W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for the ‘Newspapers’ Category

, , , , ,

Woodward’s new book stirs retelling of Watergate myth

In Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on September 25, 2010 at 10:33 am

The pre-publication publicity and reviews about Bob Woodward‘s new book, Obama’s Wars, have inevitably stirred fresh retellings of the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate, in which Woodward figures prominently.

Nixon resigns, 1974

The heroic-journalist meme can be distilled to a single sentence–as CNN commentator Jack Cafferty demonstrated in a blog post the other day.

“In 1974,” Cafferty wrote, “Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon with their reporting on Watergate.”

And demonstrating anew that media-driven myths can travel far and well, the Daily Telegraph in London declared the other day in a profile of Woodward that his collaboration with Bernstein brought them “global fame” for “breaking the Watergate scandal and forcing Richard Nixon’s resignation in the early 1970s.”

The venerable BBC, in its profile, said of Woodward:

“The veteran journalist was at the heart of the scandal that rocked the White House and brought down U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1974.

“Along with Carl Bernstein, his colleague at the Washington Post, Woodward was instrumental in uncovering a series of abuses of power that reached the highest level of the administration.”

I address, and debunk, the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate in my new book, Getting It Wrong.

Among the many elements of the myth’s debunking, I note that principals at the Washington Post have sought periodically over the years to dismiss the notion the newspaper was central to Nixon’s fall.

Katharine Graham, the newspaper’s publisher during the Watergate period and beyond, said in 1997, at the 25th anniversary of the scandal’s seminal crime, the foiled burglary at Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.:

“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.”

And Woodward, himself, has concurred, albeit in earthier terms.  “To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit,” he said in 2004 in an interview with American Journalism Review.

Complexity-avoidance, I write in Getting It Wrong, also helps explain the tenacity of the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate. Like many media myths, the heroic-journalist meme minimizes the intricacy of historical events in favor of simplistic and misleading interpretations.

In the case of Watergate, it is far easier to focus on the purported exploits of Woodward and Bernstein than it is to try to grapple with the intricacies and complexities of what was a sprawling scandal.

Far more significant and decisive to Watergate’s outcome were the contributions of federal prosecutors, federal judges, bipartisan congressional panels, and, ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court. They were the forces in that succeeded in identifying Nixon’s criminal attempt to obstruct justice in the Watergate scandal–the misconduct that led to his resignation.

Against the tableau of prosecutors, courts, and bipartisan congressional panels, I write in Getting It Wrong, “the contributions of Woodward and Bernstein were modest, and certainly not decisive.”

I further write:

“This is not to say the Post’s reporting on Watergate was without distinction.” Indeed, the newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1973, for its reporting about the scandal in the summer and fall of 1972–during the four months following the foiled breakin at the Watergate.

But by late October 1972, the Post’s investigation into Watergate had run “out of gas,” as Barry Sussman, then the newspaper’s city editor, later acknowledged.

As earnest as their reporting was, “Woodward and Bernstein did not uncover defining and decisive elements of the Watergate scandal—the cover-up and the payment of hush money to the Watergate burglars,” I note in Getting It Wrong.

Nor did they disclose the existence of the White House audiotaping system that proved so critical to Nixon’s fate.

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

“Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up and authorizing payments of thousands of dollars in hush money.”

Now that’s what “brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon.”

Related:

, , ,

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.

Related:


, , , ,

WaPo ‘didn’t like Nixon’–and that’s how ‘we got Watergate’? Huh?

In Debunking, Media myths, New York Times, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on September 9, 2010 at 7:06 am

Wolff

Michael Wolff, the media critic and biographer of Rupert Murdoch, has been sharply criticized for his column this week that presented a strange, Machiavellian assessment of the New York Times magazine article about how Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid News of the World apparently hacked the voicemail of Britain’s royals, and many others.

Murdoch

Wolff noted the Times is “locked in a ferocious battle with Murdoch. He’s trying to use the Wall Street Journal to undermine the Times—to lessen it as a competitor or, even, weaken it so much that he can buy it.”

OK, so far.

But Wolff also claimed that the article about the News of the World signaled that the Times “is striking back” at Murdoch, albeit “a little oddly (the Times can be brutal, but it likes to pretend it is much less brutal than it can be). Instead of using the paper to make its attack, it’s using the magazine—this is a clear choice for the Times.”

And in a passage holding relevance and particular interest to Media Myth Alert, Wolff (who surely ought to know better) wrote:

“Still, just because you have ulterior motives (and some worry and guilt about your motives), doesn’t mean the story won’t stick. The Washington Post didn’t like Nixon—and because of that bad blood we got Watergate.”

That’s how “we got Watergate”?

That’s just absurd.

The Watergate scandal was not the upshot of “bad blood” between the Nixon and the Post, even though neither was particularly fond of the other.

Nixon resigns, 1974

The scandal unfolded, deepened, and ultimately claimed Richard Nixon’s presidency because of broad criminal misconduct by Nixon, his close associates, some cabinet officers, as well as senior officials of his 1972 reelection campaign.

Likewise absurd is asserting that the Post‘s investigative reporting on Watergate was decisive in Nixon’s fall.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, my new book debunking prominent media-driven myths, to explain Watergate as a case of media revelation “is to abridge and misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth.”

It is an interpretation, I write, that minimizes and obscures “the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office”–notably, special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

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

“Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up and authorizing payments of thousands of dollars in hush money.”

It’s understandable to seek to distill Watergate, as Wolff did, to something simple, manageable.

After all, the complexity of Watergate–the multiple lines of inquiry that slowly unwound the scandal, and the drama of an exceptional constitutional crisis—”are not routinely recalled these days,” I write in Getting It Wrong. “The epic scandal has grown so distant that few Americans can accurately describe what took place.”

I also write:

“What does stand out amid the scandal’s many tangles is the heroic-journalist version of Watergate—the endlessly appealing notion that the dogged reporting of two young, hungry, and tireless Washington Post journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, brought down Nixon and his corrupt presidency.”

In the years since Nixon resigned in 1974, the heroic-journalist meme has become embedded and solidified as the dominant narrative of Watergate–as a short-hand way of vaguely understanding the scandal and its outcome while sidestepping its forbidding complexity.

But it is an interpretation that rests upon a serious misreading of the historical record.

WJC

Related:

, , , , ,

The editor and the protest: Bra-burning’s intriguing sidebar

In Anniversaries, Bra-burning, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times, Newspapers on September 8, 2010 at 7:27 am

The women’s liberation demonstration at Atlantic City in 1968–the event that gave rise to the legend of bra-burning–had a little-known sidebar that featured Charlotte Curtis, a prominent and pathbreaking editor for the New York Times.

Curtis, according to the Press of Atlantic City, was to have been a judge at the Miss America Pageant but backed out to cover the women’s liberation protest that took place September 7, 1968.

Curtis biography

The protest was on the boardwalk, near the Convention Center, where Miss America was crowned. The women’s liberation demonstrators denounced the pageant as a mindless spectacle demeaning to women.

And they carried placards bearing such slogans as:

“Up Against the Wall, Miss America,” “Miss America Sells It,” and “Miss America Goes Down.”

How the protest on the boardwalk gave rise to the “nuanced myth” of bra-burning–or bra-smoldering–is discussed in my new book, Getting It Wrong, which debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths.

The protest’s principal organizer, Robin Morgan, later discussed Curtis’ participatory role in covering the event–and described Curtis’ eagerness not to alert Times editors about how she helped demonstrators who had been arrested.

In her 2001 memoir, Saturday’s Child, Morgan recalled that Curtis rode with the demonstrators by bus from New York to Atlantic City.

Curtis, then the Times women’s editor, was “elegantly dressed in black (gloves, pearls, and heels) amid our colorful informality, gamely warbling ‘We Shall Overcome’ with us as we bounced along in the rattletrap buses.

“She stayed all day on the hot boardwalk with us, brought us cool drinks, laughed and applauded when we would recognize and respond to women journalists only,” Morgan wrote.

(The women’s liberation demonstrators would not speak to male reporters covering the event. Morgan later wrote that the protest’s “most enduring contribution” may have been the decision “to recognize only newswomen.”)

That night, a handful of demonstrators attended the Miss America pageant, briefly disrupted the event, and were arrested.

Morgan recalled how she went “from precinct to precinct in search of where our friends were being held. Finally, at 3 a.m., I learned they’d been released hours earlier on cash bail put up personally by ‘some older woman’ named Charlotte Curtis.

“When I phoned the next day to thank her, she asked me to keep it quiet, as ‘these dreary grey guys running the Times’ would not be amused.”

Her request “to keep it quiet” may well have been because Curtis had not only taken a role in the demonstration, but had written about it, too.

Her article for the Times appeared 42 years ago today and quoted Morgan as saying, “We told [the Atlantic City mayor] we wouldn’t do anything dangerous—just a symbolic bra-burning.”

Morgan has long insisted that the demonstrators set nothing afire that day. But her ambiguous comment to Curtis about “a symbolic bra-burning” no doubt helped propel the notion that bras were burned in a public spectacle on the boardwalk.

Curtis then was 39-years-old and well on her way to a memorable career. In all, she spent 25 years at the Times, including a stint as associate editor in charge of the daily op-ed page of opinion.

At her death in 1987, the Times eulogized Curtis as a “strong-willed, indefatigable Vassar graduate with an incisive wit.”

The anecdote about her role at the 1968 women’s liberation protest went unreported until 1999, when the Times published a letter by Morgan, who wrote to take issue with a characterization that Curtis had been “scornful of the feminist movement.”

“Actually, for a woman of her generation and prominence,” Morgan wrote in the letter to the Times, “Curtis was unusually supportive of women and feminist ideas and actions.”

Morgan proceeded to relate the anecdote about Curtis at the 1968 protest at Atlantic City.

“Charlotte Curtis had a style all her own,” Morgan wrote. “She was a lady. And she was a feminist. In her, this was no contradiction.”

WJC

Related:

, , , , ,

Remembering bra-burning–er, make that bra-smoldering

In Anniversaries, Bra-burning, Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers on September 6, 2010 at 7:20 am

The legend of “bra-burning” emerged 42 years ago this week in the aftermath of a women’s liberation demonstration on the boardwalk at Atlantic City.

Atlantic City, September 7, 1968

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, my new book debunking prominent media-driven myths, bra-burning is a “nuanced myth.”

Getting It Wrong offers evidence that bras and other items were burned–or at least smoldered–for a short time during the protest September 7, 1968, which was called to denounce the Miss America pageant at Atlantic City as a mindless spectacle that demeaned women.

The demonstration’s organizers have long insisted that nothing was set afire at the Atlantic City protest, which, as scholars such as  Thomas Lieb have noted, is regarded as decisive in the emergence of the women’s movement of the late 20th century.

Feminists have long claimed that “bra-burning” was an injurious turn of phrase, intended to denigrate the women’s movement and belittle its objectives of gender equality.

A centerpiece of the women’s liberation protest at Atlantic City was the so-called “Freedom Trash Can” (see photo, above), into which demonstrators placed what they called “instruments of torture,” such as brassieres, girdles, and high-heeled shoes, as well as copies of Playboy and Cosmopolitan magazines.

My research, as described in Getting It Wrong, found a long-overlooked contemporaneous account in the Press of Atlantic City that said bras and other items in the Freedom Trash Can were set afire that day.

That account was written by a veteran reporter named John Boucher and published September 8, 1968, beneath the headline:

“Bra-burners blitz boardwalk.”

That account, which appeared on page 4, was separately endorsed years later by Jon Katz, who in 1968 was a young reporter for the Press. He also covered the women’s liberation protest.

“I quite clearly remember the ‘Freedom Trash Can,’ and also remember some protestors putting their bras into it along with other articles of clothing, and some Pageant brochures, and setting the can on fire,” Katz said in an interview with me while I was researching Getting It Wrong.

“I am quite certain of this.”

Katz also told me:

“I recall and remember noting at the time that the fire was small, and quickly was extinguished, and didn’t pose a credible threat to the Boardwalk.”

As I point out in Getting It Wrong, the witness accounts of Boucher and Katz “lend no support to the far more vivid and popular imagery that many bras went up in flames” in a fiery spectacle that September day.

Their accounts, I write, don’t corroborate the “widely held image of angry feminists demonstratively setting fire to their bras and tossing the flaming undergarments into a spectacular bonfire.”

Such imagery can be traced to imaginative and sardonic newspaper columns published shortly after the Miss America protest.

Harriet Van Horne, writing in the New York Post a few days after the demonstration, declared:

“My feeling about the liberation ladies 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.”

Van Horne, who was not at the protest, also wrote that the highlight of the demonstration “was a bonfire in a Freedom Trash Can. With screams of delight they consigned to the flames such shackling, demeaning items as girdles, bras, high-heeled slippers, hair curlers and false eyelashes.” (Emphasis added.)

The widely read humor columnist, Art Buchwald, took up the riff a few days later, writing in his nationally syndicated column that he had been “flabbergasted to read that about 100 women had picketed the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City against ‘ludicrous beauty standards that had enslaved’ the American woman.”

Buchwald added: “The final and most tragic part of the protest took place when several of the women publicly burned their brassieres.”

The columns by Van Horne and Buchwald introduced to national audiences the notion that bra-burning was flamboyant at Atlantic City. The columns conjured, I write in Getting It Wrong, “a powerful mental image of angry women setting fire to bras and twirling them, defiantly, for all on the boardwalk to see.”

Didn’t happen.

At most, bras smoldered in the Freedom Trash Can.

So what’s the significance of the Boucher and Katz accounts, as described in Getting It Wrong?

At very least, I write, they “offer fresh dimension to the bra-burning legend.

“They represent two witness accounts that bras and other items were burned, or at least smoldered, in the Freedom Trash Can. There is now evidence that bras and other items were set afire, if briefly, at the 1968 Miss America protest in Atlantic City.”

It’s evidence that cannot be taken lightly, dismissed, or ignored, as it signals that the narrative about bra-burning needs to be modified.

WJC

Related:

, , , , ,

Investigative reporting’s ‘golden era’ lasted 25 years? Think again

In Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on September 5, 2010 at 6:43 am

In a lengthy, hand-wringing look at the state of investigative reporting, the September issue of American Journalism Review indulges in the “golden age” fallacy while hinting broadly at the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate.

The article, funded by a grant from the Open Society Institute and titled “Investigative Shortfall,” contains this passage:

“Elevated to hero status after two Washington Post reporters helped bring down a corrupt U.S. president and his cronies, investigative reporters enjoyed a golden era from the late 1970s into the 2000s.”

In other words, about 25 years.

However, the article presents scant corroboration for its 25-year “golden era” claim, beyond offering generalization such as:

“In cities blessed with activist media, reporters took aim at corruption, waste, incompetence and injustice in politics, government, charities and corporations. Cameras confronted culprits. An aroused populace demanded change. People went to jail; old laws were rewritten and new ones passed. Competition for investigative prizes swelled; others came into being.”

I think Carl Bernstein, he of Watergate fame, had it right when he said recently: “There’s a little too much nostalgia about maybe a golden age of ‘investigative journalism’ that never really existed.”

I address the “golden age” fallacy in Getting It Wrong, my new book that debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths–dubious tales about the news media that masquerade as factual.

I note in Getting It Wrong how  “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—the time, say, of … [Bob] Woodward and Bernstein.”

They’re the “two Washington Post reporters” to whom American Journalism Review refers, claiming they “helped bring down a corrupt U.S. president and his cronies,” a reference to Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal.

But as I write in Getting It Wrong, “the contributions of Woodward and Bernstein were modest, and certainly not decisive” to the outcome of Watergate.

I further write:

“… 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.”

Those forces included special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

“Even then,” I write, “Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House. Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up and authorizing payments of thousands of dollars in hush money.”

So against the tableau of federal prosecutors, judges, Congress, and the Supreme Court, the contributions of the Woodward and Bernstein were marginal. To say they “helped bring down” Nixon’s corrupt presidency is to indulge in overstatement.

The article’s woe-is-us tone about investigative reporting is hardly novel.

Brant Houston, formerly of the non-profit Investigation Reporters and Editors organization, noted this year in an article in Daedalus magazine:

“Each year that I served as executive director of IRE, from 1997 to 2007, journalists interviewed me (as they had my predecessors) about the pending death of investigative journalism.”

Those years would embrace a substantial portion of the supposed “golden era” of investigative reporting.

Undeniably, the decline of traditional, mainstream media-based investigative journalism has accelerated in recent years, given the layoffs and buyouts that have swept American newspapers.

But as Jack Shafer, media critic for slate.com pointed out a number of years ago, “newspapers aren’t the only organizations trolling for investigative news. The nonprofit Center for Public Integrity has broken as many stories as almost any big-city daily in the last couple of decades ….

“Activist organizations have similarly collected countless investigative scoops about human rights abuses, environmental crimes, consumer rip-offs, and more,” Shafer wrote, adding:

“Long before today’s newsroom budget crunch, newspapers were de facto outsourcing a good share of investigative reporting to the nonprofits, whose findings they trumpeted on their front pages.”

True enough.

It’s premature to write off investigative journalism in America, even given the deep cuts in newsroom staffs. That’d be as wrong as believing investigative reporting once enjoyed a 25-year golden age.

WJC

Related:

, , , ,

Katrina and the myth of superlative reporting

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Hurricane Katrina, Media myths, Newspapers on September 1, 2010 at 7:34 am

Five years ago this month, a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast and left much of New Orleans under water, former CBS anchorman Dan Rather went on Larry King Live to extol television’s coverage of the deadly storm.

Rather,  whose early career had been propelled by covering hurricanes, was extravagant in his praise, saying the Katrina coverage was “one of the quintessential great moments in television news,” ranking “right there with the Nixon/Kennedy debates, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate coverage, you name it.”

The coverage, Rather declared, was nothing short of “landmark.”

As I write in Getting It Wrong, my new book debunking prominent media-driven myths, Rather’s praise was “more than a little misleading.”

Rather’s comments also helped give rise to what I call the “myth of superlative reporting”–the notion that coverage of Katrina represented a memorable occasion of the news media’s finding their voice, of standing up to public officials and holding them accountable for an inept and muddled response,  especially in New Orleans.

But the notion the reporting was superlative is inexact and misleading. Katrina’s aftermath, as I write in Getting It Wrong, “was no high, heroic moment in American journalism.

“The coverage was in important respects flawed and exaggerated. On crucial details, journalists erred badly, and got it wrong. In the days following Katrina’s landfall, news reports described apocalyptic horror that the hurricane supposedly had unleashed.”

Five years on, it’s instructive to recall how extreme and over the top the reporting was from New Orleans in Katrina’s aftermath; it’s revealing to revisit what journalists said and wrote.

On CNN five years ago today, Paula Zahn spoke about “very discouraging reports out of New Orleans” about “bands of rapists going from block to block, people walking around in feces, dead bodies floating everywhere. And we know that sniper fire continues.”

She also said:

“We are getting reports that describe it as a nightmare of crime, human waste, rotten food, dead bodies everywhere. Other reports say sniper fire is hampering efforts to get people out.”

Also that day, John Burnett of National Public Radio said on the All Things Considered show: “We understand that there was a 10-year-old girl who was raped in the [New Orleans] Convention Center in the last two nights. People are absolutely desperate there. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

The Associated Press news service reported on September 1, 2005, that New Orleans had “descended into anarchy” as “corpses lay abandoned in street medians, fights and fires broke out, cops turned in their badges and the governor declared war on looters who have made the city a menacing landscape of disorder and fear.”

In her column published September 3, 2005, in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd referred to New Orleans as “a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning.”

International news organizations, I note in Getting It Wrong, were quite “keen to report the horror stories from New Orleans, as if the hurricane had exposed pathologies in American society that otherwise would remain obscure.”

The British press landed with notable eagerness on the Katrina-unleashed-mayhem narrative.

The Sunday Observer of London reported on September 4, 2005, that New Orleans had become “a city … subsumed beneath waves of violence, rape and death.”

And a columnist for London’s Independent newspaper offered a colorful and highly imaginative account that was published five years ago today:

“Reports from New Orleans ring like prophecies of the apocalypse. Corpses float hopelessly in what used to be a thriving and distinctive downtown; coffins rise from the ground; alligators, sharks and snakes ply the poisonous waters ….”

Few if any of the nightmarish accounts of violence, anarchy, and mayhem proved true.

No shots were fired at rescue helicopters. There were no known child rape victims, no bodies stacked like cordwood, no “bands of rapists going from block to block,” no sharks plying the flood waters.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, “the erroneous and exaggerated reporting had the cumulative the effect of painting for America and the rest of the world a scene of surreal violence and terror, something straight out of Mad Max or Lord of the Flies.”

The coverage of Katrina’s aftermath was no “quintessential” great moment in journalism.

Far from it.

As a bipartisan congressional report on Katrina noted in 2006:

“If anyone rioted, it was the media.”

WJC

Related:

Many thanks to Instapundit Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post

Many thanks to the National Review Corner for linking to this post

, , , , ,

The wide appeal of the bra-burning meme

In Bra-burning, Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers on August 10, 2010 at 11:34 am

I’ve written from time to time about the striking international appeal of media-driven myths, those dubious and improbable tales about the news media that masquerade as factual.

The Times newspaper in South Africa  underscored that appeal the other day in an interesting and amusing commentary titled, “From A to double D: a history of the bra.”

The commentary included a reference to bra-burning, stating:

At the 'Freedom Trash Can,' 1968

“One of the abiding symbols of the feminist movement is the burning of the bra. As a representation of liberation from the oppression of patriarchy, the alleged incineration of the intimate was meant to signify the death of male domination over women’s self-image. …

“In any case, most sources say the bra-burning never really happened.”

My research indicates otherwise, however.

As the commentary noted–and as I discuss in my new book about media-driven myths, Getting It Wrong–the bra-burning trope stems from the women’s liberation protest of the 1968 Miss America Pageant at Atlantic City.

As I write in Getting It Wrong:

“The demonstrators denounced the pageant as a ‘degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie symbol’ that placed ‘women on a pedestal/auction block to compete for male approval,’ and promoted a ‘Madonna Whore image of womanhood.'”

They carried placards declaring: “Up Against the Wall, Miss America,” “Miss America Sells It,” and “Miss America Is a Big Falsie.”A centerpiece of the protest was a burn barrel, which the demonstrators dubbed the “Freedom Trash Can.” Into the “Freedom Trash Can” they tossed items and articles they said repressed and demeaned women–bras, girdles, high-heels, as well as copies of Cosmopolitan and Playboy magazines.

The protest’s organizers have long insisted that nothing was set ablaze that day at Atlantic City. The lead organizer, Robin Morgan, has asserted, for example:

“There were no bras burned. That’s a media myth.”

But in researching Getting It Wrong, I found a long-overlooked, contemporaneous account in the Press of Atlantic City that said “bras, girdles, falsies, curlers, and copies of popular women’s magazines burned in the ‘Freedom Trash Can.’”

The Press article was published September 8, 1968, a day after the protest, and appeared beneath the headline:

“Bra-burners blitz boardwalk.”

Its author, a veteran newspaperman named John Boucher, died in 1973.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, Boucher’s article “did not elaborate about the fire and the articles burning in the Freedom Trash Can, nor did it suggest the fire was all that important. Rather, the article conveyed a sense of astonishment that an event such as the women’s liberation protest could take place near the venue of the pageant.”

Separately, I tracked down and interviewed Jon Katz, who also had covered the Miss America protest for the Press.

Katz said in interviews with me that he recalled that bras and other items were set afire during the demonstration and that they burned briefly.

“I quite clearly remember the ‘Freedom Trash Can,’ and also remember some protestors putting their bras into it along with other articles of clothing, and some Pageant brochures, and setting the can on fire. I am quite certain of this,” Katz said.

The contemporaneous Press article and Katz’s recollections represent, I write, “evidence that bras and other items were set afire, if briefly, at the 1968 Miss America protest in Atlantic City.”

At very least, the accounts offer fresh dimension to the widely appealing legend of bra-burning.

WJC

Related:

<!–[if !mso]> They carried placards declaring: “Up Against the Wall, Miss America,” “Miss America Sells It,” “Miss America Is a Big Falsie,”[i] and “Miss America Goes Down.”

[i] Cited in Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 96.

, , , , , , , ,

Going international: Media myths travel far, well

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Washington Post, Watergate myth on July 15, 2010 at 6:05 am

Prominent media-driven myths—the subject of my new book, Getting It Wrong—not only can be tenacious; some of them travel quite well, crossing linguistic and cultural borders with surprising ease.

Indeed, it’s a sign of hardy appeal when media-driven myths turn up in international contexts more often than just occasionally.

The heroic-journalist myth of Watergate–one of the 10 media myths I explore in Getting It Wrong—represents this phenomenon quite well. The heroic-journalist meme has it that the fearless investigative reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, then-young journalists for the Washington Post, brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency in the Watergate scandal.

Woodward

It’s a compelling tale that long ago became the scandal’s dominant popular narrative.

It’s also a simplistic interpretation of what was a complex and intricate web of misconduct that took down Nixon and landed nearly 20 of his top aides, associates, and cabinet officers in jail.

I note in Getting It Wrong that to roll up a scandal of such dimension required the collective, if not always the coordinated, efforts of special prosecutors, bipartisan congressional panels, federal judges, the FBI, and, ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered Nixon to surrender audiotapes that proved his complicity in the Watergate cover-up.

Against such a tableau, journalism’s contributions to unraveling Watergate were modest—certainly not decisive.

But because the heroic-journalist interpretation is so straightforward and unambiguous, it’s not surprising that it finds appeal across cultures and turns up fairly often in media reports outside the United States.

Simplicity propels the Watergate myth, enabling it to travel far and well.

Just the other day, for example, a commentary at Mediapart, a French online investigative reporting site, recalled Woodward and Bernstein as “the two journalists for the Washington Post who, thanks to their investigation, set in motion the resignation of President Richard Nixon, during Watergate.”

Another media myth that travels widely and well is that of William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain at the end of the 19th century. Hearst’s pledge supposedly was contained in a cable to the artist Frederic Remington, whom Hearst sent to draw illustrations of the Cuban rebellion, which preceded the Spanish-American War.

The anecdote lives on as one of the most famous and delicious in American journalism—even though it is buttressed by no supporting documentation and is improbable on its face.

It is, however, a tale almost too good to be disbelieved, given that it so effectively captures Hearst as warmonger . The anecdote turns up more than occasionally abroad, especially in Spanish-language media.

I note in Getting It Wrong that “Hearst’s famous vow to ‘furnish the war’ has achieved unique status as an adaptable, hardy, all-purpose anecdote, useful in illustrating any number of media sins and shortcomings. It has been invoked to illustrate the media’s willingness to compromise impartiality, promote political agendas, and indulge in sensationalism. It has been used, more broadly, to suggest the media’s capacity to inject malign influence into international affairs.”

With all that going for it, the step to adoption in international contexts is fairly small.

Beyond simplicity and deliciousness, the international appeal of prominent media myths also may be attributed to a keen and enduring curiosity abroad in American journalism. For all its faults and uncertainties, American journalism is a sprawling, robust, and intriguing profession. Such dynamism exerts appeal and interest beyond the United States.

American cinema is perhaps an even more powerful force: Hollywood treatments have helped solidify media myths. And Hollywood productions often travel well abroad.

The 1976 film All the President’s Men certainly helped propel the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate, for example. As I write in Getting It Wrong: “More than thirty-five years later, what remains most vivid, memorable, and accessible about Watergate is the cinematic version of All the President’s Men.”

The movie, I note, “helped ensure the [heroic-journalist] myth would live on by offering a neat, tidy, and vastly simplified account the Watergate scandal, one that allowed viewers to sidestep the scandal’s complexity while engaging in an entertaining storyline.”

Hollywood also was crucial to cementing Hearst’s purported vow into the popular consciousness. That vehicle was Citizen Kane, the 1941 motion picture based loosely on Hearst’s life and times.

Hearst’s purported vow is paraphrased in a scene early in Kane, which some critics regard as the best-ever American motion picture.

The Hearstian vow also is quoted in the 1997 James Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies. Or, as it was known in francophone countries, Demain ne meurt jamais.

WJC

A version of this post first appeared at the University of California Press blog.

, , , , ,

Media ‘too scared’ to challenge Joe McCarthy? Hardly

In Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, Newspapers on July 14, 2010 at 3:01 pm

It’s commonplace in American journalism to argue that it took the power and resolve of none other than Edward R. Murrow to end the witch-hunting ways of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

That meme is a durable media-driven myth, one of 10 debunked in my new book, Getting It Wrong. The meme resurfaced the other day in a column in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The column, which discussed the on-air poise of CNN’s Rachel Madow, invoked Murrow in saying the newsman’s “takedown of Sen. Joe McCarthy, was not really news–everybody in Washington knew what was going on, how vile and stupid McCarthy was; the media was just too scared to print it, possibly because politicians were too scared to challenge McCarthy, the ruiner of lives.”

How’s that?

The news media were “too scared” to take on McCarthy?

That’s scarcely what the historical record shows.

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, Murrow was very late in taking on McCarthy, doing so in a 30-minute report on the CBS See It Now program in March 1954.

That was years after the muckraking columnist Drew Pearson challenged McCarthy’s extreme charges that communists had infiltrated the U.S. government, the military, and the Democratic party.

Pearson

Pearson ridiculed McCarthy as the “harum-scarum” senator and labeled his allegations “way off base.” Pearson’s characterizations came in February 1950, shortly after McCarthy began making little-documented charges about communists in government.

Pearson was unrelenting in his scrutiny of McCarthy, poking into the senator’s tax troubles in Wisconsin and his accepting questionable payments from a government contractor.

McCarthy was so annoyed by Pearson’s probing that he threatened the columnist at a Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, D.C., in May 1950. On that occasion, McCarthy placed a hand on Pearson’s arm and muttered:

“Someday I’m going to get a hold of you and really break your arm….”

As I write in Getting It Wrong, the verbal threat was a prelude to a brief but violent encounter between McCarthy and Pearson at the fashionable Sulgrave Club in Washington. The Sulgrave occupies a Beaux-Arts mansion at DuPont Circle and in the 1950s, I write, “it was a hush-hush meeting place for Washington socialites and powerbrokers.”

McCarthy and Pearson were guests at a dinner party at the Sulgrave in December 1950. They were seated at the same table and traded gibes and insults throughout the evening.

Time magazine wrote that Pearson and McCarthy were “the two biggest billygoats in the onion patch, and when they began butting, all present knew history was being made.”

After dinner, McCarthy cornered Pearson in the Sulgrave’s coat-check room.

“Accounts differ about what happened,” I write. “Pearson said McCarthy pinned his arms to one side and kneed him twice in the groin. McCarthy said he slapped Pearson, hard, with his open hand. A third account, offered by a radio broadcaster friendly to McCarthy, said the senator slugged Pearson, a blow so powerful that it lifted Pearson three feet into the air.”

Then-Senator Richard Nixon, also a guest at the dinner party, intervened to break up the encounter.

Pearson was hardly alone in taking on McCarthy.

In September 1951, the New York Post published a bare-knuckled, 17-part series about McCarthy and his ways. The installments of the Post‘s unflattering and searching series appeared with the logo “Smear Inc.”

The first installment in the series said in part:

“McCarthy has raced to the fore with breakneck speed. In the course of his careening, reckless, headlong drive down the road to political power and personal fame, he has smashed the reputations of countless men, destroyed Senate careers, splattered mud on the pages of 20 years of national history, confused and distracted the public mind, bulldozed press and radio.”

That characterization was to echo 2½ years later, in the content of Murrow’s See It Now program about McCarthy.

So, no, the press wasn’t “too scared to print” what a menace McCarthy was. As I write in Getting It Wrong, by March 1954, Americans weren’t “waiting for a white knight like Murrow to tell them about the toxic threat the senator posed.”

They already knew, from sources other than Murrow.

WJC

Related: