W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for the ‘Media myths’ Category

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Another movie list, another myth invoked

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on April 26, 2010 at 11:52 am

The cinema can be a powerful propellant of media-driven myths.

As I note in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong, cinematic treatments can and do “influence how historical events are collectively remembered and can harden media-driven myths against debunking.”

I invoke as an example the Watergate scandal, which culminated in 1974 with the resignation of President Richard Nixon. It is often said that the Watergate reporting of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein “brought down” Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

Woodward and Bernstein’s best-selling book about their Watergate reporting, All the President’s Men, was turned into a highly successful motion picture by the same title.

And as I write in Getting It Wrong, the cinematic version of All the President’s Men, which cast Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the roles of Woodward and Bernstein, “helped ensure that the journalists and their newspaper would be regarded as central to cracking the Watergate scandal.”

Testimony to that observation was offered yesterday in an item at the Huffington Post blog referring to All the President’s Men as “one of the top films about the presidency.”

The item said the film “documents how the power of the press and the determination of two young journalists brought down this occupant [Nixon], who only two years prior had won re-election by the widest margin in history.”

As I’ve noted several times at MediaMythAlert, the notion that Woodward, Bernstein, and the Washington Post “brought down” Nixon is a media-driven myth, a trope that knows few bounds.

It is, I write in Getting It Wrong, a misleading interpretation that “minimizes the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office.”

The “heroic-journalist myth of Watergate” took hold for a number of reasons, among them the sheer complexity of the scandal. Not only was Nixon turned from office but  19 men associated with his presidency or his 1972 reelection campaign went to jail.

The “heoric-journalist” memo has become, I write, “a proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity.”

The cinematic version of All the President’s Men accomplished that, too, by offering what I call “an unmistakable assertion of the power and centrality of the press in Nixon’s fall.”

The contribution of other agencies and entities in unraveling Watergate and prosecuting Nixon’s men is downplayed or ignored.

The Huffington Post item that invoked the heroic-journalist myth discussed 11 films that examine the American presidency, including two fine motion pictures, Primary Colors and the Manchurian Candidate.

Also on the movie list was Dick, an improbable spoof about Watergate and the Nixon White House that depicts Woodward and Bernstein as antagonistic incompetents who bungle their way to a Pulitzer Prize.

WJC

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‘Getting It Wrong’ at Kensington’s ‘Day of the Book’

In 1897, Debunking, Media myths, Year studies on April 25, 2010 at 8:19 am

I participated today in the “Day of the Book” festival in the antique row section of  Kensington, MD.

The event represented first book-event exposure for Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book that addresses, and debunks, 10 prominent media-driven myths.

Getting It Wrong will be published this summer by University of California Press. Chapter One may be read here.

Also on display at the “Day of the Book” was my year study, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, which was published in 2006. The book tells the story of a decisive year in American journalism.

Book signing in Kensington (AMR photo)

Principal organizer of the “Day of the Book” was Kensington Row Bookshop and at least 80 authors and poets had registered for the event.

The threat of rain kept some of them away. But nasty weather was a no-show and a fine time was had.

I enjoyed meeting several other local authors, including Bernadette LeDoux-Brodsky,  a Parisienne who used to teach French at Georgetown University; Bob Gregg, a retired dean and professor at American University, and Ben Farmer, a young author who graduated a few years ago from Kenyon College.

Bernadette said the ambiance in Kensington evoked for her the cafe scene of streets in Paris–sans les apéritifs, of course. She sold copies of her Ici et Ailleurs: Parisienne dans le Maryland. Bob sold several of his novels, among them The Scarecrow in the Vineyard. And the gregarious Ben Farmer seemed to make a lot of friends as well several sales of his new novel, Evangeline.

For me, the event was mostly a chance to gauge interest in Getting It Wrong. And more men than women stopped by to chat about the book and/or take a flyer.

There also was some mild interest in The Year That Defined American Journalism (see book-signing photo, above).

The dog in the picture? That’s Lil, our bichon frise. She was at the book fair, too, and proved to be quite the magnet.

WJC

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Halberstam the ‘unimpeachable’? Try myth-promoter

In Bay of Pigs, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, New York Times, Spanish-American War on April 24, 2010 at 9:02 am

A book review in the New York Times the other day referred to David Halberstam, the legendary author and journalist, as an “unimpeachable” source.

Halberstam, who died in an automobile accident three years ago, certainly built an outsize reputation. But unimpeachable?

I’d say no way.

Halberstam, in his hefty and still-popular 1979 study of the news media, The Powers That Be, encouraged the rise of two prominent media-driven myths and endorsed a third.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book about media-driven myths, Halberstam’s Powers That Be was an important source, perhaps the original source, for the so-called “Cronkite Moment” of February 27, 1968.

That was when CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite asserted in a special report that the U.S. war effort in Vietnam was “mired in stalemate.”

In Halberstam’s telling, Cronkite’s report represented “the first time in American history a war had been declared over by an anchorman.”

Halberstam wrote that President Lyndon Johnson was in Washington and watched the Cronkite special that night. Upon hearing Cronkite’s dire assessment about Vietnam, the president said that if he had lost Cronkite, he had lost Mr. Average Citizen.

Interestingly, Halberstam did not place Johnson’s purported lament inside quotation marks. He paraphrased the remarks and said Johnson had directed  them to presidential press secretary George Christian.

But as I write in Getting It Wrong, Johnson was not in Washington that night. He did not see the Cronkite program when it aired. Thus, he could not have had the abrupt, dramatic, yet resigned reaction that Halberstam, and others, have attributed to him.

Johnson that night was in Austin, Texas, at the 51st birthday party of a political ally, Governor John Connally.

About the time Johnson supposedly made the comment about losing Cronkite, he was offering light-hearted banter about Connally’s age, saying:

“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.”

The “Cronkite Moment,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “is a media-driven myth. It did not have the effects that Halberstam and many others have attributed to it.”

Halberstam’s Powers That Be also offered a graphic, if exaggerated, account that President John Kennedy supposedly called James Reston of the New York Times in April 1961 and urged him not to publish a report about the pending Bay of Pigs invasion.

Kennedy “argued strongly and passionately,” Halberstam wrote, that the Times by reporting the story would damage his policy. Halberstam also wrote that in his call to Reston, Kennedy said the Times risked having blood on its hands were the article published and the invasion failed.

Such a conversation never happened, according to Reston and others quoted in Harrison Salisbury’s insider’s account of the Times, Without Fear or Favor.

Indeed, there is no evidence that Kennedy called anyone at the Times in advance of the report–which was written by Tad Szulc and published April 7, 1961, on the Times front page (see right).

As I note in Getting It Wrong:

“The Kennedy Library in Boston says that the White House telephone logs reveal no calls were placed to Reston” or other Times executives on April 6, 1961, the day the story was prepared for publication.

“Moreover,” I note, “Kennedy had almost no chance to speak with those executives during the interval from when Szulc’s story arrived at the Times building in midtown Manhattan and when it was set in type. … During that time, Kennedy was otherwise preoccupied. He spent the last half of the afternoon of April 6, 1961, playing host to Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, on a lengthy cruise down the Potomac River to Mount Vernon.”

In addition, Halberstam’s Powers That Be invoked one of the most enduring media myths–the anecdote about William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain at the end of the 19th century.

That anecdote is revisited, and dismantled, in the first chapter of Getting It Wrong.

The Powers That Be was a popular success, reaching the second spot on the New York Times best-selling list in May 1979. But the book wasn’t without persuasive critics.

Among them was David Culbert, an historian at Louisiana State University who years ago raised questions about the “Cronkite Moment,” noting that Johnson was in Texas when the program aired.

In a devastating review published in the American Historical Review, Culbert called The Powers That Be overlong and declared:

“The absence of a developed thesis, lack of proper documentation, and numerous errors of fact for events before the 1960s suggest that historians will have to use this book with caution. There is much here that might be true and, if true, valuable, but there is also no certainty that sloppy research does not undermine the very parts that seem most interesting.”

WJC

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Read Chapter One: ‘Furnish the war’

In Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Spanish-American War on April 23, 2010 at 10:07 am

The opening chapter of Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming work debunking 10 prominent media-driven myths, is available at the Web site for the book sponsored by the publisher, University of California Press.

Chapter One is titled “‘I’ll furnish the war'” and examines one of the hardiest myths in American journalism–William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain, at the end of the 19th century.

As I write in Chapter One:

“Like many media-driven myths, it is succinct, savory, and easily remembered. It is almost too good not to be true. Not surprisingly, Hearst’s vow to ‘furnish the war’ has made its way into countless textbooks of journalism. It has figured in innumerable discussions about Hearst and about the news media and war. It has been repeated over the years by no small number of journalists, scholars, and critics of the news media such as Ben Bagdikian, Helen Thomas, Nicholas Lemann, and the late David Halberstam.”

I further write:

“Interestingly, the anecdote lives on despite a nearly complete absence of supporting documentation. … It lives on even though Hearst denied ever sending such a message.”

The sole original source for the now-famous anecdote was a slim memoir, On the Great Highway, written by James Creelman and published in 1901.

I note in Getting It Wrong that Creelman’s taste for hyperbole represents one of many solid reasons for doubting “that Hearst ever vowed ‘to furnish the war.’ Creelman’s record of exaggeration offers compelling reason to challenge the anecdote’s authenticity.”

I refer to the anecdote “Creelman’s singular contribution to American journalism” and note how it “feeds popular mistrust of the news media and promotes the improbable notion the media are powerful and dangerous forces, so powerful they can even bring on a war.”

Getting It Wrong will be out this summer. It is set in a Sabon typeface, which is quite handsome.

WJC

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‘Revealing the scandal of Watergate’

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on April 22, 2010 at 3:58 pm

I blogged the other day about the polyglot nature of enduring media-driven myths, notably the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate, which holds that two Washington Post reporters exposed the Watergate scandal and brought down the corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon.

“It’s a sure sign of tenacity and hardiness when media-driven myths cross linguistic barriers to become embedded in other languages,” I wrote.

Confirmation of that observation is offered today in a post at the French-language Swiss online site, Les Quotidiennes, which declared:

“In the ’70s, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, two journalists for the Washington Post, inspired entire generations by revealing the Watergate scandal which led to the resignation of President Nixon.”

Bernstein and Woodward’s Watergate reporting won the Public Service Pulitzer Prize for the Post in 1973. They did fine work.

But it can’t really be said that they “revealed” or disclosed the Watergate scandal. Credit for that accomplishment goes largely to federal investigative agencies, bipartisan congressional panels, federal prosecutors and judges, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Edward Jay Epstein persuasively argued this point in his  fine essay in 1976 about Watergate and the news media. He wrote that “the FBI, the federal prosecutors, the [federal] grand jury, and the Congressional committees … unearthed and developed all the actual evidence and disclosures of Watergate.”

Epstein noted that Bernstein and Woodward, in All the President’s Men, their book about their Watergate reporting, “systematically ignored or minimized” the work of those agencies and institutions.

“Instead,” Epstein wrote, “they simply focus[ed] on those parts of the prosecutors’ case, the grand-jury investigation, and the FBI reports that were leaked to them.”

I address the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong, noting that it is “the most familiar storyline of Watergate: ready short-hand for understanding Watergate and its denouement, a proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity.

“How the Post and its reporters uncovered Watergate is deeply ingrained in American journalism as one of the field’s most important and self-reverential stories.”

I add:

“But to explain Watergate through the lens of the heroic-journalist is to abridge and misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth. The heroic-journalist interpretation minimizes the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office,” such as the subpoena-wielding federal authorities.

I further note in Getting It Wrong that the media scholar Jay Rosen has referred to the heroic-journalist construct as “the redemptive tale believers learn to tell about the press and what it can do for the American people. It is a story of national salvation: truth their only weapons, journalists save the day.”

It’s an endlessly appealing meme: easy to grasp, and not difficult to translate.

WJC

Jay Rosen, a media scholar, has called the heroic-journalist construct “the redemptive tale believers learn to tell about the press and what it can do for the American people. It is a story of national salvation: truth their only weapons, journalists save the day.”[i]

[i] Jay Rosen, “Deep Throat, J-School and Newsroom Religion,” PressThink Web log (5 June 2005), posted at: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/06/05/wtrg_js.html. Rosen also wrote: “When the press took over the legend of Watergate, the main characters were no longer the bad guys like Richard Nixon [and his corrupt aides] John Mitchell, Bob Haldeman, John Erlichman, or Chuck Colson, all of whom broke the law and abused state power. The narrative got turned around. Watergate became a story about heroism at the Washington Post. The protagonists were Woodward and Bernstein ….”

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One paragraph, three myths

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, New York Times, Washington Post, Watergate myth on April 21, 2010 at 11:45 am

A column posted today at a Canadian online news site achieved the feat of working three media-driven myths into a single paragraph.

Here’s what the columnist wrote, in a paean to the power and influence that traditional news media once wielded, supposedly:

“A Walter Cronkite could, however belatedly, expose the pointlessness of Vietnam. Famously, Edward R. Murrow deflated McCarthy. A pair of scruffy reporters could bring down a Nixon.”

Three sentences, three myths–a trifecta that is very rare.

All three media-driven myths are addressed, and debunked, in my book, Getting It Wrong, to be published in summer by the University of California Press.

The reference to Cronkite is to the CBS anchorman’s report of February 27, 1968, in which he said the U.S. military was “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam. As I write in Getting It Wrong, such a characterization was scarcely original or exceptional at the time. It was no exposé.

Indeed, nearly seven months before Cronkite’s pronouncement, the New York Times had suggested in a front-page report that the war was stalemated.

Victory in Vietnam, the Times report said, “is not close at hand. It may be beyond reach.”

That Murrow “deflated” Senator Joseph R. McCarthy is another media myth, stemming from Murrow’s See It Now television program of March 9, 1954.

Murrow in fact was quite belated in confronting McCarthy and the senator’s communists-in-government witch hunt.

The half-hour See It Now program on McCarthy came many months–even years–after other journalists had pointedly challenged the senator and his bullying tactics. Eric Sevareid, a friend and CBS colleague of Murrow, pointedly noted that Murrow’s program “came very late in the day.”

In an interview in 1978, Sevareid said: “The youngsters read back and they think only one person in broadcasting and the press stood up to McCarthy and this has made a lot of people feel very upset, including me, because that program came awfully late.”

And by the time Murrow’s report aired, McCarthy’s favorable ratings had been in decline for three months, as also I note in Getting It Wrong.

The Canadian columnist’s reference to “a pair of scruffy reporters” who supposedly brought down Richard Nixon is, of course, to Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who covered the Watergate scandal for the Washington Post.

As I’ve noted in previous posts at MediaMythAlert, the notion that the reporters brought down Nixon and his corrupt presidency is a myth that even the Post has tried to dismiss.

Howard Kurtz, the newspaper’s media reporter, wrote in 2005, for example:

“Despite the mythology, The Post didn’t force Richard Nixon from office—there were also two special prosecutors, a determined judge, bipartisan House and Senate committees, the belated honesty of [former White House lawyer] John Dean and those infamous White House tapes.”

Kurtz’s observations parallel those of Stanley I. Kutler, a leading historian of the  Watergate scandal, who has written:

“The fact is, an incredible array of powerful actors all converged on Nixon at once—the FBI, prosecutors, congressional investigators, the judicial system.”

The three myths are stories well-known and even cherished in American journalism. They almost always are cited as examples of media power and influence, of journalists at their courageous best.

But as I write in Getting It Wrong:

“To identify these tales as media myths is to confront the reality that the news media are not the powerful agents they, and many others, assume them to be.”

WJC

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Skirting the media’s role in the ‘crack baby’ scare

In Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post on April 18, 2010 at 3:40 pm

The Washington Post today revisits the “crack baby” scare of the late 1980s and 1990s and reports that “in the two decades that have passed since … these babies have grown into young adults who can tell their stories–and for the most part, they are tales of success.”

The Post notes that “a lot of misinformation surfaced” about the “crack baby” phenomenon, and cites an often-quoted column by Charles Krauthammer who in 1989 wrote:

Washington Post, August 1989

“Theirs will be a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority.”

(Although the Post article doesn’t mention it, Krauthammer also wrote in that column: “The inner-city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror: a bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth.”)

Otherwise, the Post‘s report steered well clear of considering the news media’s central role in spreading “misinformation” about “crack babies,” a topic is explored in Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book about media-driven myths.

The scare, I write, “was a media-driven myth based more on anecdote than solid, sustained research, a myth that had the effect of stigmatizing underprivileged children presumed to have been born damaged and despised as ‘crack babies.’”

I further note:

“To be sure, smoking crack during pregnancy is hardly risk-free, and certainly neither prudent nor sensible.”

However, I add, “the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure have proved more subtle than sweeping: Newborns exposed to crack during pregnancy tend to be smaller in birth weight, in length, and in head circumference. Some research suggested that mild cognitive deficiencies, such as difficulties in concentrating on tasks at hand, might be attributable to prenatal cocaine exposure, especially as cognitive demands on children intensify as they grow older.

“But biomedical research has found nothing akin to a ‘bio-underclass,’” that Krauthammer and others warned about some 20 years ago.

Revisiting the media-driven myth of the crack baby is important, I write in Getting It Wrong, because doing so “allows insights into a tendency among journalists to neglect or disregard the tentativeness that characterizes serious scientific and biomedical research, and to reach for certainty and definitiveness that are not often found in preliminary findings.

“The tendency of journalists to push hard on tentative data has been apparent in coverage of more recent drug scares, notably that of methamphetamine in 2004 and 2005.”

The Post‘s report today was the latest in what, in effect, has been an intermittent series in leading newspapers to revisit the “crack baby” scare and find it to have been exaggerated.

In a lengthy article published 15 months ago, the New York Times called the scare “the epidemic that wasn’t.” A columnist for the New York Daily News acknowledged in 2004 that “we probably overreacted with forecasts of harm to so-called ‘crack babies.’”

And more than 12 years ago, the Post carried a story similar to today’s. That article appeared on page Z10, beneath the headline: “‘Crack Baby’ Fears May Have Been Overstated.”

As I note in Getting It Wrong, “The news media’s retreat or rollback on crack babies was neither as extensive nor as prominent as the dramatic and ominous reports about the scourge in the late 1980s and early 1990s.”

I quote the alternative magazine, Mother Jones, which pointed out in 1995:

“The publicity blitz that spread the crack-baby myth has not been matched by an attempt to unmake the myth—and many, many people still believe in it.”

The term “crack babies” remains firmly in circulation; it is invoked casually and idiomatically, as something of a cliché.

WJC

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Movies about journalists: Another list, another myth

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on April 17, 2010 at 6:31 pm

The blog True/Slant includes a ranking today of the 10 best-ever movies about journalism, and the Bogart film, Deadline U.S.A., tops the list.

This 10-best lineup was inspired by the series of newspapering movies running at Film Forum in Manhattan.

Absence of Malice (which I thought was dreadfully stereotypical), ranked second on the True/Slant list; The Paper was third, and All the President’s Men, the best-known movie about the Watergate scandal, was fourth.

Almost predictably, the description about All the President’s Men said:  “Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman play Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who reported the Watergate scandal and brought down a President. One of the few movies that makes journalism look like something worth doing.”

So there we are again–the hoary claim resurfaces that Nixon was “brought down” by the reporting of the intrepid Post reporters.

It’s what I call the heroic-journalist myth, and it’s addressed, and debunked, in Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book about media-driven myths.

I note in the book, which is due out this summer, that heroic-journalist myth of Watergate is one of the most appealing and self-reverential stories in American media history.

It is striking indeed how routinely and even off-handedly Bernstein and Woodward are credited with the accomplishment, especially when the record of Watergate shows that the Post’s reporting had at best a marginal effect on forcing Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

Other forces and factors were far more decisive to the denouement of Watergate. As Howard Kurtz, the Post’s media reporter, has written:

“Despite the mythology, The Post didn’t force Richard Nixon from office—there were also two special prosecutors, a determined judge, bipartisan House and Senate committees, the belated honesty of [former White House lawyer] John Dean and those infamous White House tapes.”

Nixon’s White House tapes were crucial to the outcome. He resigned the presidency shortly after the Supreme Court ordered him to turn over the tapes subpoenaed by the Watergate special prosecutor.

One of the tapes undeniably showed Nixon participating in the coverup of the burglary at Democratic national headquarters, the signal crime of the Watergate scandal.

I also note in Getting It Wrong that motion pictures have a way of solidifying media-driven myths in the public’s consciousness.

“High-quality cinematic treatments,” I write, “are powerful agents of media myth-making, and can enhance a myth’s durability.”

And so what’s my top movie about newspapering? The 1941 Orson Welles masterpiece, Citizen Kane.

And that’s probably because I get such a laugh every time I watch the scene that paraphrases William Randolph Hearst‘s purported vow “to furnish the war” with Spain.

That may be the hardiest media myth of all.

A sleeper in my lineup of best movies about journalism is John Ford’s 1962 Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.

Why Liberty Valence?

Solely because of the movie’s greatest line, which is so applicable to media myth-making:

“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

WJC

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Myths going polyglot: An emblem of hardiness

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on April 16, 2010 at 9:29 am

It’s a sure sign of tenacity and hardiness when media-driven myths cross linguistic barriers to become embedded in other languages.

The heroic-journalist myth of Watergate–which I explore in Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book about media-driven-myths–represents that phenomenon quite well.

In the past few days, references to the myth–which maintains that the work of two young, intrepid reporters for the Washington Post brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency–have appeared online in French and Italian.

The French version was posted at the Web site of the weekly lifestyle magazine, Paris Match.  The item was about Sheri Fink, who this week became a winner of a Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting.

Paris Match said of Fink: “She enters the pantheon of the press that includes famous predecessors such as Bob Woodward of the Washington Post who disclosed the Watergate scandal leading to the impeachment of President Nixon.”

For starters, Nixon was never impeached; he resigned the presidency in 1974, to head off certain impeachment and conviction.

Moreover, Woodward and his reporting partner, Carl Bernstein, did not uncover or disclose the Watergate scandal.

As Edward Jay Epstein wrote years ago in a marvelous essay about the news media and Watergate, “the FBI, the federal prosecutors, the [federal] grand jury, and the Congressional committees … unearthed and developed all the actual evidence and disclosures of Watergate.”

Epstein noted that Woodward and Bernstein, in All the President’s Men, their book about their Watergate reporting, “systematically ignored or minimized” the work of those agencies and institutions.

“Instead,” Epstein wrote, “they simply focus on those parts of the prosecutors’ case, the grand-jury investigation, and the FBI reports that were leaked to them.”

The heroic-journalist meme also popped up in an item posted the other day at VignaClaraBlog, an online local news site in Rome. That item told of an upcoming interview with Bernstein, whom it credited with breaking the Watergate scandal, leading to Nixon’s resignation.

The objective here is not to score points at the expense of foreign-language sites invoking the heroic-journalist myth. Rather, it is to underscore how persistent and insidious media-driven myths can be.

Crossing linguistic barriers not only is an emblem of their appeal: It suggests that myths such as that of the heroic-journalist of Watergate are now thoroughly immune to conclusive uprooting.

WJC

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On bringing down Nixon

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on April 12, 2010 at 4:07 pm

My guestpost the other day at the “Political Bookworm” blog–in which I reviewed three media-driven myths explored in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong–has attracted more than a few comments, including this particularly blinkered rhetorical question:

“Do you really know anyone who believes the Washington Post brought Nixon down?”

For starters, check Investor’s Business Daily.

On the day the guestpost and the blinkered comment appeared, Investor’s Business Daily said the New York Times, in its coverage of sexual abuses by Roman Catholic priests, was “seeking the biggest prey since Woodward and Bernstein brought down Richard Nixon.”

There you go: Brought down Nixon.

Gerald Ford became president on Nixon's resignation

The Investor’s Business Daily reference, of course, was to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post whose investigative reporting in the Watergate scandal is often and inaccurately said to have toppled Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, the heroic-journalist meme of Watergate is one of the most hardy, persistent, and delicious myths in American media history.

Interestingly, it lives on despite periodic efforts by principals at the Washington Post to dismiss it. (“Political Bookworm” is a Washington Post blog, it should be noted.)

The newspaper’s media reporter, Howard Kurtz, wrote in 2005, for example:

“Despite the mythology, The Post didn’t force Richard Nixon from office—there were also two special prosecutors, a determined judge, bipartisan House and Senate committees, the belated honesty of [former White House lawyer] John Dean and those infamous White House tapes.”

Kurtz’s observations parallel those of Stanley I. Kutler, a leading historian of Watergate, who has written:

“The fact is, an incredible array of powerful actors all converged on Nixon at once—the FBI, prosecutors, congressional investigators, the judicial system.”

Amid this array of subpoena-wielding authorities investigating Watergate, the contributions of Woodward and Bernstein were modest–and certainly not decisive to the scandal’s outcome.

Still, the heroic-journalist myth is alive, well–and often invoked.

In large measure, that’s because the 1976 motion picture All the President’s Men–the leading movie about Watergate–depicted Woodward and Bernstein as essential to unraveling the scandal.

Indeed, this myth is a trope that knows few bounds.

WJC