W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for the ‘Watergate myth’ Category

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Thanksgiving and its permissible myths

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on November 25, 2010 at 7:37 am

Thanksgiving can be a busy time for mild and amusing varieties of myth-busting.

There’s the notion, for example, that eating roast turkey makes you want to doze off after the feast.  Not entirely accurate, says Bon Appetit magazine. “The real reason you’re sleepy? It’s likely the stress of the holiday, the hours spent cooking, the wine and spirits–and all the fat and calories you just consumed,” the magazine says.

Then there’s disputed history about the holiday: Pilgrims may not have been the hosts of North America’s first Thanksgiving.  The editor of History News Network, Rick Shenkman, has pointed out: “Texans claim the first Thanksgiving in America actually took place in little San Elizario, a community near El Paso, in 1598 — twenty-three years before the Pilgrims’ festival” in 1621.

Thanksgiving 1621 (Library of Congress)

There’s also the matter of what the Pilgrims served at the feast in 1621. “No one knows if they had turkey, although they were used to eating turkey,” Shenkman says. “The only food we know they had for sure was deer.”

There’s the question, too, of Pilgrim garb. They didn’t dress in black, Shenkman writes, and “they did not wear those funny buckles, weird shoes, or black steeple hats.”

The myths of Thanksgiving, while undeniably engaging, tend to be on the innocuous side, rather of the genre of  Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

They can be thought of, in a way, as permissible myths–misleading, perhaps, but quaint and mostly harmless.  They’re acceptable on a grander scale of things. (Of course, purists from time to time have campaigned against mythical characters like Santa Claus. As I discuss in my 2006 book, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, efforts arose in the late 19th century to discourage children from believing in Santa Claus on grounds that it simply was “wrong to poison the minds of the young with untruths.”)

Permissible myths, like those of Thanksgiving, are welcome and amusing elements of the holiday that often comes with too many stresses and pressures.

Permissible myths, to be sure, are quite unlike media-driven myths, the subject of my latest book, Getting It Wrong. Media-driven myths are false, dubious, improbable stories about and/or by the news media that masquerade as factual. I like to think of them as the “junk food” of journalism–as tasty and appealing as pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, but not terribly nutritious or healthy.

Media myths, I write in Getting It Wrong, “are neither trivial nor innocuous. They can and do have adverse consequences.

“Notably, they tend to distort understanding about the role and function of journalism in American society, conferring on the news media far more power and influence than they necessarily wield. Media myths often emerge from an eagerness to find influence and lasting significance in what journalists do and tend to extend credit where credit is not entirely due,” I note.

Indeed, media myths can serve to promote the notion of the central importance of the news media at decisive moments in history.

The heroic-journalist myth of Watergate is a telling example.

The heroic-journalist meme–the scandal’s dominant popular narrative–maintains that Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, through their dogged and fearless coverage, brought down the corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon.

As I point out in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the work of Woodward and Bernstein was marginal to Watergate’s outcome–to the resignation of Nixon in 1974 and the jailing of some 20 of his top aides and reelection campaign officials.

Nixon’s fall, I write, “was the consequence of his criminal conduct, which was exposed in the convergence of many forces, newspaper reporting being among the least decisive.”

We can be thankful Nixon was forced from presidency because of his criminal misconduct. But it is of  little value to grant undeserved credit to the news media.

That’s hardly permissible.

WJC

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Palin’s new book invokes ‘bra-burning’ stereotype

In Bra-burning, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, Watergate myth on November 24, 2010 at 8:57 am

“Bra-burning,” I point out in my mythbusting book Getting It Wrong, was scarcely a common feature of feminist protests of the 1960s and 1970s, stereotypes and popular narratives notwithstanding.

The enduring and popular notion of numerous, demonstrative bra-burnings–that female protestors in those days set their bras afire and twirled them over their heads–“is fanciful and highly exaggerated,” I write.

At most, women’s liberation demonstrators at Atlantic City in September 1968, briefly set bras and other items afire, an episode that may best be described as “bra-smoldering.”

At most, ‘bra-smoldering’

But there was no flamboyant bra-burning that day at Atlantic City, no fiery spectacle, no bonfire of bras. (See photo.) “Fire at most was a modest and fleeting aspect of the protest that day,” I write in Getting It Wrong.

Despite the thin evidentiary record, “bra-burning” lives on as a convenient if misleading shorthand phrase in “describing the upheaval of the 1960s and early 1970s,” as I note in Getting It Wrong. I  point out that “bra-burning” long has been “invoked as a defining phrase, or cliché, of those troubled times—as in ‘the era of bra-burning,’ ‘the hysteria of bra-burning,’ the time of ‘raucous bra burning,'” and the like.

To those misleading turns of phrase, Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska, adds “1960s-era bra-burning militancy.”

The phrase appears in America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, Palin’s second book, which came out yesterday.

Palin offers up “bra-burning militancy” in writing:

“Remember Hillary Clinton’s famous rant, when her husband was running for president, that she wasn’t, in her words, ‘some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette’? Hillary … came across then as someone frozen in an attitude of 1960s-era bra-burning militancy. She told us in no uncertain terms that she ‘could have stayed and baked cookies and had teas’ but preferred to pursue a serious career.”

The passage has attracted some comment–for its jab at Clinton, not for its historically incorrect reference to “bra-burning militancy.”

It’s regrettable, and more than a little unfair, that a misnomer like flamboyant “bra-burning” is so casually invoked in characterizing the 1960s and 1970s.

It’s unfortunate, too: Those turbulent times are prone to mythical treatment as it is–the mythical “Cronkite Moment” of 1968 and the heroic-journalist meme of the Watergate scandal both figure in Getting It Wrong.

But there’s no denying the perverse appeal of the term. It trips off the tongue in a blithe, faintly sneering sort of way: “Bra-burning.”

Stereotyping can be a hazard of media-driven myths, and there’s also no denying that stereotype is embedded in the phrase.

“Bra burning,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “has long been an off-hand way of ridiculing feminists and mocking their sometimes-militant efforts to confront gender-based discrimination in the home and the work place. Characterizations such as ‘bra-burning feminists,’ ‘the bra-burning women’s movement,’ ‘loud-mouthed, bra-burning, men-hating feminists,’ and ‘a 1960s bra-burning feminist’ have had currency for years.”

In its passage mentioning “bra-burning,” Palin’s book casually, almost off-handedly, serves to reinforce the stereotype.

WJC

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“Bra burning” also has long been an off-hand way of ridiculing feminists and mocking their sometimes-militant efforts to confront gender-based discrimination in the home and the work place. Characterizations such as “bra-burning feminists,”[i] “the bra-burning women’s movement,” “loud-mouthed, bra-burning, men-hating feminists,” and “a 1960s bra-burning feminist” have had currency for years.

[i] Tony Chamberlain, “Berman’s A Women’s Movement Unto Herself with Three Official Wins,” Boston Globe (16 April 2006): C1.

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Jimmy Carter fumbles Watergate history

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on November 23, 2010 at 6:28 am

Former President Jimmy Carter went on CNN’s Reliable Sources the other day to plug his new book and offered up the heroic-journalist myth of the Watergate scandal.

Carter (1980 photo)

The heroic-journalist meme, which has become the scandal’s dominant popular narrative, maintains Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in their dogged coverage, brought down the corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon.

Carter invoked this media myth in response to a fairly pointed question from the show’s host, Howard Kurtz, about whether the former president felt “the press had it for you.”

Carter in reply referred to his term in office and said:

“I came in at a time when the press was in the post-Watergate period, and when two reporters in the Washington Post had become famous because they had revealed some secrets that had brought down the Nixon administration. And when I got there, shortly thereafter, I think a lot of the reporters were looking for something within my administration that might be scandalous or put them in the headlines as very notable investigative reporters.”

Hmm. “Brought down the Nixon administration.”

As notable as the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein may have been, it didn’t bring down the Nixon administration.

As I point out in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the work of Woodward and Bernstein was at best marginal to Watergate’s outcome–the resignation of Nixon in 1974 and the eventual jailing of nearly 20 of his top aides and reelection campaign officials.

“To roll up a scandal of such dimension,” I note 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.”

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, which captured him plotting the cover-up and authorizing payments of thousands of dollars in hush money.”

I further point out in Getting It Wrong that the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate “has become the most familiar storyline” of the scandal, because it is such an effective “proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity.”

But to indulge in the heroic-journalist interpretation, I write, “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.”

As Carter’s comment suggests, though, the heroic-journalist trope offers an accessible and simplistic explanation for a sprawling scandal that unfolded many years ago.

It’s interesting to note that Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting–for which they won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1973–never disclosed the key “secrets” of the scandal.

They did not disclose the hush-money payments made in an attempt to cover up the seminal crime of Watergate, the break-in at Democratic party offices in June 1972. Nor did they disclose the existence of the taping system that Nixon had installed to record most of his conversations in the Oval Office.

So it’s really not clear what Carter had in mind in asserting that the Post reporters “revealed some secrets that … brought down the Nixon administration.”

Interestingly, Kurtz did not challenge Carter on that point. Kurtz formerly was the media writer for the Post who, in 2005, pointedly disputed the heroic-journalism myth of Watergate.

He wrote in a column for the Post:

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

That’s a fine summary of the forces that truly did bring down Nixon’s presidency.

WJC

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Mythbusting at the Smithsonian

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times, War of the Worlds, Washington Post, Watergate myth on November 19, 2010 at 7:03 pm

A fine crowd was on hand last night for my book talk at the Smithsonian’s Ripley Center about media-driven myths.

The talk was part of the Smithsonian Resident Associates Program, which organized the event superbly well.

During the talk, I reviewed three of the 10 media myths debunked in my latest book, Getting It Wrong: the heroic-journalist myth that has become the most popular narrative of the Watergate scandal; the mythical  “Cronkite Moment” of 1968 that supposedly forced President Lyndon Johnson to realize the futility of the war effort in Vietnam, and The War of the Worlds radio dramatization in 1938 that purportedly pitched tens of thousands of Americans into panic and mass hysteria.

I also offered a few suggestions about identifying and sidestepping media myths, suggestions that included being skeptical about turns of phrase that just sound too neat and tidy–almost too good to be true. Another bit of advice was to apply logic and healthy skepticism to extravagant claims about the news media and their presumed influence.

Questions and comments from the audience of 170 or so people were especially thoughtful.

One comment was about the notion the famous New York City blackout in November 1965 was followed nine months later by an uptick in births–a linkage suggested in reports by the New York Times in August 1966. The Times quoted a sociologist as saying then:

“The lights went out and people were left to interact with each other.”

Though not addressed in Getting It Wrong, it is an intriguing topic, one that could be considered in a sequel about media myths, I said.

I added that the blackout tale sounded a lot like more recent speculation that the major snowstorms along the East Coast in December 2009 and February 2010 would give rise to an increase in live births nine months later. A blizzard baby boom, as it were.

That correlation may be mythical, though.

Still, the notion there is such a linkage isn’t entirely far-fetched. It rests on the cusp of plausibility–as do many media myths addressed in Getting It Wrong, I said.

I also noted during the Q-and-A session that media myths that have appeal across the political spectrum can be especially tenacious and enduring. They are tales, I said, that offer something for everyone.

The “crack baby” scare of the late 1980s and 1990s is an example of a media-driven narrative that offered something for everyone.

As I write in Getting It Wrong:

“The crack baby was a rare social issue that had appeal across the political spectrum—appeal that made the phenomenon especially powerful, compelling, notable, and tenacious. For conservatives, the specter of crack babies underscored the importance of imposing stiff penalties in the country’s war on drugs. And penalties were stiffened for crack possession during the second half of the 1980s. For liberals, meanwhile, crack babies represented an opportunity to press for costly assistance programs aimed at helping crack users and their children.”

“Crack babies” were children born to women who had taken cocaine during pregnancy, and many news reports and commentaries predicted an epidemic of crack-damaged misfits.

Among the more overheated predictions was that of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who wrote in 1989:

“The inner-city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror: a bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth.”

Krauthammer likened the crack-induced “bio-underclass” to a “biologically determined underclass of the underclass.”

But it never happened.

The crack baby phenomenon turned out to be the epidemic that wasn’t, the product of over-the-top, anecdote-driven news reporting.

WJC

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Cinematic treatments can solidify media myths

In Cinematic treatments, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on November 14, 2010 at 7:12 am

In this, the last of three installments drawn from an interview with Newsbusters about Getting It Wrong, the discussion turns to whether new media are effective in thwarting the spread of media-driven myths.

I express doubts about that prospect.

The Newsbusters interview was conducted by Lachlan Markay, who described Getting It Wrong as “exhaustively researched and painstakingly even-handed.” The interview transcript is accessible here.

NEWSBUSTERS: Looking forward, do new media present an opportunity to debunk these myths, before they get started?

CAMPBELL: You would think that it would, and I think there has been some evidence that that’s the case, but then there are other myths that just seem to defy debunking newer myths.

Jack Shafer at Slate.com has done some interesting work in looking at the so-called … “pharm parties” in which young people would raid their medicine cabinets of their parents and just take whatever medication they could find, bring them to a party, and then dump them in a communal bowl, and sort of play Russian roulette with these drugs–by the handful take them, and see what kind of effect that they have.

And it seems to be an urban legend that’s just taken hold, and it’s appeared in newspapers, periodically, around the country–San Francisco to DC–and there seems to be no evidence to support this other than the notion that police have heard that this kind of stuff goes on. And Shafer’s written a number of columns at Slate that insist that no one has ever seen this happen, no one has ever attended a pharm party, there’s never been any kind of first person documentation.

And yet, the story is too good not to be true, and it lives on.

So you would think that the Internet would have been more effective by now in knocking down that kind of story. It hasn’t.

NB: So these myths, then, get started because newspapers have disregarded their own–or not just newspapers, but any media has disregarded its own standards of journalism.

CAMPBELL: You could see that in some cases, yeah, I suppose that’s true. [But] I don’t think they’re going at this whole hog and saying, we’re just going to forget about our standards and go at this story just because it sounds so good.

NB: Or, put differently, if those standards were followed to a T, some of these myths might never have taken shape.

CAMPBELL: Yeah, that’s probably true.

NB: A lot of these myths are ingrained in our culture. They’re part of American history, included in textbooks. The Woodward and Bernstein example comes to mind. You have movies, for instance, All the President’sMen , or Good Night, and Good Luck with Edward R. Murrow–does pop culture, or culture in general, play a larger part in perpetuating these myths? Is this something that journalists create on their own, or is it out of their hands and American culture sees these magnificent stories, and sort of adopts them as their own?

CAMPBELL: I think the dynamic that leads to the solidification of media myths is a very interesting one. It’s kind of complex, but I think that some of the points that you’ve mentioned are very central to that process of solidifying a myth–sort of the national consciousness. Cinema does a very good job of doing that.

Cinematic treatments help solidify in the minds of people the supposed reality of some of these exchanges, of some of these encounters, of some of these moments.

…. the cinematic treatment of Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men I think really helped solidify the notion that those two guys were central to bringing down Richard Nixon. In fact, the movie, as clever and well-done as it is, leads to no other interpretation but that. It had to be those guys. …

As a nation we do tend to remember things cinematically. I’m not the first one to say that. Others have looked at it more closely than I have and have made that determination. It’s a fair statement. Good Night, and Good Luck introduced a whole new generation of Americans to the notion that Edward R. Murrow was the one who did in Joe McCarthy, with his 30-minute television program.

NB: Do you have students who come in and say, “I saw Good Night and Good Luck and it inspired me to pursue a career in journalism”?

CAMPBELL: You know, I haven’t heard it said quite that way. But they do think that that movie is well done.

NB: The romanticism of journalism appeals to the students.

CAMPBELL: Exactly. And … more students have seen All the President’s Men than have read the book, by far. … But cinema really is a factor that propels and solidifies these myths.

End of part three

http://www.slate.com/id/2242212/

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Media myths send ‘misleading’ message of media power

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Hurricane Katrina, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Washington Post, Watergate myth on November 13, 2010 at 9:42 am

In this, the second of three installments drawn from Newsbusters‘ lengthy interview about Getting It Wrong, I discuss why it’s vital to debunk media-driven myths, those dubious tales about the news media that masquerade as factual.

This installment also includes a discussion about the flawed and over-the-top news coverage of Hurricane Katrina‘s aftermath in 2005.

The Newsbusters interview was conducted by Lachlan Markay, who described Getting It Wrong as “exhaustively researched and painstakingly even-handed.”

The third and final excerpt from the interview will be posted tomorrow at Media Myth Alert . The interview transcript is accessible here.

NEWSBUSTERS: So why, personally, do you feel that–you obviously feel it’s very important that these myths be exposed as myths. What’s the damage that these myths do if they carry on unquestioned?

CAMPBELL: I think one of the drawbacks [of media-driven myths] is that they … suggest power that the news media typically do not have. Media power in my view tends to be episodic, tends to be situational, nuanced, and it’s typically trumped by other forces and other factors. Government power, police power tend to overwhelm media power on an average basis in most circumstances.

But these stories–about [Walter] Cronkite, about [Edward] Murrow, about Watergate, about [William Randolph] Hearst, and some of the others in the book–typically send a message that the media have great power, to do good or to do harm.

They can start a war, they can end a war, they can alter the political landscape, they can even bring down a president–they’re that powerful. That’s absolutely a misleading message. It’s not how media power is applied or exerted, and that’s an important reason to debunk these myths.

There’s also some inherent importance too in trying to set the record straight to the extent you can. And in that regard, the book is aligned with the fundamental objective of journalism as practiced in this country, of getting it right, getting the story correct. …

NB: And some of the–the Katrina example comes to mind–some of the myths actually have to do with the media–not just a flawed or misleading understanding of events, but a completely fabricated, and made up and very destructive events sometimes. And I say Katrina because there were all these reports of gunfire in New Orleans, of dead bodies being piled up in the Superdome, none of which was true.

CAMPBELL: That’s right. …  Not only that, but the collective sense that those kinds of media reports gave about New Orleans–the place had just collapsed, the city and its people had collapsed into this sort of apocalyptic, Mad Max-like, nightmarish scene–and it served to besmirch the city and its citizens at the time of their direst need.

And that, I think, is just absolutely reprehensible. And that’s the message that we were getting [from the coverage of Katrina’s aftermath in early September 2005]. …

To the credit of the news media, they did go back –many of them, many of these news organizations–and took a look at how they got it wrong. But that tended to be a one-off kind of thing, and placed … inside the papers.

Broadcast media didn’t do much of this at all. … So even to this day, five years on, I still don’t believe the news media have taken full measure of the mistakes they made in the coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

The tendency is still to blame government–local, state, and certainly federal government–for an inept response. But the story was deeper than that, and it was more complex than that, and that’s the part that the news media got wrong.

NB: And of course one of the consequences of that misreporting was that, as you mention, the federal government especially bore a lot of the blame for what was happening there. And then you also have Murrow taking down perhaps the most notorious cold warrior in our country’s history, you have Cronkite as the standard-bearer for the left’s main cause during the 1960s, you have Woodward and Bernstein taking down a Republican president. Are there political factors at work here, do you think?

CAMPBELL: I think that some of the more enduring myths are those that have appeal across the political spectrum.

The Cronkite moment is one of them–it appeals because this is, for folks on the right, this is a real clear-cut example of how “the news media screwed us in Vietnam, and how they prevented us from winning the war there.” And on the left it’s an example of telling truth to power, and how Walter Cronkite was able to pierce … the nonsense, and make it clear to the Johnson administration that the policy in Vietnam was bankrupt.

Something for everyone.

End of part two

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‘Exhaustively researched and painstakingly even-handed’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Washington Post, Watergate myth on November 12, 2010 at 10:15 pm

“Getting It Wrong is exhaustively researched and painstakingly even-handed,” writes Lachlan Markay in introducing his detailed interview with me about my latest book.

He writes that W. Joseph Campbell “makes sure to stress at the outset that it is not a ‘media-bashing book.’ Rather, the volume stays true to journalism’s real mission: not myth-making, but fact-finding. Campbell seeks to set the record straight where often journalists themselves have obscured it.”

Excerpts of the interview–posted at the lively Newsbusters online site–follow. The transcript of the interview, which runs to 4,200 words, is accessible here. Other excerpts  will be posted at Media Myth Alert tomorrow and Sunday .

NEWSBUSTERS: We as a society, and as a culture, seem to have this iconic image, collective image, of a journalist in the good old days of journalism, of course, as sort of a shadowy figure with a little press label in his hat hammering away at his typewriter all night to make deadline. Is that a media driven myth, and do we have a sort of false nostalgia about the bygone days of journalism, when reporters were hardworking and honest and could really make a difference and affect positive change?

CAMPBELL: I mean, we can look back in those days, and I think very we’re very susceptible in journalism in general, to what I call in the book the Golden Age fallacy. It’s not my construction, others have identified it, but I think its very applicable to journalism to look back and say, “oh, yes, there really was a time when journalism mattered, when [Walter] Cronkite could shift the direction of a war, or [Bob] Woodward and [Carl] Bernstein, two young reporters could bring down a president.”

That’s emblematic of the Golden Age fallacy. …

NB: So how are these media-driven myths created?

CAMPBELL: They come from lots of different sources. Sometimes these are stores that are just too good to be checked out. Like, William Randolph Hearst [and his famous vow], “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” That sums up not only Hearst and his malignant, toxic personality pretty well, but it also suggests the news media can, at the worst … even bring about a war that the country otherwise wouldn’t have fought.

NB: You open the book with the example of the New York Sun, and mere months before it closes shop, it offers Cronkite and [Edward] Murrow as the paragons of the power of journalism and journalistic integrity and honesty and speaking truth to power. Those are both myths?

CAMPBELL: Yeah, both of ’em. And Murrow–although he’s held up as the white knight of broadcast journalism–was very much a compromised character. Even his own biographers have identified what we would see today as disqualifying ethical lapses in his background. He claimed degrees that he did not earn, he coached Adlai Stevenson on the finer techniques of using television during the 1956 presidential campaign. Privately, he did this, but if that was known, and a well-known broadcast journalist was doing that today–well, I don’t know, but I suspect there would be considerable controversy about that kind of conduct.

Murrow, no white knight

No, Murrow was no white knight. …

NB: Going back to the New York Sun example, these are very self-serving myths sometimes, and today, when traditional journalism, especially print journalism, seems to be on the decline in terms of its influence, are these myths being promoted more than they have traditionally in an attempt by the old guard to convince people of–to make people nostalgic for the time when these honest journalists with integrity spoke truth to power?

CAMPBELL: There is no doubt part of that. That’s one of the factors.

I think that these stories, though, many of them–the Murrow story, the Cronkite story, Watergate, Hearst–are just too good to resist … and they [have] become ingrained as part of the accepted conventional wisdom.

The Watergate story–the dominant narrative of Watergate–really is that Woodward and Bernstein brought down a corrupt president. Now there’s no doubt in my mind that Nixon was corrupt and deserved to be removed from office, but the forces that brought him down were not Woodward and Bernstein. In fact, Woodward and Bernstein and the Washington Post were really marginal to that [outcome]. But it’s become part of the story, part of the dominant narrative, it’s an intriguing story and it lives on that way.

It’s also a very simplistic explanation for a complex historical event, and that’s another reason these myths take hold and live on. Watergate was not–the outcome of Watergate was not due to the Washington Post so much as it was to the combined, collective, if not always coordinated efforts of subpoena-wielding authorities. The FBI, federal prosecutors, special prosecutors, both houses of Congress, ultimately the Supreme Court, which got Nixon to surrender the tapes the prosecutors had wanted, and those tapes quite clearly showed his active role in covering up the seminal crimes of Watergate.

So it took that kind of collective effort over a sustained period of time by people who could compel testimony and could compel the disclosure of evidence in ways that reporters can’t.

End of part one

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Inaugurating the Parker-Qualls lecture

In Debunking, Media myths, Spanish-American War, War of the Worlds, Washington Post, Watergate myth, Yellow Journalism on November 11, 2010 at 10:55 pm

I inaugurated last night the Parker-Qualls lecture in communications at the University of North Alabama with an audience of some 300 students, faculty, staff, administrators, and townspeople in attendance.

My talk centered on three of the 10 prominent media-driven myths debunked in  my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

I discussed the heroic-journalist myth that has become the dominant narrative of the Watergate scandal, which ended Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974; the mythical  “Cronkite Moment” of 1968 that supposedly forced President Lyndon Johnson to realize the futility of the war effort in Vietnam, and The War of the Worlds radio dramatization that reputedly pitched Americans into panic and mass hysteria in 1938.

During the Q-and-A that followed my presentation, I was asked how media audiences can better identify potential media-driven myths, those dubious stories about or by the news media that masquerade as factual. It’s a fine question, with no easy answer.

I advised being wary about media-related stories that just sound too neat and too tidy. The famous vow attributed to William Randolph Hearst–“you furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war”–is a telling example, I said. The quote just seems too good, too perfect to be true.  It deftly captures Hearst as war-monger, but it’s supported by almost no evidence. It’s almost certainly apocryphal.

Media audiences also should apply logic and healthy skepticism to stories about or by the news media and their power, I said, citing The War of the Worlds dramatization as an example. It it really plausible that a radio show–even one as  clever and imaginative as that–really could send tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of Americans into the streets in sheer panic and hysteria? It doesn’t seem logical to me.

I also recommended consulting online sources: Some, like Media Myth Alert, are devoted to mythbusting. Even a simple Google search will readily turn skeptical accounts of popular, mediacentric stories.

I also was asked whether there were candidate-media myths that proved to true. Another good question and I couldn’t recall any immediately.

Then I remembered having had suspicions about Joe Namath’s guarantee that the New York Jets would defeat the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in the 1969 Super Bowl. That Namath guaranteed victory sounded to me almost too neat and tidy to be true.  (I privately congratulated myself on remembering being suspicious of that quote,  as it enabled me to mention a football legend who starred at the University of Alabama, a team much followed in Northern Alabama.)

Anyway, it turned out that Namath had indeed made such a guarantee–which I quickly determined in a check of a database of historical newspapers. So that was a candidate myth that proved to be true.

I also was asked what prompted me to write Getting It Wrong. In some ways, I replied, the book built upon previous research. I mentioned my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, in which I addressed the myth of Hearst’s famous vow.

I noted that I returned to that topic in the first chapter of Getting It Wrong, offering additional detail about how the often-retold tale about Hearst’s vow took hold and was diffused.

Another inspiration for the book stemmed from my classes at American University. I’ve often included in my courses references to the “Cronkite Moment,” I noted for example, adding that the more I read about and thought about such anecdotes, the more dubious they seemed to be.

And under scrutiny–in researching them–they dissolved as apocryphal or wildly exaggerated.

My hosts at the University of North Alabama have been Greg Pitts, chair of the department of communications, and Jim R. Martin, a journalism historian and editor of the scholarly journal American Journalism.

WJC

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‘Getting It Wrong’ among 90 titles at NPC Book Fair

In 1897, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Hurricane Katrina, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth, Year studies on November 8, 2010 at 11:55 am

I will be among more than 90 authors signing and selling their recent books tomorrow evening at the annual National Press Club Book Fair and Authors’ Night.

My latest book, Getting It Wrong, will be among the titles at the Press Club event.

The book fair this year brings together a variety of authors, including one of my favorite journalism historians, Maurine Beasley of the University of Maryland; Jack Fuller, author of What Is Happening To News, and Chesley (“Sully”) Sullenberger, the pilot who safely landed a stricken passenger airliner on the Hudson River in January 2009.

The Book Fair is a fine occasion. I attended the event in 2006 and had a great time. My book at that event was The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms.

Getting It Wrong, which came out during the summer, addresses and debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths. These are stories about and/or by the news media that widely believed and often retold but which, under scrutiny, dissolve as apocryphal or wildly exaggerated.

I liken them to the “junk food” of journalism–delicious and appealing, perhaps, but not terribly healthy or nutritious.

The myths debunked in Getting It Wrong include some of the most cherished stories American journalism tells about itself, including:

“Because it takes on some of the most treasured stories in American journalism,” I write in the introduction to Getting It Wrong, the book “is a work with a provocative edge. It could not be otherwise.”

I further write that Getting It Wrong “aligns itself with a central objective of newsgathering—that of seeking to get it right, of setting straight the record by offering searching reappraisals of some of the best-known stories journalism tells about itself.

“Given that truth-seeking is such a widely shared and animating value in American journalism,” I add, “it is a bit odd that so little effort has been made over the years to revisit, scrutinize, and verify these stories. But then, journalism seldom is seriously introspective, or very mindful of its history. It usually proceeds with little more than a nod to its past.”

I point out that media myths take hold for a variety of reasons: Because they delicious stories that are almost too good not to be true; because they are reductive in offering simplistic interpretations of complex historical events, and because they are self-flattering in that they place journalists at the decisive center of important developments.

The Book Fair opens at 5:30 p.m. Admission is free for members, and $5 for non-members.

WJC

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‘Follow the money’: A made-up Watergate line

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on November 6, 2010 at 6:52 am

“Follow the money” is one of the most memorable phrases of Watergate-era American journalism.

And it’s a made-up line.

That hasn’t prevented it from being invoked, as it was yesterday in a blog post at the online financial site, MarketWatch.

The item discussed how the Washington Post continues to be buoyed by its Kaplan education-testing service unit, saying:

“If Kaplan’s business ever went south, the Washington Post Co. would be in big trouble—and the flagship newspaper would likely become a shadow of its former self.”

No doubt.

The MarketWatch item closed by invoking the “follow the money” phrase, stating:

“The Post family had better pray that nothing unsettles Kaplan’s business. Kaplan is their lifeblood and future. As the Post preached during its glory days, the Watergate investigations of the 1970s, follow the money.”

The attempt to offer a cute closing line misfired. “Follow the money” never figured in the newspaper’s Watergate coverage–which is the topic of a chapter in my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

A search of the electronic archive of all issues of the Post from June 1, 1972, to October 1, 1974, the period embracing the Watergate scandal, produced no returns for the phrase “follow the money.”

The line, however, was uttered in the cinematic version of All the President’s Men by the anonymous and mysterious source code-named “Deep Throat.” The movie dramatized the Watergate reporting of Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and was based on their non-fiction book by the same title.

But the phrase “follow the money” doesn’t appear in the book.

As I noted in a blog post last month, the line was “kind of made up for the movie,” according to an item at the online site of National Public Radio.

That item quoted an NPR research librarian as saying that newsman Daniel Schorr once asked her “to find the phrase ‘follow the money’ in the book All The President’s Men.”

The librarian was further quoted as saying that she “went through the book page by page,” finding that the “phrase does not appear there.

“And then in talking to Bob Woodward and the screenwriter, William Goldman, Dan discovered that [the phrase is] actually kind of made up for the movie.”

I also noted that former Nixon speechwriter William Safire offered in 1997 a somewhat more detailed version of the anecdote, writing in the New York Times Sunday Magazine that Woodward and Goldman blamed each other for having invented the line.

“The screenplay was written by William Goldman,” Safire wrote. “When Schorr called him, the famed screenwriter at first insisted that the line came from the book; when proved mistaken about that, he said: ‘I can’t believe I made it up. I was in constant contact with Woodward while writing the screenplay. I guess he made it up.”’

Safire wrote that Schorr “then called Woodward, who could not find the phrase in his exhaustive notes of Watergate interviews. The reporter told Schorr he could no longer rely on his memory as to whether Deep Throat had said the line and was inclined to believe that Goldman had invented it.”

(New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote in 2005 that Goldman took credit for coming up with “follow the money.”)

The Post in an article last summer praised All the President’s Men, which was released in 1976, saying the movie had “held up not only as a taut, well-made thriller but as the record itself of the Watergate scandal that transpired four years earlier.”

The Post article also stated:

“It barely matters that the film’s most iconic piece of dialogue–‘Follow the money’– was never spoken in real life.”

How so, it barely matters?

It certainly does matter. The memorable, often-quoted but phony line is emblematic of the exaggerations that characterize the movie.

Far from being “the record itself of the Watergate scandal,” the cinematic version of All the President’s Men presented “a neat, tidy, and vastly simplified account” of the scandal, I write in Getting It Wrong. It’s a version “that allowed viewers to sidestep the scandal’s complexity while engaging in an entertaining storyline.”

The movie version helped cement the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate by leaving the inescapable but erroneous impression that Woodward and Bernstein were central to unraveling the scandal and to forcing the resignation of a president.

WJC

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to Ed Driscoll for linking to this post.