W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for the ‘Watergate myth’ Category

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The ‘stories that brought down a president’: Sure, they did

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on September 26, 2011 at 3:31 am

The Guardian, one of London’s top newspapers, bought into Watergate’s dominant myth yesterday in a flattering article about Carl Bernstein, who teamed with Bob Woodward to report the scandal for the Washington Post.

Referring to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 at the height of Watergate, the Guardian asserted that Bernstein and Woodward produced “a string of stories that brought down a president.”

That claim may be the dominant narrative of Watergate. But it’s simplistic, a media-centric misreading of history.

As I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate — the notion that Bernstein and Woodward’s dogged reporting forced Nixon from office in disgrace — “minimizes the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office.”

Bernstein: Didn't bring down Nixon

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

To explain Watergate through the lens of the heroic-journalist interpretation, I write in Getting It Wrong, is to short-change and “misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth.”

The myth, though, is endlessly appealing – as the Guardian article suggested.

Interestingly, though, not even the Washington Post embraces the heroic-journalist trope.

For example, Michael Getler, then the newspaper’s ombudsman wrote 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.”

And Ben Bradlee, the Post’s executive editor during and after Watergate, said on the Meet the Press interview show in 1997:

[I]t must be remembered that Nixon got Nixon. The Post didn’t get Nixon.”

Even Woodward has dismissed the heroic-journalist interpretation, stating in an interview with American Journalism Review:

“To say the press brought down Nixon, that’s horse shit.”

What brought down Nixon’s presidency was evidence of his guilty role in the crimes of Watergate — evidence captured on audiotapes that he secretly made of his conversations at the White House.

The decisive evidence — known as the “Smoking Gun” tape — revealed that Nixon at a meeting with his top aide, H.R. Haldemann, on June 23, 1972, sought to deflect or derail the FBI investigation into the Watergate burglary.

Bernstein and Woodward didn’t reveal the contents of that tape, which Watergate prosecutors had subpoenaed and which Nixon refused to surrender until ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to comply.

Nor did Bernstein and Woodward reveal the existence of Nixon’s taping system, which proved so crucial to Watergate’s outcome.

In All the President’s Men, their book about their Watergate reporting, Bernstein and Woodward said they had received a tip about the taping system a few days before its existence was made public in July 1973.

But according to the book, Bradlee, the executive editor, suggested not expending much energy pursuing the tip. And they didn’t.

WJC

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Talking media myths on ‘Community Voices’

In Debunking, Media myths, Media myths and radio, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on September 3, 2011 at 3:14 pm

The exaggerated tales of Watergate, Hurricane Katrina, and crack babies were the principal media myths I discussed the other day in an interview on KPCW Radio in Utah.

The interview focused on those chapters of my latest book, Getting It Wrong, and was conducted by Larry Warren and Linda Gorton on their  “Community Voices” show.

I noted early in the interview that the “animating force” in American journalism is to get the story right and that Getting It Wrong “is associated with that ethos of truth-telling, of seeking to get the story right.”

The interviewers quickly turned to Watergate, asking whether the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for the Washington Post was what indeed drove President Richard Nixon to resign in 1974.

“That is the dominant narrative of Watergate,” I pointed out, adding that’s also a very simplistic explanation for rolling up what was a complex scandal.

“To unravel the complexity and the intricacy of Watergate,” I said, “took all kinds of forces, most of them subpoena-wielding — federal prosecutors, the FBI, bipartisan panels of both houses of Congress, ultimately Supreme Court, which forced Richard Nixon to surrender the evidence which clearly showed that he had conspired with top aides to try to cover up the investigation into the Watergate break-in, the signal crime of the scandal.

“Against that backdrop, the contributions of Woodward and Bernstein fade into relative insignificance,” I said.

Another reason that Watergate’s dominant narrative focuses so squarely on Woodward, Bernstein, and the Washington Post is, I said, the cinematic version of the reporters’ book, All the President’s Men.

It surely is the most-watched movie ever made about Watergate, and “it really does focus,” I noted, “on the work of Woodward and Bernstein to the exclusion” of the forces and factors that were truly decisive in bringing down Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

“I think we know,” Warren interjected, “that you’re not going to be invited to Mr. Woodward’s for dinner anytime soon.”

“You know,” I replied, Woodward “has said something to the effect of, ‘to say the press brought down Richard Nixon is total nonsense.’ He used earthier terms to make that point.”

The reference to Woodward’s comment in an interview in 2004 with American Journalism Review in which he asserted:

“To say the press brought down Nixon, that’s horse shit.”

I also discussed the notion that news coverage of Hurricane Katrina was superlative, that it supposedly “demonstrated the value and importance of traditional news media, both print and broadcast, at a time of disaster. And Hurricane Katrina was no small storm. It was no [Hurricane] Irene, that’s for sure.”

But I added:

“The coverage of Hurricane Katrina was no high heroic moment in American journalism because, on many important elements of that story, the news media got it badly wrong.”

The hurricane’s death toll was “wildly exaggerated,” I noted, adding that the “apocalyptic reports that the news media put out in the days after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall proved to be largely untrue.

“There were no snipers firing at medical personnel, no snipers firing at [rescue] helicopters. No bodies stacked up like cordwood, no children with their throats slashed. No roving gangs preying on tourists. No sharks plying the flood waters of New Orleans.

“All these reports were out there,” I said, but in the end “none of them was verified or substantiated.”

The erroneous and exaggerated reports of violence in post-Katrina New Orleans in some cases had the effect of delaying the arrival and delivery of aid to the storm-stricken city, I noted.

The social disaster that the news media anticipated in the purported — and widely misreported — “crack baby” epidemic never took place, I pointed out.

More than one news commentator, I said, described as a “bio-underclass” the generation that would come of age after having been exposed to crack cocaine in the womb. These children supposedly would be so mentally and physically deformed as to be forever dependent on the state.

“The news media were spectacularly wrong about the crack baby epidemic,” I said, noting that news reports in the late 1980s and early 1990s “pushed very hard on preliminary evidence suggesting there was a powerful linkage between taking crack during pregnancy and subsequent deformities in children.”

To their discredit, I added, the news media never went back in a sustained and systematic way to undertake to dismantle the crack-baby myth — “even after consensus had taken hold among scientists and biomedical researchers that [prenatal] exposure to crack was not this destructive force that preliminary research had suggested.”

WJC

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Woodward, Bernstein toppled Nixon? Think again

In Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on August 27, 2011 at 9:58 am

'Nixon got Nixon'

The passing of time is making the heroic-journalist narrative of Watergate even more heroic.

A commentary yesterday at Huffington Post suggests as much, in extolling — and overstating — the accomplishments of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who covered the scandal.

The commentary, which considers the state of investigative reporting, says Woodward and Bernstein “plugged away for two years at the Watergate story through thick and thin and false leads. They were determined to nail then President Richard Nixon for authori[z]ing a break in at the Democratic Party HQ during his re-election campaign and then organi[z]ing a cover up. They did, with his resignation in August 1974.”

Woah. A lot of overstatement there.

First, there’s no evidence that Nixon authorized or even knew in advance about the burglary in June 1972 at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, the signal crime of Watergate.

Nixon, however, certainly did seek to block the FBI’s investigation of the breakin — and for that obstruction of justice, he was compelled to resign the presidency in disgrace.

But more important is that Woodward and Bernstein didn’t “nail” Nixon on Watergate. As I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, their investigative reporting for the Post certainly didn’t bring down Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

The heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate, I write in Getting It Wrong, is to “misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth.

“The heroic-journalist interpretation,” I add, “minimizes the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office.” Those forces included bipartisan panels of both houses of Congress, special federal Watergate prosecutors, federal judges, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

If inelegantly, even Woodward has concurred, declaring in an interview in 2004:

“To say the press brought down Nixon, that’s horse shit.”

What toppled Nixon, what brought down his presidency, was clear evidence of his culpability in the crimes of Watergate — evidence captured on audiotapes that he secretly made of his conversations at the White House.

The decisive evidence — known as the “Smoking Gun” tape — revealed that Nixon at a meeting with his top aide, H.R. Haldemann, on June 23, 1972, sought to deflect or derail the FBI investigation into the Watergate burglary.

Woodward and Bernstein didn’t reveal the contents of that tape, which Watergate prosecutors had subpoenaed and which Nixon had refused to surrender until ordered to do so by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Nor did Woodward and Bernstein disclose the existence of Nixon’s secret taping system. That was revealed in July 1973, during hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Watergate.

In All the President’s Men, their book about their reporting, Woodward and Bernstein said they had received a tip about the taping system a few days before its existence was made public.

According to All the President’s Men, Ben Bradlee, then the Post‘s executive editor, suggested not expending much energy pursuing the tip. And they didn’t.

Interestingly, Bradlee also insisted the Post did not nail Nixon.

Speaking on a Meet the Press interview program at the 25th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, Bradlee declared:

[I]t must be remembered that Nixon got Nixon. The Post didn’t get Nixon.”

WJC

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Recalling who gave us the ‘manufactured heroism’ of Jessica Lynch

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Watergate myth on August 22, 2011 at 5:09 am

Lynch: No hero, she

I’ve noted how remarkable it is that the Washington Post so thoroughly eludes censure for placing the bogus hero-warrior tale about Jessica Lynch into the public domain during the first days of the Iraq War.

Confirmation of that observation came yesterday in an otherwise thoughtful essay in the New York Times about the deference Americans across the political spectrum tend to pay the military.

The essay described the Lynch case not as a stunning example of errant journalism but as “an instrument of propaganda.”

The essay, written by William Deresiewicz, asserts that in 2003, “we were treated to the manufactured heroism of Jessica D. Lynch, the young supply clerk who was rescued from an Iraqi hospital a few days after her capture by enemy forces (both events turning out to be far less cinematic than initially put out) and who finally felt compelled to speak out against her own use as an instrument of propaganda.”

Great line, “manufactured heroism.”

But who really was responsible for the “manufactured heroism”?

Deresiewicz avoids saying.

He fails to identify the Washington Post as solely responsible for placing the hero-warrior tale about Lynch into worldwide circulation.

He doesn’t say that the Post’s botched story about Lynch’s purported heroics was picked up by news organizations around the world, turning the 19-year-old Army private into the best-known American solider of the Iraq War.

WaPo's botched hero-warrior story

It was the Post, citing otherwise unnamed “U.S. officials,” that offered up the electrifying tale about how Lynch “fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed” her unit, the 507th Maintenance Company, in Nasiriyah on March 23, 2003.

It was the Post that reported Lynch “continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her” in the fighting.

None of it was true, however.

Lynch never fired a shot in Iraq. Her weapon jammed during the ambush. Her shattering injuries were suffered in the crash of a Humvee as it fled the attack.

It wasn’t long before the Post’s erroneous report about Lynch’s derring-do began to unravel.

But as I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the newspaper in the years since has never fully explained how it got the Lynch story so badly wrong.

Nor has the Post ever identified the sources who led it so badly astray.

And why has the Post sidestepped blame for the botched Lynch narrative? Why isn’t the newspaper more routinely cited in essays, such as Deresiewicz’s, that invoke the Lynch case?

It’s principally because details of the Lynch case have been subordinated to a far more sinister narrative that says the Pentagon conjured the hero-warrior tale about the waif-like young woman in order to bolster popular support for the Iraq War.

It’s a perversely appealing narrative — and it’s quite false.

As Vernon Loeb, one of the Post reporters who shared a byline on the botched Lynch story in 2003, has said:

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

Loeb also said, in an interview that aired on NPR’s Fresh Air program in mid-December 2003:

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

Loeb said the story was provided by “some really good intelligence sources” in Washington, D.C., adding:

“We wrote a story that turned out to be wrong because intelligence information we were given was wrong. That happens quite often.”

As I note in Getting It Wrong, Loeb on another occasion was quoted in the New York Times as saying:

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

What’s more, the notion the Pentagon’s made up the story  — and somehow fed it to the Post — to bolster popular support for the war doesn’t make much sense. After all, the American public in overwhelming numbers supported the war in its early days and months.

But it’s clear that if not for the Post, the “manufactured” tale of Lynch’s heroism never would have circulated as it did.

Far from being an “instrument of propaganda,” the Lynch hero-warrior narrative is a case of bungled reporting that has never been adequately explained, let alone corrected.

WJC

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Misreporting Watergate

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on August 20, 2011 at 5:15 am

That new historical marker at the parking garage where Bob Woodward of the Washington Post occasionally met his stealthy “Deep Throat” source has stirred some cheery buzz among journalists — and some breathtaking exaggeration about the consequences of Woodward’ reporting on the Watergate scandal.

Credit: Odestreet.com

The marker titled “Watergate Investigation” went up late last week outside the garage in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, Virginia.

As I’ve noted at Media Myth Alert, the marker errs in stating that information Deep Throat” (who in 2005 was self-revealed to have been W. Mark Felt) provided Woodward “exposed the Nixon administration’s obstruction of the FBI’s Watergate investigation.”

For some news outlets commenting about the marker, it has been occasion to assert hyperbolic claims that the Post’s reporting on Watergate brought down Richard Nixon’s scandal-riddled presidency.

For example, the widely followed all-news radio station in Washington, WTOP,  said yesterday in its report about the marker:

“Mark ‘Deep Throat’ Felt, passed state secrets to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward for a string of stories that would eventually take down a president — what would come to be known as the Watergate scandal.”

Quite simply not true.

Felt, formerly a top official at the FBI, offered Woodward mostly incremental details about Watergate as the scandal unfolded in 1972 and 1973. And as Woodward noted in the book, All the President’s Men, the role of “Deep Throat” was “only to confirm information that had been obtained elsewhere, and to add some perspective.”

It was hardly the stuff of “state secrets.”

More important, the reporting of Woodward and his Post colleague Carl Bernstein assuredly did not “take down” Nixon’s presidency.

Embracing that interpretation of Watergate, I write my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, “is to abridge and misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth.”

It’s an interpretation that not even officials at the Post have endorsed.

For example, Kathryn Graham, the newspaper’s publisher during and after Watergate, said in 1997, at a Newseum program marking the scandal’s 25th anniversary:

“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, in earthier terms, has concurred, telling American Journalism Review in 2004:

“To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.”

The popular Washington entertainment blog, DCist, offered an even stranger interpretation of “Deep Throat” and his meetings with Woodward in the garage.

DCist, in a brief report about the marker, said yesterday the garage was where  “the informant, the FBI’s Mark ‘Deep Throat’ Felt, fessed up to what would eventually become the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon.”

Huh? The “Deep Throat” source “fessed up to what would eventually become the Watergate scandal”?

“Fessed up”?

Such wording suggests that Felt/”Deep Throat” was a culprit or a suspect in the Watergate scandal.

Which he wasn’t.

Felt in fact wasn’t even around the FBI when the scandal reached its climax with Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

He had been passed over for the FBI directorship and left the agency in 1973. Felt last conferred with Woodward at the Arlington garage in November that year.

But that’s not to say Felt was beyond reproach.

He really wasn’t such a hero.

In his senior position at the FBI, Felt had authorized illegal burglaries in the early 1970s as part of the agency’s investigations into leftists associated with the radical Weather Underground.

Felt was convicted in 1980 on felony charges related to those break-ins, but pardoned by President Ronald Reagan.

So if it not Felt’s tips to Woodward, what then brought down Nixon?

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

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

Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender the recordings that captured him plotting to cover up the break-in in June 1972, the signal crime of Watergate.

WJC

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‘Deep Throat’ garage marker errs about Watergate source disclosures

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on August 18, 2011 at 10:16 am

An historical marker went up the other day outside the parking garage in Arlington, Virginia, where Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward periodically met during the Watergate scandal with a stealthy, high-level source code-named “Deep Throat.”

It’s a handsome marker, artfully scalloped at the top.

Felt: Cagey source

But it errs in describing the information Woodward received from “Deep Throat,” who in 2005 revealed himself as W. Mark Felt, formerly the FBI’s second in command.

The marker, which is titled “Watergate Investigation,” says:

“Felt provided Woodward information that exposed the Nixon administration’s obstruction of the FBI’s Watergate investigation.”

Not so.

Such evidence would have been so damaging and explosive that it surely would have forced Nixon to resign the presidency well before he did, in August 1974.

Felt didn’t have that sort of information — or (less likely) didn’t share it with Woodward.

As described in Woodward’s book about Felt, The Secret Man, the FBI official provided or confirmed a good deal of piecemeal evidence about the scandal as it unfolded.

And he could be cagey and evasive in doing so.

Here, for example, is a passage from Secret Man, in which Woodward discussed efforts he and his Post colleague Carl Bernstein had made to identify Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldemann, as one of five people controlling a secret slush fund:

“I told Felt that we were going to publish a story next week saying that Haldemann was the fifth and final person to control the secret fund.

“‘You’ve got to do it on your own,’ Felt said.

“I said I expected him to warn me if we were wrong.

“Felt said he would.

“So he was essentially confirming Haldemann?

“‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to do it on your own.’

“It was a distinction that didn’t make sense to me. I was tired of this dancing around.

“‘You cannot use me as a source [on that story],’ Felt said. ‘I won’t be a source on a Haldemann story.””

And so it went.

(All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein’s book about their Watergate reporting, says Woodward’s conversations with “Deep Throat” were intended “only to confirm information that had been gathered elsewhere and to add some perspective.”)

Woodward met Felt at the garage six times from October 1972 to November 1973, the marker notes. The last meeting at the garage was a few months after Felt had been passed over for the FBI directorship and retired.

Not until late summer 1974 — months after Felt left the FBI — did unequivocal evidence emerge about Nixon’s attempt to thwart the agency’s investigation into Watergate.

That came when Nixon complied with a unanimous Supreme Court ruling and surrendered audiotape recordings he had secretly made of conversations at the White House.

A recording of Nixon’s meeting with Haldemann on June 23, 1972, revealed that the president had sought to deflect or derail the FBI investigation into the burglary six days before at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington.

The recording was called the “Smoking Gun” tape — and that tape, not information Felt gave Woodward, exposed Nixon’s guilt and forced his resignation.

The tape offered stunning and incontrovertible evidence that Nixon “had participated in an obstruction of justice almost from the outset” of the scandal, Stanley I. Kutler, the leading historian of the scandal, wrote in The Wars of Watergate.

As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, had Nixon not recorded his conversations, he likely would have survived the Watergate scandal and served out his second term.

The marker outside the “Deep Throat” garage contains another, smaller error, too.

It says it was “erected in 2008 by Arlington County, Virginia.” But the online news site arlnow .com pointed out that the marker went up late last week — “after a three year delay.”

WJC

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Fox News misremembers Watergate and ‘follow the money’

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on August 16, 2011 at 9:20 am

I’ve referred to “follow the money” as Watergate’s best-known made-up line.

It also can be thought of as Watergate’s best-known misremembered line.

I say that because a Fox News commentary posted yesterday thoroughly misremembered the phrase as having been part of the “media circus” of Watergate in the months before the scandal reached its denouement with Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

The Fox commentary declared:

“America was transfixed for months by [Watergate-related] televised hearings presided over by the colorful Sen. Sam Ervin. … We learned about the mysterious insider, pornographically code-named ‘Deep Throat’ murmuring intriguing clues like ‘Follow the Money….’ It was a media circus.”

But as I’ve noted at Media Myth Alert, “follow the money” was not part of the vernacular of Watergate. It was never offered as advice — murmured or otherwise — by the stealthy “Deep Throat” source, who met periodically with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post as the scandal unraveled.

(The identity of “Deep Throat” remained a secret for more than 30 years until W. Mark Felt, a former top FBI official, self-identified himself as having been Woodward’s secret source during Watergate.)

What’s more, “follow the money” appeared in no Watergate-related article or editorial in the Post until June 1981.

Nor is the line to be found in All the President’s Men, the book Woodward and his Post colleague, Carl Bernstein, wrote about their Watergate reporting.

The phrase exists only in the movies — in the cinematic version of All the President’s Men, which came out in April 1976.

“Follow the money” was written into the screenplay of All the President’s Men and spoken by the actor Hal Holbrook, who turned in a memorable performance as “Deep Throat.”

Holbrook intoned “follow the money” with such steely assurance that it did indeed seemed to suggest a way — however simplistic — to unravel the scandal.

But even if “Deep Throat”/Felt had counseled Woodward to “follow the money,” the advice would have neither unraveled Watergate nor led the reporter to Nixon.

Nixon quit the presidency not because he misused campaign funds; he resigned in disgrace after it became clear he had sought to obstruct justice by covering up the signal crime of Watergate, the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972.

As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, rolling up a scandal of the dimension and complexity of Watergate required “the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

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

“Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” — which cost him the presidency.

WJC

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No ‘rock-em,’ no ‘sock-em’: What ails WaPo

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on August 7, 2011 at 1:59 am

The ombudsman of the Washington Post, Patrick Pexton, weighs in today with platitudes and hang-wringing about the newspaper. He mostly misses the mark.

Pexton writes in his column that the Post’s “future lies not with the rich; it lies with the citizenry.

“This newspaper must be the one source of high-quality, probing Washington news that readers in this region and across the country can look to for holding their government accountable. This publication must be for all Americans.”

Oh, brother.

But wait: Here’s more vague abstraction:

“The Post,” Pexton writes, “can’t be a liberal publication or a conservative one. It must be hard-hitting, scrappy and questioning — skeptical of all political figures and parties and beholden to no one. It has to be the rock-’em-sock-’em organization that is passionate about the news. It needs to be less bloodless and take more risks when chasing the story and the truth.”

A “rock-’em-sock-’em organization,” eh? Well, that’s useful guidance.

In his five or so months as ombudsman, Pexton hasn’t dared touch the electrified third rail about the Post, which one of his predecessors, Deborah Howell, gamely if belatedly addressed.

That’s a decided lack of intellectual diversity in the Post’s newsroom. In mid-November 2008, shortly after Barack Obama was elected president, Howell wrote in her ombudsman column:

“I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.”

Howell’s column quoted Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism as saying that “conservatives are right that journalism has too many liberals and not enough conservatives. It’s inconceivable that that is irrelevant.”

In Obama's thrall

The lack of intellectual diversity often shows in the Post’s report. Even casual reading signals that the newspaper remains in the thrall of Obama, despite his clearly failing presidency.

Obama scarcely gets “rock-’em-sock-’em” treatment from the Post.

Last Wednesday, for example, the Post’s once-edgy “Style” section devoted most of its front page to a cheery feature about the meaning of Obama’s turning 50-years-old.

“On Thursday,” the article gushed, “President Obama — one of American history’s most precocious achievers — joins the ranks of Washington 50-somethings ….”

But what ails the Post goes well beyond its routinely tender treatment of Obama.

The Post’s local report is superficial, a diet of eye-rolling, feel-good features. The newspaper carries little staff-produced national coverage. Its international report is undistinguished, especially compared to that of the New York Times.

Moreover, the Post offers few notable cases of investigative journalism any more.

It has won two Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting in 25 years, which has to be considered meager for a newspaper that reputedly brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency with its relentless digging into the Watergate scandal.

But as I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the Post-Watergate trope, of course, is a powerful media-driven myth.

I’d be remiss were I to fail to note that the Post never has come clean about how it erred so utterly in offering the world the bogus hero-warrior tale about Jessica Lynch in the early days of the Iraq War.

Lynch, the Post reported on its front page on April 3, 2003, “fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday.”

But none of the derring-do attributed to Lynch was true, and the Post has never explained who led it so badly astray.

Moreover, the staff cuts and buyouts of recent years left few notable characters on the newspaper’s staff.

Gone are such colorful figures as the erudite and pugnacious Henry Allen, a Pulitzer winner who left the Post after throwing punches at a staff writer who called him a c—sucker.

Now there was “rock-’em-sock-’em,” old school variety.

WJC

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

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India high court order invokes phony Watergate line

In Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on August 2, 2011 at 9:48 am

Two Supreme Court judges in India last month turned to Watergate’s most famous made-up line in ordering an investigation into large sums of money believed stashed in banks abroad.

The judges in their order cited the made-up line as if it had been genuine advice from a high-level source to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post  during the newspaper’s investigation of the Watergate scandal.

The line is “follow the money” — and it had no role whatsoever in the Watergate scandal.

“Follow the money” was never uttered by Woodward’s stealthy source, who was code-named “Deep Throat.”

The line appears nowhere in the All the President’s Men, the book Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote about their Watergate reporting for the Post.

Nor did the passage appear in any Watergate-related news article or editorial in the Post before June 1981 — nearly seven years after the scandal reached its denouement with President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

“Follow the money” was written into the screenplay of All the President’s Men, the 1976 movie based on Woodward and Bernstein’s book.

Many people and many news outlets over the years have cited “follow the money” as if it were real, as if it had been advice to Woodward that really worked.

Just last week, for example, a column in London’s high-brow Financial Times newspaper described “follow the money” as the “mantra” of Watergate. And a column posted at Huffington Post a couple of weeks ago also repeated “follow the money” as if it had been vital guidance to uncovering Watergate.

But finding its way into a high court order probably represents a first for “follow the money.”

As noted in a Bloomberg news service report yesterday, the two judges — B. Sudershan Reddy and S.S. Singh Nijjar — invoked “follow the money” at the outset of the order they released early last month.

Credulously, the judges wrote:

“‘Follow the money’ was the short and simple advice given by the secret informant, within the American Government, to Bob Woodward, the journalist from Washington Post, in aid of his investigations of the Watergate Hotel break in.”

So how is it that such errors are made? What explains the impressive reach and popularity of this appealing but contrived statement?

A partial explanation is that “follow the money” seems just too good, too delicious, not to be true. It’s in the class of William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain: It’s a quotation that really ought to true.

And as I point out in my media myth-busting book, Getting It Wrong:

“To thwart media myths, journalists can start by applying a measure of skepticism to pithy, telling quotes such as Hearst’s vow to ‘furnish the war.’ … Turns of phrase that sound too neat and tidy often are too perfect to be true.”

The popularity of “follow the money” goes beyond appealing pithiness and is rooted in the dramatic quality of All the President’s Men, the most-watched movie ever made about Watergate.

The “Deep Throat” character was played in All the President’s Men by the actor Hal Holbrook, who turned in a marvelous performance.

In a late-night scene in a darkened parking garage, the shadowy, raspy-voiced Holbrook told the Woodward character (played by Robert Redford):

“I have to do this my way. You tell me what you know, and I’ll confirm. I’ll keep you in the right direction, if I can, but that’s all.

“Just follow the money.”

Holbrook delivered the line with such quiet insistence that it truly seemed to offer a way through the labyrinth of the Watergate scandal. And the popularity of the movie carried “follow the money” into the vernacular.

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

Nixon was toppled not by heroic journalists who followed a money trail, but by irrefutable evidence captured on audiotapes that he had ordered the cover up Watergate’s signal crime, the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972.

WJC

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A media myth eruption: WaPo, Watergate, and Nixon’s fall

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on July 30, 2011 at 4:55 am

“Bimbo eruptions” was the memorably colorful term invoked during the 1992 presidential campaign by Betsey Wright, an aide to presidential candidate Bill Clinton, to describe the suspicions and potential allegations about Clinton’s womanizing.

Sure, he did

The past couple of days have brought an eruption of media myth — notably, the rich and appealing tale that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting for the Washington Post brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency in the Watergate scandal.

Not even the Post buys into that simplistic and media-centric interpretation. As Michael Getler, the newspaper’s then-ombudsman correctly noted 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.”

(More coarsely, Woodward himself has declared: “To say the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.”)

Even so, the media myth about Woodward, Bernstein, and the Post — the heroic-journalist myth, as I describe it in my latest book, Getting It Wrong — is so delicious and compelling that it lives on and on, as this recent eruption attests.

Figuring in the media myth eruption have been:

  • The Daily Beast, which rhetorically asked in a commentary yesterday about the phone-hacking scandal that has battered Rupert Murdoch’s media in Britain: “Did Woodward and Bernstein need [phone-hackers and private investigators] to bring down Richard Nixon?”
  • The Daily Mirror  tabloid in Britain declared in an article posted online today that “Watergate was exposed by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.”
  • Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, which declared passage in an editorial about Murdoch’s troubles in Britain: “The Washington Post toppled President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal.”
  • The publisher of the North Platte Telegraph in Nebraska, who in a column the other day referred to the “early 1970s when the Post brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon using primarily an unnamed source.” That was a reference to Woodward’s stealthy, high-level source who was code-named “Deep Throat.”

The appearance of the heroic-journalist myth in such diverse outlets and contexts is testifies to how deeply embedded the tale has become in the popular consciousness.

And why is that?

The heroic-journalist myth, as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, is “ready short-hand for understanding Watergate and its denouement, a proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity.”

Rather that attempting to keep straight the dimensions of a scandal that began to break nearly 40 years ago, it is fair easier to embrace the proxy version — the simplified narrative that Woodward and Bernstein took down Nixon, with help from the “Deep Throat” source.

The identity of “Deep Throat” remained a secret — and the subject of much speculation and many guessing games — until 2005 when W. Mark Felt and his family announced that Felt, a former FBI official, had been Woodward’s mysterious source.

The heroic-journalist myth lives on because it’s such a reassuring narrative for the news media — a tale that describes the news media at their supposed best, a time when their reporting made a powerful difference in national life.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, the notion that the Post and its reporters exposed the Watergate scandal “is deeply ingrained in American journalism as one of the field’s most important and self-reverential stories.”

It’s a comforting trope about a purported triumph for a profession that’s more accustomed to scorn and condemnation than applause and approbation.

But it’s no less a media myth.

WJC

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

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