W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for the ‘Media myths’ Category

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Encore: Sighting the mythical ‘Cronkite Moment’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times on September 23, 2010 at 5:43 am

Cronkite in Vietnam

Sighting the “Cronkite Moment” is fairly easy game.

After all, few media-driven myths are invoked as routinely or as matter-of-factly as the legendary occasion when CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite altered U.S. policy with his downbeat, on-air assessment of the war in Vietnam.

The “Cronkite Moment” stems from a special report that aired February 27, 1968. At the end of the half-hour show, Cronkite intoned that the U.S. war effort was “mired in stalemate” and suggested that negotiations might eventually offer a way out for American forces.

The myth–which is debunked in my new book, Getting It Wrong–lies in the purported reaction to Cronkite’s assessment.

At the White House, President Lyndon Johnson supposedly watched the program and, upon hearing the anchorman’s closing remarks, reached over and snapped off the television set, declaring:

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

Or words to that effect: Versions vary as to what the president purportedly said.

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America” was the version invoked the other day in a commentary posted at the Daily Caller online site, in a recent sighting of the myth.

The commentary–which discussed former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s recent criticism of President Barack Obama–opened by invoking the “Cronkite Moment,” stating:

“‘If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America,’ said President Lyndon B. Johnson at the time of the Communist Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968. Walter Cronkite was then the CBS News anchor man, often described as ‘the most trusted man in America.’ Just a few weeks after he said that, LBJ withdrew from his party’s nomination contest.”
But as I note in Getting It Wrong, Johnson did not see the Cronkite program when it aired. Nor was the president at the White House.

He was in Austin, Texas, on the campus of the University of Texas, attending the 51st birthday party of a longtime political ally, Governor John Connally.

About the time Cronkite offered his “mired in stalemate” assessment, Johnson was joking about Connally’s age, saying:

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

It wasn’t the most humorous joke ever told by a president. But Johnson clearly wasn’t throwing his hands up in despair about his failed war policy.

He wasn’t lamenting “If I’ve lost Cronkite….”

There is, moreover, no evidence that Johnson later saw the Cronkite program on videotape.

“The power of the ‘Cronkite moment,'” I write in Getting It Wrong, “resides in the sudden, unexpected, and decisive effect it supposedly had on the president:  Such an effect would have been absent, or greatly diminished, had Johnson seen the program on videotape at some later date.”

But even if Johnson later heard—or heard about— Cronkite’s assessment, it represented no epiphany for him.

Not long after the program, Johnson gave a rousing, lectern-pounding speech in which he urged a “total national effort” to win the war in Vietnam. So in the days and even weeks immediately after the Cronkite program, Johnson remained publicly hawkish on the war.

What’s more, Cronkite’s assessment about the U.S. predicament in Vietnam was scarcely original or exceptional in early 1968.

Jack Gould, the New York Times’ television critic, noted in a review of the Cronkite’s program that the anchorman’s assessment “did not contain striking revelations” but served instead “to underscore afresh the limitless difficulties lying ahead and the mounting problems attending United States involvement.”

It’s revealing to note that nearly seven months before the “Cronkite Moment,” the New York Times published on its front page as analysis that said victory in Vietnam “is not close at hand. It may be beyond reach.” The Times analysis was published in August 1967 beneath the headline:

“Vietnam: The Signs of Stalemate.”

As for Johnson’s announcing he would not seek reelection, Cronkite’s program was a non-factor in that decision.

Johnson’s announcement came at the end of March 1968, a month after Cronkite’s program–and a couple of weeks after the president’s poor showing as a write-in candidate in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire.

What’s more, there’s strong evidence that Johnson never intended to seek reelection, that he had privately decided in 1967, or even not sooner, against another campaign for the presidency.

<!–[if !mso]> The power of the “Cronkite moment” resides in the sudden, unexpected, and decisive effect it supposedly had on the president:[i] Such an effect would have been absent, or greatly diminished, had Johnson had seen the program on videotape at some later date

[i] See, for example, Jeffrey Lord, who wrote at the American Spectator’s online site: “The effect was almost immediate. In the White House, the President of the United States looked grimly at his television and in a remark that would become famous said, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.’” Lord, “The Limbaugh-Hannity Administration,” American Spectator (3 February 2009), posted at: http://spectator.org/archives/2009/02/03/the-limbaugh-hannity-administr.

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Edward R. Murrow ‘had guts’ in taking on Joe McCarthy? Not really

In Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth on September 22, 2010 at 4:12 pm

How Edward R. Murrow single-handedly ended the witch-hunting ways of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the most feared and loathsome political figure of the Cold War era, is the stuff of legend.

It’s one of the best-known, most cherished stories about American journalism, one that lives on as an example of media power at its finest and most effective–as a lesson about what courageous journalists can accomplish, even in the face of imposing odds.

Murrow in 1954

It is also one of American journalism’s most tenacious myths.

As I write in my new book, Getting It Wrong, Murrow’s televised report on McCarthy on March 9, 1954–the 30-minute program that lies at the heart of the myth–did not have the outcome so often claimed for it.

Notably, I write, “McCarthy’s favorable ratings had begun to slide well before Murrow took to the air” with his report on McCarthy.

Moreover, Murrow’s program on McCarthy was aired months and even years after exposes of the senator and his tactics had been reported by other American journalists.

As Jay Nelson Turk, television critic for the New York Post wrote after Murrow’s program on McCarthy:

“Murrow said nothing, and his cameras showed nothing, that this and some other newspapers have not been saying—and saying more strongly—for three or four years.”

Still, the notion that Murrow stood up to McCarthy when no one else would, or dared, lives on. It was invoked most recently in a commentary published yesterday at the New Jersey Today online site.

It asserted that before Murrow’s report on McCarthy, “Little substantive commentary was coming from the news media. No one with any power was willing to take on the popular McCarthy ….

“However, on March 9, 1954, Edward R. Murrow, the most-respected newsman on television at the time, broke the ice. He attacked McCarthy on his weekly show, See It Now. Murrow interspersed his own comments and clarifications into a damaging series of film clips from McCarthy’s speeches.”

The commentary added:

“Murrow had guts—something lacking in most of today’s television commentators who are more adept at reading teleprompters than tackling issues—and he spoke truth to power.”

Those paragraphs contain no small amount of error and misinterpretation.

For one, McCarthy was never especially “popular” among Americans.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, “Gallup Poll data show that McCarthy’s appeal crested in December 1953, when 53 percent of Americans said they had a favorable view of him.

“McCarthy’s favorable rating had slipped to 40 percent by early January 1954, and to 39 percent in February 1954, when an almost identical number of Americans viewed him unfavorably.”

The sharp drop, of course, preceded Murrow’s program.

More significant is the commentary’s erroneous claim that the news media had offered little substantive commentary about McCarthy and his communists-in-government witch-hunt.

As I note in Getting It Wrong:

Pearson

“Long before the See It Now program, several prominent journalists—including the Washington-based syndicated columnist Drew Pearson—had become persistent and searching critics of McCarthy, his record, and his tactics.”

Pearson wrote critically about McCarthy beginning in February 1950–just days after the senator first claimed that communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Department.

Pearson noted that he had covered the State Department for about twenty years, during which time he had been “the career boys’ severest critic. However, knowing something about State Department personnel, it is my opinion that Senator McCarthy is way off base.”

In subsequent columns, Pearson raised questions about McCarthy’s tax troubles, his accepting suspicious campaign contributions, and his taking a $10,000 payment from a U.S. government contractor for a 7,000 word article.

“Pearson’s inquiries embarrassed and angered McCarthy, who began entertaining thoughts of doing him harm,” I write in Getting It Wrong. And in December 1950, McCarthy physically assaulted Pearson in the cloakroom of the fashionable Sulgrave Club on DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C. (Accounts vary: McCarthy said he slapped Pearson, hard, with an open hand. Pearson said the senator kneed him, twice, in the groin. Then-Senator Richard M. Nixon pulled McCarthy away from Pearson.)

The encounter at the Sulgrave anticipated McCarthy’s vicious verbal attack on Pearson, declaring from the Senate floor that the columnist was the “diabolically” clever “voice of international communism” and the “sugar-coated voice of Russia.”

Pearson surely wasn’t the most enviable figure in American journalism. Media critic Jack Shafer in a column at Slate the other day called Pearson “one of the skuzziest journalists to ever write a story.”

Perhaps.

But the historical record is clear that if anyone in the news media “broke the ice” about McCarthy, it was Pearson. In 1950.

He posed critical and persistent challenges to McCarthy’s red-baiting ways when doing so really did take guts.

WJC

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Kennedy-Nixon debate myth certain to circulate anew

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Media myths on September 20, 2010 at 7:50 am

With the 50th anniversary of the first Kennedy-Nixon presidential debate just days away, it’s a fair bet that a particularly hardy media myth will make frequent appearances in news reports recalling the 1960 encounter.

And that’s the myth of viewer-listener disconnect, which holds that the debate’s television viewers mostly thought Senator John F. Kennedy won the encounter; those who heard the debate only on radio thought Vice President Richard M. Nixon had prevailed.

The debate myth lives on because it suggests that television–and how candidates look on the air–can be decisive in presidential elections. Like many of the media-driven myths debunked in my new book, Getting It Wrong, the debate myth also is appealing in that it offers a simplistic explanation for a complex historical event.

The viewer-listener disconnect in the 1960 debate isn’t discussed in Getting It Wrong. But I do admire the surgical dismantling of the myth that David L. Vancil and Sue D. Pendell presented in 1987 in the Central States Speech Journal.

They found scant support for a viewer-listener disconnect in the debate, which took place September 26, 1960.

In their article, Vancil and Pendell pointed to serious flaws in the anecdotal reports and the limited surveys that suggested disagreement among viewers and listeners in assessing what was the first televised debate between U.S. presidential candidates.

Central to the notion that radio audiences thought Nixon won the debate was a survey conducted by Sindlinger & Company. The survey indicated that by a 2-to-1 margin, radio audiences thought Nixon had prevailed.

But Vancil and Pendell pointed out that the Sindlinger survey, conducted the day after the debate, included more than 2,100 respondents–of whom only 282 had listened on radio.

Of that number, 178 (or fewer than four people per state) “expressed an opinion about the debate winner,” they wrote.

Further, Vancil and Pendell noted, “the critical characteristics of the 282 listeners surveyed are unknown. …Crucial information, such as the relative numbers of Republicans and Democrats in the sample” was not captured, rendering meaningless any generalizations about the debate’s radio audience.

Vancil and Pendell also wrote that the survey’s finding that an overwhelming number of radio listeners thought Nixon won ran contrary to the tendency of debates to “reinforce pre-debate candidate preferences.” And a Gallup survey showed the electorate nearly split on the eve of the debate: 47 percent favored Nixon, 46 percent favored Kennedy, and 7 percent were undecided.

Kennedy during the debate committed no gaffes or blunders that would have swung radio listeners to Nixon. “The available evidence,” they wrote, “suggests … that Kennedy’s supporters and potential supporters were delighted with his arguments and responses to questions during the debate….”

Indeed, anecdotal evidence gathered immediately afterward–including an informal survey conducted by Associated Press correspondents of 100 people in 10 cities–indicated that the debate changed few minds.

And James Reston, then a leading Washington-based columnist for the New York Times, wrote the day after the debate:

“This TV program did not do any of the dramatic things predicted for it. It did not make or break either candidate.”

Vancil and Pendell also challenged the notion that Nixon’s haggard appearance and sweaty brow contributed greatly to viewer perceptions about the debate.

“Appearance problems, such as Nixon’s perspiring brow, could have had a negative impact on viewer perceptions,” Vancil and Pendell wrote, “but it is also possible for viewers to be sympathetic to such problems, or to interpret them as evidence of attractive or desirable qualities.”

They added: “Even if viewers disliked Nixon’s physical appearance, the relative importance of this factor is a matter of conjecture.”

Not all observers thought Nixon’s performance was especially dismaying. In its post-debate editorial, the Washington Post even said:

“Of the two performances Mr. Nixon’s probably was the smoother.”

It is interesting to show undergraduate students portions of the first 1960 debate, as I sometimes do in journalism history classes. For many students, it’s their initial exposure to the debate’s televised record.

Invariably, some of them say they were surprised that Nixon didn’t look worse, given the received wisdom about his appearance that night.

They’re right: Nixon was fatigued, but he didn’t look awful debating Kennedy in what was the first of four presidential debates that fall.

What stands out, though, is how often during the first debate Nixon said he agreed with Kennedy’s views.

Not necessarily the most effective debate strategy, that.

WJC

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New ‘Nueva York’ exhibition and the Spanish-American War

In 1897, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on September 18, 2010 at 7:56 am

The Nueva York (1613-1945) exhibition that opened yesterday at El Museo del Barrio in New York City looks to be terrific.

It was jointly developed by Museo de Barrio and the New-York Historical Society, and is billed as “the first museum exhibition to explore … New York’s long and deep involvement with Spain and Latin America.”

Descriptive material posted online about Nueva York describes the show’s thematic presentation across five galleries.

The descriptive material also  contains a passage of particular interest to Media Myth Alert.

It says the Spanish-American War–which was fought over Cuba in 1898–“was a conflict sold to the American public by New York newspaper publishers including Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst,” the city’s leading practitioners of yellow journalism.

That’s a media-centric interpretation of a much-misunderstood war.

New York Evening Journal, April 1898

It’s a misleading characterization, too.

As I discussed in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, such claims tend to rest on unsupported assumptions about the effects of newspaper content on readers in New York City and beyond, and on policymakers in Washington.

Critics who blame the yellow press for bringing on the war–or for selling the American public on the conflict–fail to explain precisely how the often-exaggerated content of the New York yellow journals was transformed into policy and military action.

As I state in Yellow Journalism:

“The yellow press 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 Spanish-American War was the upshot of a prolonged, three-sided diplomatic impasse: Cubans who in 1895 launched what became an island-wide rebellion against Spanish rule would settle for nothing short of political independence. Spain, for reasons of political stability at home, could not agree to grant Cuba its independence. And the United States could tolerate no longer the disruptions caused by turmoil in Cuba.

Spain sent nearly 200,000 soldiers to the island in a mostly failed attempt to restore order. By early 1898, the Cuban rebellion had become a stalemate.

A particularly disastrous element of Spain’s strategy was to seek to deprive Cuban rebels of support in the hinterland by a policy called “reconcentration,” under which Cuban non-combatants–old men, women, and children–were forced into garrison towns. There, by the tens of thousands, the Cubans fell victim to disease and starvation.

A humanitarian disaster had taken hold in Cuba by early 1898, and the harsh effects of Spain’s “reconcentration” policy were often described in U.S. newspapers, yellow and otherwise.

In many ways, the U.S. entry in April 1898 into the rebellion on Cuba was a humanitarian crusade to end to abuses caused by Spain’s “reconcentration” policy. (A leading historian of the Spanish-American War, David F. Trask, has written that Americans in 1898 “went to war convinced that they had embarked upon an entirely selfless mission for humanity.”)

It was the human rights disaster on Cuba, not the press of New York City, that “sold” Americans on going war with Spain. Newspapers–including the yellow journals of Hearst and Pulitzer–were marginal in that equation.

WJC

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‘Exquisitely researched and lively’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Hurricane Katrina, Media myths, Reviews on September 16, 2010 at 9:40 am

That’s the Denver Post‘s take on Getting It Wrong, my new book on media-driven myths which the newspaper recently reviewed.

The Post offers a discerning summary of the book, noting that it “takes a critical look at 10 stories that were either total fabrications or blown way out of proportion and yet became part of our popular culture.”

It also says Getting It Wrong offers “an exquisitely researched and lively look at an industry that too often shines the light on itself more than it does on events and public figures.”

And it notes, quite correctly:

“Much of the ‘wrong’ coverage through the years comes from the media’s self-congratulatory preening.”

The review points out that the sternest criticism in Getting It Wrong is reserved “for coverage, mainly by television, of the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.

“Hyperactive reporters told tales of snipers roaming the streets, ‘hundreds’ of bodies stacked up in the Super Dome and babies being raped and murdered, none of which could be verified.

The upshot of the exaggerated coverage of the storm’s aftermath, the review notes, “was that rescue operations were hindered by fear, and prejudices of a watching public against poor people and minorities were confirmed.”

The review was written by Dick Kreck, a former reporter and columnist for the Post who has written three books. Kreck is an engaging storyteller and the go-to source for details about the lusty history of Denver journalism. (Full disclosure: Kreck spoke at a program at the Denver Post during last month’s convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Convention. I helped organize the program.)

Kreck opens the review of Getting It Wrong by declaring:

“Memo to media: Get over yourself. You’re not that important.”

He later cites a passage in Getting It Wrong quoting Robert Samuelson, a columnist who writes on economic issues for the Washington Post:

“Because the media are everywhere—and inspire much resentment—their influence is routinely exaggerated. The mistake is confusing visibility with power and the media are often complicit in the confusion. We [in the news media] embrace the mythology, because it flatters our self-importance.”

Getting It Wrong indeed offers a brief for modest media effects.

To bust media myths, I write in the book, “is to confront the reality that the news media are not the powerful agents they, and many others, assume them to be.

“It is exceedingly rare for any news report to trigger a powerful, immediate and decisive reaction akin to President Lyndon Johnson’s purported response to [Walter] Cronkite’s televised assessment about Vietnam: ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite ….’

“Researchers long ago dismissed the notion the news media can create such profound and immediate effects, as if absorbing media messages were akin to receiving potent drugs via a hypodermic needle,” I note, adding:

“Media power tends to be modest, nuanced, diffused, and situational.” And typically trumped by other, more powerful forces and factors.

WJC

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New book on Tet invokes mythical ‘Cronkite Moment’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths on September 15, 2010 at 7:06 am

Cronkite in Vietnam, 1968

A provocative new book on the 1968 Tet offensive, titled This Time We Win, devotes a chapter to “The Walter Cronkite Moment,” that mythical occasion when the CBS anchorman’s on-air assessment that the war in Vietnam was “mired in stalemate” supposedly had decisive effect on the U.S. president.

The “Cronkite Moment” also is a chapter in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths–those dubious and improbable tales about the news media that masquerade as factual.

I note in Getting It Wrong that the “Cronkite Moment,” under scrutiny, “dissolves as illusory—a chimera, a media-driven myth.”

This Time We Win is the work of James S. Robbins, an editorial writer on defense issues for the Washington Times. Robbins doesn’t exactly embrace the “Cronkite Moment,” but offers it instead with qualification, writing:

“It is said that after watching Cronkite’s documentary President [Lyndon] Johnson said to his aides, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.’ Five weeks later Johnson decided not to run for reelection based on this belief. So the legend goes. This is the Holy Grail for a reporter, that a documentary, newscast, article, picture, or other product shapes history on a grand scale.”

Robbins further writes:

“But did Johnson lose Middle America? Did sensationalistic or misleading press coverage turn the country against the President and against the war?”

His answer: “In a word, no.”

He’s quite right about that.

But Robbins might well have asked a more direct, searching, and relevant question:

“Was there really a ‘Cronkite Moment’ at all?”

The answer is, in a word, no. The anecdote’s pivotal, defining, and most delicious element is in error.

Cronkite certainly did take to the air on February 27, 1968, in a special report about Vietnam, where U.S. forces and South Vietnamese allies had repelled a broad offensive that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong launched a month before, at the Tet lunar new year.

Cronkite closed his report that night with an editorial comment that said the U.S. war effort was “mired in stalemate.” He suggested that a negotiated settlement might eventually be the way out.

Central to the anecdote’s power and enduring appeal is that Johnson, at the White House, was watching the program and, upon hearing Cronkite’s assessment, snapped off the television set and muttered to an aide or aides:

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

It supposedly was an epiphany for the president, a burst of clarity and insight about an unwinnable war.

But as I write in Getting It Wrong, “Scrutiny of the evidence associated with the program reveals that Johnson did not have—could not have had—the abrupt yet resigned reaction that so often has been attributed to him.”

Johnson was not at the White House that night.

He wasn’t in front of a television set, either.

Johnson then was in Austin, Texas, at the 51st birthday party of Governor John Connally, one of his political allies.

About the time Cronkite declared the war “mired in stalemate,” Johnson was offering light-hearted banter, saying: “Today you are 51, John. That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for—a simple majority.”

Johnson’s memoir, The Vantage Point, is silent about the Cronkite program, offering no clue about whether the president ever saw it on videotape or, if he did, what he thought of it.

And as I note in Getting It Wrong, “The power of the ‘Cronkite moment’ resides in the sudden, unexpected, and decisive effect it supposedly had on the president.

“Such an effect would have been absent, or greatly diminished, had Johnson seen the program on videotape at some later date.”

Moreover, in the days and weeks immediately following Cronkite’s pessimistic assessment, Johnson remained outwardly hawkish about the war.

On March 18, 1968, for example, he delivered a rousing speech in Minneapolis in which he urged “a total national effort” to win the war in Vietnam. The president also declared:

“We love nothing more than peace, but we hate nothing worse than surrender and cowardice.”

He criticized critics as wanting the United States to “tuck our tail and violate our commitments” to South Vietnamese allies.

Johnson’s aggressive remarks are difficult to square with his supposedly downcast, self-pitying reaction to Cronkite’s assessment about Vietnam.

That the “Cronkite Moment” turns out to be a media myth is not so surprising, I write in Getting It Wrong.

“Seldom, if ever, do the news media exert truly decisive influences in decisions to go to war or to seek negotiated peace,” I note. “Such decisions typically are driven by forces and factors well beyond the news media’s ability to shape, alter, or significantly influence.”

So it was in Vietnam.

WJC

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On sensationalism and yellow journalism: Not synonymous

In Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Yellow Journalism on September 14, 2010 at 6:06 am

The popular Politico blog yesterday invoked the yellow press period of the late 1890s, saying it was a time in American journalism when sensationalism ran wild.

In its commentary, Politco likened recent news coverage of the formerly obscure Rev. Terry Jones of Florida, who had threatened a Quran-burning spectacle on September 11, to the story line of Ace in the Hole, a terrific Billy Wilder movie released in 1951.

Ace in the Hole starred Kirk Douglas as a jaded newspaper reporter who sought to manipulate coverage of a mining cave-in in New Mexico in a cynical and ultimately failed attempt to restore a career in big-city journalism.

“What the media did last week with Jones is what Wilder’s reporter did a half-century ago,” the Politico post asserted. “Both amped a non-story by creating stakes.”

The Politico commentary further declared:

“Indeed, rampant sensationalism has been a news staple from the penny press of the 1830s, through the yellow journalism of the 1890s, through the tabloids of the 1920s, through the salivating cable shows of the last 20 years. The aberration was actually the ‘respectable’ press, like the New York Herald-Tribune or the old the New York Times or Edward R. Murrow’s CBS — which prided itself on its civic duty and lack of hyperventilation.”

But yellow journalism of the late 19th century was much more than merely sensational.

It was a lively, provocative, often-swaggering brand of journalism, a genre “well suited to an innovative and expansive time—a period when the United States first projected its military power beyond the Western Hemisphere in a sustained manner,” I wrote in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies.

Hearst in 1890s

Yellow journalism was “keen to adapt and eager to experiment,” I wrote. Its practitioners–notably William Randolph Hearst, owner of the New York Journal–took risks, spent lavishly on gathering the news, and generally shook up the field.

So it’s quite unfair, and inaccurate, to characterize “yellow journalism” as having been synonymous with the sensational treatment of news.

In its most developed form, I wrote in Yellow Journalism, the genre was characterized by these features:

  • the frequent use of multicolumn headlines that sometimes stretched across the front page.
  • a variety of topics reported on the front page, including news of politics, war, international diplomacy, sports, and society.
  • the generous and imaginative use of illustrations, including photographs and other graphic representations such as locator maps.
  • bold and experimental layouts, including those in which one report and illustration would dominate the front page. Such layouts sometimes were enhanced by the use of color.
  • a tendency to rely on anonymous sources, particularly in dispatches of leading reporters.
  • a penchant for self-promotion, to call attention eagerly to the paper’s accomplishments. This tendency was notably evident in crusades against monopolies and municipal corruption.

As defined above and as practiced more than a century ago, yellow journalism, I wrote in the book, “certainly could not be called predictable, boring, or uninspired”—complaints of the sort that are rather common about American newspapers of the early 21st century.

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Going newsless, and its implications

In Debunking, Media myths on September 13, 2010 at 7:47 am

The biennial news consumption survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press invariably is full of intriguing data about how Americans use, or shun, the news media.

A particularly telling data point is the percentage of adults Americans who get no news on a typical day.

The 2010 Pew biennial news consumption survey, released yesterday, says that 17 percent of Americans go newsless: That is, they avoid getting news despite the wide variety of options offered by new media technologies.

This data point is not highlighted by Pew researchers; you have to dig a bit into the voluminous report to find a mention of Americans who go newsless.

“The vast majority of Americans (83 percent) get news in one form or another as part of their daily life,” Pew says in the report, adding:

“But even with the availability of news over a wide range of new technologies, 17% of Americans say they got no news yesterday, a figure that is virtually unchanged from previous years.”

Pew notes that in its news consumption survey conducted in 2008, 19 percent of adult Americans said they went newsless–and that survey “did not ask about getting news on a given day via cell phones or other digital technologies.”

Moreover, Pew says, 27 percent of American adults younger than 30 get no news on a typical day.

And among the 18-to-24-year-old cohort, 31 percent go newsless.

Pew offers neither commentary nor detailed tables about its “going newsless” data. And it presents no breakdown by age cohort, as it did in its 2008 report.

But the implications are fairly obvious: Choosing to go newsless suggests that a significant segment of the adult population has little interest, and probably little trust, in the U.S. news media and their content.

I mention the “going newsless” phenomenon in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths–dubious tales about the news media that masquerade as factual.

Referring to Pew’s 2008 news consumption study, I write:

“Large numbers of Americans are beyond media influence in any case. They choose to go newsless—they mostly ignore the news altogether. They are nonaudiences for news.”

Indeed, it is difficult to make a persuasive case for the sweeping influence of the news media if nearly one American adult in five chooses to eschew the news.

Moreover, the U.S. news media are far too splintered and diverse—print, broadcast, cable, satellite, online—to exert much in the way of collective and sustained influence on policymakers or media audiences, I write in Getting It Wrong. And  I quote the sociologist Herbert Gans who has pointed out:

“If news audiences had to respond to all the news to which they are exposed, they would not have time to live their own lives. In fact, people screen out many things, including news, that could interfere with their own lives.”

The 2010 news consumption study contained another surprising finding, that slightly less than half of young adult Americans get news on a typical day from a digital platform.

Pew notes that “Internet usage among those younger than 30 is nearly universal,” that four in five “have profiles on social networking sites and 58 percent go online using their cell phones.” And yet just 48 percent of that cohort “got news over any kind of digital platform yesterday.”

In fact, Pew says, “more of those younger than 30 (57 percent) got news from traditional sources” than from digital technology.

Americans in their 30s, Pew said, “are the most likely to use digital technologies to get news. Fully 57 percent of those in their 30s say they got news through a digital platform yesterday – either online or mobile – the highest percentage of any age group. And 21 percent of those 30 to 39 say they got news through social networking or Twitter.”

In conducting its 2010 news consumption study, Pew researchers interviewed 3,006 adults via cell phones or land line telephones from June 8 to June 28.

WJC

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Many thanks to Jim Romenesko for linking to this post

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‘Getting It Wrong’ goes on WTIC talk radio

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Hurricane Katrina, Media myths, Media myths and radio, Washington Post, Watergate myth on September 12, 2010 at 11:38 am

I was interviewed about Getting It Wrong the other day by Ray Dunaway on WTIC AM radio in Hartford, where years ago I was a reporter for the Hartford Courant newspaper.

The interview was live, brisk, and wide-ranging, covering a number of topics discussed in Getting It Wrong, my new book which debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths–those dubious and improbable stories about the media that masquerade as factual.

Topics that Dunaway and I discussed included the media myths associated with the Washington Post and the Watergate scandal, with Edward R. Murrow and his 1954 program on Senator Joseph McCarthy, and with coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath in 2005.

Dunaway, a veteran talk-shown host in Connecticut (with whom I had never previously spoken), said in introducing the segment:

“There are a lot of things we believe growing up and some of these are very near and dear to my heart. One would be–and I think this is absolutely true–when I was in graduate school, everybody, especially on the print side, everybody wanted to be the next Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward [of Watergate fame] and, you know, bring down a president. That was kind of their dream.”

He added:

“Anyhow, there’s a great book out now. And what you believe ain’t necessarily so. W. Joseph Campbell has written a book … called Getting It Wrong …

“First of all,” Dunaway said in launching into the interview, “I must tell you how much I enjoyed the book. It was a trip down memory lane, but maybe in a different direction than I originally thought.”

He asked whether I wrote the book to “set the record straight a bit.”

“That’s exactly right,” I replied. “The book is not really a media-bashing book but really aligns itself with a central objective of news-gathering, which is to try to get it right. And the book does seek to set the record straight by offering reappraisals of some of the best-known stories in American journalism.”

I added:

“I think these stories live on because they do offer simplistic explanations and simplistic answers to very complex historical events. So it’s a way of distilling what went on in the past [in] a very digestible and understandable way.

“In the process of simplification, though, there are exaggerations made–and myths are born. And I think that’s a recurring theme in this book. … These stories are appealing stories. They’re delicious stories. They’re almost too good to be checked out, and I think that’s another reason why these have lived on.”

We spent some time discussing the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate–that the investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein in the Washington Post brought about President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

“Woodward and Bernstein–the Watergate story–is another example of the David-and-Goliath encounter,” another thread that runs through Getting It Wrong, I said, adding that Nixon’s fall in the Watergate scandal “was the consequence of his own criminal conduct and that was exposed through the convergence of many forces and factors.

“And the Washington Post, although it did some good reporting in the aftermath of the Watergate breakin in 1972–it wasn’t the decisive factor.

“Its reporting did not bring down Richard Nixon.”

Dunaway, who described Getting It Wrong as “well worth reading,” turned the interview to Hurricane Katrina and what I call “the myth of superlative reporting.”

The coverage of Katrina’s aftermath was highly exaggerated and represented “no high heroic moment for American journalism,” I pointed out.

We spoke about exaggerated estimated death tolls in New Orleans in Katrina’s wake–estimates of 10,000 fatalities or more that were offered by public officials including the city’s then-mayor, Ray Nagin.

I noted:

“Nagin’s estimate is another example of why journalists and reporters have an obligation to themselves and to their audiences to question sources closely. ‘How did you find that information, Mr. Mayor? Could we talk to people who came up with that estimate?’ I mean, not being credulous but being searching, and a bit skeptical.

“I think skepticism was absent in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the apocalyptic horror that the hurricane supposedly unleashed was absolutely untrue.”

Dunaway wrapped up the interview by calling the book “more of a learning experience than a critique.”

That was an interesting characterization with which to close an engaging and thoughtful interview.

WJC

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‘Cronkite Moment’ makes ‘Best of the Web’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths on September 11, 2010 at 8:41 am

The lead item yesterday of the Wall Street Journal‘s online “Best of the Web” roundup invoked the legendary “Cronkite Moment,” one of American journalism’s hardiest and best-known media-driven myths.

Cronkite in Vietnam, 1968

Only “Best of the Web” presented the anecdote as if it were factual, stating:

“‘If I’ve lost Cronkite,’ Lyndon B. Johnson is said to have lamented in 1968, ‘I’ve lost Middle America.'”

The passage set up an observation about President Barack Obama’s declining popularity:

“Obama has been losing Middle America, slowly but steadily, almost since the day he took office, in large part because he has taken his cues from a community of notions whose attitude toward Middle America ranges from indulgent condescension to outright hostility.”

Obama’s fallen popularity is of but passing and academic interest to Media Myth Alert. Far more intriguing is this latest affirmation of the casual yet confident use of the “Cronkite Moment.”

Its appearance in “Best of the Web” was the latest in a spate of recent sitings of the “Cronkite Moment.”

In the past few weeks, Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today; Cal Thomas, a conservative syndicated columnist, and  David Zurawik, veteran television writer for the Baltimore Sun, all have invoked the anecdote in commentaries as if it were true.

Such frequent use signals not only the irresistible allure of the “Cronkite Moment,” it suggests the anecdote’s appeal across the political spectrum. Neuharth, for example, typically writes from the left; Thomas and “Best of the Web” offer analyses from the right.

I examine the “Cronkite Moment” in my new book, Getting It Wrong, which addresses and debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths–apocryphal or improbable tales about the news media that masquerade as factual.

The “Cronkite Moment” refers to the special report about the Vietnam War that was presented by CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite and aired February 27, 1968.

Near the end of his report, Cronkite asserted that the U.S. war effort was “mired in stalemate” and suggested negotiations might offer a “rational” way out of Vietnam.

Supposedly, President Lyndon Johnson watched the Cronkite program at the White House and, upon hearing the anchorman’s assessment, experienced the flash of insight that his war policy had hit the rocks.

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

As I point out in Getting It Wrong, accounts vary markedly as to what Johnson supposedly said in reacting to Cronkite’s commentary.

Some accounts have the president saying: “I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”

Or: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the American people.”

Or: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the war.”

Or: “If we lose Cronkite, we lose America.”

Most common is: “If I lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America,” the version used by “Best of the Web.”

But version variability of such magnitude, I write in Getting It Wrong, signals implausibility.

It’s a marker of a media-driven myth.

Moreover, Johnson was not at the White House the night Cronkite’s special report aired. Nor was the president in front of a television set.

He was on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, attending the 51st birthday party of Governor John Connally, a long-time political ally.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, at about the time Cronkite offered his “mired in stalemate” editorial comment, Johnson was engaging in mildly humorous banter about Connally’s age.

“Today you are 51, John,” he said. “That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for—a simple majority. Throughout the years we have worked long and hard—and I might say late—trying to maintain it, too.”

Even if Johnson saw the Cronkite program later, on videotape, the president “gave no indication of having taken the anchorman’s message to heart,” I write in Getting It Wrong, noting:

“Just three days after the [Cronkite] program aired, Johnson vowed in remarks at a testimonial dinner in Texas that the United States would ‘not cut and run’ from Vietnam. ‘We’re not going to be Quislings,’ the president said, invoking the surname of a Norwegian politician who helped the Nazis take over his country. ‘And we’re not going to be appeasers….’”

So even if he later heard, or heard about, Cronkite’s assessment about Vietnam, it represented no epiphany for Johnson, no stunning revelation about policy gone awry.

Interestingly, the legend of the “Cronkite Moment” began to take hold and gain circulation several years after Johnson’s death in 1973. It was in 1968 neither an instant sensation nor a stunning assessment. “Mired in stalemate” was hardly a novel interpretation at the time.

Indeed, the New York Times had used “stalemate” in a front-page assessment of the war effort in early August 1967, nearly seven months before the “Cronkite Moment.”

WJC

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