Here’s the book trailer for Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book that addresses, and debunks, 10 prominent media-driven myths.
Getting It Wrong will be published this summer by University of California Press.
Posts Tagged ‘1897’
Advance copies arrive
In 1897, Furnish the war, Media myths, Spanish-American War on May 7, 2010 at 4:11 pmI received two advance copies of Getting It Wrong this afternoon. My wife says they look great, so that’s got to be the final word on that matter.
They do look very good.
I had a feeling the advances were being delivered when the UPS truck rolled up in front of the house.
Getting It Wrong–which addresses and debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths–is being published by University of California Press. Reed Malcolm, the acquisition editor with whom I worked, enclosed a generous note, saying copies of the book are en route to warehouses on the East and West coasts.
Getting It Wrong should be on sale next month.
The book‘s opening chapter, which revisits William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain in the late 19th century, is available here.
Getting It Wrong has already attracted a measure of attention. I guest-blogged about the book at the Washington Post‘s “Political Bookworm” site and the newspaper’s “Outlook” section carried a short writeup about last month about three myths the book debunks.
‘War Lovers’: A myth-indulging disappointment
In 1897, Furnish the war, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on May 2, 2010 at 3:37 pmI had a chance today to thumb through The War Lovers, the widely reviewed new book by Evan Thomas about the run-up to Spanish-American War.
But I didn’t buy it. It’s a myth-indulging disappointment.
Remington in Cuba
In sections of the book about the yellow press period at the end of the 19th century, Thomas ignored–or was unaware of–recent scholarship that has cast serious doubt on anecdotes he included.
Notably, Thomas embraced the media-driven myth of William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain–a vow supposedly contained in a telegram to the artist Frederic Remington, on assignment in Cuba.
It is perhaps American journalism’s best-known tale. But as I wrote in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, the anecdote almost certainly is apocryphal.
It lives on despite a nearly complete absence of supporting documentation. It lives on even though the telegram Hearst’s reputedly sent has never turned up. It lives on even though Hearst denied ever sending such a message.
And it lives on despite an obvious and irreconcilable internal inconsistency: It would have been absurd for Hearst to have vowed to “furnish the war” because war—specifically, the Cuban rebellion against Spain’s colonial rule—was the reason Hearst sent Remington to Cuba in the first place.
Remington was there in early 1897, at a time when anyone reading U.S. newspapers would have been quite aware that Cuba for two years had been a theater of a very nasty war. By 1897, Spain had sent nearly 200,000 soldiers to Cuba in a failed attempt to put down the rebellion, which in 1898 gave rise to the Spanish-American War.
Thomas–whose biography at Amazon.com says he “is one of the most respected historians and journalists writing today”–overlooked almost all of that.
He cited as his authority James Creelman, the pompous, hyperbolic reporter for Hearst’s New York Journal who recounted the anecdote, without documentation, in his 1901 memoir, On the Great Highway.
Creelman presented the “furnish the war” anecdote in an admiring way, saying it demonstrated how Hearst’s “yellow journalism” had an eye toward the future and was good at anticipating events. But over the years, the vow has taken on the more sinister overtones, of the sort that Thomas invoked in his book.
The anecdote’s evolution over the past 110 years is discussed in Chapter One of Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book on media-driven myths.
Creelman, by the way, wasn’t with Remington in Cuba in early 1897. He wasn’t in New York with Hearst, either. Creelman was in Europe, as the Journal‘s special correspondent on the continent. So he would not have had first-hand knowledge about the “furnish the war” telegram, had Hearst sent it to Remington in Cuba.
Thomas indulged in another myth of yellow journalism, one that centers around what I call the greatest escape narrative in American media history.
In what also is known as the case of “jail-breaking journalism,” Hearst’s Journal organized the escape in 1897 of a 19-year-old Cuban political prisoner named Evangelina Cisneros.
By then, she had been held in a Havana jail, without trial, for 15 months on suspicion of conspiring to kill a senior Spanish military officer. Cisneros claimed the officer had made her the target of unwelcome sexual advances.
As I described in my 2006 book, a year-study titled The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, Hearst sent a reporter named Karl Decker to Cuba, ostensibly as the Journal correspondent in Havana.
In reality, Decker was under orders to organize the rescue of Cisneros.
With the quiet help of U.S. diplomatic personnel in Cuba, and with the vital support of a clandestine smuggling network in Havana, Decker succeeded: He and two accomplices broke Cisneros out of jail in early October 1897. She was smuggled aboard a passenger steamer to New York City, where Hearst organized a delirious reception for her.
Thomas claimed that Decker, in articles the Journal published about jailbreak, “neglected to inform readers that he had bribed the guards, who arranged the theater of the escape as a way to save face.”
Decker
Such claims have circulated since 1897, mostly as a way to denigrate the Journal and its brazen accomplishment. Decker did say he tried, but failed, to bribe the jailer.
As is noted in The Year That Defined American Journalism, the evidentiary record to support the claim that bribes were paid is very, very thin.
“No one has identified to whom bribes were paid, how much, by what method, and how the purported payoffs secured the enduring silence of the authorities,” I wrote, adding:
“The allegations or suspicions of bribery rest more on assertion—and newspaper rivals’ contempt for the Journal—than on specific, persuasive documentation.”
It’s a good story, though. Like many media-driven myths, the Decker-bribery tale is delicious and enticing.
But it withers under scrutiny.
Advance pub for ‘Getting It Wrong’
In 1897, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, War of the Worlds, Washington Post on April 28, 2010 at 3:47 pmThe online site of the School of Communication here at American University posts today a Q-and-A with me about Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book that debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths.
Topics addressed include the Remington-Hearst/furnish the war anecdote; the War of the Worlds/mass hysteria myth, and the “Cronkite moment“/”I’ve lost Middle America” meme.
And while the topic is not considered in Getting It Wrong, I also mention the “pharm parties” myth, in which young people are said to take pills of any kind from their parents’ medicine cabinets. They supposedly show up at a party and dump the purloined pills into a large, common bowl. Then they are purported to take turns scooping out and swallowing handfuls of the medications, not knowing what they’re taking, in the supposed pursuit of a drug-induced high.
Jack Shafer, media critic for slate.com, has done fine work in knocking down the “pharm party” meme.
Here are excerpts from the Q-and-A:
Q: “Myth busting” can upset people who have accepted, or even benefited from, the myth. Have you gotten any negative feedback?
A: Not really. Not so far. I do know that some people wonder “who cares?” about some of the myths debunked in Getting It Wrong. The Hearst—”furnish the war” myth, after all, is more than 100 years old. But I emphasize in the book that media-driven myths are neither innocuous nor trivial. They can, and do, promote stereotypes. They can deflect attention or blame away from the makers of flawed policies. They can, and often do, offer an exaggerated sense of the power and influence of the news media. Plus, debunking myths is a pursuit that’s aligned with a fundamental objective of mainstream American journalism—that of getting it right.
Q: What’s next?
A: I’d like to think there’s a sequel to Getting It Wrong. The universe of media-driven myths isn’t confined to 10, after all. There are more to confront. Also, in fall 2010, I’ll be teaching a “wild card” course in the University’s General Education program titled “Media Myth and Power.” The course will consider several of the myths debunked in Getting It Wrong.
A tip of the chapeau to Michael Wargo of the School of Communication for putting together the Q-and-A, which follows the writeup about the book that appeared April 11 in the “Outlook” section of the Washington Post.
‘Getting It Wrong’ at Kensington’s ‘Day of the Book’
In 1897, Debunking, Media myths, Year studies on April 25, 2010 at 8:19 amI participated today in the “Day of the Book” festival in the antique row section of Kensington, MD.
The event represented first book-event exposure for Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book that addresses, and debunks, 10 prominent media-driven myths.
Getting It Wrong will be published this summer by University of California Press. Chapter One may be read here.
Also on display at the “Day of the Book” was my year study, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, which was published in 2006. The book tells the story of a decisive year in American journalism.
Book signing in Kensington (AMR photo)
Principal organizer of the “Day of the Book” was Kensington Row Bookshop and at least 80 authors and poets had registered for the event.
The threat of rain kept some of them away. But nasty weather was a no-show and a fine time was had.
I enjoyed meeting several other local authors, including Bernadette LeDoux-Brodsky, a Parisienne who used to teach French at Georgetown University; Bob Gregg, a retired dean and professor at American University, and Ben Farmer, a young author who graduated a few years ago from Kenyon College.
Bernadette said the ambiance in Kensington evoked for her the cafe scene of streets in Paris–sans les apéritifs, of course. She sold copies of her Ici et Ailleurs: Parisienne dans le Maryland. Bob sold several of his novels, among them The Scarecrow in the Vineyard. And the gregarious Ben Farmer seemed to make a lot of friends as well several sales of his new novel, Evangeline.
For me, the event was mostly a chance to gauge interest in Getting It Wrong. And more men than women stopped by to chat about the book and/or take a flyer.
There also was some mild interest in The Year That Defined American Journalism (see book-signing photo, above).
The dog in the picture? That’s Lil, our bichon frise. She was at the book fair, too, and proved to be quite the magnet.
About the innovative social media deck, and ‘yellow blogging’
In 1897, Newspapers, Yellow Journalism on April 20, 2010 at 10:22 amKudos to my nephew, Rob Campbell, and the innovative social media deck he’s helped launch at the Cleveland Indians’ ballpark, Progressive Field.
The Tribe Social Deck, believed to be the first of its kind in a major professional sports venue, is described as “a press box for bloggers/social media types.”
The Deck was launched last week at the team’s home opener.
As far as is known, Rob has been quoted as saying, “the Tribe Social Deck is a one-of-a-kind endeavor. Other professional sports teams have offered individual bloggers press credentials on occasion but to our knowledge there has never been a section exclusively catering to the internet and social media community.”
Rob heads up social media efforts for the Indians and posts frequently to the team’s Twitter site, Tribetalk.
In other developments in social media, a writer for the BetaNews blog has proposed “yellow blogging” as a latter day “reincarnation” of yellow journalism, which flared in the U.S. press more than 100 years ago.
By “yellow blogging,” he means those “gossip and rumor blogsites [that] ruthlessly compete for pageviews.”
Cool term, “yellow blogging.” I like it.
But as heir to yellow journalism, as it was practiced in urban America at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century–unh-uh.
As I wrote in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, “yellow journalism” has become a shorthand term–a cliché, really–for exaggerated, sensationalized, rumor-driven treatment of the news.
But that’s far from what “yellow journalism” was.
Hearst caricature, 1896
Newspapers of a century or so ago that can be classified as “yellow journals” (such as those of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer) “were, at a minimum, typographically bold in their use of headlines and illustrations,” I wrote in Yellow Journalism, adding:
“They certainly looked different from their gray, conservative counterparts, and their use of design elements was more conspicuous and imaginative. They were, moreover, inclined to campaign against powerful interests and municipal abuses, ostensibly on behalf of ‘the people.’ And they usually were not shy about doing so.”
More specifically, yellow journalism–a term that emerged in 1897–was defined by these features and characteristics:
- the frequent use of multicolumn headlines that sometimes stretched across the front page.
- a variety of topics reported on the front page, including news of politics, war, international diplomacy, sports, and society.
- the generous and imaginative use of illustrations, including photographs and other graphic representations such as locator maps.
- bold and experimental layouts, including those in which one report and illustration would dominate the front page. Such layouts sometimes were enhanced by the use of color.
- a tendency to rely on anonymous sources, particularly in dispatches of leading reporters.
- a penchant for self-promotion, to call attention frequently to the newspaper’s accomplishments.
So the yellow press back then was certainly anything but boring, predictable, or uninspired—complaints of the sort that frequently are raised about contemporary American newspapers.
The yellow journals were hardly wretched scandal sheets, indulging in gossip and rumor.
Today’s Boston Marathon: Recalling the 1897 inaugural run
In 1897, Anniversaries, Year studies, Yellow Journalism on April 19, 2010 at 7:17 pmAn ESPN columnist said it well today:
“The Boston Marathon turned 114 years old on Monday, but it never gets old.”
Indeed. The Boston Marathon is perhaps the most famous and prestigious race of its kind in the United States.
The first running of the storied marathon was in 1897, the year that defined American journalism. The race was one of the year’s landmark moments.
As I wrote in a book by that title, the inaugural Boston Marathon was run April 19, 1897, having been “inspired by the revival of the marathon race at the first modern Olympic games in 1896.”
The course, I noted in The Year That Defined American Journalism, began in Ashland, Massachusetts, and was 24.5 miles long–about 1.5 miles shorter than that of a contemporary marathon race.
Fifteen men were in the field in 1897.
Some of them, said the Boston Post, in revealing a delicious sense for detail, “looked as if they could spare a few pounds.”
Winner of the 1897 Boston Marathon
Along the course that spring day, “the runners answered the cheers of spectators with bows and waves.”
The winner of the inaugural run was John J. McDermott of the Pastime Athletic Club in New York. He finished the course in 2 hours, 55 minutes, and 10 seconds, which the Boston Globe said exceeded the record time of the 1896 Olympics.
McDermott supposedly dropped nine pounds during the race, suffered severe leg cramps, and was forced to cut through a funeral procession as the marathon neared the finish line, where some 3,000 spectators awaited.
“This probably will be my last long race,” McDermott said afterward. “I hate to quit now, because I will be called a quitter and a coward, but look at my feet.
“Do you blame me for wanting to stop it? I only walked about a quarter of a mile in the whole distance and it was 20 miles before I lagged a step.”
But, he added, “I think I shall be all right tomorrow.”
McDermott entered the 1898 edition of Boston Marathon, and finished fourth.
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The winner was John J. McDermott of the Pastime Athletic Club in New York, who finished the course in 2 hours, 55 minutes, and 10 seconds, which the Boston Globe said exceeded the record time of the 1896 Olympics.[i] McDermott dropped nine pounds, suffered severe leg cramps, and was forced to cut through a funeral procession on the last leg of the race. Some 3,000 spectators awaited at the finish line.[ii] “This probably will be my last long race,” McDermott said afterward. “I hate to quit now, because I will be called a quitter and a coward, but look at my feet. Do you blame me for wanting to stop it? I only walked about a quarter of a mile in the whole distance and it was 20 miles before I lagged a step. I think I shall be all right tomorrow.”
‘War means profits’? It didn’t for Hearst’s papers
In 1897, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on April 3, 2010 at 9:05 amWilliam Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain in the late 1890s may be the anecdote most often told in American journalism.
Hearst
It’s a woolly tale that’s been in circulation since 1901, and it lives on despite repeated and thorough debunking. It’s one of the ten media-driven myths examined in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong.
“Furnish the war” is so tenacious because it offers a tidy summary of the news media at their worst. And it’s a pithy quotation, easily digested and readily recalled.
The anecdote reemerged the other day, in a commentary posted at TheCitizen.com, an online news site of Fayette Publishing in Fayetteville, GA. The commentary stated:
“William Randolph Hearst in 1897 [told] the artist Frederic Remington: ‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.’ Think for a minute what that statement means. War means business, war means profits and war means death.”
Hearst’s purported message to Remington is almost certainly apocryphal–as is the notion that war meant profits for Hearst’s newspapers. In their intensive coverage of the four-month Spanish-American War of 1898, his papers lost money.
As I wrote in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, the Spanish-American War generally boosted newspaper circulation. But advertising revenues fell, as advertisers feared the war would undercut the nascent recovery from the hard economic times of the 1890s.
In addition, newsprint costs soared, as did news-gathering expenditures.
The trade journal Fourth Estate estimated in 1899 that Hearst’s New York Journal had spent $50,000 a week—the equivalent these days of more than $1 million—on cable tolls, reporters’ salaries, and dispatch boats that ferried correspondents’ reports from the war’s principal theater in Cuba to Jamaica and elsewhere for transmission to New York.
Hearst's 'New York Evening Journal'
The Journal scoffed at claims that it helped foment the conflict in a cynical scheme to build circulation and boost profits.
“Would you like to know what effect the war had on the money-making feature of this particular newspaper? The wholesale price of paper was greatly increased. Advertising diminished, expenses increased enormously,” the Journal said, adding that its expenses related to covering the conflict exceeded $750,000—the equivalent these days of more than $20 million.
During the war, which lasted 114 days, the Journal‘s racy sister publication, the Evening Journal, produced as many as forty extra editions a day–a late 19th century manifestation of what contemporary journalists would recognize as the unrelenting, 24-hour news cycle.
Recalling journalism’s ‘greatest escape narrative’
In 1897, Debunking, Yellow Journalism on February 17, 2010 at 12:06 amThat Canadian newspaper column I blogged about yesterday included erroneous and exaggerated references to one of the most brazen and spectacular moments in late 19th century journalism–the jailbreak in Havana organized by a reporter for William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.
It was, I wrote in my 2006 book, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, the “greatest escape narrative” in U.S. media history, “an episode unique in American journalism.”
Evangelina Cisneros
The central figure in the jailbreak was a 19-year-old political prisoner named Evangelina Cisneros, who had been held for more than a year without charges. She was suspected of plotting to kill a senior Spanish military officer who, she said, had made her the target of unwelcome sexual advances.
In late summer 1897, as Cuba’s guerrilla war against Spanish colonial rule wore on, Hearst sent a reporter named Karl Decker to Cuba, ostensibly as the Journal‘s correspondent in Havana.
In reality, Decker was under orders to organize the escape of Evangelina Cisneros.
With the quiet help of U.S. diplomatic personnel in Cuba, and with the vital support of a clandestine smuggling network in Havana, Decker succeeded in early October 1897 in breaking Cisneros out of jail.
She was hidden for nearly three days at the home of Carlos Carbonell, an American-educated Cuban banker whom she later married. Then, dressed as a boy, Cisneros was smuggled aboard the Seneca, a passenger steamer bound for New York City, where Hearst organized a thunderous welcome for her.
The column, published the other day in the Guardian newspaper of Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island, offers a grubbier and error-strewn account of the Cisneros case, saying:
“Evangelina was a beautiful, teenage virgin caught in the grasp of evil, dark-haired, poorly shaven, leering captors determined to do horrible things to her. She had to be rescued. At least, that was Hearst’s version of the story.
“He milked her plight for three weeks, until, with the help of a Hearst-funded rescuer, she sawed her way through the bars of her cell, climbed out on the ladder connecting it to an adjoining building, and crawled to freedom.
“Readers loved it. None of it was true, of course.
“A bribe had been paid so she could walk out, but that was the last thing Hearst wanted to see in a story. He wanted action.”
Hearst certainly was an advocate of activist journalism. In 1897, he advanced a model called the “journalism of action,” in which he argued newspapers should do more than gather and comment on the news. Rather, he claimed, newspapers had an obligation to inject themselves routinely and conspicuously to address the ills of society.
The Cisneros jailbreak was just such a case: For Hearst’s Journal, the leading exemplar of flamboyant “yellow journalism,” her rescue was “epochal,” a “supreme achievement of the journalism of action.” (Illicit “jail-breaking journalism” was more like it, scoffed the Chicago Times-Herald.)
Decker
As for the claim that Cisneros sawed through the bars herself: Not so. Decker and his accomplices broke the bars of her cell, using a heavy Stillson wrench.
And as for the claim the rescue was a farce, that Decker paid bribes to win Cisneros’ release: The evidentiary record to support that claim is very, very thin.
As I wrote in The Year That Defined American Journalism:
“No one has identified to whom bribes were paid, how much, by what method, and how the purported payoffs secured the enduring silence of the authorities.
“A conspiracy of silence that included … Spanish authorities in Cuba would have been so extensive—so many people would have known—that concealment could not possibly have lasted for long, certainly not 100 years and more.”
I further wrote:
“The allegations or suspicions of bribery rest more on assertion—and newspaper rivals’ contempt for the Journal—than on specific, persuasive documentation. They are supported more by argument than evidence.”
The Cisneros jailbreak was not a hoax. It was, rather, the successful result of an intricate plot in which Cuba-based operatives and U.S. diplomatic personnel filled vital roles—roles that remained obscure for more than 100 years.
‘Newspapers must learn from their history’
In 1897, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Spanish-American War on February 16, 2010 at 8:03 amSo read the headline over a column the other day in a Canadian newspaper, the Guardian of Charlottetown, which says it covers Prince Edward Island “like the dew.”
“Newspapers must learn from their history.”
A fine sentiment, that.
As the Guardian headline suggests, many journalists tend to be ahistoric: They have but a dim understanding of journalism’s past.
It’s not entirely their fault, though: The task of finding lessons in journalism history is complicated because journalism history often is badly mangled, and distorted by myth.
Young W.R. Hearst
The Guardian column offers a case in point: Despite its call to learn from the past, the column mangled an often-mangled moment in journalism history.
That is, it indulged in a hardy media-driven myth–the myth of the purported vow of New York newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst to provide the war with Spain at the end of the 19th century.
Here’s what the Guardian column said:
“Hearst was embroiled in a newspaper war in New York City. He figured a war would do wonders for circulation. Cuba was run by the Spanish, and that didn’t seem right, so a war there seemed logical.
“Get down there and cover the war, he told his reporting staff. Those assigned to the story promptly booked passage on the next boat. Once there, however, they discovered they had a rather serious problem.
“Have arrived, but there doesn’t seem to be a war, they said in a cable.
“You provide the stories, I’ll provide the war, Hearst replied.”
So where to begin in unpacking this account?
As I write in Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book about media-driven myths, the anecdote about Hearst’s vowing to bring about war with Spain is almost certainly apocryphal.
Here are some reasons why:
- The telegram that supposedly contained Hearst’s vow has never turned up.
- Hearst denied ever sending such a message.
- Spanish censors in Cuba surely would have intercepted, and called attention to, such an inflammatory message, had it been sent.
And the anecdote lives on despite an irreconcilable internal inconsistency: It would have been absurd for Hearst to vow to furnish or provide the war because war—the Cuban rebellion against Spanish colonial rule—was the reason Hearst sent correspondents to Cuba in the first place.
In most retellings, the anecdote about Hearst’s vow revolves around the purported exchange of telegrams with the famous artist, Frederic Remington, whom Hearst sent to Cuba in early 1897. Paired with him on the assignment was the famous writer, Richard Harding Davis.
Remington and Davis were there at a time when anyone reading U.S. newspapers would have been well aware that Cuba was the theater of a nasty war. By then, Spain had sent nearly 200,000 soldiers in a failed attempt to put down the rebellion, which led in 1898 to the Spanish-American War.
Although the Guardian column suggested that Hearst blithely sought to foment a war as a ploy to boost readership (“a war would do wonders for circulation”), the causes of the conflict with Spain were of course far more profound and complex.
The Cubans who rebelled against Spanish rule were determined to win political independence, and would settle for nothing short of that.
The Spanish, for domestic economic and political reasons, would not grant Cuba its independence.
And the Americans could no longer tolerate the disruptions and human rights abuses created by Spain’s failed attempt to put down the Cuban rebellion.
That impasse became the formula for the U.S. war with Spain over Cuba in 1898.
It is quite likely the United States would have gone to war no matter what Hearst printed in his newspapers.
Media Myth Alert 