national audience, conjuring as it did a powerful mental image of angry women setting fire to bras and twirling them, defiantly, for all … to see.”

But as for the claim in the Bangor Daily News commentary that “more than a few college-age women … burned their bras” in the 1960s and 1970s, well, the supporting evidence just isn’t there.

WJC

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Cronkite ‘dissed’ Johnson? Think again

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths on April 30, 2010 at 3:40 pm

When the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart weighed on the Apple-Gizmodo dust-up over the lost prototype of a next generation iPhone, it was akin to Walter Cronkite’s taking to the air to criticize the U.S. war effort in Vietnam in 1968.

Or so says an item posted yesterday at the  tech-news blog DVICE.

Stewart the other night called out Apple over the police search at the home of the Gizmodo editor who had blogged about the iPhone prototype, which an Apple employee reportedly had lost at a bar.

In a segment about the Gizmodo controversy, Stewart in mock lament asked of Apple: “Are you becoming the Man?”

He also said in skewering Apple: “I mean, if you want to break down someone’s door, why don’t you start with AT&T, for god’s sake? They make your amazing phone unusable as a phone.”

In reaching–overreaching–for significance, DVICE said of Stewart’s segment:

“Is that a paradigm we feel shifting? It reminds us of when President Lyndon Johnson got dissed by Walter Cronkite in a scathing report on the futility of the Vietnam War, with Johnson saying, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.'”

Interesting analogy.

Trouble is, there’s no documented evidence of Johnson ever having said anything of the sort.

The Cronkite-Johnson anecdote is one of 10 media-driven myths that I address, and debunk, in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong.

The anecdote–often called the “Cronkite moment“–centers around the special report on Vietnam that aired February 27, 1968, on CBS. At the end of the program, Cronkite declared the U.S. military effort in Vietnam was “mired in stalemate” and suggested a negotiated settlement would be the only way out.

Legend has it that Johnson watched the program at the White House and, upon hearing Cronkite’s editorial comment, snapped off the television and said to an aide or aides:

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

Or words to that effect. Versions vary.

But as I note in Getting It Wrong, Johnson wasn’t in Washington when the Vietnam special was shown. He was in Austin, Texas, at the 51st birthday party of Governor John Connally–and did not see the Cronkite program.

As such, I write:

Johnson in Austin, February 27, 1968

“Johnson did not have—could not have had—the abrupt yet resigned reaction that so often has been attributed to him.”

Moreover, I add, “Johnson’s supposedly downbeat, self-pitying reaction to Cronkite’s on-air assessment clashes sharply with the president’s aggressive characterization about the war. Hours before the Cronkite program, Johnson delivered a little-recalled but rousing speech on Vietnam, a speech cast in Churchillian terms. It seems inconceivable that Johnson’s views would have pivoted so swiftly and dramatically, upon hearing the opinion of a television news anchor, even one as esteemed as Cronkite.”

I further write in Getting It Wrong that even if the president had “later heard—or heard about—Cronkite’s assessment, it was no epiphany for Johnson. Not long after the program, Johnson gave a rousing, lectern-pounding speech in which he urged a ‘total national effort’ to win the war in Vietnam.”

So Johnson “got dissed” by Cronkite? One might say that, but Johnson didn’t care. Or even know about it. Not immediately.

And more important, Cronkite’s comments made no significant difference to Johnson and his Vietnam policy.

WJC

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Advance pub for ‘Getting It Wrong’

In 1897, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, War of the Worlds, Washington Post on April 28, 2010 at 3:47 pm

The online site of the School of Communication here at American University posts today a Q-and-A with me about Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book that debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths.

Topics addressed include the Remington-Hearst/furnish the war anecdote; the War of the Worlds/mass hysteria myth, and the “Cronkite moment“/”I’ve lost Middle America” meme.

And while the topic is not considered in Getting It Wrong, I also mention the “pharm parties” myth, in which young people are said to take pills of any kind from their parents’ medicine cabinets. They supposedly show up at a party and dump the purloined pills into a large, common bowl. Then they are purported to take turns scooping out and swallowing handfuls of the medications, not knowing what they’re taking, in the supposed pursuit of a drug-induced high.

Jack Shafer, media critic for slate.com, has done fine work in knocking down the “pharm party” meme.

Here are excerpts from the Q-and-A:

Q: “Myth busting” can upset people who have accepted, or even benefited from, the myth. Have you gotten any negative feedback?

A:  Not really. Not so far. I do know that some people wonder “who cares?” about some of the myths debunked in Getting It Wrong. The Hearst—”furnish the war” myth, after all, is more than 100 years old. But I emphasize in the book that media-driven myths are neither innocuous nor trivial. They can, and do, promote stereotypes. They can deflect attention or blame away from the makers of flawed policies. They can, and often do, offer an exaggerated sense of the power and influence of the news media. Plus, debunking myths is a pursuit that’s aligned with a fundamental objective of mainstream American journalism—that of getting it right.

Q: What’s next?

A: I’d like to think there’s a sequel to Getting It Wrong. The universe of media-driven myths isn’t confined to 10, after all. There are more to confront. Also, in fall 2010, I’ll be teaching a “wild card” course in the University’s General Education program titled “Media Myth and Power.” The course will consider several of the myths debunked in Getting It Wrong.

A tip of the chapeau to Michael Wargo of the School of Communication for putting together the Q-and-A, which follows the writeup about the book that appeared April 11 in the “Outlook” section of the Washington Post.

WJC

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Remembering ‘journalism hero’ Murrow, 45 years on

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth on April 27, 2010 at 9:46 am

The Poughkeepsie Journal notes the 45th anniversary today of the  death of legendary broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow.

Murrow died April 27, 1965, at his farm near Pawling, N.Y., about 20 miles from Poughkeepsie. Murrow, a chainsmoker, fell victim to lung cancer. He had just turned 57.

Chainsmoking Ed Murrow

Inevitably, the Poughkeepsie Journal tribute–which carried the headline, “Journalism hero Edward R. Murrow lives on”–recalled Murrow’s famous See It Now documentary program in March 1954. That was when he took on the red-baiting Republican senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy.

The newspaper’s article said Murrow’s program on McCarthy “is credited for exposing the senator’s tactics by using clips of his own words, and helped lead to the senator’s downfall.”

The program’s mythical dimensions are addressed in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong, in which I note:

“See It Now that night was powerful television. More accurately, it was a hearty serving of advocacy journalism. … Murrow and his See It Now team assembled a series of film clips that was decidedly unflattering to McCarthy.”

I also write:

“McCarthy’s oddball appearance and mannerisms—his hulking, menacing presence, his nutty laugh, his five o’clock shadow, his careless grooming that allowed strands of thinning, greasy hair to creep down his forehead—were among the most revealing and most unforgettable moments of the program.”

But did the show expose McCarthy’s tactics?

Not at all.

McCarthy had burst upon the national scene four years earlier, claiming in a series of speeches that scores of communists, communist sympathizers, or persons of risk were embedded in the U.S. State Department.

His charges were almost immediately challenged by Drew Pearson, a nationally syndicated muckraking columnist based in Washington, D.C.

“The Senator from Wisconsin has been a healthy watchdog of some government activities, but the alleged communists which he claims are sheltered in the State Department just aren’t,” Pearson wrote in February 1950, more than four years before Murrow’s program on McCarthy.

So did the See It Now show “helped lead to the senator’s downfall,” as the Poughkeepsie Journal claims?

Not so much.

By the time Murrow took to the air to confront McCarthy, the senator’s favorability ratings had already hit the skids.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, “it wasn’t as if Americans in early 1954 were hoping for someone to step up and expose McCarthy, or waiting for a white knight like Murrow to tell them about the toxic threat the senator posed.”

Thanks to Pearson, and other journalists, they knew.

WJC

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Another movie list, another myth invoked

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on April 26, 2010 at 11:52 am

The cinema can be a powerful propellant of media-driven myths.

As I note in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong, cinematic treatments can and do “influence how historical events are collectively remembered and can harden media-driven myths against debunking.”

I invoke as an example the Watergate scandal, which culminated in 1974 with the resignation of President Richard Nixon. It is often said that the Watergate reporting of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein “brought down” Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

Woodward and Bernstein’s best-selling book about their Watergate reporting, All the President’s Men, was turned into a highly successful motion picture by the same title.

And as I write in Getting It Wrong, the cinematic version of All the President’s Men, which cast Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the roles of Woodward and Bernstein, “helped ensure that the journalists and their newspaper would be regarded as central to cracking the Watergate scandal.”

Testimony to that observation was offered yesterday in an item at the Huffington Post blog referring to All the President’s Men as “one of the top films about the presidency.”

The item said the film “documents how the power of the press and the determination of two young journalists brought down this occupant [Nixon], who only two years prior had won re-election by the widest margin in history.”

As I’ve noted several times at MediaMythAlert, the notion that Woodward, Bernstein, and the Washington Post “brought down” Nixon is a media-driven myth, a trope that knows few bounds.

It is, I write in Getting It Wrong, a misleading interpretation that “minimizes the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office.”

The “heroic-journalist myth of Watergate” took hold for a number of reasons, among them the sheer complexity of the scandal. Not only was Nixon turned from office but  19 men associated with his presidency or his 1972 reelection campaign went to jail.

The “heoric-journalist” memo has become, I write, “a proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity.”

The cinematic version of All the President’s Men accomplished that, too, by offering what I call “an unmistakable assertion of the power and centrality of the press in Nixon’s fall.”

The contribution of other agencies and entities in unraveling Watergate and prosecuting Nixon’s men is downplayed or ignored.

The Huffington Post item that invoked the heroic-journalist myth discussed 11 films that examine the American presidency, including two fine motion pictures, Primary Colors and the Manchurian Candidate.

Also on the movie list was Dick, an improbable spoof about Watergate and the Nixon White House that depicts Woodward and Bernstein as antagonistic incompetents who bungle their way to a Pulitzer Prize.

WJC

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‘Getting It Wrong’ at Kensington’s ‘Day of the Book’

In 1897, Debunking, Media myths, Year studies on April 25, 2010 at 8:19 am

I participated today in the “Day of the Book” festival in the antique row section of  Kensington, MD.

The event represented first book-event exposure for Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book that addresses, and debunks, 10 prominent media-driven myths.

Getting It Wrong will be published this summer by University of California Press. Chapter One may be read here.

Also on display at the “Day of the Book” was my year study, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, which was published in 2006. The book tells the story of a decisive year in American journalism.

Book signing in Kensington (AMR photo)

Principal organizer of the “Day of the Book” was Kensington Row Bookshop and at least 80 authors and poets had registered for the event.

The threat of rain kept some of them away. But nasty weather was a no-show and a fine time was had.

I enjoyed meeting several other local authors, including Bernadette LeDoux-Brodsky,  a Parisienne who used to teach French at Georgetown University; Bob Gregg, a retired dean and professor at American University, and Ben Farmer, a young author who graduated a few years ago from Kenyon College.

Bernadette said the ambiance in Kensington evoked for her the cafe scene of streets in Paris–sans les apéritifs, of course. She sold copies of her Ici et Ailleurs: Parisienne dans le Maryland. Bob sold several of his novels, among them The Scarecrow in the Vineyard. And the gregarious Ben Farmer seemed to make a lot of friends as well several sales of his new novel, Evangeline.

For me, the event was mostly a chance to gauge interest in Getting It Wrong. And more men than women stopped by to chat about the book and/or take a flyer.

There also was some mild interest in The Year That Defined American Journalism (see book-signing photo, above).

The dog in the picture? That’s Lil, our bichon frise. She was at the book fair, too, and proved to be quite the magnet.

WJC

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Halberstam the ‘unimpeachable’? Try myth-promoter

In Bay of Pigs, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, New York Times, Spanish-American War on April 24, 2010 at 9:02 am

A book review in the New York Times the other day referred to David Halberstam, the legendary author and journalist, as an “unimpeachable” source.

Halberstam, who died in an automobile accident three years ago, certainly built an outsize reputation. But unimpeachable?

I’d say no way.

Halberstam, in his hefty and still-popular 1979 study of the news media, The Powers That Be, encouraged the rise of two prominent media-driven myths and endorsed a third.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book about media-driven myths, Halberstam’s Powers That Be was an important source, perhaps the original source, for the so-called “Cronkite Moment” of February 27, 1968.

That was when CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite asserted in a special report that the U.S. war effort in Vietnam was “mired in stalemate.”

In Halberstam’s telling, Cronkite’s report represented “the first time in American history a war had been declared over by an anchorman.”

Halberstam wrote that President Lyndon Johnson was in Washington and watched the Cronkite special that night. Upon hearing Cronkite’s dire assessment about Vietnam, the president said that if he had lost Cronkite, he had lost Mr. Average Citizen.

Interestingly, Halberstam did not place Johnson’s purported lament inside quotation marks. He paraphrased the remarks and said Johnson had directed  them to presidential press secretary George Christian.

But as I write in Getting It Wrong, Johnson was not in Washington that night. He did not see the Cronkite program when it aired. Thus, he could not have had the abrupt, dramatic, yet resigned reaction that Halberstam, and others, have attributed to him.

Johnson that night was in Austin, Texas, at the 51st birthday party of a political ally, Governor John Connally.

About the time Johnson supposedly made the comment about losing Cronkite, he was offering light-hearted banter about Connally’s age, saying:

“That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for—a simple majority. Throughout the years we have worked long and hard—and I might say late—trying to maintain it, too.”

The “Cronkite Moment,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “is a media-driven myth. It did not have the effects that Halberstam and many others have attributed to it.”

Halberstam’s Powers That Be also offered a graphic, if exaggerated, account that President John Kennedy supposedly called James Reston of the New York Times in April 1961 and urged him not to publish a report about the pending Bay of Pigs invasion.

Kennedy “argued strongly and passionately,” Halberstam wrote, that the Times by reporting the story would damage his policy. Halberstam also wrote that in his call to Reston, Kennedy said the Times risked having blood on its hands were the article published and the invasion failed.

Such a conversation never happened, according to Reston and others quoted in Harrison Salisbury’s insider’s account of the Times, Without Fear or Favor.

Indeed, there is no evidence that Kennedy called anyone at the Times in advance of the report–which was written by Tad Szulc and published April 7, 1961, on the Times front page (see right).

As I note in Getting It Wrong:

“The Kennedy Library in Boston says that the White House telephone logs reveal no calls were placed to Reston” or other Times executives on April 6, 1961, the day the story was prepared for publication.

“Moreover,” I note, “Kennedy had almost no chance to speak with those executives during the interval from when Szulc’s story arrived at the Times building in midtown Manhattan and when it was set in type. … During that time, Kennedy was otherwise preoccupied. He spent the last half of the afternoon of April 6, 1961, playing host to Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, on a lengthy cruise down the Potomac River to Mount Vernon.”

In addition, Halberstam’s Powers That Be invoked one of the most enduring media myths–the anecdote about William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain at the end of the 19th century.

That anecdote is revisited, and dismantled, in the first chapter of Getting It Wrong.

The Powers That Be was a popular success, reaching the second spot on the New York Times best-selling list in May 1979. But the book wasn’t without persuasive critics.

Among them was David Culbert, an historian at Louisiana State University who years ago raised questions about the “Cronkite Moment,” noting that Johnson was in Texas when the program aired.

In a devastating review published in the American Historical Review, Culbert called The Powers That Be overlong and declared:

“The absence of a developed thesis, lack of proper documentation, and numerous errors of fact for events before the 1960s suggest that historians will have to use this book with caution. There is much here that might be true and, if true, valuable, but there is also no certainty that sloppy research does not undermine the very parts that seem most interesting.”

WJC