W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for the ‘Media myths’ Category

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Fox News misremembers Watergate and ‘follow the money’

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on August 16, 2011 at 9:20 am

I’ve referred to “follow the money” as Watergate’s best-known made-up line.

It also can be thought of as Watergate’s best-known misremembered line.

I say that because a Fox News commentary posted yesterday thoroughly misremembered the phrase as having been part of the “media circus” of Watergate in the months before the scandal reached its denouement with Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

The Fox commentary declared:

“America was transfixed for months by [Watergate-related] televised hearings presided over by the colorful Sen. Sam Ervin. … We learned about the mysterious insider, pornographically code-named ‘Deep Throat’ murmuring intriguing clues like ‘Follow the Money….’ It was a media circus.”

But as I’ve noted at Media Myth Alert, “follow the money” was not part of the vernacular of Watergate. It was never offered as advice — murmured or otherwise — by the stealthy “Deep Throat” source, who met periodically with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post as the scandal unraveled.

(The identity of “Deep Throat” remained a secret for more than 30 years until W. Mark Felt, a former top FBI official, self-identified himself as having been Woodward’s secret source during Watergate.)

What’s more, “follow the money” appeared in no Watergate-related article or editorial in the Post until June 1981.

Nor is the line to be found in All the President’s Men, the book Woodward and his Post colleague, Carl Bernstein, wrote about their Watergate reporting.

The phrase exists only in the movies — in the cinematic version of All the President’s Men, which came out in April 1976.

“Follow the money” was written into the screenplay of All the President’s Men and spoken by the actor Hal Holbrook, who turned in a memorable performance as “Deep Throat.”

Holbrook intoned “follow the money” with such steely assurance that it did indeed seemed to suggest a way — however simplistic — to unravel the scandal.

But even if “Deep Throat”/Felt had counseled Woodward to “follow the money,” the advice would have neither unraveled Watergate nor led the reporter to Nixon.

Nixon quit the presidency not because he misused campaign funds; he resigned in disgrace after it became clear he had sought to obstruct justice by covering up the signal crime of Watergate, the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972.

As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, rolling up a scandal of the dimension and complexity of Watergate required “the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

“Even then,” I write, “Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House.

“Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” — which cost him the presidency.

WJC

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60 years after his death, media myth towers around Hearst

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Spanish-American War on August 15, 2011 at 4:35 am

The BBC over the weekend marked the 60th anniversary of the death of William Randolph Hearst by posting a piece I wrote about the mythology surrounding the often-scorned media tycoon of the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Hearst: Routinely scorned

Hearst, I wrote, “lives on 60 years after his death as the mythical bogeyman of American journalism, the personification of the field’s most egregious impulses,” and the inspiration for the epithet “yellow journalism.”

I discussed the hardy media myths that Hearst famously vowed to “furnish the war” with Spain and then made good on the pledge.

“The towering mythology that envelopes Hearst,” I noted, “began to take hold long before his death on 14 August 1951.

“The lore dates to the late 1930s and the first in a succession of wretched biographies about Hearst.

“Among them was Imperial Hearst, a truculent work that excoriated Hearst’s increasingly conservative politics and resurrected the ‘furnish the war’ myth.”

Even more important to the mythology around Hearst, I wrote, was Orson Welles’ cinematic masterpiece, Citizen Kane.

“The movie was based loosely on Hearst’s life and times, and received mostly mixed reviews when it was released in 1941,” I noted, adding:

“Hearst did try to have the film killed, which served to enhance its latent appeal. Kane was rediscovered in the 1960s and ultimately gained deserved recognition as a classic.”

I noted that a rollicking scene in Kane “borrows from and paraphrases the ‘furnish the war’ anecdote, which further helped to implant the myth in the popular consciousness.”

Hearst was a ready target for the contempt of his peers and rivals because of inherited wealth enabled him to enter journalism at the top — as publisher of the San Francisco Examiner and, later in the 19th century, the New York Journal.

Hearst’s quixotic personality also made his a target of media mythmaking. I quoted David Nasaw’s fine biography of Hearst, The Chief, which noted:

“William Randolph Hearst was a huge man with a tiny voice; a shy man who was most comfortable in crowds; a war hawk in Cuba and Mexico but a pacifist in Europe; an autocratic boss who could not fire people; a devoted husband who lived with his mistress; a Californian who spent half his life in the East.”

It’s little wonder then why Hearst was, and remains, the object of so much myth and misunderstanding.

He also used his newspapers as platforms for pursuing his mostly unfulfilled political ambitions — which further accounts for the mythology, which further explains why he became a lightning rod for enduring scorn.

Hearst ran for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency in 1904, but fell well short. Later, he ran for governor of New York and mayor of New York City, and lost.

By 1910 or so, Hearst’s political ambitions were, I noted, mostly spent.

And now, 60 years after his death, the mythology surrounding Hearst is so firmly entrenched so as never to be expunged.

WJC

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Blogging about journalism history: Why, and why bother?

In Debunking, Media myths on August 10, 2011 at 6:44 am

Journalism historians who blog.

It seems a little oxymoronic.

After all, isn’t journalism history a little too fusty, a little too musty, and a little too obscure to be readily adapted to contemporary social media such as blogging?

One might reflexively think so.

But a panel of four journalism historians who blog will discuss why they do so at a panel in St. Louis this afternoon, during the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).

The panel, titled “We blog about journalism history: Why, and why bother,” will consider the value of injecting historical dimension into contemporary debates and critiques about the performance of  news media, both traditional and online.

I’ll moderate and participate on the panel, which will bring together Chris Daly of Boston University, Karen Russell of the University of Georgia, and James McPherson of Whitworth College.

I intend to point out how blogging about journalism history can offer relevant and valuable context to the blogosphere’s never-ending debates about media performance. Journalism historians can bring to those debates perspective and analysis that would otherwise be missing or overlooked.

I also expect to note there are personal reasons for blogging as well. By blogging, journalism historians can test emergent ideas and hypotheses. Blogging can reinforce (and direct attention to) previously published work — much as Media Myth Alert seeks to do in promoting my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths.

Blogging is a way to call out media myths. After all, as historian Gerard DeGroot has pointed out, “The good historian is a mythbuster.”

Blogging also allows journalism historians to take the steps toward developing larger, more detailed works, a point suggested several years ago in an intriguing blog post by Timothy Burke about why historians blog.

Among other points, Burke said he writes online essays because “I want to find out how much of my scholarly work is usefully translatable into a wider public conversation.”

Blogging about journalism history can have pedagogical value and impact far beyond the blogger’s expectations and knowledge. As such, blog posts about topics in journalism history may greatly expand the reach and application of a scholar’s research.

So it promises to be lively, the AEJMC blogging panel, which convenes at 1:30 p.m. in the Landmark #1 meeting room of the Renaissance Grand and Suites Hotel in St. Louis.

Panel-goers are invited to live-Tweet the proceedings, and use the Twitter hashtags #AEJMCblogging and #AEJMC11.

WJC

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Following the money on 37th anniversary of Nixon’s fall

In Anniversaries, Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post on August 9, 2011 at 12:55 am

Nixon resigns, 1974

It’s somehow fitting on this, the 37th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s resignation, to direct attention to the myth and hyperbole that embrace the best-known line of the Watergate scandal, the line that supposedly helped bring him down.

That line, of course, is “follow the money,” which purportedly was crucial advice given the Washington Post by a super-secret, high-level source code-named “Deep Throat.”

“Follow the money” was said to have been so telling and effective that it’s still cited as exemplary guidance applicable in journalism, politics, and finance.

Just yesterday, for example, Barry Nolan, a journalist and contributor to Boston Magazine’s “Boston Daily” blog, invoked the famous phrase, writing:

“Any time you really want to know why a vote happened the way it did, the single best piece of advice ever given came from ‘Deep Throat,’ the shadowy tipster in the Watergate scandal. ‘Follow the money,’ he told the Washington Post reporters.”

It may seem like stellar advice, but it’s guidance that the “Deep Throat” source offered only in the movies.

As I’ve discussed at Media Myth Alert, “follow the money” is Watergate’s most famous made-up line.

The phrase was written into the screenplay of All the President’s Men, the 1976 cinematic version of the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post.

“Follow the money” appears nowhere in Woodward and Bernstein’s book about their Watergate reporting — reporting that did not, as I discuss in my latest work, Getting It Wrong, take down Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

Nor did “follow the money” appear in any Watergate-related news article or editorial in the Post until June 1981, nearly seven years after Nixon’s resignation.

Nor did “Deep Throat” — who was self-identified in 2005 as W. Mark Felt, formerly the FBI’s second-ranking official — utter the line in his periodic meetings with Woodward. (And Felt/”Deep Throat” didn’t meet Bernstein until 2008.)

“Follow the money” was memorably intoned not by Mark Felt but by Hal Holbrook, the actor who played “Deep Throat” in All the President’s Men.

As I’ve noted, Holbrook turned in a marvelous performance as a tormented, conflicted, and stealthy “Deep Throat.”

Holbrook delivered the “follow the money” line with such conviction and steely assurance, that it seemed for all the world to offer a way through the labyrinth of the Watergate scandal.

But even if Woodward had been counseled to “follow the money,” the advice certainly neither would have unraveled Watergate nor led him to Nixon.

Nixon resigned 37 years ago today not because he misused campaign funds but because he sought to obstruct justice by covering up the signal crime of Watergate, the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972.

The simplified follow-the-money  interpretation of Watergate effectively deflects attention from the decisive forces that ultimately forced Nixon from office.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, rolling up a scandal of Watergate’s intricacy and dimension required “the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

“Even then,” I write, “Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House.

“Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” that cost him the presidency.

WJC

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No ‘rock-em,’ no ‘sock-em’: What ails WaPo

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on August 7, 2011 at 1:59 am

The ombudsman of the Washington Post, Patrick Pexton, weighs in today with platitudes and hang-wringing about the newspaper. He mostly misses the mark.

Pexton writes in his column that the Post’s “future lies not with the rich; it lies with the citizenry.

“This newspaper must be the one source of high-quality, probing Washington news that readers in this region and across the country can look to for holding their government accountable. This publication must be for all Americans.”

Oh, brother.

But wait: Here’s more vague abstraction:

“The Post,” Pexton writes, “can’t be a liberal publication or a conservative one. It must be hard-hitting, scrappy and questioning — skeptical of all political figures and parties and beholden to no one. It has to be the rock-’em-sock-’em organization that is passionate about the news. It needs to be less bloodless and take more risks when chasing the story and the truth.”

A “rock-’em-sock-’em organization,” eh? Well, that’s useful guidance.

In his five or so months as ombudsman, Pexton hasn’t dared touch the electrified third rail about the Post, which one of his predecessors, Deborah Howell, gamely if belatedly addressed.

That’s a decided lack of intellectual diversity in the Post’s newsroom. In mid-November 2008, shortly after Barack Obama was elected president, Howell wrote in her ombudsman column:

“I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.”

Howell’s column quoted Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism as saying that “conservatives are right that journalism has too many liberals and not enough conservatives. It’s inconceivable that that is irrelevant.”

In Obama's thrall

The lack of intellectual diversity often shows in the Post’s report. Even casual reading signals that the newspaper remains in the thrall of Obama, despite his clearly failing presidency.

Obama scarcely gets “rock-’em-sock-’em” treatment from the Post.

Last Wednesday, for example, the Post’s once-edgy “Style” section devoted most of its front page to a cheery feature about the meaning of Obama’s turning 50-years-old.

“On Thursday,” the article gushed, “President Obama — one of American history’s most precocious achievers — joins the ranks of Washington 50-somethings ….”

But what ails the Post goes well beyond its routinely tender treatment of Obama.

The Post’s local report is superficial, a diet of eye-rolling, feel-good features. The newspaper carries little staff-produced national coverage. Its international report is undistinguished, especially compared to that of the New York Times.

Moreover, the Post offers few notable cases of investigative journalism any more.

It has won two Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting in 25 years, which has to be considered meager for a newspaper that reputedly brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency with its relentless digging into the Watergate scandal.

But as I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the Post-Watergate trope, of course, is a powerful media-driven myth.

I’d be remiss were I to fail to note that the Post never has come clean about how it erred so utterly in offering the world the bogus hero-warrior tale about Jessica Lynch in the early days of the Iraq War.

Lynch, the Post reported on its front page on April 3, 2003, “fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday.”

But none of the derring-do attributed to Lynch was true, and the Post has never explained who led it so badly astray.

Moreover, the staff cuts and buyouts of recent years left few notable characters on the newspaper’s staff.

Gone are such colorful figures as the erudite and pugnacious Henry Allen, a Pulitzer winner who left the Post after throwing punches at a staff writer who called him a c—sucker.

Now there was “rock-’em-sock-’em,” old school variety.

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post.

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India high court order invokes phony Watergate line

In Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on August 2, 2011 at 9:48 am

Two Supreme Court judges in India last month turned to Watergate’s most famous made-up line in ordering an investigation into large sums of money believed stashed in banks abroad.

The judges in their order cited the made-up line as if it had been genuine advice from a high-level source to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post  during the newspaper’s investigation of the Watergate scandal.

The line is “follow the money” — and it had no role whatsoever in the Watergate scandal.

“Follow the money” was never uttered by Woodward’s stealthy source, who was code-named “Deep Throat.”

The line appears nowhere in the All the President’s Men, the book Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote about their Watergate reporting for the Post.

Nor did the passage appear in any Watergate-related news article or editorial in the Post before June 1981 — nearly seven years after the scandal reached its denouement with President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

“Follow the money” was written into the screenplay of All the President’s Men, the 1976 movie based on Woodward and Bernstein’s book.

Many people and many news outlets over the years have cited “follow the money” as if it were real, as if it had been advice to Woodward that really worked.

Just last week, for example, a column in London’s high-brow Financial Times newspaper described “follow the money” as the “mantra” of Watergate. And a column posted at Huffington Post a couple of weeks ago also repeated “follow the money” as if it had been vital guidance to uncovering Watergate.

But finding its way into a high court order probably represents a first for “follow the money.”

As noted in a Bloomberg news service report yesterday, the two judges — B. Sudershan Reddy and S.S. Singh Nijjar — invoked “follow the money” at the outset of the order they released early last month.

Credulously, the judges wrote:

“‘Follow the money’ was the short and simple advice given by the secret informant, within the American Government, to Bob Woodward, the journalist from Washington Post, in aid of his investigations of the Watergate Hotel break in.”

So how is it that such errors are made? What explains the impressive reach and popularity of this appealing but contrived statement?

A partial explanation is that “follow the money” seems just too good, too delicious, not to be true. It’s in the class of William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain: It’s a quotation that really ought to true.

And as I point out in my media myth-busting book, Getting It Wrong:

“To thwart media myths, journalists can start by applying a measure of skepticism to pithy, telling quotes such as Hearst’s vow to ‘furnish the war.’ … Turns of phrase that sound too neat and tidy often are too perfect to be true.”

The popularity of “follow the money” goes beyond appealing pithiness and is rooted in the dramatic quality of All the President’s Men, the most-watched movie ever made about Watergate.

The “Deep Throat” character was played in All the President’s Men by the actor Hal Holbrook, who turned in a marvelous performance.

In a late-night scene in a darkened parking garage, the shadowy, raspy-voiced Holbrook told the Woodward character (played by Robert Redford):

“I have to do this my way. You tell me what you know, and I’ll confirm. I’ll keep you in the right direction, if I can, but that’s all.

“Just follow the money.”

Holbrook delivered the line with such quiet insistence that it truly seemed to offer a way through the labyrinth of the Watergate scandal. And the popularity of the movie carried “follow the money” into the vernacular.

But such guidance, had it really been offered to Woodward, would have taken the reporter only so far. Watergate, after all, was much broader than the improper use of campaign monies.

Nixon was toppled not by heroic journalists who followed a money trail, but by irrefutable evidence captured on audiotapes that he had ordered the cover up Watergate’s signal crime, the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972.

WJC

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Some dubious history from Frank Rich

In Media myths, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on August 1, 2011 at 9:50 am

Frank Rich, in a lengthy New York magazine screed about Rupert Murdoch, invokes the hoary media myth that William Randolph Hearst’s “papers famously fomented the Spanish-American War and perfected the modern gossip machine.”

I won’t quarrel much with Rich’s claim about “the modern gossip machine.” But the bit about the Spanish-American War represents a serious misreading of history.

In addressing such a dubious assertion as Hearst’s yellow press “fomented the Spanish-American War,” it’s useful to ask: How’d they do it? How was newspaper content translated into war policy?

Rich doesn’t say. He doesn’t pause to consider how it was that content of Hearst’s newspapers set an agenda for war that the administration of President William McKinley pursued.

The yellow press in fact had no such agenda-setting influence. It was a negligible factor.

As I wrote in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, McKinley administration officials took no leads from Hearst’s newspapers.

They derided the yellow press, when they thought of it at all, and regarded it as a complicating factor in efforts to resolve a diplomatic impasse over Spain’s harsh rule of Cuba — an impasse that gave rise in April 1898 to the Spanish-American War.

The impasse arose from Spain’s brutal but ineffective attempts to put down a rebellion on Cuba that began in 1895 and reached islandwide proportion by 1898.

To tamp down the rebellion, Spain imposed a policy it called “reconcentration,” in which tens of thousands of Cuban men, women, and children were herded into garrisons towns and fortified areas, from where they could provide no aid or support to Cuban insurgents in the countryside.

“Reconcentration” brought on widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease. Tens of thousands of Cuban non-combatants died as a result of the Spanish policy which, as historian Ivan Musicant has written, “did more to bring on the Spanish-American War than anything else the Spanish could have done.”

The misguided policy, Musicant also noted, “turned public opinion enormously in the United States.”

Ultimately, then, as I wrote in Yellow Journalism, the Spanish-American War was “the result of a convergence of forces far beyond the control or direct influence of even the most aggressive of the yellow newspapers, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.”

I also noted:

“While the yellow press may have reported extensively on the consequences of Spain’s failures and missteps, it did not create them.”

So what? one might ask.

After all, Rich’s reference to Hearst and the Spanish-American War represented a small portion of a lengthy article about Murdoch. So why make a fuss about it?

Several reasons offer themselves.

For starters, the Hearst-Murdoch comparison, as I’ve pointed out previously at Media Myth Alert, is facile and inexact. The similarities between the two media tycoons are largely superficial.

Notably, Hearst had nothing akin to the global reach of Murdoch’s multimedia empire. And Hearst, unlike Murdoch, vigorously pursued political ambitions: Hearst ran repeatedly and mostly unsuccessfully for high political office during his late 30s and 40s, before giving up.

But a more important reason for directing attention to this dubious bit of media history is that Rich arguably should have known better: Few serious historians buy into the claim about Hearst and his newspapers fomenting the war with Spain.

And thinking it through, it doesn’t seem very logical: Could newspaper content be so powerful and decisive that it could push a country into war it otherwise wouldn’t have fought?

Does it really work that way?

Assuredly not.

WJC

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A media myth eruption: WaPo, Watergate, and Nixon’s fall

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on July 30, 2011 at 4:55 am

“Bimbo eruptions” was the memorably colorful term invoked during the 1992 presidential campaign by Betsey Wright, an aide to presidential candidate Bill Clinton, to describe the suspicions and potential allegations about Clinton’s womanizing.

Sure, he did

The past couple of days have brought an eruption of media myth — notably, the rich and appealing tale that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting for the Washington Post brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency in the Watergate scandal.

Not even the Post buys into that simplistic and media-centric interpretation. As Michael Getler, the newspaper’s then-ombudsman correctly noted in 2005:

“Ultimately, it was not The Post, but the FBI, a Congress acting in bipartisan fashion and the courts that brought down the Nixon administration. They saw Watergate and the attempt to cover it up as a vast abuse of power and attempted corruption of U.S. institutions.”

(More coarsely, Woodward himself has declared: “To say the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.”)

Even so, the media myth about Woodward, Bernstein, and the Post — the heroic-journalist myth, as I describe it in my latest book, Getting It Wrong — is so delicious and compelling that it lives on and on, as this recent eruption attests.

Figuring in the media myth eruption have been:

  • The Daily Beast, which rhetorically asked in a commentary yesterday about the phone-hacking scandal that has battered Rupert Murdoch’s media in Britain: “Did Woodward and Bernstein need [phone-hackers and private investigators] to bring down Richard Nixon?”
  • The Daily Mirror  tabloid in Britain declared in an article posted online today that “Watergate was exposed by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.”
  • Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, which declared passage in an editorial about Murdoch’s troubles in Britain: “The Washington Post toppled President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal.”
  • The publisher of the North Platte Telegraph in Nebraska, who in a column the other day referred to the “early 1970s when the Post brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon using primarily an unnamed source.” That was a reference to Woodward’s stealthy, high-level source who was code-named “Deep Throat.”

The appearance of the heroic-journalist myth in such diverse outlets and contexts is testifies to how deeply embedded the tale has become in the popular consciousness.

And why is that?

The heroic-journalist myth, as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, is “ready short-hand for understanding Watergate and its denouement, a proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity.”

Rather that attempting to keep straight the dimensions of a scandal that began to break nearly 40 years ago, it is fair easier to embrace the proxy version — the simplified narrative that Woodward and Bernstein took down Nixon, with help from the “Deep Throat” source.

The identity of “Deep Throat” remained a secret — and the subject of much speculation and many guessing games — until 2005 when W. Mark Felt and his family announced that Felt, a former FBI official, had been Woodward’s mysterious source.

The heroic-journalist myth lives on because it’s such a reassuring narrative for the news media — a tale that describes the news media at their supposed best, a time when their reporting made a powerful difference in national life.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, the notion that the Post and its reporters exposed the Watergate scandal “is deeply ingrained in American journalism as one of the field’s most important and self-reverential stories.”

It’s a comforting trope about a purported triumph for a profession that’s more accustomed to scorn and condemnation than applause and approbation.

But it’s no less a media myth.

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post.

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The Fin Times and the ‘mantra’ of Watergate

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on July 28, 2011 at 7:33 am

The single phrase associated most often with Watergate surely is “follow the money” — guidance supposedly given to Washington Post reporters covering the scandal in the early 1970s.

“Follow the money” also is the best-known made-up line of Watergate.

The statement is only as real as images projected on the screen: “Follow the money” was written into the screenplay of All the President’s Men, the cinematic version of the Watergate book by Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

But because it sounded so compelling, because it seemed to be such crucial guidance to unraveling the dimensions of Watergate, “follow the money” made a smooth transition from cinematic fiction to the vernacular.

So it’s commonly believed that “follow the money” was guidance uttered by the  Post’s high-level secret source, who was code-named “Deep Throat.”

The usually sober and usually well-reported Financial Times of London yesterday invoked “follow the money” as if it were genuine, stating in a column on financial matters:

“’Follow the money’ might have been the mantra for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in investigating the Watergate scandal. But ‘follow the debt’ would be a better way of summing up where investors should be looking for the next bubble.”

We’ll leave “follow the debt” to bubble-seeking investors.

What intrigues Media Myth Alert is the reference to “follow the money” as the “mantra” of Watergate.

No way was it Watergate’s “mantra.”

The line appeared in no Watergate-related news article or editorial in the Post until 1981 — nearly seven years after Watergate had reached a climax with the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Moreover, “follow the money” appears nowhere in Woodward and Bernstein’s book about their Watergate reporting. The book came out in June 1974, a couple of months before Nixon quit the presidency in disgrace.

So the phrase was no “mantra.”

What pressed “follow the money” into the vernacular was the marvelous performance of actor Hal Holbrook in the cinematic version of All the President’s Men.

Holbrook played a conflicted, shadowy, even tormented “Deep Throat” character. In a memorable, late-night scene in a darkened parking garage, Holbrook told the Woodward character (played by Robert Redford):

“I have to do this my way. You tell me what you know, and I’ll confirm. I’ll keep you in the right direction, if I can, but that’s all.

“Just follow the money.”

Holbrook delivered the “follow the money” line with such quiet conviction that it seemed to be a guide to unraveling the labyrinthine scandal that was Watergate.

Bernstein (Newseum photo)

But had it really been offered to Woodward (“Deep Throat” never met Bernstein during Watergate), “follow the money” would have taken him only so far.

Watergate, after all, was much broader than the misuse of campaign funds.

What ultimately brought down Nixon was  his plotting to cover up the signal crime of Watergate — the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972.

As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, rolling up a scandal of Watergate’s dimension required “the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

“Even then,” I write, “Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House.”

Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender the Watergate-related recordings that captured him plotting to cover up the Watergate break-in.

Heeding advice to “follow-the-money” scarcely would have enabled investigators to uncover the decisive evidence about Nixon’s misconduct.

WJC

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Juan Williams’ new book repeats Spanish-American War myth

In Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on July 27, 2011 at 8:58 am

The new book by Juan Williams, the political analyst clumsily dismissed by NPR last year, offers some history of American journalism.

Some inaccurate history of American journalism.

The book, Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate, repeats the hoary media myth that the yellow press of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer brought on the Spanish-American War of 1898.

That’s a facile, media-centric interpretation endorsed by few if any serious historians of the conflict.

According to an excerpt of Muzzled posted at the online site of Fox News,  Williams writes:

“Hearst and Pulitzer became infamous for starting a real war. They whipped up so much anger at Spain through inflammatory stories about Spain’s handling of American vessels that they incited the United States to go to war with Spain in the Spanish-American War.”

Williams also says of Hearst and Pulitzer:

“Their coverage of the news, from crime to political scandals to war, was a study in sensationalized accounts, including outright distortion and lies, in a battle to sell more papers in New York City.”

Hearst and Pulitzer were bitter rivals, to be sure. But anyone who has spent much time reading their newspapers of the mid- and late-1890s can only be impressed by the vigor and breadth of their report.

As media historian John D. Stevens wrote in his study of sensationalism and New York City journalism, it is “tempting to caricature the yellow papers as being edited for janitors and clerks.”

But in fact they “published a fair amount of sober financial, political, and diplomatic information,” Stevens wrote. They were much more than merely sensational.

If the newspapers of Hearst and Pulitzer titillated, Stevens noted, they also informed.

In any case, they certainly cannot be blamed for bringing on the Spanish-American War.

As I wrote in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies:

The yellow press “did not force — it could not have forced— the United States into hostilities with Spain over Cuba in 1898. The conflict was, rather, the result of a convergence of forces far beyond the control or direct influence of even the most aggressive of the yellow newspapers, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.”

Claims that the yellow press brought on the war, I wrote, “are exceedingly media-centric, often rest on the selective use of evidence, and tend to ignore more relevant and immediate factors that give rise to armed conflict.”

Those factors centered around a diplomatic impasse between the United States and Spain over Spanish colonial rule of Cuba — the scene of an islandwide rebellion that had begun in 1895.

In a failed attempt to put down the rebellion, Spanish authorities ordered thousands of Cubans, mostly old men, women, and children, into garrison towns where they could offer neither support nor supplies to the Cuban rebels.

The authorities called the policy “reconcentration,” and it gave rise to malnutrition and disease: Unknown tens of thousands of Cuban non-combatants died from illness and starvation.

The human rights disaster on Cuba “inevitably stirred outrage and condemnation in the United States,” I wrote in Yellow Journalism. The conditions on Cuba were in 1897 and early 1898 a frequent topic of reporting in the American press — included, but not limited to, the newspapers of Hearst and Pulitzer.

A leading historian of that period, Ivan Musicant, has quite correctly observed that the abuses and suffering caused by reconcentration “did more to bring on the Spanish-American War than anything else the Spanish could have done.”

The yellow press reported on, but certainly did not create, the devastating effects of Spain’s ill-considered and destructive policy.

So to indict Hearst and Pulitzer, as Williams does, for supposedly “starting” the Spanish-American War is to misread the evidence and do disservice to a keener understanding of the much-maligned genre of yellow journalism.

WJC

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