W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for the ‘Furnish the war’ Category

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Invoking media myths to score points

In 1897, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on July 23, 2010 at 8:25 am

Media-driven myths, those improbable tales about the news media that masquerade as factual, endure for a number of reasons–not the least of which is their value in scoring points about contemporary American journalism.

Evidence of that impulse appears today in a commentary posted at the Moderate Voice blog. The commentary assails conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart as a latter-day practitioner of “yellow journalism” and invokes what are media myths in making that claim.

“At the turn of the 19th century,” the commentary says, “Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst ‘created a frenzy’ among the U.S. citizenry that pushed us into the Spanish-American War. Historians accuse Hearst of trying to boost his circulation by advocating war.”

In support of that dubious claim–most historians scoff at the notion that Pulitzer and Hearst “pushed us into” war with Spain–the Moderate Voice commentary offers the hoary tale of Hearst’s purported vow, supposedly contained in a telegram to the artist Frederic Remington, that stated:

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

Well, where to begin in unpacking the errors in such sweeping claims?

For starters, Hearst and Pulitzer were prominent in the 1880s and 1890s, not at “the turn of the 19th century.”

More significant, there is little evidence that the newspapers of Hearst and Pulitzer–the New York Journal and New York World, specifically–“created a frenzy” in the run-up to the Spanish-American War in 1898.

As I wrote in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, Hearst and Pulitzer exerted no more than limited agenda-setting influence on the U.S. press in the run-up to the war.

As I noted 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 before and after the Maine’s destruction” in Havana harbor in mid-February 1898.

The mysterious destruction of the battleship U.S.S. Maine killed more than 260 Navy sailors and officers, and helped propel the war with Spain.

Moreover, I noted, “claims that the yellow press fomented the Spanish-American War contain almost no discussion about how, specifically, that influence was brought to bear” inside the administration of President William McKinley.

“There is,” I wrote in Yellow Journalism, “almost no evidence that the content of the yellow press, especially during the decisive weeks following the Maine’s destruction, shaped the thinking, influenced the policy formulation, or informed the conduct of key White House officials.”

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

I note in Getting It Wrong that the purported vow has gained “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.” The Moderate Voice commentary accomplishes all three.

I further note in Getting It Wrong that the tale about Hearst’s vow lives on “despite a nearly complete absence of supporting documentation. It lives on even though the telegram that supposedly contained Hearst’s vow has never turned up. It lives on even though Hearst denied ever sending such a message.”

Additionally, the tale endures in the face of what I call “an irreconcilable internal inconsistency.” It would have been illogical and absurd for Hearst to vow to “furnish the war” because war—specifically, the islandwide Cuban rebellion against Spain’s colonial rule—was the very reason Hearst sent Remington to Cuba in the first place.

Remington was in Cuba in early 1897, at a time when anyone reading U.S. newspapers would have been well aware that Cuba was a theater of a nasty war. By then, Spain had sent nearly 200,000 soldiers in a failed attempt to put down the rebellion, which gave rise in April 1898 to the Spanish-American War.

WJC

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‘Famously rumored’: Hearst and his reputed vow

In 1897, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Spanish-American War on July 22, 2010 at 9:26 am

Media-driven myths are propelled by many forces, among them the reality that the tales sometimes are just too good, too delicious, to check out.

Hearst's Evening Journal, April 1898

So it was with a commentary posted yesterday at the “Unleashed” blog of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The commentary invoked the well-known and often-repeated anecdote about William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain, stating:

“Hearst is famously rumored to have declared in writing to artist Frederic Remington: ‘I’ll furnish the war,’ referring, of course, to the Spanish-American War in 1898, henceforth referred to as ‘Mr Hearst’s War’….”

“Famously rumored,” eh? A flimsy construct, that, for making a point or building an argument.

It takes but a few minutes spent online to find evidence that the Hearstian vow is almost certainly a media-driven myth–a dubious, improbable tale masquerading as fact.

Chapter One in Getting It Wrong, my new book debunking 10 prominent media-driven myths, takes up and dismantles the Hearstian vow, and that chapter is readily accessible online.

Still, it’s clear that the anecdote’s simplistic directness have helped make it resistant to debunking. As I note in Getting It Wrong, media myths that can be reduced to a memorably pithy phrase are most likely to withstand debunking.

So it is with “furnish the war.”

The anecdote also is impressively flexible. It is useful, I write, “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.”

Even more impressive, perhaps, is that the anecdote endures despite the near-complete absence of supporting documentation.

Hearst

“It lives on,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “even though the telegrams supposedly exchanged by Remington and Hearst have never turned up. It lives on even though Hearst denied ever sending such a message. It 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 reading U.S. newspapers in early 1897 would have been well aware that Cuba was a theater of a nasty war.”

Hearst assigned Remington to Cuba 15 months before the Spanish-American War broke out. In early 1897, no one, including Hearst, could have known the United States would take up arms against Spain over Cuba.

WJC

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Hearst, war, and the international appeal of media myths

In 1897, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on July 18, 2010 at 3:24 pm

I wrote the other day about the international appeal of prominent media-driven myths, an observation that was reconfirmed yesterday in the Correio do Brasil.

The Correio item recounted the purported exchange of telegrams between the artist Frederic Remington and newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, in which Hearst supposedly declared:

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

Remington at the time was in Cuba, on assignment for Hearst’s New York Journal to draw illustrations of the rebellion against Spanish colonial rule.

The exchange, if it took place, would have been in January 1897, during Remington’s six-day visit to the island. The anecdote was first recounted in 1901 by James Creelman, a bluff, cigar-chomping journalist who was neither with Hearst nor Remington in early 1897; he was in Europe at the time of the purported exchange, and never explained how he learned of it.

The anecdote Creelman told, though, is rich and delicious, suggesting the malign potential of media power as well as Hearst’s meddling ways. The anecdote often is cited in support of the dubious claim that Hearst and his yellow press fomented the Spanish-American War in 1898.

Trouble is, the “furnish the war” tale is almost certainly apocryphal.

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, my new book debunking 10 media-driven myths, the 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 such an exchange.

Hearst’s purported message, moreover, 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 very reason he sent the artist to Cuba in the first place.

I also note in Getting It Wrong that Remington’s work from Cuba further serves to impugn the anecdote. His sketches for Hearst’s Journal depicted unmistakable (if unremarkable) scenes of rebellion.

His work 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.”

After his return to the United States, Remington wrote a letter to the Journal’s keenest rival, the New York World, in which he disparaged the Spanish colonial regime as a “woman-killing outfit down there in Cuba.”

As I write in Getting It Wrong, “Remington’s sketches and correspondence … leave no doubt that he had seen a good deal of war-related disruption in Cuba.”

In addition, I write, “there was no chance that telegrams such as those Creelman described would have flowed freely between Remington in Havana and Hearst in New York. Spanish control of the cable traffic in Havana was too vigilant and severe to have allowed such an exchange to have gone unnoticed and unremarked upon.

“A vow such as Hearst’s to ‘furnish the war’ surely would have been intercepted and publicized by Spanish authorities as a clear-cut example of Yankee meddling in Cuba.”

That element–because it reputedly suggests Yankee meddling–surely helps explain why the Remington-Hearst anecdote exerts appeal beyond the United States, especially in Latin America.

The anecdote, in addition, is broadly appealing in its simplicity and deliciousness.

Indeed, it is almost too delicious to check out.

WJC

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Going international: Media myths travel far, well

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Washington Post, Watergate myth on July 15, 2010 at 6:05 am

Prominent media-driven myths—the subject of my new book, Getting It Wrong—not only can be tenacious; some of them travel quite well, crossing linguistic and cultural borders with surprising ease.

Indeed, it’s a sign of hardy appeal when media-driven myths turn up in international contexts more often than just occasionally.

The heroic-journalist myth of Watergate–one of the 10 media myths I explore in Getting It Wrong—represents this phenomenon quite well. The heroic-journalist meme has it that the fearless investigative reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, then-young journalists for the Washington Post, brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency in the Watergate scandal.

Woodward

It’s a compelling tale that long ago became the scandal’s dominant popular narrative.

It’s also a simplistic interpretation of what was a complex and intricate web of misconduct that took down Nixon and landed nearly 20 of his top aides, associates, and cabinet officers in jail.

I note in Getting It Wrong that to roll up a scandal of such dimension 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 such a tableau, journalism’s contributions to unraveling Watergate were modest—certainly not decisive.

But because the heroic-journalist interpretation is so straightforward and unambiguous, it’s not surprising that it finds appeal across cultures and turns up fairly often in media reports outside the United States.

Simplicity propels the Watergate myth, enabling it to travel far and well.

Just the other day, for example, a commentary at Mediapart, a French online investigative reporting site, recalled Woodward and Bernstein as “the two journalists for the Washington Post who, thanks to their investigation, set in motion the resignation of President Richard Nixon, during Watergate.”

Another media myth that travels widely and well is that of William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain at the end of the 19th century. Hearst’s pledge supposedly was contained in a cable to the artist Frederic Remington, whom Hearst sent to draw illustrations of the Cuban rebellion, which preceded the Spanish-American War.

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 is improbable on its face.

It is, however, a tale almost too good to be disbelieved, given that it so effectively captures Hearst as warmonger . The anecdote turns up more than occasionally abroad, especially in Spanish-language media.

I note in Getting It Wrong that “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.”

With all that going for it, the step to adoption in international contexts is fairly small.

Beyond simplicity and deliciousness, the international appeal of prominent media myths also may be attributed to a keen and enduring curiosity abroad in American journalism. For all its faults and uncertainties, American journalism is a sprawling, robust, and intriguing profession. Such dynamism exerts appeal and interest beyond the United States.

American cinema is perhaps an even more powerful force: Hollywood treatments have helped solidify media myths. And Hollywood productions often travel well abroad.

The 1976 film All the President’s Men certainly helped propel the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate, for example. As I write in Getting It Wrong: “More than thirty-five years later, what remains most vivid, memorable, and accessible about Watergate is the cinematic version of All the President’s Men.”

The movie, I note, “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.”

Hollywood also was crucial to cementing Hearst’s purported vow into the popular consciousness. That vehicle was Citizen Kane, the 1941 motion picture based loosely on Hearst’s life and times.

Hearst’s purported vow is paraphrased in a scene early in Kane, which some critics regard as the best-ever American motion picture.

The Hearstian vow also is quoted in the 1997 James Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies. Or, as it was known in francophone countries, Demain ne meurt jamais.

WJC

A version of this post first appeared at the University of California Press blog.

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‘Persuasive and entertaining’: WSJ reviews ‘Getting It Wrong’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Furnish the war, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, New York Times, Reviews, Spanish-American War, War of the Worlds, Washington Post, Watergate myth on July 12, 2010 at 6:05 am

Today’s Wall Street Journal reviews Getting It Wrong, characterizing as “persuasive and entertaining” my new book debunking 10 prominent media-driven myths.

The review–which appears beneath the headline “Too good to check”–is clever and engaging, and opens this way:

“Hello, city desk, get me rewrite. Here’s the lead: Many of the landmark moments in American journalism are carefully nurtured myths—or, worse, outright fabrications.

“William Randolph Hearst never said, ‘You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.’ Orson Welles’s ‘War of the Worlds’ radio broadcast didn’t panic America. Ed Murrow’s ‘See It Now’ TV show didn’t destroy Sen. Joseph McCarthy. JFK didn’t talk the New York Times into spiking its scoop on the Bay of Pigs invasion. Far from being the first hero of the Iraq War, captured Army Pvt. Jessica Lynch was caught sobbing ‘Oh, God help us’ and never fired a shot.

“These fables and more are lovingly undressed in W. Joseph Campbell’s persuasive and entertaining ‘Getting It Wrong.’ With old-school academic detachment, Mr. Campbell, a communications professor at American University, shows how the fog of war, the warp of ideology and muffled skepticism can transmute base journalism into golden legend.”

The reviewer, Edward Kosner, author of the memoir It’s News to Me, also discusses the myth of the “Cronkite Moment,” writing, “Television icons are central to two of Mr. Campbell’s dubious cases: Murrow and his successor as the patron saint of TV news, Walter Cronkite.”

Kosner notes–as I do in Getting It Wrong–that at least some of the myths confronted in the book will likely survive their debunking.

“For all Mr. Campbell’s earnest scholarship,” Kosner writes, “these media myths are certain to survive his efforts to slay them. Journalism can’t help itself—it loves and perpetuates its sacred legends of evil power-mongers, courageous underdogs, dread plagues and human folly.”

Well said.

And, alas, he may be right. Some of the myths almost certainly will live on. As I write in the introduction to Getting It Wrong, they “may prove resistant to debunking. They may still be widely believed despite the contrary evidence marshaled against them.

“The most resilient myths,” I further write, “may be those that can be distilled to a catchy, pithy phrase like: ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.’ Such quotations are neat, tidy, and easily remembered. Cinematic treatments influence how historical events are collectively remembered and can harden media-driven myths against debunking. The motion picture All the President’s Men, which cast Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the lead roles of Washington Post reporters [B0b] Woodward and [Carl] Bernstein, has helped ensure that the journalists and their newspaper would be regarded as central to cracking the Watergate scandal.”

Kosner closes the review with a humorous observation, writing:

“At the end of the book, Mr. Campbell offers some remedies for media mythologizing, urging journalists, among other things, ‘to deepen their appreciation of complexity and ambiguity.’ Good luck with that, professor.'”

Heh, heh. Nice touch.

WJC

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Seeking antidotes to journalism’s ‘junk food’

In Bra-burning, Debunking, Furnish the war, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth on July 2, 2010 at 12:31 am

Media-driven myths—those false, dubious yet prominent stories about the news media that masquerade as factual—can be thought of as the junk food of journalism. They’re alluring and delicious, but neither especially wholesome nor healthy.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, media-driven myths can spring from many sources. War is an especially fertile breeding ground for media myths, partly because the shock of combat is alien and unfamiliar to most people. Given their limited first-hand experience with war, media audiences generally are in no position to challenge reports from the battlefield.

“The confusion and intensity inherent in warfare can lead journalists to place fragmented information that emerges from conflict into recognizable if sometimes misleading frames,” I write.

An example of that came early in the Iraq War in 2003, with the Washington Post’s erroneous report about the battlefield heroics of Jessica Lynch, a topic discussed in Getting It Wrong. The Post’s characterization of Lynch as a female Rambo, pouring lead into attacking Iraqis, did not seem entirely implausible. It was, after all, a story picked up by news organizations around the world.

Hurried and sloppy reporting, which certainly figured in the sensational report about Lynch, also contributes to the rise to media myths. The myth of “crack babies” of the late 1980s and 1990s was certainly propelled by hurried reporting, by over-eager journalism and by premature medical findings.

Reporters and columnists pushed too eagerly on preliminary and inconclusive research about children born to women who took crack cocaine during pregnancy. The horrors that many journalists predicted—that “crack babies” would grow up to be a vast, permanently dependent class, a so-called “bio-underclass” of staggering dimension—proved quite wrong.

So are there antidotes to media-driven myths?

I argue in Getting It Wrong that while “they spring from multiple sources, it is not as if media-driven myths are beyond being tamed.”

To slow or thwart the spread of media myths, journalists might start by applying a measure of skepticism to pithy, telling quotes such as William Randolph Hearst’s vow to “furnish the war” with Spain at the end of the 19th century.

Turns of phrase that sound too neat and too tidy often are too good to be true.

Journalists also would do well to cultivate greater recognition of their fallibility. Too often they seem faintly concerned with correcting the record they tarnish. They tend not to like revisiting major flaws and errors. As Jack Shafer, media critic for the online magazine Slate, has written:

“The rotten truth is that media organizations are better at correcting trivial errors of fact—proper spellings of last names, for example—than they are at fixing a botched story.”

Not surprisingly, there was no sustained effort by the news media to set straight the record about the chimerical scourge of “crack babies.” Not surprisingly, there was little sustained effort to explore and explain the distorted and badly flawed reporting from New Orleans in 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall.

Encouraging a culture of skepticism and tolerance for viewpoint diversity in American newsrooms also would help curb the rise and dissemination of media-driven myths. Newsrooms can seem like bastions of group-think. Michael Kelly, the former editor of National Journal and the Atlantic once observed:

“Reporters like to picture themselves as independent thinkers. In truth, with the exception of 13-year-old girls, there is no social subspecies more slavish to fashion, more terrified of originality and more devoted to group-think.”

Group-think and viewpoint diversity are not topics often discussed in American newsrooms. But they’re hardly irrelevant. It is not inconceivable that a robust newsroom culture that embraces encourages skepticism, invites challenges to dominant narratives, and rewards contrarian thinking would have helped thwart publication of embarrassingly mistaken tales such as the Post’s account about Jessica Lynch.

Another antidote to media-driven myths is offered by the digitization of newspapers and other media content.

Digitization has made it easier than ever to consult and scrutinize source material from the past. Never has journalism’s record been more readily accessible, through such databases as ProQuest and LexisNexis.

Reading what was written makes it clear that radio dramatization of the War of the Worlds in 1938 created nothing approaching nationwide panic and hysteria. Reading what was written makes clear that Edward R. Murrow’s televised critique of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954 was belated and quite unremarkable.

Reading what was written can be a straightforward and effective antidote to media-driven myths.

WJC

A version of this post first appeared at the University of California Press blog.

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‘Getting It Wrong’ goes Majic

In Bay of Pigs, Bra-burning, Debunking, Furnish the war, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Media myths and radio, New York Times, War of the Worlds, Washington Post, Watergate myth on July 1, 2010 at 11:34 am

I did an engaging and entertaining in-studio interview yesterday on the Lanigan & Malone show, one of the most popular radio programs in Cleveland, the gritty city where I cut my teeth, journalistically, years ago.

On the air with Lanigan (center) and Malone

The show airs on WMJI, Majic 105.7 FM, and I spoke with hosts John Lanigan and Jimmy Malone about several media-driven myths addressed and debunked in my new book, Getting It Wrong.

They included the case of Jessica Lynch, the waiflike Army private whom the Washington Post elevated to hero status in a sensational but utterly erroneous report early in the Iraq War in 2003.

The Post depicted Lynch as having “fought fiercely” in the Iraqi ambush at Nasiriyah of the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company. The newspaper said Lynch had “shot several enemy soldiers” and kept “firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition.”

Walters

The Lynch case, I said during the Lanigan & Malone interview, appears to have centered around a case of mistaken identity. It wasn’t Lynch who had fought heroically at Nasiriyah. It was most likely Donald Walters, a cook-sergeant in Lynch’s unit who, after running out of ammunition, was captured by Iraqi irregulars and executed.

I pointed out during the interview how war and conflict can readily give rise to myth and misunderstanding. Indeed, half the chapters in Getting It Wrong are related to warfare, including the book’s first chapter, the myth of William Randolph Hearst’s infamous vow to “furnish the war” with Spain.

We moved on to discuss the myth that widespread panic and mass hysteria characterized the reactions to the 1938 radio dramatization of The War of the Worlds, then jumped to a discussion of the myth of superlative reporting of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath in September 2005, and considered at some length about what I call the “nuanced myth” of bra-burning.

“Bra-smoldering,” I said, would be a more accurate characterization of what happened during the women’s liberation protest at Atlantic City in September 1968. My research shows that bras and other items were set afire, if briefly, during the demonstration against that year’s Miss America pageant.

“All these are ruined,” Lanigan said at one point about the myths debunked in Getting It Wrong.

We also discussed the Bay of Pigs-New York Times suppression myth. That myth centers around a telephone call President John F. Kennedy supposedly placed to the Times publisher or top editors in April 1961, asking that the newspaper hold off on reporting about the pending CIA-supported invasion of Cuba.

There is no evidence, I said, that Kennedy ever placed such a call. (Or even had time to place such a call.)

What appears to have happened is that the Bay of Pigs-suppression myth has become confounded with the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, during which Kennedy did call the Times to request a delay on a report about nuclear-tipped missiles the Soviets had deployed on the island.

As the interview wrapped up, Lanigan said he’s “sure there will be another” volume, a sequel, to Getting It Wrong.

“It’s a good book,” he said afterward. “I’m glad he did it.”

WJC

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‘Junk food of jornalismo’: Diário writes up ‘Getting It Wrong’

In Bay of Pigs, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Media myths and radio, Murrow-McCarthy myth, Reviews, Watergate myth on June 28, 2010 at 2:49 pm

Today’s edition of the venerable  Portuguese newspaper Diário de Notícias includes a write up about Getting It Wrong, my new book about prominent media-driven myths–those false, dubious, improbable stories about the news media that masquerade as factual.

With the help of the online translation site Babelfish, I was able to make out a good deal of the Diário review, which says in part:

“W. Joseph Campbell in Getting it Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism, published the University of California Press, [says] these ‘myths can be thought as junk food of jornalismo.'”

The Diário article mentions several media myths addressed and debunked in Getting It Wrong, including those of William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain; the 1938 radio dramatization of the War of the Worlds which supposedly sowed panic across the United States; the notion that Edward R. Murrow’s 1954 See It Now television program abruptly halted Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communists-in-government witch-hunt, and the myth that the New York Times suppressed its coverage of the run-up to the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

Diário characterizes as one of the book’s “more concrete” examples “the Watergate case,” in which reporters for the Washington Post are credited with having toppled the corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon.

Media myths, the articles notes, are not innocuous; ” they can distort the perception of the power and function of jornalismo” because “they tend to give the media” more power and influence than they rightly deserve. It also says that myths can “minimize the complexity of the historical events for simplistic interpretations.” Both of those are important points raised in Getting It Wrong.

The review closes by taking up the suggestion I offer in the conclusion of Getting It Wrong, namely that there are more media myths to debunk.

“By no means do the media myths examined on these pages represent a closed universe,” I write in the book’s closing passage. “Others surely will assert themselves. They may tell of great deeds by journalists, or of their woeful failings. They may well hold appeal across the political spectrum, offering something for almost everyone. They may be about war, or politics, or biomedical research.

“Predictably, they will be delicious tales, easy to remember, and perhaps immodest and self-congratulatory. They probably will offer vastly simplified accounts of history, and may be propelled by cinematic treatment.  They will be media-driven myths, all rich candidates for debunking.”

WJC

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‘Getting It Wrong’ on the road in Oberlin, OH

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, Spanish-American War, War of the Worlds, Watergate myth, Yellow Journalism on June 27, 2010 at 8:40 am

I gave a talk yesterday about Getting It Wrong to an engaging audience at the college bookstore in Oberlin, Ohio.

The talk was facilitated quite well by Kira McGirr, the bookstore’s tradebook manager, and covered such topics as William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain at the end of the 19th century, the myth of the “Cronkite Moment” of February 1968, and the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate.

We also discussed the media-driven myth of “crack babies” and the famous 1938 radio dramatization of The War of the Worlds, which supposedly was so dramatic that tens of thousands of Americans were seized by panic and mass hysteria.

One of Kira’s questions was how long it may take before the myths discussed and debunked in Getting It Wrong to be excised from history books. It’s a very good question, and difficult to say for sure.

I responded by saying some of the myths–such as those of Watergate and the War of the Worlds—are so appealing, delicious, and ingrained that they may never be totally uprooted.

The same probably goes for Hearst’s purported vow: That anecdote has been around since 1901 and likely is too appealing ever to be utterly debunked. What’s more, the “furnish the war” tale is a neat, tidy, reductive way of explaining the causes of the Spanish-American War:  Hearst, the war-mongering publisher, is to blame.

It’s far easier to blame Hearst than it is to grapple with the complexities of the diplomatic demarche in 1897-98 that failed to resolve differences among Spain, Cuba, and the United States: Failed diplomacy, not the contents of Hearst’s yellow press, led to the Spanish-American War.

We also discussed how high-quality cinematic treatments can press media myths into the public consciousness.

That certainly was the case with All the President’s Men, the most-viewed movie about Watergate, in which Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman played the starring roles of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

The film depicted the reporters as central, indeed crucial, to cracking the Watergate scandal, I noted. For many Americans,  All the President’s Men is an important way of learning about Watergate. As I write in Getting It Wrong: “More than thirty-five years later, what remains most vivid, memorable, and accessible about Watergate is the cinematic version of All the President’s Men.”

The book talk coincided with Oberlin’s fifth annual Chalk Walk event, at which artists and aspiring artists draw often-elaborate pastel images on the sidewalks in the heart of town.

One of Kira’s colleagues, Amanda Turner, drew a fine rendering of the cover of Getting It Wrong at the entrance to the bookstore (see photo).

Amanda, Kira, and I posed for the photo below.
Several former classmates of mine at Oberlin Firelands High School (class of 1970) also attended the book talk.

WJC

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Photo credit: Ann-Marie C. Regan (Chalk Walk images)

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‘Getting It Wrong’ launched at Newseum

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, Spanish-American War, Washington Post, Watergate myth on June 20, 2010 at 2:09 pm

Newseum program, audience view

Getting It Wrong, my new book about media-driven myths, was launched at a terrific program yesterday at the Newseum, the $450 million museum of news in downtown Washington, D.C.

The Newseum’s John Maynard moderated a brisk “Inside Media” talk, during which I reviewed the myths of:

  • William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain,
  • Edward R. Murrow‘s  1954 See It Now television program that supposedly ended Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s communists-in-government witch-hunt,
  • the so-called “Cronkite moment” of 1968,
  • the heroic-journalist of Watergate, and
  • the supposedly superlative reporting in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina‘s landfall in 2005.

The audience (see photo, above) posed several intriguing questions about the book. Among them was whether I thought the media myths confronted in Getting It Wrong would now be forever buried.

It’s probably too soon to say, given the book’s recent publication. But I mentioned in my reply that I’ve been struck by how dearly some myths are held.

The myth of the “Cronkite moment” is an example, I said: It seems quite difficult for some people to believe that Walter Cronkite’s program on Vietnam in February 1968 was not of decisive effect.

The “Cronkite moment” may live on, and continue to be embraced, despite the weight of the evidence that Cronkite’s television report about Vietnam was of scant importance in revising policy or in shaping the president’s thinking about reelection.

At the book launch

A question was posed about how media myths emerge, and I noted that they arise from several sources, including an urge to identify examples of media power. Another factor is  what I call “complexity-avoidance”–the appeal of simplified explanations for complex historical events.

It is, after all, far easier to believe that Hearst and his “yellow press” brought on the Spanish-American War in 1898, I said, than it is to grasp the complexities of the failed diplomacy among Spain, Cuba, and the United States that gave rise to that conflict. It is far easier to believe that the Washington Post brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency, I said, than it is to sort through tangled lines of investigation of the Watergate scandal that ultimately forced Nixon from office.

Even then, I said, Nixon may have served out his term if not for the tape-recordings he made of his private Oval Office conversations. Those tapes, which the U.S. Supreme Court forced Nixon to produce in 1974, revealed his guilty role in the Watergate coverup.

I also was asked whether there are other media myths to bust.

Indeed there are, I said.

Getting It Wrong may deserve a sequel and suggested as candidates for a follow-on book the dubious phenomenon of “Pharm Parties” and the question of whether Cronkite really was “the most trusted man in America.”

Book signing at Newseum

I signed copies of Getting It Wrong following the “Inside Media” program, and then toasted the book’s publication at a reception sponsored by the Newseum and American University’s School of Communication.

The School’s dean, Larry Kirkman, offered generous remarks in his toast at the reception, which was attended by AU colleagues, former students, past research assistants, and friends and family.

WJC

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Photo credits:

  • Ruxandra Giura (audience view)
  • Bruce Guthrie