W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for the ‘Watergate myth’ Category

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Serving up Watergate, très simple

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on February 1, 2011 at 9:23 am

The simplified storyline of the Watergate scandal goes this way:

Two young, diligent reporters for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, obtained from their secretive “Deep Throat” source information that incriminated President Richard Nixon and brought about his downfall.

That essentially is the “heroic-journalist” interpretation of Watergate — a reductive and misleading trope to which I devote a chapter in my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

I write in Getting It Wrong that “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.”

Yahoo!News yesterday served up that très simple version of Watergate in an article about Julian Assange of Wikileaks. The item Yahoo! posted online referred to Mark Felt, formerly the second-ranking official at the FBI, saying he “supplied information about the role of Richard Nixon and his top aides in the Watergate scandal to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and came to be known as ‘Deep Throat.’

“That series of leaks ultimately felled the Nixon presidency.”

Uh, no, it didn’t.

What Felt/”Deep Throat” told Woodward did not topple Nixon.

According to All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein’s book about their Watergate reporting, Woodward turned to “Deep Throat” “only to confirm information that had been obtained elsewhere and to add some perspective.”

(Bernstein, by the way, never met Felt until shortly before Felt’s death in 2008. Felt disclosed in 2005 that he had been the “Deep Throat” source.)

Nixon’s fall was the result of his criminal conduct in attempting to cover up the signal crime of Watergate, the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, the simplified, mediacentric interpretation of Watergate “minimizes the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office.”

To topple a president and roll up a scandal of the dimensions of Watergate required, I write, “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, 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.”

Against that tableau of subpoena-wielding investigative authorities, the contributions of Woodward and Bernstein fades into relative insignificance.

So why has the heroic-journalist meme become the most familiar storyline of Watergate? Why is it so endlessly appealing?

Complexity-avoidance.

Watergate, after all, was a sprawling scandal. Twenty-one men associated with Nixon’s presidency or his reelection campaign in 1972 were convicted of Watergate-related crimes. Nineteen went to jail.

The heroic-journalist interpretation provides a passage through the intricacies of Watergate, offering what I call “a proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity.”

Contributing to the durability of the heroic-journalist meme is the cinematic treatment of All the President’s Men, a 1976 film based on Woodward and Bernstein’s best-selling book.

All the President’s Men the movie focuses on Woodward and Bernstein while mostly ignoring, and even at times denigrating, the contributions of investigative agencies like the FBI.

All the President’s Men has held up quite well in the 35 years since its release. It surely is the most-watched movie ever made about Watergate.

But as I point out in Getting It Wrong, All the President’s Men the movie allows no interpretation other than the work of Woodward and Bernstein brought about the first-ever resignation of a U.S. president.

Woodward

Even Woodward has challenged that très simple version.

He declared in an interview several years ago with American Journalism Review:

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

WJC

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Who, or what, brought down Nixon?

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on January 24, 2011 at 10:26 am

Who brought him down?

The easy, but wrong, answer to the question of who or what brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency in the Watergate scandal is: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post.

As I point out in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, that interpretation has become “ready short-hand for understanding Watergate and its denouement, a proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity.

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

It’s also a prominent media-driven myth–a well-known but dubious or improbable tale about the news media that masquerades as factual.

What I call the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate offers a convenient, accessible, easy-to-grasp version of what was a sprawling and intricate scandal.

“But to explain Watergate through the lens of the heroic-journalist,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “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.”

Britain’s Spectator magazine takes up the Watergate question in an article about fallout from the phone-hacking scandal that has swept up Rupert Murdoch’s London tabloid, the Sunday News of the World.

To its credit, Spectator sidestepped the heroic-journalist myth in declaring:

“Everyone who remembers the Watergate scandal remembers Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting. Brilliant though it was, the Nixon administration was destroyed not by the Washington Post, but by Sam Ervin’s Senate committee, which had the powers parliamentary select committees ought to have to issue subpoenas and compel witnesses to talk or go to jail for contempt.”

While commendable in eschewing the mythical heroic-journalist interpretation, the Spectator commentary overstated the importance of the Senate select committee on Watergate, which was chaired by Sam Ervin of North Carolina and took testimony during the spring and summer of 1973.

Rather than destroying Nixon’s presidency, the select committee had the effect of training public attention on the crimes of Watergate and, in the testimony it elicited, offered a way to determine whether Nixon had a guilty role in the scandal.

The select committee’s signal contribution to unraveling Watergate came in producing the revelation that Nixon had secretly tape-recorded conversations with top aides in the Oval Office of the White House.

The tapes, I note in Getting It Wrong, “proved crucial to the scandal’s outcome.”

They constituted Nixon’s “deepest secret,” Stanley Kutler, Watergate’s leading historian, has written.

The revelation about their existence set off a year-long effort to force Nixon to turn over the tapes, as they promised to clear or implicate him in the scandal.

Nixon resisted surrendering the tapes until compelled by the U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision in July 1974.

The tapes revealed his guilty role in seeking to block the FBI investigation of the Watergate’s seminal crime, the breakin in June 1972 at the offices of the Democratic national committee in Washington.

Nixon resigned in August 1974.

In the final analysis, then, who or what brought down Richard Nixon?

Certainly not Woodward and Bernstein. Not the Senate select committee, either.

The best answer is that 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,” as I write in Getting It Wrong.

“Even then,” I add, “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,” making inevitable the early end of his presidency.

WJC

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Talking ethics and the ‘golden days’ of Watergate

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on January 19, 2011 at 8:12 am

An Editor & Publisher commentary yesterday referred to the Watergate reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as “golden days” of journalism that “made heroes of reporters.”

Journalism schools, the commentary declared, “filled up with idealistic young men and women hoping to become famous and perhaps bring down a president, or two.

“Didn’t Woodward and Bernstein–or Woodstein as they were famously known –practically force President Nixon to resign?”

Er, no.

Not even remotely.

The investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein didn’t force Nixon’s resignation. Nor did journalism school enrollments surge because of the presumed glamor effect of their work, as the column suggested.

Both topics–what I call the heroic-journalist myth and the subsidiary or spinoff myth of Watergate–are addressed and debunked in my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

As I write in Getting It Wrong:

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.”

Rolling up the Watergate scandal, I note, “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.”

And even then, Nixon probably would have served out his term had it not been 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 in the summer of 1974 did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up and authorizing payments of thousands of dollars in hush money.

Those disclosures, required by the Supreme Court’s decision, forced Nixon to resign in August 1974.

So against the tableau of special prosecutors, federal judges, congressional panels, the Justice Department, and the Supreme Court, the contributions of Woodward and Bernstein recede in significance–even though their work became the stuff of legend, at least as depicted in the cinematic version of their book, All the President’s Men.

“Ultimately,” as Michael Getler, the then-ombudsman of the Post, accurately noted in 2005, “it was not The Post, but the FBI, a Congress acting in bipartisan fashion and the courts that brought down the Nixon administration.”

The spinoff or subsidiary myth of Watergate has it that the exploits of Woodward and Bernstein “were a profound stimulus to enrollments in collegiate journalism programs,” I write in Getting It Wrong. “Journalism supposedly was made sexy by All the President’s Men, and enrollments in journalism schools surged.”

However, there’s at best only anecdotal support for such claims.

Scholarly research has shown that Woodward, Bernstein, and the cinematic treatment of All the President’s Men did not prompt enrollments to climb at journalism and mass communication programs at U.S. college and universities.

One such study, financed by the Freedom Forum media foundation, was conducted by researchers Lee B. Becker and Joseph D. Graf. They reported in 1995 that “growth in journalism education result[ed] not from specific events as Watergate … but rather to a larger extent from the appeal of the field to women, who ha[d] been attending universities in record numbers. The growth also in part reflect[ed] the applied nature of the field and its link to specific job skills.”

They added:

“There is no evidence … that Watergate had any effect on enrollments.”

The E&P commentary, titled “Talking Ethics: Money and Politics,” lamented ethical lapses of contemporary journalists, such as Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, who donate money to political causes and candidates for public office.

The commentary noted that giving money to politicians allows them “one more chance to publicly complain that journalists are all bought and paid for or in somebody’s pocket.”

That’s a fair point.

But in characterizing the Watergate reporting of Woodward and Bernstein as “golden days,” the commentary overlooked the ethical lapses those reporters committed in their work.

They acknowledged in their book to failed attempts in encouraging federal grand jurors to violate their oaths of secrecy and talk about Watergate testimony. Woodward and Bernstein conceded their efforts were “a seedy venture”–which nonetheless had the approval of top editors at the Post, including the then-executive editor, Ben Bradlee.

Bernstein also acknowledged in the book that he sought and obtained information from otherwise private telephone records.

Woodward and Bernstein also inaccurately attributed to FBI investigators an account published in the Post in October 1972 that said “at least 50 Nixon operatives” had been set loose “to disrupt and spy on Democratic campaigns.” An internal FBI memorandum disputed Woodward and Bernstein’s claim as “absolutely false.”

So those were “golden days”? I’d say that’s erroneous.

WJC

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Have a look: New trailer for ‘Getting It Wrong’

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Hurricane Katrina, Media myths, Media myths and radio, Newspapers, War of the Worlds, Washington Post, Watergate myth on January 18, 2011 at 7:08 am

Check out the new trailer for my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which addresses and debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths–those dubious stories about the news media that masquerade as factual.

As I say in narrating the trailer, media-driven myths can be thought of as the “junk food of journalism“–delicious and appealing, perhaps, but not very nutritious.

The trailer, recently completed by research assistant Jeremiah N. Patterson, reviews the media myths related to the Watergate scandal, the purported Cronkite Moment, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

A trailer prepared last year by Mariah Howell shortly before publication of Getting It Wrong remains accessible at YouTube.

Another YouTube video–prepared by Patterson in the fall to mark the anniversary of the famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast that supposedly was so realistic that it panicked America–also is accessible online. The video discusses Halloween’s greatest media myth.

WJC

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Turning to that fake Watergate line, ‘follow the money’

In Cinematic treatments, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, Washington Post, Watergate myth on January 11, 2011 at 8:56 am

The irresistible but entirely made-up line from the Watergate scandal–the supposed advice to the Washington Post by the anonymous source “Deep Throat” to “follow the money”–made an appearance the other day in Spokane Spokesman-Review.

The newspaper invoked the passage in a commentary about priorities of Washington’s state legislature which yesterday opened its 2011 session.

During the session, the commentary said,  “important state policy will seem to adhere to Deep Throat’s admonition on Watergate: It will follow the money.”

Follow the money.

It’s a wonderfully evocative and appealing line. But it never figured in the Watergate coverage of the Washington Post–a topic of a chapter in my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

As I’ve noted at Media Myth Alert, electronic archives containing issues of the Post show that the phrase “follow the money” never made it into print during the period of the Watergate scandal–June 1, 1972, to October 1, 1974.

Indeed, no Post article or editorial invoked “follow the money” in a Watergate-related context until June 1981–long after Richard Nixon had resigned the presidency, long after the successor who pardoned him, Gerald Ford, had lost reelection. (And the article in June 1981 merely noted the line’s use in a fifth grade play.)

“Follow the money” was, however, spoken in the movie All the President’s Men, by the character who played the anonymous and mysterious source called “Deep Throat.” The film, which dramatized the Watergate reporting of Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, was based on their non-fiction book by the same title.

The actor Hal Hollbrook played “Deep Throat,” and invoked the phrase rather insistently in All the President’s Men.

In a scene showing a late-night meeting in a parking garage, Holbrook tells 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.”

The line’s probable author was William Goldman, the screenwriter of All the President’s Men. He told a New York Times columnist in 2005 that he had invented “follow the money” for the movie.

So why bother with all this? What difference does it make if “follow the money” is a made-up line?

For starters, misattributing “follow the money” bolsters a misleading and simplistic interpretation of the sprawling scandal that was Watergate–a scandal that sent nearly 20 of Nixon’s men to jail.

And that interpretation is what I call the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate–that it was the dogged investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein that brought down Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

I write in Getting It Wrong that to consider 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,” I add, “minimizes the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office.”

And those forces included subpoena-wielding agencies and entities such as the FBI, federal grand juries, special Watergate prosecutors, bipartisan congressional panels, and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court.

Their contributions to unraveling the Watergate scandal are minimized, and even denigrated, in the cinematic treatment of  All the President’s Men, which came out in 1976 and effectively promoted, and solidified, the heroic-journalist myth.

I point out in Getting It Wrong how media myths like the heroic-journalist meme “tend to minimize or negate complexity in historical events and offer simplistic and misleading interpretations instead. Edward Murrow no more took down Joseph McCarthy than Walter Cronkite swayed a president’s views about the war in Vietnam. Yet those and other media myths endure, because in part they are reductive: They offer unambiguous, easily remembered explanations about complex historic events.”

Speaking of reductive: I’ve meant to share this fine observation from the Financial Times commentary over the weekend that called Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate coverage the “defining moment” in investigative reporting. The commentary was topic of a couple of recent posts at Media Myth Alert.

The essay, which was titled “The new power of the press,” noted:

“Any journalist not too full of himself to admit it reali[z]es, sooner or later, that the trade demands a facility for simplification that squeezes the most complex events, trends and characters into a limited form with limited, stereotypical narratives.”

So it is with “follow the money”: To invoke the passage is to reach for simplification, to seek an ostensibly telling phrase that can be applied widely, even to the often-dry business of a state legislature.

WJC

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H/T to Kenton Bird for correcting the publication city
of the Spokesman-Review (January 14, 2011).

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The elusive ‘defining moment’ in investigative journalism

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on January 9, 2011 at 8:59 am

The Financial Times of London has asserted that the Watergate reporting of the Washington Post stands as the “defining moment” in investigative reporting–a claim I challenged yesterday.

Not the Post's doing

The notion that the Post and its reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency in the Watergate scandal is a hardy meme–and is one of 10 prominent media-driven myths I debunk in my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

The heroic-journalist trope has been driven principally the cinematic version of Woodward and Bernstein’s book about their Watergate reporting, All the President’s Men. The movie’s inescapable message was that the work of reporters brought about Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

But even principals at the Post over the years have dismissed the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate.

So if not Watergate, what then was the “defining moment” in investigative reporting?

And how’s “defining moment” to be defined, anyway? The essay in the Financial Times didn’t say.

I argue that the “defining moment” in investigative reporting would have to be that collection of reports recognized years afterward as a landmark in journalism, for having exposed corruption or misconduct. The reports would have been so significant as to have changed government policy and/or altered practices among journalists.

Not many media investigations have had such profound and lasting effect. As Jack Shafer of slate.com has correctly noted:

“Too many journalists who wave the investigative banner merely act as the conduit for other people’s probing.” That is, they often feed off government-led investigations. Woodward and Bernstein did so, to an extent.

A review of the Pulitzer Prizes awarded for investigative reporting over the past 25 years turns up impressive and intriguing candidates. But most winners of the Pulitzer for investigative journalism are local and decidedly narrow in focus and impact; none of them meets my definition of “defining moment.”

The Post won the 2008 Pulitzer for public service for its outstanding reports about abuses at the Walter Reed Army hospital. The first installment of the Post series described the venerable institution as “a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients.”

It was a shameful scandal that led to much soul-searching, some reforms, and a few broken careers in Army medicine. The series projected a faint whiff of controversy, too, because conditions at Walter Reed had been the subject of somewhat similar reporting two years earlier by salon.com.

The Boston Globe in 2003 won the public service Pulitzer for its reports about sexual abuse among Roman Catholic priests–a series that seems to have stood up well over time and perhaps qualifies as landmark in investigative reporting.

But is it widely recognized and remembered as such? I don’t think so.

A few media historians have identified the so-called “Arizona Project” in the 1970s as landmark investigative journalism.

The Arizona Project brought together reporters and editors from 23 newspapers, in response to a call by the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization to conduct a collaborative inquiry into the bombing death of Don Bolles, an investigative reporter for the Arizona Republic.

The project produced 40 articles about organized crime in Arizona.

David Sloan and Lisa Mullikin Parcell wrote in their book, American Journalism: History, Principles, Practices that the Arizona Project “was a defining moment in the history of investigative reporting–a rare instance when normally competitive journalists set aside their egos, stepped outside their news organizations, and cooperated on a dramatic and startling story.”

But in all, the Arizona Project produced mixed results.

It didn’t lead to a succession of similar joint ventures by journalists. Prominent news organizations such as the Post and the New York Times declined to participate. And critics said the undertaking smacked of a kind of arrogant vigilantism by journalists.

The Financial Times in its essay published Friday mentioned in addition to the Watergate reporting by the Post a few other works of outstanding investigative journalism.

It said the journalistic “exposures such as The Sunday Times on the effects of Thalidomide in the 1970s, The Guardian on bribery scandals in British Aerospace in 2003 and The New Yorker’s revelations about abuses in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004″ have prominent places on “a long roll of honor” in investigative journalism.

Intriguing cases, all. But are they recognized as landmarks? Maybe.

Tarbell (Library of Congress)

How about the muckraking period early in the 20th century–notably Ida Tarbell’s two-year exposé of Standard Oil, published in McClure’s magazine from 1904 to 1906? That work certainly is recognized as memorable, as a landmark, even.

But its effects tend to have been overstated. Tarbell’s work, detailed and searching though it was, did not bring about the breakup of Standard Oil, as is often claimed.

The breakup came years after Tarbell’s series, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1911 that Standard Oil had violated antitrust laws.

In the end, we have a few candidates but no overwhelming favorite for the “defining moment” in investigative journalism. And perhaps that’s not so surprising.

Like most works of journalism, investigative reporting tends to be time-specific and of transient importance–and short-lived in its effects.

WJC

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The ‘defining moment’ in investigative journalism? Wasn’t Watergate

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Watergate myth, Yellow Journalism on January 8, 2011 at 9:03 am

The “defining moment” in investigative journalism? Well, that had to be the Watergate reporting of the Washington Post in the early 1970s.

So says Britain’s serious-minded Financial Times in a commentary published yesterday.

The newspaper, however, offered no persuasive evidence for the Post-Watergate claim beyond asserting:

“Investigative reporting has been one of the strongest developments of postwar journalism, illuminating government deceit, corporate fraud and criminal activity. The reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for The Washington Post in the early 1970s on the illegal efforts of Nixon’s White House to destabilise the Democratic party remains its defining moment.”

Was it, really, the “defining moment”? The Post certainly practiced some solid journalism in reporting the unfolding Watergate scandal; its coverage after all won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1973.

But the defining moment of investigative reporting?

I argue “no, not at all,” in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which addresses and debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths–among them the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate.

The heroic-journalist meme has it that Woodward and Bernstein’s dogged reporting about the Watergate scandal brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency. (Nixon resigned in 1974, in the face of certain impeachment and conviction for his role in seeking to coverup the Watergate scandal.)

“The heroic-journalist has become the most familiar storyline of Watergate,” I write in Getting It Wrong. That interpretation, I add, is “ready short-hand for understanding” Watergate, “a proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity. How the Post and its reporters uncovered Watergate is deeply ingrained in American journalism as one of the field’s most important and self-reverential stories.”

But that doesn’t make it the “defining moment” in investigative reporting.

The reporting by the Post certainly did not bring down Nixon’s presidency. To embrace that interpretation is, I write, “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”–including the collective efforts of such subpoena-wielding agencies and entities as the FBI, federal grand juries, special prosecutors, bipartisan congressional panels, and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court.

Not even the Post embraces the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate.

For example, the newspaper’s publisher during the Watergate period, Katharine Graham, insisted the Post did topple Nixon. In 1997, at a Newseum program marking the 25th anniversary of the break-in at Democratic headquarters–the Watergate’s seminal crime–Graham declared:

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

And in 2005, Michael Getler, then the newspaper’s ombudsman, declared in his column:

“Ultimately, it was not The Post, but the FBI, a Congress acting in bipartisan fashion and the courts that brought down the Nixon administration.”

I note in Getting It Wrong that 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.”

Those aspects of the scandal, Woodward was quoted as saying in 1973, were “held too close. Too few people knew. We couldn’t get that high.”

Nor did they disclose the secret audiotaping system that Nixon had installed at the White House; the recordings of his private conversations about Watergate proved decisive in the scandal’s outcome.

If not Watergate, then what was the “defining moment” in investigative reporting–the genre’s most decisive and lasting contribution?

I’ll take up that question tomorrow at Media Myth Alert.

WJC

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Murrow, Cronkite myths cited in Poland’s top paper

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, New York Times, Newspapers, Watergate myth on January 4, 2011 at 10:25 am

I’ve discussed from time to time at Media Myth Alert how media-driven myths about the U.S. news media have a way of traveling well and finding expression in news outlets overseas.

Watergate-related myths are notable examples of this tendency.

A couple of prominent media myths popped up yesterday in an article posted at the online site of Gazeta Wyborca, the leading daily in Poland and a newspaper with a remarkable past.

Gazeta Wyborca traces its lineage to what was the leading underground newspaper in Poland of the 1980s, Tygodnik Mazowsze. The clandestine title appeared under the noses of Poland’s communist authorities, week after week, from 1982 to 1989–some 290 issues in all.

Tygodnik Mazowsze was run almost entirely by women affiliated with Poland’s then-banned Solidarity opposition. When the country’s communist rulers permitted Solidarity candidates to stand in elections in 1989, one of the conditions was that the movement be permitted to publish an above-ground newspaper.

So the staff of Tygodnik Mazowsze moved up from the underground to launch Gazeta Wyborca, which means “electoral newspaper.” In the years since, Gazeta has become the dominant news outlet in Poland, which now is a thriving democracy.

Gazeta yesterday referred to the debate that bubbled last week in U.S. news media over a New York Times article that likened TV comedian Jon Stewart to legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow.

Gazeta noted that U.S. news media “triumphantly” mentioned “cases in which journalists have changed the course of history” and referred to Murrow’s “instrumental” role in ending Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communists-in-government witch-hunt.

It also noted CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite’s criticism of the Vietnam War in 1968, which supposedly forced President Lyndon Johnson to realize his war policy was a shambles.

It’s too bad Gazeta didn’t point out that both cases are media-driven myths.

As I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, Murrow was quite late in confronting McCarthy, doing so most prominently in a half-hour television program that aired March 9, 1954.

That show came months, even years after other American journalists–notably, syndicated columnist Drew Pearson–had reported critically, closely, and often about McCarthy and his exaggerated charges.

“To be sure,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “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.”

By then, they knew all too well.

Nor was Cronkite at the cutting edge of criticism of the U.S. war effort in Vietnam.

Far from it.

The CBS anchorman declared in a televised special report on February 27, 1968, that the U.S. military was “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam.

LBJ in Texas, February 27, 1968

But that scarcely was a remarkable assertion.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, “stalemate” had been appearing as early as the summer of 1967 in New York Times editorials and analyses about the war.

What supposedly made the Cronkite characterization stand out is that President Johnson saw the program and, as it ended, said to an aide or aides, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Or something to that effect.

But in fact, Johnson wasn’t in front of a television set that night. He didn’t see the Cronkite program when it aired.

At the time Cronkite was intoning his “mired in stalemate” assessment, Johnson was offering light-hearted banter in Austin, Texas, at the 51st birthday party of one of his longtime political allies, Governor John Connally.

So it’s difficult to fathom how Johnson could have been much moved by a program that he hadn’t seen.

WJC

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LOC honor stirs references to Watergate myth

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on December 29, 2010 at 11:31 am

All the President’s Men, the movie that helped solidify the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate, was among 25 American motion pictures chosen for the 2010 National Film Registry, the Library of Congress announced yesterday.

I have no serious quarrel with the LOC’s selection. All the President’s Men is an entertaining and imaginative film, adapted from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book by the same title about their Watergate reporting for the Washington Post.

The cinematic version of All the President’s Men came out in 1976, just as the wounds of Watergate were beginning to heal, and has aged quite well.

But as I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, All the President’s Men “offers an unmistakable assertion of the power and centrality of the press” in the fall of Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency. The movie promotes the misleading yet beguiling heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate.

I note in Getting It Wrong that All the President’s Men “allows no other interpretation: It was the work Woodward and Bernstein that set in motion far-reaching effects that brought about the first-ever resignation of a U.S. president.”

And that message that “has endured,” I write. “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.”

Nonetheless, as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, the Watergate reporting of Woodward and Bernstein was at best marginal to the outcome of the scandal, in which 19 men associated with Nixon’s presidency or his 1972 reelection campaign went to jail.

Nixon resigned in 1974, to avoid certain impeachment and conviction for his role in Watergate.

Rolling up a scandal of such dimension, I write in Getting It Wrong, “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.”

But the cinematic version of All the President’s Men portrays none of that collective effort. In fact, the movie downplays, even denigrates, the contributions of investigative agencies such as the FBI.

The LOC’s announcement inevitably stirred references in mainstream media and the blogosphere to the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate.

The New York Post, for example, said in referring to the movie’s recognition that the work of Woodward and Bernstein “led to the resignation of President Nixon.”

And in a lengthy and glowing post at Houston’s CultureMap blog, a film critic described Woodward and Bernstein as “fearless and relentless seekers of truth who helped to bring down the most corrupt President in U.S. history.”

He also wrote that All the President’s Men stood as “first among equals” among the movies selected for the National Film Registry and added that Woodward and Bernstein “set new standards for American journalism, and inspired thousands of idealists — along with more than a few amoral glory-hounds — to follow in their paths.”

Just what were those “new standards” was left unsaid.

And the work of Woodward and Bernstein may have “inspired thousands of idealists” to enter American journalism, but there’s only anecdotal support for such claims.

And scholarly research has shown that Woodward, Bernstein, and All the President’s Men did not cause enrollments to climb at journalism and mass communication programs at U.S. college and universities.

One such study was financed by the Freedom Forum media foundation and conducted by researchers Lee B. Becker and Joseph D. Graf. They reported in 1995 that “growth in journalism education result[ed] not from specific events as Watergate … but rather to a larger extent from the appeal of the field to women, who ha[d] been attending universities in record numbers. The growth also in part reflect[ed] the applied nature of the field and its link to specific job skills.”

Becker and Graf added:

“There is no evidence … that Watergate had any effect on enrollments.”

A final note about All the President’s Men and the National Film Registry: As the MovieNation blog at the Boston Globe pointed out, “It has to be the only film on the list that includes a scene set in the Library of Congress.”

That scene depicts Woodward and Bernstein at a table in the Library’s spectacular Main Reading Room, sorting through records of materials checked out by the Nixon White House. As they thumb through stacks of cards, the camera pulls away, slowly and upward, toward the Reading Room’s gold-inlaid dome. The effect is to suggest the lonely earnestness of the reporters’ work.

WJC

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‘The newspaper that uncovered Watergate’?

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on December 23, 2010 at 12:40 pm

The Huffington Post online news site, in a thoughtful piece today about the Kaplan Higher Education subsidiary that makes the Washington Post profitable, offers up a mistaken claim about the newspaper and the Watergate scandal.

The Huffington Post item states that “the same company bearing the name of the newspaper that uncovered Watergate, that published the Pentagon Papers, and more recently revealed the existence of secret CIA-operated prisons in Eastern Europe now draws its largest share of revenues from an enterprise that seems on par with subprime mortgage lending in terms of its commitment to public welfare.”

As I say, it’s a thoughtful piece.

Of particular interest to Media Myth Alert is the reference to Watergate–that the Washington Post “uncovered” the scandal.

Simply put, that’s erroneous. Erroneous to say the Post “uncovered Watergate.”

This is not to quibble, but rather to insist on extending credit where credit is due.

As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the Watergate reporting of Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had at best a marginal effect on the outcome of the scandal, in which 19 men associated with Richard Nixon’s presidency or his 1972 reelection campaign went to jail.

Nixon resigned in 1974, in face of certain impeachment and conviction for his role in Watergate.

Rolling up a scandal of such dimension, I write in Getting It Wrong, “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.” [Note: An expanded second edition of Getting It Wrong was published in late 2016.]

I point out that the reporting of the Post “did not uncover defining and decisive elements” of Watergate—notably the cover-up of the break-in” at the Watergate complex in June 1972.

The Watergate cover-up was exposed incrementally in 1973 and 1974 by such subpoena-wielding entities as federal prosecutors, federal grand juries, and investigators for the U.S. Senate select committee on Watergate.

It was the select committee, not the Post, that disclosed the existence of the White House audiotaping system that proved so critical to determining Nixon’s fate.

Only when ordered by the Supreme Court did Nixon to surrender audiotapes of Watergate-related conversations recorded at the White House–conversations that clearly demonstrated his guilty role in the scandal’s cover-up and forced his resignation.

This is not to say the reporting by the Post on Watergate was without distinction. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973, after all.

And I note in Getting It Wrong that as “the scandal slowly unfolded in the summer and fall of 1972, Woodward and Bernstein progressively linked White House officials to a secret fund used to finance the burglary.”

The Post was the first news organization to report a connection between the Watergate burglars and the White House, the first to demonstrate that campaign funds to for Nixon’s reelection were used to finance the break-in, and the first to implicate John Mitchell, the former U.S. attorney general, in the scandal.

Those reports were published in the Post during the four months immediately after the break-in at the Watergate. By late October 1972, however, the newspaper’s investigation into Watergate was “out of gas,” as Barry Sussman, then the city editor for the Post, later put it.

In early November 1972, Nixon was reelected to the presidency, defeating the hapless Democratic candidate, George McGovern, in a 49-state landslide.

WJC

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