W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for the ‘Media myths’ Category

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The Post ‘took down a president’? That’s a myth

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on January 24, 2010 at 6:58 pm

Nixon after his resignation, 1974

The Washington Post has tried from time to time over the years to distance itself from the media myth that its coverage of the Watergate scandal brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

The newspaper’s publisher at the time of Watergate, Katharine Graham, said at a program at the Newseum in 1997:

“Sometimes people accuse us of bringing down a president, which of course we didn’t do. The processes that caused [Nixon’s] resignation were constitutional.”

Michael Getler, then the newspaper’s ombudsman, wrote in a column in 2005:

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

Still, the media myth that it was the Post — and, specifically, reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — who exposed Nixon’s corrupt ways can be too tempting and too perfect to resist.

Such was the case in today’s edition of the Post, in a commentary by Dana Milbank, who declared that “in the mid-1970s,” the Post “took down a president.”

It was a passing reference in a commentary that challenged the dire assessment about the Post published in latest issue of New Republic.

Still, the “took down a president” passage hints at latent hubris and suggests how the Watergate meme can be used as a not-so-subtle reminder of greatness by Post loyalists and insiders.

But as I write in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong, to argue that the Post took down Nixon is to “misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth.”

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

What I call 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” myth has become, I also write in Getting It Wrong, “a proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity.” That the Post and its reporters supposedly uncovered Watergate “is deeply ingrained in American journalism as one of the field’s most important and self-reverential stories.”

Despite, that is, the periodic protestations from the Post.

Hearty thanks to Jim Romenesko for linking to this post.

WJC

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Another twist to the ‘Cronkite Moment’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths on January 21, 2010 at 11:47 pm

The “Cronkite Moment” — that legendary occasion in February 1968 when a CBS News special report by Walter Cronkite supposedly altered the course of the Vietnam War — is one impressively dogged, tenacious media myth.

Cronkite in Vietnam

As I noted in a recent post, the “Cronkite Moment” knows few bounds. It supposedly “turned the tide of American public opinion” against the U.S. war effort in Vietnam and “influenced Lyndon Johnson not to seek reelection” to the presidency.

And just the other day, the TVWeek online site claimed:

“President Lyndon Johnson once famously said about his support of the Vietnam War that once he had lost Walter Cronkite he had lost America. Johnson was referring to a report Cronkite once did where he said the war could not be won.”

Where to start?

First, there is no evidence Johnson ever saw Cronkite’s special report about Vietnam, which aired February 27, 1968. At the close of the program, Cronkite claimed the U.S. military was “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam.

As I write in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong, Johnson at the time was not in front of a television set but on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, attending a party marking the 51st birthday of Governor John Connally.

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

Second, Cronkite did not say in that special report that “the war could not be won.” What the anchorman did say was that the time might be approaching when the United States might seek a negotiated settlement to the war.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, “a close reading of the transcript of Cronkite’s closing remarks reveals how hedged and cautious they really were.”

Cronkite in those remarks held open the possibility that the U.S. military efforts might still force the North Vietnamese to the bargaining table, and suggested the U.S. forces be given a few months more to press the fight in Vietnam.

In addition, the TVWeek item represents a minor addition to the varied accounts of what Johnson supposedly said in response to Cronkite’s closing assessment.

The most common version has Johnson saying: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Another version quotes him this way: “I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”

And another has it this way: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the American people.”

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

And “If we lose Cronkite, we lose America.”

The TVWeek item indirectly quotes Johnson as saying that “once he had lost Walter Cronkite he had lost America.”

Version variability of  such magnitude is a strong signal of implausibility.

And of a media-driven myth.

WJC

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That awesome ‘Cronkite Moment’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths on January 13, 2010 at 11:44 am

The power of the so-called “Cronkite Moment” knows few bounds.

A column in a Florida newspaper the other day claims that the “Cronkite Moment” was “seminal” because “many say” it “marked the end of the media’s reputation for credibility.”

The occasion was February 27, 1968, when CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite pronounced that the U.S. war effort in Vietnam had become mired in stalemate. Cronkite suggested that negotiations with the communist North Vietnamese should be considered, as a way to end the conflict.

Cronkite’s analysis was supposedly so powerful and insightful that President Lyndon Johnson purportedly told an aide or aides:

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” Or words to that effect.

Johnson in 1968

The column in the Hernando Today newspaper, a publication of the Tampa Tribune, doesn’t invoke Johnson’s purported remarks — which, as MediaMythAlert has noted several times, Johnson almost certainly did not say.

The column does, though, say that Cronkite’s remarks “turned the tide of American public opinion and influenced Lyndon Johnson not to seek reelection.”

Nope. Not so.

As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong,  “there is scant evidence that the Cronkite program had much influence at all on American popular opinion about the war.” As I further write in the book, which is to be published in the summer by University of California Press:

“Polling data clearly show that American sentiment had begun shifting months before the Cronkite program.”

Indeed, those data indicate that Americans’ views about the war had begun to shift months before the Cronkite program.

Journalists at the time also detected a softening in support of the war.

In December 1967, for example, Don Oberdorfer, then a national correspondent for the Knight newspapers, noted that “summer and fall of 1967 [had] been a time of switching, when millions of American voters—along with many religious leaders, editorial writers and elected officials—appeared to be changing their views about the war.”

As for Johnson’s decision not to seek reelection, the Cronkite program had little or no effect.

Critical to Johnson’s decision, which he announced at the end of March 1968, was the advice and counsel of his advisers, and the implications of Senator Eugene McCarthy’s insurgent bid for the Democratic nomination for president.

The surprising potency of McCarthy’s antiwar campaign was demonstrated in the Democratic primary election in New Hampshire on March 12, 1968. McCarthy won 42 percent of the vote, a far greater portion than expected. Johnson won 49 percent.

Not only that, there is evidence that Johnson never intended to seek reelection in 1968.

In any event, Cronkite  used to scoff at the notion that his report of February 27, 1968, had a powerful influence on Johnson. Rather, he would say, the effect was like that of “a very small straw.”

Near the end of his life, however, Cronkite (who died in July 2009) came to embrace the supposed power of the broadcast.

“To be honest,” he told Esquire magazine in 2006: “I was rather amazed that my reporting from Vietnam had such an effect on history.”

But it didn’t, though. Not really.

WJC

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The poverty-causes-crime link: A myth?

In Debunking, Media myths on January 11, 2010 at 5:56 pm

The Wall Street Journal published recently an intriguing op-ed commentary disputing the notion of a strong link between poverty and crime.

The commentary, written by Heather Mac Donald, a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, asserts:

“The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice.

“As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008, criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the ‘root causes’ theory holds, begets criminals. Instead, the opposite happened.”

“Over seven million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s. The consequences of this drop for how we think about social order are significant.”

Mac Donald further asserts that “by the end of 2009, the purported association between economic hardship and crime was in shambles.

“According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, homicide dropped 10% nationwide in the first six months of 2009; violent crime dropped 4.4% and property crime dropped 6.1%. Car thefts are down nearly 19%. The crime plunge is sharpest in many areas that have been hit the hardest by the housing collapse. Unemployment in California is 12.3%, but homicides in Los Angeles County, the Los Angeles Times reported recently, dropped 25% over the course of 2009. Car thefts there are down nearly 20%.”

[In an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, Robert Samuelson cites the latest edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States in noting:  “From 1993 to 2007, murders dropped from 25,000 to 17,000 and robberies from 660,000 to 445,000. Crime rates per 100,000 declined more, because the population rose 16 percent over the same period. There is no consensus as to why. Possibilities include better policing techniques and tougher sentencing (the incarcerated population doubled from 1.15 million in 1990 to 2.29 million in 2007).]

Mac Donald in her op-ed says the “increase in the number of people incarcerated had a large effect on crime in the last decade and continues to affect crime rates today, however much anti-incarceration activists deny it.”

She also says that “data-driven policing” techniques also have contributed to the drop in crime.

It’s all intriguing material, evocative in some respects of the research of Princeton economist Alan B. Krueger on what makes a terrorist.

As I note in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong, Krueger disputes “the popular notion that poverty breeds terrorism. Such a linkage seems intuitive, and has been invoked by politicians, scholars, analysts, and journalists. Krueger’s research showed persuasively, however, that the poverty-terrorism symbiosis is illusory.”

Mac Donald’s op-ed certainly suggests that the poverty-breeds-crime nexus is a myth — or at very least, conventional wisdom that the news media have routinely embraced.

She notes that the recession “could still affect crime rates if cities cut their police forces and states start releasing prisoners early. Both forms of cost-saving would be self-defeating.”

Her op-ed raises intriguing issues that surely merit fuller attention by the news media.

WJC

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Slaying the McCarthy dragon? It wasn’t Murrow

In Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth on January 10, 2010 at 2:46 pm

Few lessons in American journalism are as inspiring — but, in the end, as misplaced — as the notion of Edward R. Murrow’s slaying the dragon of McCarthyism in a single television program in 1954.

It’s a great story, how Murrow, the legendary figure of American broadcasting, stood up to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, when no one else would, or dared, and in so doing, brought an abrupt end to senator’s witchhunt for communists in the U.S. government.

Murrow in 1954 (Library of Congress)

It’s a tale that dates to the evening of March 9, 1954, and Murrow’s “Special Report on Joseph R. McCarthy,” which aired on the CBS television show, See It Now.

The epic confrontation of Murrow and McCarthy was recalled the other day in a commentary posted at the online edition of a Philipine newspaper, the News Today.

The commentary invoked the dragon metaphor, stating in part:

“Edward Murrow slew the dragon that was McCarthyism, ushering in the pure air of freedom enjoyed by his fellow Americans be they from the left, right, or center. Witch-hunting was thrashed to damnation, and Joseph McCarthy exited in ignominy.”

It is a great story; indeed, it’s one of the most treasured in American journalism.

But as I write in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong, the notion that Murrow took down McCarthy and ended the senator’s witchhunting ways is a tenacious media-driven myth, one that obscures the more important contributions of journalists other than Murrow in McCarthy’s demise.

As I also write in Getting It Wrong:

“Long before the See It Now program” in March 1954, “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’s contributions to unraveling the scourge of McCarthyism are, however, little recalled these days.

Interestingly, the media myth of Murrow v. McCarthy took hold despite the protestations of its central figures.

In the days and weeks following the See It Now program on McCarthy, Murrow said he recognized his accomplishments were modest, that at best he had reinforced what others had long said about McCarthy.

Jay Nelson Tuck, the television critic for the New York Post, wrote that Murrow felt “almost a little shame faced at being saluted for his courage in the McCarthy matter. He said he had said nothing that … anyone might not have said without a raised eyebrow only a few years ago.”

Murrow told Newsweek magazine: “It’s a sad state of affairs when people think I was courageous.”

Murrow’s collaborator and co-producer, Fred W. Friendly, also rejected claims the program was pivotal or decisive, writing in his 1967 memoir:

“To say that the Murrow broadcast of March 9, 1954, was the decisive blow against Senator McCarthy’s power is as inaccurate as it is to say that Joseph R. McCarthy … single-handedly gave birth to McCarthyism.”

So why has the Murrow-McCarthy myth become so tenacious?

There are several reasons. A particularly persuasive explanation, in my view, is that mythologizing Murrow’s See It Now program on McCarthy serves, as I write in Getting It Wrong, “to affirm television’s sometimes-tenuous claim to seriousness of purpose.

“Enveloping the program in heroic terms is a way to identify and celebrate the potential of broadcast journalism, which often has been criticized for superficiality and a taste for the trivial. As it became an inescapable presence in American living rooms in the 1950s, television needed a hero and a heroic moment. Murrow and his ‘Report on Joseph R. McCarthy’ were both ….”

This is a point that communications scholar Gary Edgerton has addressed notably well, having written in 1992:

“In a deep and heartfelt sense, Murrow is the electronic media’s hero for self-justification. Commemorating a ‘patron saint of American broadcasting’ is also an act of testimony to the tenets of fairness, commitment, conscience courage, and social responsibility which compose the Murrow tradition for broadcast journalism.”

Besides, it wasn’t as if Americans in early 1954 were hoping for someone to step up and expose McCarthy, or waiting for a white knight like Murrow to tell them about the toxic threat the senator posed. It was quite well-known by then.

WJC

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The ‘Cronkite Moment’: That famous, dubious turn of phrase

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths on January 8, 2010 at 6:57 pm

I blogged not long ago about what may be the most famous words in American journalism, offering a couple of media myths as examples.

One was the enduring anecdote about William Randolph Hearst’s supposed vow to “furnish the war” with Spain. That one’s been retold many, many since it first appeared in print in 1901.

It is arguably American journalism’s most tenacious myth. Those words attributed to Hearst surely are some of the most famous in journalism. Even though it’s quite unlikely he ever made such a vow.

Another example I cited was the so-called “Cronkite Moment,” the occasion in 1968 when the views of CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite were supposedly so powerful and persuasive they swiftly altered U.S. policy in Vietnam.

That anecdote centers around Cronkite’s special program on the Vietnam War, a show that aired February 27, 1968. Near the end of the program, Cronkite declared the U.S. war effort was “mired in stalemate” and suggested negotiations with the communist North Vietnamese to end the conflict.

At the White House, President Lyndon Johnson supposedly watched the Cronkite program and snapped off the television set when he heard the anchorman’s dire assessment, telling an aide, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” Or something to that effect.

The point is that Cronkite was such a trusted figure that his views could sway the opinions of countless thousands of Americans. With Cronkite gone wobbly on Vietnam, the Johnson White House supposedly reeled. At the end of March 1968, Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.

The “Cronkite Moment” made yet another appearance the other day in a blog of the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The blog comment, posted by an editorial writer for the newspaper, stated:

“One of the standard views of why America turned on the Vietnam War focuses on CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite’s increasingly obvious pessimism about President Lyndon Johnson’s statements about and management of the war. LBJ reportedly told an aide, ‘That’s it. If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.'”

As I’ve noted several time at Media Myth Alert, and as I write in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong, Johnson did not see the Cronkite program on Vietnam when it aired. The president that night was in Austin, Texas, at the 51st birthday of a political ally, Governor John Connally.

When Cronkite was intoning his downbeat assessment of the war, Johnson was offering light-hearted banter 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. Throughout the years we have worked long and hard—and I might say late—trying to maintain it, too.”

Earlier that day, Johnson delivered a rousing speech in Dallas, invoking Churchillian language at one point.

“There will be blood, sweat and tears shed,” he said, adding:  “I do not believe that America will ever buckle” in pursuit of its objectives in Vietnam.

Even if the president had seen the Cronkite program, it is exceedingly difficult to imagine how his mood could swing so abruptly, from vigorously defending the war effort to throwing up his hands in despair.

But if the “Cronkite Moment” is to be believed, that’s what happened: A swift, dramatic and decisive change of heart that occurred within hours of the hawkish speech in Dallas.

Not likely.

Even so, the frequency with which the quote attributed to Johnson is invoked certainly has made it among the most famous, if most dubious, turns of phrase in American journalism.

As I also 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. 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, where the war ground on for years after the ‘Cronkite moment.’”

WJC

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A media myth tamed — or at least controlled

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths on January 3, 2010 at 4:58 pm

Many media-driven myths seem to defy debunking.

The tale of William Randolph Hearst’s supposed vow to “furnish the war” with Spain is a telling example. So is the notion that Walter Cronkite’s downbeat report in 1968 about the U.S. military effort in Vietnam forced President Lyndon Johnson to rethink American war policy.

Both media myths live on and on.

As I write in my forthcoming book Getting It Wrong, these “and other media myths endure, because in part they are reductive: They offer unambiguous, easily remembered explanations about complex historic events. Similarly, media myths invite indulgence in the ‘golden age fallacy,’ the flawed but enticing belief that there really was a time when journalism and its practitioners were respected and inspiring.”

While many media myths are indeed tenacious, the efforts of the Annenberg Public Policy Center over the past 10 years suggest that some myths can be curbed or contained, if not defeated entirely.

The Phildelphia-based Annenberg Center has worked to debunk the notion that suicides rise during the year-end holidays.

Such a connection may seem logical, given the stresses of the holiday season. But the data point otherwise: Suicides most often peak in the United States during the spring and fall, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

(See the CDCP’sl 2009 data sheet on suicides here.)

The Annenberg Center tracks newspaper reports for mentions of a holiday season-suicide link. Its analysis of reporting during the 2008–09 holiday season found that 37.5 percent of 64 newspaper articles asserted such a linkage. A majority, 62.5 percent, disputed or challenged the presumed holiday season-suicide connection.

The difference over 10 years is quite dramatic. In 1999–2000, the first year of the Annenberg Center’s study on the topic, 77 percent of 101 newspapers articles asserted a holiday season-suicide link.

The pattern has been a bit erratic in the intervening years, Annenberg Center data show.

In 2006–07, for example, just 9 percent of 32 articles asserted a holiday season-suicide link. The following season, however, 51 percent of 43 articles claimed there was such a connection.

Data for the 2009–2010 season are still being compiled. But a quick check of the LexisNexis database suggests that newspaper articles published in late 2009 more often challenged than claimed a holiday season-suicide link.

A notable example was an article in USA Today in late November which noted:

“You could blame George Bailey” for the myth. “In the 1946 holiday film It’s a Wonderful Life, that fictional character contemplated suicide on Christmas Eve, possibly giving birth to the idea that suicides climb during the winter holidays.”

The Washington Times suggested a similar explanation in an article published two days before Christmas.

Like many media-driven myths, the dubious holiday season-suicide link is neither harmless nor trivial.

The Annenberg Center says:

“Perpetuating the myth not only misinforms readers but it also misses an opportunity to educate the public about the most likely sources of suicide risk, including major depression and substance abuse.”

Still, the Center’s data offer a measure of encouragement that media-driven myths are not entirely beyond taming.

WJC

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‘If I’ve lost Cronkite,’ an encore appearance in 2009

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths on December 31, 2009 at 11:53 am

President Lyndon Johnson’s purported reaction to Walter Cronkite’s 1968 CBS News special on Vietnam — “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America” — makes a year-end appearance in the Newark Star-Ledger‘s television column.

The column offers a “look back at some of the notable people from the world of television who died” in 2009. Among them is Cronkite, the retired CBS News anchor who died in July.

The column says Cronkite represented the “gold standard of TV anchormen” and “was so respected and powerful in his ’60s and ’70s heyday that Lyndon Johnson reportedly said (after Cronkite delivered an editorial against our presence in Vietnam), ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.'”

No, not likely.

As is discussed in Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book about media-driven myths, Johnson did not even see the Cronkite program on Vietnam when it aired February 27, 1968. (Near the end of that 30-minute report, Cronkite said the U.S. military effort in Vietnam was “mired in stalemate” and suggested that negotiations might be considered to settle the conflict.)

At the time, Johnson was in Austin, Texas, at the 51st birthday party of Governor John Connally, where he engaged in light-hearted banter with his longtime political ally.

Johnson at Connally's birthday party, 1968

“Today you are 51, John,” the president told Connally. “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 later heard—or heard about— Cronkite’s downbeat assessment, it represented no epiphany for the president.

Indeed, not long after the program, Johnson gave a rousing, lectern-pounding speech in Minneapolis, in which he urged a “total national effort” to win the war in Vietnam.

That speech was delivered March 18, 1968, and in it, the president declared:

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

He disparaged critics of the war as being inclined to “tuck our tail and violate our commitments.”

Those remarks are difficult to square with the president’s supposedly downbeat and self-pitying reaction to Cronkite’s assessment about Vietnam.

So even in the weeks immediately following the Cronkite program, Johnson remained outwardly hawkish on the war in Vietnam. The Cronkite program was neither decisive nor pivotal to his thinking on Vietnam.

Happy New Year.

WJC

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Getting It Wrong update: Page proofs in

In Debunking, Media myths on December 27, 2009 at 1:49 pm

Page proofs of Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book on media-driven myths, arrived just before Christmas.

The pages look handsome. They’re set in a Sabon typeface, which stands out nicely. Especially attractive are the all-cap subhedes, as are the chapter headings. The chapter-opening epigrams (e.g., “Accurant reporting was among Katrina’s many victims”) are set off well, too.

It’s a very appealing package.

The page proofs are due back to the publisher, University of California Press, by January 21.

If all goes as planned, Getting It Wrong should be out in May.

FAQs about the book are available here and here.

“Media-driven myths,” by the way, are well-known stories about and/or by the news media that are widely believed and often retold but which, on close inspection, prove to be apocryphal or wildly exaggerated.

They are dubious tales that often promote misleading interpretations of media power and influence.

They can be thought of as the “junk food of journalism.”

Media-driven myths arise from a variety of sources—including a tendency to believe the news media are very powerful and sometimes even dangerous forces in society.

Media myths also are appealing because they offer simplistic answers to complex issues. Stories that are too good—too delicious—to be checked out can become media myths.

Those three factors—media power, simple answers to complex questions, and a sense of being too good not to be true—help explain the emergence and tenacity of one of the most famous media myths—the purported vow of William Randolph Hearst to “furnish the war” with Spain.

That anecdote is rich, telling, and delicious—and fits well with the image of Hearst as an unrestrained war-monger. But it’s almost certainly apocryphal, as is discussed in Chapter One of Getting It Wrong.

WJC

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Bra-burning revisited, in error

In Bra-burning, Debunking, Media myths on December 22, 2009 at 2:37 pm

The enduring myths of bra-burning — a topic explored in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong — were invoked not only ago in a column posted at the Syndey Morning Herald‘s online site.

The passage was brief, but stunning in the ways in which it was in error.

The Morning Herald column was about the National Organization of Women and its opposition to a proposed tax on Botox. But here’s the passage about bra-burning, which refers to a demonstration in Atlantic City in September 1968 that targeted the Miss America Pageant:

“The most famous NOW action — burning a trash can full of bras and girdles outside a Miss America beauty pageant – became the stuff of folklore, and made ‘bra-burning’ a universal symbol of women’s liberation. As a symbol it’s perhaps been over-hyped, but at least it grabbed attention and made a point.”

Where to begin?

The protest on the boardwalk at Atlantic City had little to do with NOW. It was organized by a small group called New York Radical Women, a leader of which was the writer and former child actor, Robin Morgan.

At the Freedom Trash Can, 1968 (Duke University, special collections)

A highlight of the protest came when Morgan and other demonstrators (described by the New York Times as “mostly middle-aged careerists and housewives”) tossed into a barrel what they called “instruments of torture,” which included brassieres, girdles, high-heeled shoes, and magazines such as Playboy and Cosmopolitan. The protesters dubbed the barrel the Freedom Trash Can.

Morgan and others have long insisted that the bras and other contents of the Freedom Trash Can were not set afire during the protest that day.

Moreover, “bra-burning” scarcely was “a universal symbol of women’s liberation.” Far from it: Feminists like Morgan abhorred the term. They never embraced “bra-burning” as anything remotely approaching a symbol or metaphor.

But “bra-burning” did become a media-driven myth.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, the term was often invoked “to denigrate women’s liberation and feminist advocacy as trivial and even a bit primitive.”

The notion that bras were demonstratively and flamboyantly set afire at the Atlantic City protest was driven by syndicated newspaper columnists such as Harriett Van Horne.

“My feeling about the liberation ladies,” Van Horne wrote soon after the protest at Atlantic City, “is that they’ve been scarred by consorting with the wrong men. Men who do not understand the way to a woman’s heart, i.e., to make her feel utterly feminine, desirable and almost too delicate for this hard world. … No wonder she goes to Atlantic City and burns her bra.”

The author of the Sydney Morning Herald column, by the way, was Virginia Haussegger, whose Web site identifies her as “a journalist, author and commentator whose extensive media career spans more than 20 years.” She is further identified as “the face” of Australian Broadcasting Corp. TV News in Canberra.

Haussegger is the author of Wonder Woman: The Myth of Having It All, a 2005 memoir that takes feminism to task. Read the first chapter here.

WJC

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