W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for the ‘Media myths’ Category

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He ‘did a Zhou Enlai’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times on July 26, 2011 at 10:15 am

Cohen (NYTimes photo)

Roger Cohen, a twice-a-week foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, stirred murmured commentary not long by defending Rupert Murdoch as a phone-hacking scandal swirled around the tycoon’s media holdings in Britain.

“If you add everything up,” Cohen wrote about the tough, old media mogul, “he’s been good for newspapers over the past several decades, keeping them alive and vigorous and noisy and relevant.”

Maybe Cohen was being contrarian. Or maybe he didn’t quite grasp what the scandal says about Murdoch and his corporate management.

In a more recent column, Cohen revealed that he’s not fully up to speed with the revised interpretation of Zhou Enlai’s famous comment in 1972 that “it’s too early” to discern the implications of upheaval in France.

The conventional interpretation is that Zhou was speaking about the French Revolution that began in 1789.

As such, his comment suggests a sagacity and a long view of history seldom matched by Western leaders.

Recent evidence has emerged, however, that says Zhou was referring not to the French Revolution but to the more recent political unrest that rocked France in 1968.

The new evidence was offered last month by Charles W.  (Chas) Freeman Jr., a retired U.S. diplomat who a was present when Zhou made the comment during President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972.

Freeman discussed the context of Zhou’s remark last month at a panel discussion in Washington, D.C. London’s Financial Times was first to report on the revised interpretation that Freeman offered about Zhou’s comment.

In a subsequent interview with me, Freeman said that Zhou made the remark during a discussion about revolutions that had failed or succeeded.

He pointed out that it was clear from the context that Zhou’s “too early to say” comment was in reference to upheaval in France in May 1968, not the years of turmoil that began in 1789.

Freeman described Zhou’s misinterpreted comment as “one of those convenient misunderstandings that never gets corrected,” adding that “it conveniently bolstered a stereotype … about Chinese statesmen as far-sighted individuals who think in longer terms than their Western counterparts.”

The misconstrued comment fit nicely with “what people wanted to hear and believe,” Freeman said, “so it took” hold.

And it’s not infrequently repeated.

Cohen invoked the conventional interpretation late last week, in a column that began this way:

“When I asked Gen. David H. Petraeus what the biggest U.S. mistake of the past decade has been, he did a Zhou Enlai on the French Revolution number to the effect that it was too early to say.

“The outgoing commander in Afghanistan and incoming Central Intelligence Agency chief is adept at politics,” Cohen wrote, “one reason he’s the object of the sort of political speculation once reserved for Gen. Colin L. Powell, who was the face of the military to most Americans before Petraeus assumed that role later in the post-9/11 era.”

The passage, “he did a Zhou Enlai,” suggests how irresistible Zhou’s misconstrued remark really is — a quality that’s typical of quotations that seem just too highly polished.

“Turns of phrase that sound too neat and tidy often are too perfect to be true,” I write in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which addresses and debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths.

Among the myths is the remark attributed to President Lyndon B. Johnson, who after watching Walter Cronkite’s pessimistic, on-air assessment about the Vietnam War supposedly said:

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

Or something to that effect.

Versions vary markedly.

But as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, the anecdote is almost certainly apocryphal.

Johnson wasn’t in front of a television when Cronkite’s special report about Vietnam aired on CBS television on February 27, 1968.

The president wasn’t lamenting the supposed loss of Cronkite’s support, either.

Rather, Johnson was on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, offering light-hearted banter at the 51st birthday party of a longtime political ally, Governor John Connally.

At about the time Cronkite was saying the U.S. war effort was “mired in stalemate,” Johnson was quipping:

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

WJC

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Jessica Lynch featured in ‘this day in history’ feature; WaPo ignored

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post on July 25, 2011 at 10:00 am

Lynch in 2003

It is remarkable how often Jessica Lynch pops up in media reports, even though eight years have passed since the bogus story about her heroics in an ambush in Iraq thrust her into the international limelight.

It’s likewise remarkable how seldom the Washington Post is identified as the sole source of the tale about her derring-do — how Lynch, a private in a non-combat Army maintenance unit, supposedly fought ferociously against Iraqi attackers, despite being shot and stabbed.

None of it was true; Lynch suffered neither gunshot nor stab wounds. She was badly injured in the crash of a Humvee as its fled the ambush. But Lynch never fired a shot in the attack, which took place March 23, 2003, in Nasiriyah in southern Iraq.

The other day, the online site of cable TV’s History Channel recalled Lynch and the return in July 2003 to her hometown in West Virginia as the “lead story” of its “this day in history” feature.

Predictably, the account made no mention of the singular role the Washington Post played in thrusting the bogus hero-warrior story into the public domain. The ensuing worldwide sensation had the effect of making Lynch the single best-known American soldier of the war.

Instead of mentioning the Post, the History Channel feature referred vaguely to “news accounts indicating that even after Lynch was wounded during the ambush she fought back against her captors.”

And just as vaguely, it blamed the government for the bogus story, noting that critics “charged the U.S. government with embellishing her story to boost patriotism and help promote the Iraq war.”

So just who in the “U.S. government” concocted the Lynch story “to boost patriotism and help promote the Iraq war”? Nor surprisingly, the History Channel feature didn’t say: Such accusations typically are unaccompanied by specific details.

The accusation is, though, sometimes aimed at the Pentagon — that the military ginned up the hero-warrior tale about Lynch to bolster public support for the war.

But that claim is untenable for at least two reasons, as I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

One, public backing for the war in Iraq was quite strong in the conflict’s early days. For example, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, taken of 1,012 American adults on March 29 and 30, 2003, found that 85.5 percent of respondents thought the war effort was going “very well” or “moderately well” for U.S. forces. And that was before Baghdad fell to U.S. ground forces.

So there was no need or incentive to concoct a hero-warrior tale to bolster support for the war.

Two, and more important, one of the Post reporters who wrote the bogus hero-warrior story about Lynch said in late 2003 that the Pentagon was not the source. The reporter, Vernon Loeb, stated flatly:

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

Loeb also said in the interview, which aired December 15, 2003, on National Public Radio, that the Pentagon “wouldn’t say anything about Jessica Lynch.”

He added:

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

On an earlier occasion, Loeb was quoted in a commentary in the New York Times as saying:

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

The Post’s hero-warrior story about Lynch was published April 3, 2003, and cited otherwise anonymous “U.S. officials” as sources.

As I’ve previously stated at Media Myth Alert, it is high time for the Post to identify the “U.S. officials” who led it astray.

The Post is under no obligation to protect the identity of sources who misled it so badly. Identifying them would clear the record by clarifying what role, if any, the Pentagon or other U.S. agencies had in the derivation of the bogus tale.

And doing so certainly would help make those periodic retrospective pieces such as the History Channel’s writeup about Lynch more complete, revealing, and accurate.

WJC

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More media myths from CounterPunch

In Bay of Pigs, Debunking, Furnish the war, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on July 24, 2011 at 8:30 am

CounterPunch touts itself as “America’s best political newsletter.”

It’s building a reputation for indulging in media-driven myths, too.

Since mid-March, essays posted at CounterPunch have:

CounterPunch has indulged yet again in media myth, in a commentary in its weekend edition about Rupert Murdoch’s troubled media empire.

CounterPunch claimed the tough old media mogul has “surpassed William Randolph Hearst,” press baron of the 19th and early 20th centuries, “in practicing yellow journalism.”

The commentary invoked the hoary media myth about Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain.

According to CounterPunch, Hearst said: “Get me the photos and I’ll get you the war.”

That was, CounterPunch added, “Hearst’s 1898 dictum to help start the Spanish-American War.”

Provocative tale. But it’s pure media myth.

Hearst’s vow is almost surely apocryphal, for reasons I discuss in my myth-busting book, Getting It Wrong, which came out last year.

Among the reasons:  The telegram that supposedly contained Hearst’s vow — a cable sent to artist Frederic Remington, on assignment to Cuba — has never turned up.

More significantly, as I point out Getting It Wrong, the anecdote about Hearst’s purported vow suffers from “an irreconcilable internal inconsistency.”

That is, it would have been absurd and illogical for Hearst to have vowed to “furnish the war” because war — specifically, the Cuban rebellion against Spain’s colonial rule — was the reason he sent Remington to Cuba in the first place.

In addition, the Spanish colonial authorities who ruled Cuba closely controlled and censored incoming and outgoing telegraphic traffic: They surely would have intercepted and called attention to Hearst’s incendiary telegram, had it been sent.

But in fact, there was, as I write in Getting It Wrong, no chance that telegrams would have flowed freely between Remington in Cuba and Hearst in New York.

So “furnish the war” (or, “provide the war”) wasn’t at all Hearst’s “dictum to help start the Spanish-American War.”

That Hearst helped bring on the war with Spain is a media myth, too.

It’s a myth dismantled in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, in which I pointed out that the yellow press of Hearst and his rival, Joseph Pulitzer, “is not to blame for the Spanish-American-War.

“It 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.”

The proximate cause of the war was the humanitarian crisis created by Spain’s bungled attempts to quell a rebellion that had begun in Cuba in 1895 and had spread across the island by 1897, when Remington arrived in Havana on assignment for Hearst.

WJC

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An outbreak of ‘follow the money,’ that phony Watergate line

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on July 23, 2011 at 7:05 am

From Oregon to Canada to India, news outlets turned yesterday to Watergate’s most famous made-up phrase, treating the line as if it were genuine.

Felt: Not his line

The line is “follow the money,” which supposedly was vital guidance that a secret source code-named “Deep Throat” gave to the Washington Post during its Watergate investigation in 1972-74.

The passage was offered up credulously by these news outlets yesterday:

  • The Huffington Post, in (yet another) commentary about the phone-hacking scandal that has battered Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The commentary declared: “During the Washington Post‘s investigative reporting of President [Richard] Nixon’s attempts to cover up the Watergate burglary, it’s [sic] source, ‘Deep Throat’ gave the reporters the best advice. ‘Deep Throat’ said that the truth would be discovered if they ‘follow the money.’ They did and it ultimately led to the resignation of President Nixon.”
  • The Register-Guard newspaper of Eugene, Oregon, in a column about the phone-hacking scandal: “As Deep Throat advised reporters unraveling a different national scandal, ‘Follow the money.’”
  • The Business News Network in Canada, in a blog post about interest rates in that country: “I’ll take the advice of Mark Felt, the former FBI agent most famously known as Deep Throat, the key source in Bob Woodward’s Watergate investigation: follow the money.”
  • The Hindu newspaper in India, in a commentary about suspected banking improprieties: “‘Follow the money’ was the advice given by the secret informant within the government to Bob Woodward of Washington Post at the beginning of the Watergate scandal.”

As those cases suggest, “follow the money” is impressively versatile. Its popularity seems limitless.

But however appealing and catchy, “follow the money” is contrived.

The phrase was never uttered by the “Deep Throat” source, who met periodically with Woodward as Watergate unfolded. (“Deep Throat” was self-identified in 2005 as W. Mark Felt, formerly the second-ranking official at the FBI. Felt never spoke during Watergate with Woodward’s reporting partner, Carl Bernstein.)

According to a database of Washington Post content, the phrase “follow the money” appeared in no news article or editorial about Watergate before 1981.

“Follow the money” doesn’t appear, either, in All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein’s book about their Watergate reporting, which came out in 1974.

The derivation of the passage lies in a scene in All the President’s Men, the cinematic version of Woodward and Bernstein’s book. The movie was released to much fanfare in April 1976, 20 months after Nixon resigned the presidency for his guilty role in obstructing justice in the Watergate scandal.

What pressed “follow the money” into the popular consciousness was an outstanding performance turned in by actor Hal Holbrook in the cinematic version of All the President’s Men.

Holbrook played a twitchy, conflicted, shadowy “Deep Throat.” In a 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 line with such quiet conviction that it did seem to be a way through the labyrinth that was the Watergate scandal.

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

In the end, Nixon was toppled by his efforts to cover up the signal crime of Watergate, the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972.

As a simplistic key to explaining the scandal, the follow-the-money interpretation minimizes the far more decisive forces that unraveled Watergate and forced Nixon from office.

As I point out in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, rolling up a scandal of Watergate’s complexity 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 the Watergate-related recordings that captured him plotting to cover up the Watergate break-in.

WJC

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‘Economist’ indulges in media myth

In 1897, Debunking, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on July 22, 2011 at 8:31 am

The latest issue of Britain’s Economist newsweekly carries a column that presents an intriguing discussion of “the madness of great men” — an affliction it says is common among media tycoons.

To buttress that point, the usually well-reported Economist turns to a media myth — the discredited notion that press baron William Randolph Hearst, the timeless bogeyman of American journalism, fomented the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Such claims about Hearst are often made but rarely supported by persuasive explanations as to how the contents of Hearst’s newspapers were transformed into U.S. policy and military action.

The Economist column offers no such explanation: Its assertion about Hearst is supported by no evidence.

The column, titled “Great bad men as bosses,” considers the serious recent troubles of media mogul Rupert Murdoch and introduces Hearst with a brief discussion of “what Norwegians call stormannsgalskap, the madness of great men.” (It also can be translated to “megalomania.”)

“Stormannsgalskap,” the Economist says, “is particularly common among media barons, not least because they frequently blur the line between reporting reality and shaping it. William Randolph Hearst is widely suspected of stirring up the Spanish-American war to give his papers something to report.”

Widely suspected by whom?

No serious historian of the Spanish-American war period gives much credence to such claims.

As I wrote in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, the yellow press of Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer “is not to blame for the Spanish-American-War. It 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.”

The proximate cause of the war was the humanitarian crisis created by Spain’s bungled attempts to quell a rebellion that had begun in Cuba in 1895 and had spread across the island by 1898.

To deprive the Cuban rebels of support, Spain’s colonial rulers herded Cuban women, children, and old men into garrison towns, where thousands of them died from starvation and disease.

While mostly forgotten nowadays, that humanitarian crisis was widely reported in the U.S. press, and widely condemned by the U.S. government.

The disaster on Cuba “inevitably stirred outrage and condemnation in the United States,” I noted in Yellow Journalism.

And as a leading historian of that period, Ivan Musicant, has correctly noted, the ill-advised and destructive policy toward Cuban non-combatants “did more to bring on the Spanish-American War than anything else the Spanish could have done.”

The Economist’s additional claim, that Hearst stirred up the war “to give his papers something to report,” is laughable.

Quite simply, there was no shortage of news to cover in the run-up to the Spanish-American War.

As I wrote in Yellow Journalism, a “variety of other events figured prominently on the Journal’s front page in the months before the Spanish-American War,” including the inauguration in March 1897 of President William McKinley;  the brief war between Greece and Turkey; the headless torso murder mystery that gripped New York in the summer of 1897; the Klondike gold rush; New York’s vigorously contested mayoral election, and the Journal-sponsored New Year’s Eve gala to celebrate the political consolidation of the five boroughs of New York City.

WJC

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Inflating the exploits of WaPo’s Watergate reporters

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on July 21, 2011 at 2:51 am

As it has receded in time and memory, the Watergate scandal of 1972-74 has become ever more prone to myth and misleading interpretation.

Bernstein in 2009 (Newseum photo)

That helps explain why Watergate’s dominant narrative centers on the reporting exploits of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, two then-young reporters for the Washington Post.

It’s far simpler to focus on two star reporters — and to inflate their accomplishments — than it is to wrestle with the forbidding complexity of a scandal that sent 19 men to jail and forced the resignation of a sitting U.S. president, Richard Nixon.

That’s a point I make in my media myth-busting book, Getting It Wrong, which came out last year. “How the Post and its reporters uncovered Watergate,” I write, “is deeply ingrained in American journalism as one of the field’s most important and self-reverential stories.”

It’s a narrative that commands considerable appeal abroad as well.

Just yesterday, Britain’s Sky News channel became the latest news outlet to indulge in the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate, declaring in a report posted online that “Bernstein was one of two reporters who revealed US president Richard Nixon’s efforts to cover up a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

“It led to the conviction of a number of White House officials and Mr Nixon’s eventual resignation,” Sky’s report said.

Well, no: Neither Bernstein nor Woodward “revealed” Nixon’s attempts to cover up the burglary at the Watergate complex in Washington, the scandal’s signal crime. And their reporting didn’t bring about Nixon’s downfall, either.

Nixon’s authorization of a cover-up — to obstruct justice by attempting to divert the FBI’s investigation of the break-in — wasn’t clearly demonstrated until July 1974.

That was when Nixon complied with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision and surrendered audiotapes of key, Watergate-related conversations that he had secretly recorded in the Oval Office of the White House.

The tapes clearly showed the president had engaged in a cover-up, a revelation that led directly to his resigning in August 1974.

Bernstein and Woodward’s reporting had nothing to do with the forced disclosure of the incriminating audiotapes.

Nor did Bernstein and Woodward’s reporting disclose that the tapes existed.

That Nixon had made such recordings emerged in July 1973, during the Watergate investigation by a select committee of the U.S. Senate.

To call out the erroneous Sky News report about Bernstein and Woodward is not to pick nits.

Rather, it’s to insist on a more precise understanding of the Washington Post’s modest role in Watergate — and to note how routinely that role is exaggerated.

In other words, to call out the Sky News report is to insist on what Bernstein says is journalism’s fundamental objective — that of seeking “the best obtainable version of the truth.”

And the truth is, the Post’s reporting did not disclose the cover-up Nixon ordered; nor did the newspaper’s reporting force the president’s resignation.

To roll up a scandal of the dimension of Watergate, I point out in Getting It Wrong, “required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

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

WJC

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Tarring Murdoch with Hearst’s evil ‘vow’ to ‘furnish the war’

In 1897, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Spanish-American War on July 20, 2011 at 8:28 am

Rupert Murdoch’s much-anticipated hearing yesterday before a Parliament committee was hardly very dramatic — save for the assault on the tough old media mogul by a chucklehead wielding a shaving cream-pie.

The hearing, which centered around the misconduct of journalists formerly in Murdoch’s employ, was more farce and tedium than high-noon encounter that threatened Murdoch’s far-reaching media empire.

Murdoch, who is 80 and clearly doddering, even won a measure of sympathy as victim of the none-too-bright shaving cream-pie attack.

What was fairly remarkable was that in the hearing’s aftermath at least a couple of U.S. commentators turned credulously to a hoary media myth to make points about Murdoch’s supposedly evil ways.

Hearst: Made no vow

The media myth is the tale that press baron William Randolph Hearst, in an exchange of telegrams with the artist Frederic Remington, vowed to “furnish the war” with Spain in the late 19th century.

I describe in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, why that tale is almost surely apocryphal for reasons that include Hearst’s denial and the improbable context in which his message supposedly was sent.

One of the pundits invoking the media myth was Milos Stehlik, a commentator on WBEZ, an FM radio station in Chicago.

Stehlik likened Murdoch to Hearst and Charles Foster Kane, the fictional media baron in Citizen Kane, the 1941 movie loosely based on Hearst’s life.

“Kane, Hearst and Murdoch … share a political activism which pretends to help the media-consuming masses while, in reality, mostly helped their own privileged class,” Stehlik declared, before invoking the “furnish the war” myth as if it were genuine.

“Hearst,” he said, “told artist Frederic Remington, who was in Cuba, to send dispatches about the war. Remington sent Hearst a telegram saying there was no war in Cuba. Hearst famously told Remington to just provide him the pictures, and he would furnish the war.”

Meanwhile in Seattle, Jon Talton, a newspaper columnist on economic issues, posted a commentary that began this way:

“Press lord Rupert Murdoch isn’t accused of doing anything some of his notorious forebears wouldn’t have attempted given the technology. ‘You supply the pictures and I’ll supply the war,’ William Randolph Hearst is said to have instructed his Cuba correspondents as he ginned up circulation on the eve of the Spanish-American War.”

If Hearst had made the vow, it wouldn’t have been “on the eve of the Spanish-American War,” as Talton wrote in his column for the Seattle Times. It would have been in January 1897 — 15 months before the war began.

That was when Remington arrived in Havana, on a brief assignment for Hearst’s New York Journal to draw sketches of the Cuban rebellion against Spanish colonial rule.

Remington soon tired of the assignment and, the myth has it, cabled Hearst, stating:

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

Hearst, in New York, supposedly replied by stating:

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

The anecdote’s sole original source was a blustering, cigar-chomping journalist named James Creelman, who recounted the tale in his 1901 memoir, On the Great Highway.

Creelman, though, did not explain how he heard about the Remington-Hearst exchange. It couldn’t have been first hand because at the time Remington was in Cuba, Creelman was in Spain, on assignment for the Journal.

That means Creelman could only have learned about the tale second-hand or, as is more likely, just made it up.

Significantly, the context of the supposed Remington-Hearst exchange makes no sense.

I write in Getting It Wrong that “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.”

The rebellion was a vicious conflict that began in early 1895; by early 1897, it had reached islandwide proportion. As such, the rebellion attracted much attention in U.S. newspapers, including those published by Hearst.

So what may prompt pundits to turn credulously and not infrequently to the anecdote about Hearst and his supposed wickedness?

Because it’s arguably the most deliciously evil tale in journalism history, a tale that reveals Hearst’s ruthlessness and his warmongering. It’s a tale about journalism at its most sinister and malign, a tale wrapped in a dark and arrogant pledge to bring on a war the country otherwise wouldn’t have fought.

And these days, it’s a handy if indirect way of tarring Murdoch, by associating him with Hearst in the exclusive club of vile and villainous media magnates.

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post

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A ‘fascinating and detailed exploration’

In Debunking, Media myths, War of the Worlds, Washington Post, Watergate myth on July 19, 2011 at 9:04 am

My media myth-busting book, Getting It Wrong,was reviewed recently by the Idaho Statesman, which called the work a “fascinating and detailed exploration.”

Getting It Wrong addresses and debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths, those dubious tales about the news media that masquerade as factual.

The Statesman’s review discusses in some detail the myths about the War of the Worlds radio broadcast in October 1938, which supposedly set off nationwide panic and mass hysteria, and about the Watergate scandal of 1972-74 which brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

The reviewer was Bob Kustra, president of Boise State University and the engaging host of the  Reader’s Corner, a weekly radio program about books and their authors. I was interviewed on Kustra’s show last month.

About the media myth of Watergate — the notion that intrepid reporters for the Washington Post broke or exposed the scandal and brought about Nixon’s resignation — Kustra writes:

“While Campbell acknowledges that most people believe two young and ambitious Washington Post reporters brought down a corrupt president, he deftly shows how journalism’s contribution to Nixon’s fall was modest at best.

“The president’s decline, he explains, was the consequence of his criminal conduct, which was exposed in the convergence of many forces. But it’s far easier to focus on two heroic journalists, says Campbell, than it is to grapple with the complexities of the Watergate scandal.

Nixon resigns: Not WaPo's doing

“Therein,” Kustra adds, “lies one of the reasons we are so likely to believe media myths — they offer simplistic answers to complex issues. They also lead us to believe the news media are very powerful and sometimes even dangerous forces in society.”

He also writes that the myths debunked in Getting It Wrong “are worth revisiting, and not just to set the record straight.

“Doing so offers important lessons on being discerning consumers of what we read and hear in the news.”

WJC

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Recalling Hearst to bash Murdoch: Superficial and off-target

In Debunking, Hurricane Katrina, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on July 18, 2011 at 12:26 am

Hearst: Murdoch's model?

The fallout from the phone-hacking scandal rocking Rupert Murdoch’s media holdings in Britain has prompted unflattering comparisons that the tough old media mogul is but a latter-day reincarnation of William Randolph Hearst, American press lord of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Trouble is, such comparisons are facile and no better than superficial. Hearst, for example, hardly established the international presence that Murdoch commands.

And these off-target comparisons have become an occasion to indulge in the hoary media myth that Hearst and his yellow press fomented the Spanish-American War in 1898.

The Sun Herald newspaper of Mississippi, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2006 for coverage of the Hurricane Katrina disaster on the Gulf Coast, did just that in an editorial published over the weekend.

“Not since William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire sensationalized news and gave a distinctive yellow tinge to journalism has the world seen the likes of Rupert Murdoch, the Australian/American media lord whose News Corporation has spread its tabloid brand in print and on the airwaves to so many corners of the globe,” the Sun Herald harrumphed in its editorial.

Of Hearst, the Sun Herald further stated:

“His newspapers were so powerful in molding public opinion that they were credited with pushing the United States into war with Spain in 1898.”

Really?

No.

As I pointed out in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, critics who blame the yellow press of Hearst (and his rival, Joseph Pulitzer) for bringing on the war invariably fail to explain how the contents of those newspapers came to be transformed into policy and military action.

How did that work? What was the mechanism? Why was the yellow press so singularly powerful at that moment in American history?

In truth, as I’ve noted previously at Media Myth Alert, there was no mechanism by which the newspapers’ contents were translated into policy and a decision to go to war. They were not that powerful.

Had the newspapers of Hearst and Pulitzer brought about the war with Spain, then “researchers should be able to find some hint of, some reference to, that influence in the personal papers and the reminiscences of policymakers of the time,” I wrote in Yellow Journalism, adding:

“But neither the diary entries of Cabinet officers nor the contemporaneous private exchanges among American diplomats indicate that the yellow newspapers exerted any influence at all. When it was discussed within the McKinley administration, the yellow press was dismissed as a nuisance or scoffed at as a complicating factor.”

In short, senior officials in the administration of President William McKinley largely disregarded the content of what was called the yellow press. They did not turn to it for guidance or insight in policymaking.

Their thinking was not shaped by yellow journalism.

A variation of the Murdoch-Hearst criticism is to assail Murdoch — as a commentary  posted yesterday at Huffington Post put it — “the latest prime purveyor of so-called ‘yellow journalism’.”

The author, novelist Terence Clarke, declared that yellow journalism as practiced by Hearst and Pulitzer “sacrificed truth in favor of sensationalism in order simply to sell more papers.

“It was a business ploy, not an example of high journalistic ideals. Now, with Murdoch leading the way, journalism in many instances has fallen victim to the same wish for sales, and has descended, again, from the high ground it should occupy.”

Oh, spare us such superficiality.

The yellow press of Hearst and Pulitzer was much more than merely sensational.

Anyone who has spent much time reading through their newspapers of the late 19th century invariably comes away impressed with the aggressive and news-oriented approaches they took.

David Nasaw, author of a commendably even-handed biography of Hearst, pointed this out notably well, writing:

“Day after day, Hearst and his staff improved on their product. Their headlines were more provocative than anyone else’s, their drawings more lifelike … the writing throughout the paper outstanding, if, at times, a bit long-winded.”

Not only that, but Hearst was willing to spend lavishly to get the news. He, much more so than Pulitzer, was inclined to tap prominent writers, such as Mark Twain, and pay them well to cover important events for his New York Journal.

Hearst paid $3,000 to the novelist, playwright, and foreign correspondent Richard Harding Davis to spend a month for the Journal in Cuba in early 1897, writing reports about the Cuban rebellion that was the proximate cause of the Spanish-American War.

That sum is the equivalent today of more than $50,000.

Moreover, the yellow press of the late 19th century exerted a lasting and profound influence on American journalism history.

As I wrote in Yellow Journalism, the genre “was much decried but its salient features often were emulated.”

Yellow journalism “was appealing and distinctive in its typography, in its lavish use of illustrations, in its aggressive newsgathering techniques,” I noted, adding:

“To a striking degree, features characteristic of the yellow press live on in American journalism, notably in the colorful layouts that characterize the formerly staid titles that used to disparage the yellow press—titles such as the New York Times and Washington Post.”

WJC

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Imprecise, overwrought Watergate analogies emerge in Murdoch scandal

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on July 17, 2011 at 3:00 am

Meeting his Watergate?

Watergate has become a frequent though imprecise point of reference for the reporting scandal that has battered Rupert Murdoch’s media holdings in Britain, prompting the closure of a leading Sunday tabloid, the resignation of two executives prominent in his news empire, and groveling apologies in print.

The scandal, which centers on illegal hacking of cell phone voicemail, has come to called Murdoch’s Watergate, a characterization embraced especially by Murdoch’s  enemies in America, hoping that this imbroglio may finally brings down the tough old media mogul.

The phone-hacking scandal is “a debacle that features Murdoch starring in the eerily similar role as the one Dick Nixon played,” declared Eric Boehlert in an essay posted the other day at Huffington Post.

Carl Bernstein, who teamed with Bob Woodward in covering Watergate for the Washington Post, has notably promoted the Murdoch-Watergate comparison.

In an essay titled “Murdoch’s Watergate?” and published recently in Newsweek, Bernstein wrote, not surprisingly:

“For this reporter, it is impossible not to consider these facts through the prism of Watergate. … The circumstances of the alleged lawbreaking within [Murdoch’s] News Corp. suggest more than a passing resemblance to Richard Nixon presiding over a criminal conspiracy in which he insulated himself from specific knowledge of numerous individual criminal acts while being himself responsible for and authorizing general policies that routinely resulted in lawbreaking and unconstitutional conduct.”

But it’s imprecise, premature, and a bit overwrought to liken the phone-hacking scandal to Watergate.

It’s no Watergate. Not yet, anyway. And it’s certainly not clear that Murdoch authorized policies that “routinely resulted in lawbreaking and unconstitutional conduct.”

Watergate was sui generis, an unprecedented constitutional crisis that led in to Nixon’s departure from office in disgrace in 1974. He was the first U.S. president ever to resign.

In addition, 19 men associated with Nixon’s presidency or his 1972 reelection campaign went to jail for Watergate-related crimes. (Woodward once called Watergate “an immensely complicated scandal with a cast of characters as varied as a Tolstoy novel.”)

Rolling up a scandal of such dimension required, as I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, “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, Nixon likely would have survived and served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most private conversations in the Oval Office of the White House. (Woodward has endorsed that interpretation as well. He said in an online chat at washingtonpost.com in 1997 that “if the tapes had never been discovered, or [Nixon] had burned them, he almost surely would not have had to resign, in my view.”)

Toppling Nixon was no certain outcome of Watergate, at least not in the first year or so of the slowly unfolding scandal. And bringing down Nixon wasn’t a consequence of the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein, hoary media myth notwithstanding.

The phone-hacking scandal — in which reporters and private investigators for Murdoch’s now-shuttered News of the World tabloid broke into the voicemail of scores of people — has been an occasion to conjure Watergate in another way. In a romanticized, glowing way that recalls Watergate as a golden age in American journalism.

The Houston Chronicle has given expression to the golden-age sentiment.

The newspaper declared in a tut-tutting editorial the other day that the phone-hacking scandal “is a very long way from the saga of All the President’s Men, the uplifting account of how two dogged young reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, with the backing of ethically responsible Washington Post management, broke the Watergate scandal in 1972 that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. It inspired a generation of new journalists to their mission and exhibited the finest aspects of the profession.”

All the President’s Men was Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 book about their Watergate reporting. The book’s cinematic version came out in 1976 and helped solidify the mythical notion that the Post brought down Nixon.

It deserves noting that the Chronicle’s editorial errs in at least three respects.

One, the Post management was not always so “ethically responsible” during Watergate.

For example, top editors approved an ethically suspect scheme allowing Woodward and Bernstein to approach federal grand jurors hearing Watergate testimony and ask them to break their vows of secrecy. As the reporters wrote in All the President’s Men, the ill-advised overtures to grand jurors nearly landed them in jail.

Two, the Post did not break the Watergate scandal.

The signal crime of Watergate — the burglary in June 1972 at Democratic National Committee headquarters — was interrupted by police. Within hours, news was circulating of the arrest of five burglars at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.

The Post’s article about the break-in appeared beneath the byline of Alfred E. Lewis, a veteran police reporter, and it drew heavily on information from investigators.

In subsequent Watergate reporting, moreover, the Post exposed  neither the cover-up of crimes linked to the break-in, nor the payment of hush money to the burglars. Nor did it break the news about Nixon’s secret audiotapes.

Three, the claim that coverage of Watergate “inspired a generation of new journalists to their mission” is exaggerated.

Watergate produced no enrollment surge in journalism programs at American colleges and university. Enrollment growth in fact had begun well before Woodward and Bernstein wrote their first Watergate-related story in 1972.

Still, as I note in Getting It Wrong, the notion that Woodward and Bernstein inspired a generation of students to take up journalism “lives on despite its thorough repudiation in scholarly research.”

Like many media-driven myths, the tale of inspiration is almost too good not to be true.

WJC

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

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