W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for the ‘Furnish the war’ Category

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SRO for ‘Getting It Wrong’ talk at UMd

In Anniversaries, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Furnish the war, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Media myths and radio, War of the Worlds, Washington Post, Watergate myth on November 5, 2010 at 11:50 am

A terrific audience of journalism students and faculty turned out last night for my talk at the University of Maryland’s Merrill College of Journalism.

It was standing-room-only at the Knight Hall conference room, where I discussed several chapters in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths.

I walked through the heroic-journalist myth of the Watergate scandal that toppled Richard Nixon’s presidency; the mythical  “Cronkite Moment” of 1968 that reputedly shifted U.S. public opinion about the war in Vietnam, and The War of the Worlds radio dramatization of 1938 that supposedly panicked listeners across the United States.

During the Q-and-A period that followed, I touched on the famous vow to “furnish the war” attributed to William Randolph Hearst and on the erroneously reported battlefield heroics of Private Jessica Lynch early in the Iraq War.

An intriguing question from the audience was what message should students take away from a book that identifies as media-driven myths some of the best-known stories in American journalism. The implication was that mythbusting may undercut the regard would-be journalists have for the profession.

I replied by saying that I  don’t consider Getting It Wrong a media-bashing book: Such books are many on the market as it is.

Rather, I said, the mythbusting in Getting It Wrong is aligned with the fundamental objective of American journalism. And that is to get it right, to offer an account that is as accurate as possible.

And it does journalism little good to indulge in tales such as the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate or the mythical “Cronkite Moment” that offer misleading interpretations about the news media and their power.

Debunking media myths, as I write in Getting It Wrong, “can help to place media influence in more coherent context.”

Nor should we worry about students being disappointed that well-known and even cherished stories about American journalism have been exposed as mythical. It shouldn’t be disheartening to learn the news media aren’t necessarily the powerful forces they are often believed to be.

Students can handle it.

Not only that, but mythbusting can offer them useful lessons in the importance of applying skepticism and a critical eye to dominant narratives and received wisdom of American journalism.

Indeed, Professor John Kirch, host and organizer of my talk at Maryland, does just that in presenting these and other tales in his journalism classes. Doing so can become a revealing exercise in critical thinking.

I also was asked about candidate-myths for a prospective sequel to Getting It Wrong.

A strong candidate for such a book, I said, is the myth of viewer-listener disagreement in the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960.

The myth has it that people who watched the debate on television thought that Senator John F. Kennedy won; those who listened on radio thought Vice President Richard Nixon had the better of the exchanges.

The notion of listener-viewer-disagreement was long ago debunked by David L. Vancil and Sue D. Pendell, in an article in Central States Speech Journal. They noted that reports of viewer-listener disagreement typically were anecdotal and the few surveys that hinted at a viewer-listener disconnect were too small and unrepresentative from which to make confident judgments.

But the myth is a hardy one, I noted, and it resurfaced in late September, at the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy-Nixon encounter.

Among the 80 or so people in attendance last night was Jamie McIntyre, former Pentagon correspondent for CNN. Afterward, we compared notes about the misreported Lynch case, which the Washington Post propelled into the public domain with a botched, front-page story in early April 2003.

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IBD invokes Hearst myth of ‘furnish the war’

In 1897, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on October 21, 2010 at 5:19 pm

Remington, Davis in Cuba

In Getting It Wrong, my new mythbusting book, I point out that the most resilient media-driven myths often are those that are distilled “to a catchy, pithy phrase.”

A telling case in point is the line often attributed to William Randolph Hearst: “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” He supposedly was referring to war with Spain in the late 19th century.

Testimony to the tenacity of Hearst’s reputed comment–which I address and debunk in Getting It Wrong–appeared the other day in a commentary in Investor’s Business Daily. The commentary asserted:

“The media have a history of offering more heat than light on many issues. Recall publisher William Randolph Hearst’s telegram to a photographer on assignment to document the supposed conflict in Cuba in 1897: ‘You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.'”

Let’s unpack that error-fraught paragraph.

For starters, the story goes that Hearst purportedly sent the telegram to Frederic Remington, a prominent artist (not a photographer), who arrived in Cuba in January 1897 on assignment for Hearst’s New York Journal (see image, above).

Remington was sent there to illustrate the island-wide rebellion against Spanish colonial rule. The artist later recalled that at the time of his brief visit, the Cuban countryside “was a pall of smoke” from homes of Cubans that had been set afire.

Davis

Remington traveled to Cuba with Richard Harding Davis, a prominent writer and correspondent. Davis’ correspondence from that time stated flatly: “There is war here and no mistake.”

So a “supposed conflict” the rebellion was not. In fact, the Cuban rebellion gave rise in 1898 to the Spanish-American War.

As I also point out in Getting It Wrong, the “furnish the war” anecdote lives on despite a nearly complete absence of supporting documentation.

“It lives on,” I write, “even though telegrams supposedly exchanged by Remington and Hearst have never turned up.

“It lives on even though Hearst denied ever sending such a message.”

Moreover, I write, the myth “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.”

A further reason for doubting that Hearst sent such a message is that Spanish authorities closely controlled cable traffic into and out of Cuba. They surely would have intercepted–and would have called attention to–such an inflammatory message, had it been sent.

Despite those and other factors, the Remington-Hearst anecdote is a media myth that refuses to die. One reason for its tenacity, I point out in Getting It Wrong, is that the tale “has achieved unique status as an adaptable, hardy, all-purpose anecdote, useful in illustrating any number of media sins and shortcomings.

“It has been invoked to illustrate the media’s willingness to compromise impartiality, promote political agendas, and indulge in sensationalism. It has been used, more broadly, to suggest the media’s capacity to inject malign influence into international affairs.”

Like many media-driven myths, the “furnish the war” anecdote is succinct, savory, and easily remembered. It is indeed “a catchy, pithy phrase,” one almost too good not to be true.

WJC

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Books and Banter club discusses ‘Getting It Wrong’

In Debunking, Furnish the war, Hurricane Katrina, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on October 19, 2010 at 6:46 pm

I was honored that the Books and Banter club in Washington, D.C., selected Getting It Wrong for discussion at its October meeting.

Getting It Wrong is my latest book; it debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths–dubious or improbable stories about the news media that masquerade as factual.

Sixteen members of the club met last night at a restaurant in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, Virginia–within a block or two of the underground parking garage where during the Watergate investigation Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward sometimes met his high-level federal source known as “Deep Throat.”

At the request of club member Paige Gold, who led the discussion, I dropped in for the closing half of the discussion about Getting It Wrong.

I told the club members that I didn’t consider Getting It Wrong as an exercise in media-bashing.

Rather, I said, I like to think of the book as aligned with a fundamental imperative in journalism–that of getting it right.

I had a great time fielding the club members’ very thoughtful, engaging, and intriguing questions.

Among those questions was whether media audiences bear any responsibility for the tenacity of media myths.

Not directly or significantly, I replied.

The myths addressed in Getting It Wrong are, in one way or another, all media-driven. Journalists and news organizations have been the primary culprits in pushing them. Their doing so is more than a little self-serving: After all, media myths serve to reinforce the notion that, for good or bad, the news media are central and decisive forces in American life.

So at one end of the scale, I said, “we have William Randolph Hearst, journalist-as-war-monger, who famously vowed to ‘furnish the war‘ with Spain” in the late 19th century.

At the other, I added, we have the heroic journalists of Watergate, Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein, whose investigative reporting brought down a corrupt presidency.

Myths such as those can be used to identify the media as malevolent forces or as indispensable guardians of truth and democratic values. And variety of that kind helps explain why media myths can be so tenacious.

I also was asked what should readers be sure to take away from the book.

In jest, I replied that I thought they should take away the recognition that Getting It Wrong is such a good book they should offer it as gifts to friends and family, especially at the year-end holidays.

Seriously, I added, the takeaway for readers may well be to treat media content with a healthy measure of skepticism, to realize that news reports often are tentative, incomplete, prone to error and revision.

This is especially the case in coverage of disasters, such as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina a little more than five years ago.

Almost certainly, the early reports about a disaster will prove to be exaggerated in some fashion. The coverage of Katrina’s aftermath in New Orleans offers a telling reminder, I said.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, Katrina’s aftermath represented “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 flawed coverage–the erroneous reports of snipers firing at medical personnel and relief helicopters, of bodies being stacked like cordwood in the New Orleans convention center, of roving gangs raping and killing, of children with their throats slashed, of sharks plying the city’s flood waters–was not without consequences.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, the over-the-top reporting “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 [storm] evacuees at the Superdome and Convention Center, and of broadly stigmatizing a city and its people.”

WJC

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Sniffing out media myths

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on October 17, 2010 at 8:19 am

I had a fine interview about Getting It Wrong the other day with Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times, the fruits of which appear in his column today.

He writes that Getting It Wrong, my latest book, “picks apart some of journalism’s key moments, from the notion that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate reporting brought down Richard Nixon’s White House (action by the FBI, U.S. Congress and Supreme Court actually did that), to the myth of babies born to crack-addicted moms swamping the country and the idea that CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite turned public opinion on the Vietnam War with a single critical broadcast (public opinion had been souring on the war for months).”

Deggans cleverly structured the column as a series of “clues to spot myths in the making.”

Tip-offs mentioned in his column are:

  • Myths can seem too good to be true.
  • Myths tend to support the notion of media power.
  • Myths simplify complex issues and historical events.

Those factors certainly do characterize media-driven myths, which are prominent stories about and/or by the news media that are widely believed and often retold but which, under scrutiny, dissolve as apocryphal or wildly exaggerated. Media myths can be thought of as the junk food of journalism–tasty and alluring, perhaps, but not terribly nutritious or healthy.

The media myths addressed and debunked in Getting It Wrong include some of American journalism’s best-known stories. “Most of them are savory tales,” I write in the book. “And at least some of them seem almost too good to be false.”

Media myths, I point out in Getting It Wrong, do “tend to distort understanding about the role and function of journalism in American society, conferring on the news media far more power and influence than they necessarily wield.”

They are media-centric. Self-flattering.

As I further write in Getting It Wrong:

“Media myths often emerge from an eagerness to find influence and lasting significance in what journalists do and tend to extend credit where credit is not entirely due.”

What I call the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate is an example of such hero-seeking.

The myth has it that the investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein in the Washington Post brought down Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

“In reality,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “the Post and other news organizations were marginal factors in unraveling the Watergate scandal. Nixon’s fall was the consequence of his criminal conduct, which was exposed in the convergence of many forces, newspaper reporting being among the least decisive.”

And yet the Watergate myth lives on, as an example of the news media exerting power in an effective and beneficial manner.

Media myths also endure, I write, because they tend to be reductive. That is,  they simplify, they “offer unambiguous, easily remembered explanations about complex historic events.”

It is, after all, far easier to place Woodward and Bernstein at the center of unraveling Watergate than it is to grapple with and understand the sprawling complexity of the scandal.

Media myths also invite indulgence in the “golden age fallacy,” a flawed but enticing belief that there really was a time when journalism and its practitioners were respected and inspiring—the time, say, of Woodward and Bernstein.

Interestingly, Woodward has scoffed at the notion that he and Bernstein took down Nixon. Woodward said in an interview in 2005:

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

To the list of tip-offs that Deggans discusses, I would add: “Myths often fail the sniff test.” Tales that are quite neat and tidy do tend to emit a whiff of phoniness.

Pithy quotes such as William Randolph Hearst’s vow to “furnish the war” with Spain fail the sniff test. They invite suspicion because they seem almost too perfect, too neat and tidy.

Hearst’s famous vow is examined in Chapter One in Getting It Wrong.

In closing, I note another newspaper reference to Getting It Wrong.

Leo Morris, editorial page editor at the News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Indiana, wrote the other day that he the book “sounded so intriguing” that he was prompted to download its Kindle edition.

Morris’ brief piece carried the headline: “Journalism’s mythtakes.”

Clever. “Mythtakes.” I like it.

WJC

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Hearst, agenda-setting, and war

In Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on October 12, 2010 at 9:26 am

William Randolph Hearst is the bogeyman of American journalism, a timeless representation of what’s malign and dubious about the news media.

HearstAt their worst, the media can even force a country into war–just as Hearst did with his sensational and irresponsible newspapers in 1898.

It’s an easy meme: Juicy, delicious, easy to remember. It’s also a classic media-driven myth, a tall tale about the news media that dissolves under scrutiny.

The latest to repeat the myth was London’s Daily Telegraph, which usually ranks among Britain’s “quality” newspapers. (Unlike, that is, the raunchy and outlandish London tabloids of Rupert Murdoch.)

In an article yesterday that discussed the Hearst Corp.’s magazine holdings, the Telegraph said of William Randolph, who died in 1951:

“Through Hearst’s newspapers and magazines, he had enormous political influence and is sometimes credited with pushing opinion in the US into a war with Spain in 1898.”

Few serious historians of late 19th century America, and no recent biographers of Hearst credit (or blame) him and his publications with “pushing” the country into the war with Spain.

It just didn’t happen that way.

Like many media myths, Hearst-the-war-monger offers a simplistic explanation for a complex subject. It is far easier to blame Hearst’s yellow press for fomenting the conflict than it is to sort through the failed diplomacy that led the United States and Spain to go to war over Cuba in April 1898.

As I wrote in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, the New York newspapers of Hearst and his rival Joseph Pulitzer exerted at best limited agenda-setting influence on the U.S. press in the run-up to the war.

As I wrote in Yellow Journalism:

“A significant body of research indicates that newspapers in small-town and rural America scoffed at, condemned, and ignored the exaggerated and fanciful reports appearing in New York City’s yellow journals….”

Often cited as Exhibit A in the lineup of evidence that supposedly fingers Hearst as a war-monger is his own vow to “furnish the war” with Spain.

The pledge supposedly was sent by telegram to the artist Frederic Remington, who in January 1897 was on assignment to Cuba for Hearst’s New York Journal. Cuba at the time was in open rebellion against Spanish colonial rule–a rebellion that gave rise in 1898 to the Spanish-American War.

But the “furnish the war” tale is almost certainly apocryphal, as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, my new book debunking 10 prominent media-driven myths.

Reasons for doubting the anecdote are many, and include the fact that the purported telegram containing Hearst’s vow has never surfaced. Hearst, himself, denied having sent such a message, and Remington apparently never discussed the matter.

The purported vow, moreover, is illogical: It would have made no sense for Hearst to have pledged to “furnish the war” because war–the Cuban rebellion against Spanish rule–was the very reason he sent Remington to Cuba in the first place.

What’s more, Spanish authorities would have intercepted a telegram that contained a passage vowing to “furnish the war.” The Spanish controlled all incoming and outgoing cable traffic in Cuba in 1897 and they surely would have called attention to Hearst’s vow as a clear-cut example of Yankee meddling.

Which it would have been, had it been sent.

WJC

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‘Getting It Wrong’ goes on ‘PJM Political’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Furnish the war, Hurricane Katrina, Media myths on October 10, 2010 at 10:24 am

I had a fine interview recently with Silicon Valley blogger Ed Driscoll for the Pajamas Media radio show, PJM Political.

The interview aired yesterday on Sirus-XM radio’s POTUS channel.

Topic: My new book, Getting It Wrong, which debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths, those dubious and improbable tales about the news media that masquerade as factual.

Driscoll, who conducts a thoughtful and well-prepared interview, led me through a discussion of several myths addressed in Getting It Wrong, including the Cronkite Moment” of 1968.

That was when, supposedly, the on-air analysis of CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite prompted President Lyndon Johnson to change his thinking about the Vietnam War and led him to decide against seeking reelection.

“That’s simply not true,” I pointed out. “Lyndon Johnson didn’t even see the [Cronkite] program when it aired in February 1968. And his decision not to seek reelection was driven by other forces and factors. Cronkite really was irrelevant to that equation, to that decision.

“But yet it lives on, as an example of media power, the media telling truth to power. And it’s a misleading interpretation, it’s a misreading of history.”

Driscoll said that the chapters of Getting It Wrong “have a sort of curious” set of bookends, in that they begin with a discussion of William Randolph Hearst’s famous vow to “furnish the war” with Spain and end with a look at the exaggerated, over-the-top coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.

“Was this sort of book-ending intentional?” Driscoll asked.

It was an insightful question–and the first time an interviewer had asked about the book’s conceptual component.

I noted that the “original framework of the book had it organized more thematically, by ‘media and war’ and ‘media and government,'” and so on.

That framework was discarded, I said, “for a more chronological approach. So the bookends were driven more by chronology than anything else.”

We discussed how Orson Welles‘ cinematic masterpiece, Citizen Kane, helped cement the “furnish the war” myth in the public’s consciousness. Kane includes a scene that paraphrases Hearst’s purported vow.

The “furnish-the-war” anecdote about Hearst is dubious in many respects, I said, adding:

“Yet it lives on as an example of Hearst as the war-monger, as an example of the media–at its most malignant, in an extreme–can bring about a war that the country otherwise wouldn’t have fought.”

I mentioned how media-driven myths can be thought of as the “junk food of journalism,” which prompted Driscoll to ask:

What’s wrong with the American people being fed a little junk food? What’s wrong with being fed a few media myths?

There are several reasons, I replied.

Notably, “these myths tend to misrepresent the role of the news media in American society. They tend to grant the news media far more power and far more influence than they really do exert in American life.”

I added:

“Most people believe the media are powerful agents and powerful entities and often refer to some of the myths that I address, and debunk, in Getting It Wrong. They refer to them in support of this mistaken notion.”

In wrapping up the interview, Driscoll referred to Media Myth Alert as “a nifty blog.”

It was a generous plug that was much appreciated.

WJC

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Doing more than casting ‘doubt’ on Hearst’s famous vow

In 1897, Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on October 9, 2010 at 7:15 am

In a thoughtful essay posted the other day about “Hollywood and the Power of Myth,” the director of new media at the Wharton School invoked my research into William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain, saying that I’ve cast “doubt” on the often-repeated anecdote.

I like to think that I’ve pretty much demolished that tale.

The Wharton new media director is Kendall Whitehouse, who referred in his essay to my 2000 article in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly that challenges the Hearstian vow as improbable. In that article, I wrote that the anecdote deserved “relegation to the closet of historical imprecision.”

I revisited the tale in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths–dubious and improbable stories about the news media that masquerade as factual.

Chapter One in Getting It Wrong is devoted to the Hearstian tale, which I flatly describe as a media-driven myth, calling it “perhaps the hardiest myth in American journalism.”

I note:

“Hearst’s famous vow to ‘furnish the war’ has achieved unique status as an adaptable, hardy, all-purpose anecdote, useful in illustrating any number of media sins and shortcomings. It has been invoked to illustrate the media’s willingness to compromise impartiality, promote political agendas, and indulge in sensationalism. It has been used, more broadly, to suggest the media’s capacity to inject malign influence into international affairs.”

Its versatility and its pithiness are two of the reasons the Hearstian myth has lived on.

The anecdote stems from Hearst’s assigning Frederic Remington, the famous artist of the American West, to Cuba, to draw illustrations for the New York Journal of the island-wide rebellion against Spanish colonial rule. Remington and the writer Richard Harding Davis, who also was on Hearst’s payroll, reached Cuba in January 1897. (Both are shown in the front-page image above.)

Remington was in Cuba six days before returning to New York. He suffered in the tropical heat and didn’t along with the self-important Davis, who called the rotund Remington “a large, blundering bear.”

Before returning, the media myth has it, Remington sent Hearst a telegram stating:

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

Hearst supposedly cabled the artist reply: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”

In most tellings of the anecdote, Hearst supposedly made good on his promise and brought on the war with Spain, which was declared 15 months later.

The Remington-Hearst anecdote is riven with flaw and incongruity. For starters, Hearst at least twice denied ever having sent such a message. And Remington apparently never discussed the anecdote.

Moreover, 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.”

And it lives on despite what I call “an irreconcilable internal inconsistency.” That is, it would have been absurd for Hearst to have vowed to “furnish the war” because war—specifically, the Cuban rebellion against Spain’s colonial rule—was the very reason Hearst sent Remington and Davis to Cuba in the first place.

“Anyone reading U.S. newspapers in early 1897 would have been well aware that Cuba was a theater of a nasty war,” I write in Getting It Wrong. “By then, the Cuban rebellion had reached islandwide proportions and not a single province had been pacified by Spain’s armed forces.”

Despite those and other flaws, the tale lives on as too good to check out, too good not to be true.

And as I note in Getting It Wrong:

“What firmly and finally pressed Hearst’s purported vow to ‘furnish the war’ into the public’s consciousness was Citizen Kane, the 1941 motion picture that was based loosely on Hearst’s life and times.”

In a scene early in the film, Orson Welles in the role of Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper tycoon who readily invites comparisons to Hearst, paraphrases the purported Remington-Hearst exchange.

Whitehouse noted in his essay: “Rightly or wrongly, Orson Welles’s … Citizen Kane has largely shaped our popular perception of William Randolph Hearst.” True enough.

Kane certainly helped solidify a robust media-driven myth.

WJC

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Myth appeal runs deep abroad; Watergate a case in point

In 1897, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Washington Post, Watergate myth, Yellow Journalism on October 7, 2010 at 10:20 am

I  spoke about my new book, Getting It Wrong, at a superbly organized American University alumni event last night, at a venue commanding spectacular views of Seattle, Puget Sound, and the Olympic Mountains.

Following my talk, which focused on three of the 10 media-driven myths debunked in Getting It Wrong, I was asked by one of the people in attendance whether myths have similarly emerged about the media in other countries.

A very good question, I replied: I really don’t think so.

Maybe in Britain, I suggested, given the robust media scene there. But I couldn’t say for sure.

While I had to hedge a bit on the question, there’s no doubt that myth appeal runs deep from the United States to other countries. That is, news organizations outside the United States not infrequently repeat what are American media myths.

Media-driven myths, I have noted, can and do travel far, and well.  Take, for example, the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate.

The notion is often embraced in news media in the United States and overseas that the investigative reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, then-young reporters for the Washington Post, took down Richard Nixon and his corrupt presidency.

A measure of the myth’s international appeal can found in a report that aired today on Australia’s ABC radio network, which described Woodward as “one of the Washington Post journalists who brought down a U.S. President.”

Not even Woodward embraces that claim. He said in an interview in 2005:

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

And he’s right. Earthy, perhaps, but right.

I discuss the heroic-journalist myth in Getting It Wrong, noting that it’s a simplistic and misleading interpretation of what was a sprawling and complex scandal. Watergate’s web of misconduct forced Nixon from office and landed nearly 20 of his top aides, associates, and cabinet officers in jail.

To roll up a scandal of such dimension, I write,  required the collective, if not always the coordinated, efforts of special prosecutors, bipartisan congressional panels, federal judges, the FBI, and, ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered Nixon to surrender audiotapes that proved his complicity in the Watergate cover-up.

Against that tableau, journalism’s contributions to unraveling Watergate were modest—certainly not decisive.

But because the heroic-journalist interpretation is such an unambiguous assertion of the media’s presumed power, it tends to travel well.

The same holds for the purported vow of William Randolph Hearst to “furnish the war” with Spain.

Hearst supposedly made the pledge in a cable to the artist Frederic Remington, who was in Cuba in early 1897, on assignment for Hearst’s New York Journal to draw illustrations of the rebellion against Spanish colonial rule.

The anecdote lives on as one of the most famous and delicious in American journalism—even though it is buttressed by no supporting documentation. And Hearst denied ever having made such statement.

It is, however, a tale almost too good to be disbelieved, given that it so effectively represents Hearst as warmonger. The tale’s sheer deliciousness is another reason why the anecdote turns up more than infrequently in news outlets abroad, especially in Spanish-language media.

The media myths associated with Watergate, the so-called “Cronkite Moment” of 1968, and the War of the Worlds radio dramatization of 1938 were the principal elements of my talk last night.

Those myths live on, I said, in part because “they are appealing reductive, in that they minimize the complexity of historical events and offer simplistic and misleading interpretations instead. The Washington Post no more brought down Nixon that Walter Cronkite swayed [Lyndon] Johnson’s views about Vietnam.

“Yet those and other media myths endure because they present unambiguous, easy-to-remember explanations for complex historic events.”

WJC

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‘Getting It Wrong’ plays the Tattered Cover

In Debunking, Furnish the war, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on August 7, 2010 at 7:28 pm

Denver’s well-known Tattered Cover bookstore was the venue last night for a fine discussion about Getting It Wrong, my new book that addresses and debunks 10 prominent, media-driven myths.

At the Tattered Cover

About 60 people attended the book event, at least a few of whom had learned about it in listening to my in-studio interview Friday morning with David Sirota on KKZN, AM 760, Denver’s progressive talk radio station.

At the Tattered Cover, one of the country’s top independent bookstores, I discussed the myths of Watergate, of the “Cronkite Moment,” of William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain, and of the famous War of Worlds radio dramatization of  1938.

Those stories, I noted, are “all well-known—they are often taught in schools, colleges, and universities. They’re all delicious tales about the power of the news media to bring about change, for good or ill.”

And I proceeded to explain why all of them are media-driven myths–dubious and improbable tales about the news media that masquerade as factual. “They can be thought of as the junk food of journalism,” I noted. “Tasty and alluring, perhaps, but in the end, not terribly healthy or nutritious.”

The surprise of the evening came in discussing the mythical “Cronkite Moment,” in which President Lyndon Johnson supposedly realized U.S. policy in Vietnam was doomed, given the on-air assessment by CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite that the war was “mired in stalemate.”

Among the reasons the “Cronkite Moment” is a media myth, I said, is that Johnson did not see the Cronkite program on Vietnam when it aired on February 27,  1968.

Johnson was not in Washington; he was not in front of a television set. He was in Austin, Texas, making light-hearted comments at a black-tie birthday party for Governor John Connally, who that day turned 51.

“At about the time Cronkite was intoning his ‘mired in stalemate’ commentary,” I said at the Tattered Cover, “Johnson was at the podium at Connally’s birthday party, saying: ‘Today you are 51, John. That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for—a simple majority.'”

And with that, the audience burst into laughter.

Never before had the line prompted so many laughs. For some reason last night, it did.

The audience was attentive and inquisitive. Questions were raised about the media myth associated with coverage of the Jessica Lynch case and of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which battered the Gulf Coast five years ago this month.

Another question was about the cinema’s capacity to promote and propel media myths. It was a good observation, one that I wished I had emphasized earlier in my talk.

A telling example of the how cinematic can solidify media myths is to be found in the 1976 film All the President’s Men, an adaptation of the book by the same name by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward about their Watergate reporting.

As I write in Getting It Wrong the cinematic version of All the President’s Men “helped ensure the [heroic-journalist] myth would live on by offering a neat, tidy, and vastly simplified account the Watergate scandal, one that allowed viewers to sidestep the scandal’s complexity while engaging in an entertaining storyline.”

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

The Tattered Cover was a wonderful venue–comfortable, inviting. Its staff is exceptionally courteous and professional, and the hour-and-a-half went by extremely quickly.

WJC

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Photo credit: Ann-Marie C. Regan

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Silly season arrives? ‘Furnish the war’ sightings suggest as much

In 1897, Debunking, Furnish the war, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on July 24, 2010 at 10:01 am

It must be the onset of summer’s silly season, the period from mid-July to the end of August when news content becomes noticeably lighter and fluff-filled.

How else to explain the recent sightings in the news, in the United States and abroad, of William Randolph Hearst’s mythical vow to “furnish the war” with Spain?

The purported Hearstian vow–which, as I describe in Chapter One of my new book, Getting It Wrong, is surely a media myth–appeared yesterday in a breezy travel piece posted at the Christian Science Monitor‘s online site.

The writer, Ruth Walker, tells of a recent cross-country road trip during which she turned often to Tippecanoe and Tyler Too: Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History, a 2008 book by Jan R. Van Meter.

The book, Walker writes, “is essentially a retelling of various chapters of American history through the catchphrases and slogans that emerged from them.”

She notes that a visit to the Hearst Castle in California “recalled William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper publisher who called for war with Spain after the USS Maine sank mysteriously in Havana Harbor.”

A memorable Hearstian line, Walker writes, was his “instruction to the artist Frederic Remington, whom he had sent to Cuba to ‘cover,’ as an illustrator, the anticipated war: ‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.'”

As is discussed in Getting It Wrong, reasons for doubting the veracity of the anecdote are many and include the significant fact that the purported telegram containing Hearst’s “furnish the war” vow has never surfaced.

Hearst, moreover, denied having sent such a message, and Remington apparently never discussed such an exchange.

Additionally, Hearst’s purported message is incongruous and illogical on its face: It would have made no sense for Hearst to have pledged to “furnish the war” because war–the Cuban rebellion against Spanish rule–was the reason he assigned Remington to Cuba in the first place.

The artist was on the island for six days in January 1897–15 months before the start of the Spanish-American War. The war was not “anticipated” in early 1897.

I further note in Getting It Wrong that Remington’s work from Cuba impugns the anecdote, too. His sketches for Hearst’s New York Journal depicted unmistakable (if unremarkable) scenes of the rebellion, which had begun in 1895.

Remington’s work for the Journal showed a scouting party of Spanish cavalry with rifles at the ready; a cluster of Cuban non-combatant captives being herded into Spanish lines; a scruffy Cuban rebel kneeling to fire at a small Spanish fort, and a knot of Spanish soldiers dressing a comrade’s wounded leg.

The sketches appeared in the Journal beneath headlines such as “Cuban War Sketches Gathered in the Field by Frederic Remington” and “Frederic Remington Sketches A Familiar Incident of the Cuban War.”

Remington clearly had seen many signs of war in Cuba.

For those and other reasons, the anecdote about Hearst’s vow is assuredly a media-driven myth, a dubious and improbable tale that deserves relegation to the closet of historical imprecision.

And that closet need not be opened at any time of year, not even during summer’s silly season when indulgence in the lighter side of the news becomes conspicuous.

WJC

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