W. Joseph Campbell

Posts Tagged ‘Cinema’

, , , , , , , , , , ,

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

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

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

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Mythmaking on Blu-ray?

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on December 20, 2010 at 11:11 am

All the President’s Men, the most-seen movie about the Watergate scandal, may be released on Blu-ray early next year, according to a post yesterday at a blog sponsored by a Canadian newspaper.

“Word is that Warner Bros. will release the Watergate movie … in a feature loaded  Blu-ray book in February,” said the item at the Leader-Post newspaper in Saskatchewan.

Now at best, the Blu-ray version of All the President’s Men is of mild interest to Media Myth Alert. What caught the  eye, though, was this characterization in the Leader-Post item:

“The 1976 movie is perhaps the greatest ever on newspaper journalism. It tells the true story of how Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward exposed the real story behind the break-in at Democratic Party offices in the Watergate building by Republican political operatives. Their exposé, fed by a mysterious source called ‘Deep Throat,’ led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.”

I placed the words in bold for emphasis.

As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, Woodward and Bernstein didn’t expose the Watergate scandal. It was at first a police beat story that spiraled into an intricate and sprawling scandal that sent to jail nearly 20 men associated with Nixon’s presidency or his 1972 reelection campaign.

And the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein didn’t lead to Nixon’s resignation.

As I point out in Getting It Wrong:

“To roll up a scandal of such dimension [as Watergate] required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

“Even then, 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 [in 1974] did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up and authorizing payments of thousands of dollars in hush money.”

Against the tableau of subpoena-wielding investigative authorities, the work of Woodward and Bernstein for the Washington Post fades into relative insignificance.

Even so, as I write in Getting It Wrong, the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate–the endlessly appealing notion that the  reporting of Woodward and Bernstein did bring down Nixon’s  presidency–“has become the most familiar storyline of Watergate.”

The heroic-journalist interpretation is, I note, “a proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity.”

Perhaps the factor most important in propelling and solidifying the heroic-journalist meme of Watergate was the movie All the President’s Men, an adaptation of Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 book by the same title.

“The book in fact had been written with the cinema in mind,” I write in Getting It Wrong, noting that the actor Robert Redford “had taken keen interest in the Woodward-Bernstein collaboration in reporting the scandal and encouraged the reporters to structure the book around their experiences.”

Redford paid $450,000 for the rights to All the President’s Men, and he played Woodward in the movie.

The cinematic version of All the President’s Men focuses on the work of Woodward and Bernstein while mostly ignoring, and even denigrating, the efforts of investigative agencies like the FBI.

I further note that the movie All the President’s Men allows no interpretation other than 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.

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

The myth is solidly entrenched in popular culture. It is one of the heartiest of media-driven myths, those dubious, media-centric tales that masquerade as factual.

The Blu-ray version of All the President’s Men may serve to introduce the myth of Watergate to yet another generation of movie-goers.

WJC

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , ,

Woah, WaPo: Mythmaking in the movies

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on December 8, 2010 at 12:09 pm

I was traveling last week and only recently caught up with the eye-opening recent editorial in the Washington Post that took to task the makers of Fair Game, a just-released movie about the Valerie Plame-CIA leak affair, which stirred a lot of misplaced fury seven years ago.

The Post editorial is eye-opening in a revealing way, describing Fair Game as “full of distortions–not to mention outright inventions.”

Even more revealing–and pertinent to Media Myth Alert–was this observation:

“Hollywood has a habit of making movies about historical events without regard for the truth; ‘Fair Game’ is just one more example. But the film’s reception illustrates a more troubling trend of political debates in Washington in which established facts are willfully ignored.”

That’s akin to the point I make in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, about how cinema can propel and solidify media-driven myths.

On that point, I write in Getting It Wrong:

“High-quality cinematic treatments are powerful agents of media myth-making, and can enhance a myth’s durability.

“Untold millions of Americans born after 1954 were introduced to the Murrow-McCarthy confrontation through Good Night, and Good Luck, a critically acclaimed film released in 2005 that cleverly promoted the myth that Murrow stood up to McCarthy when no one else would or could.”

Good Night, and Good Luck is but one example of cinema’s mythmaking capacity.

Not surprisingly, comments made online about the Post editorial were largely critical. Said one: “You just reminded me why I stopped reading the Washington Post editorials and began subscribing to the New York Times.”

Said another: “This editorial proves the thesis that The Post is willing to go to any length to suck up to the power elite in order to maintain access to the same.”

And another, more perceptive comment read:

“The myth-making in ‘Fair Game’ is no more or less egregious than it was in ‘All the President’s Men.’ Hollywood loves simplistic story lines (which is why the likes of John Sirica and Archibald Cox were nowhere to be found in ‘ATPM’).”

Now that’s an excellent point.

As I note in Getting It Wrong:

“The 1976 cinematic version of All the President’s Men solidified the notion that young, diligent reporters for the Washington Post brought down President Richard Nixon. That myth of Watergate may be stronger than ever, given that All the President’s Men is the first and perhaps only extended exposure many people have to the complex scandal that was Watergate.

“Thanks in part to Hollywood, the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate has become the most familiar and readily accessible explanation about why Nixon left office in disgrace.”

Indeed, All the President’s Men has been a significant contributor to the misleading yet dominant popular narrative of Watergate, that the reporting of Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered evidence that forced Nixon’s resignation. The movie focuses on the reporters and their work, ignoring the more significant contributions of Sirica, a federal judge, and Cox, a special prosecutor, in unraveling the Watergate scandal.

As bold as it may have been, the Post editorial about Hollywood and Fair Game might have gone farther and ruminated about the effects of All the President’s Men.  Still, it was a telling and impressive commentary.

I not infrequently take the Post to task at Media Myth Alert, usually for its unwillingness to confront its singular role in thrusting the Jessica Lynch case into the public domain. The Post, I’ve argued, ought to disclose the sources for its electrifying but bogus story about Lynch’s supposed battlefield heroics in Iraq.

The newspaper’s unwillingness to do so has allowed the false popular narrative that the Pentagon concocted the story to emerge and become dominant. Even one of the reporters on the Lynch story has said, “Our sources for that story were not Pentagon sources.”

But for its clear-eyed editorial about Fair Game, the Post deserves a tip of the chapeau.

WJC

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , ,

Mythical ‘follow the money’ line turns up in sports

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on December 5, 2010 at 6:29 pm

I’ve noted at Media Myth Alert how media-driven myths–those dubious and improbable stories that masquerade as factual–can infiltrate the sports pages.

There was, for example, a sports column a month ago that invoked the mythical “Cronkite Moment” of 1968–a hardy media myth that I take up and debunk in my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

And today, the famous made-up line of Watergate, “follow the money,” popped up in the sports pages of a newspaper in Midland, Texas.

The phrase supposedly was offered as advice by “Deep Throat,” the high-level, anonymous source who met from time to time with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post during the newspaper’s Watergate investigation.

A sports writer for the Midland Reporter-Telegram, invoked the “follow the money” line in referring to the NCAA investigation of Auburn quarterback  Cam Newton, whose father is suspected of having sought more than $100,000 if his son would sign with Mississippi State University. (The NCAA recently said it had determined that Cam Newton knew nothing about the purported scheme.)

The Reporter-Telegram item stated:

“In the words of Bob Woodward’s famous Watergate source ‘Deep Throat’ it’s time to ‘follow the money’ when it comes to Cam Newton. Newton has been ruled eligible [to play], but I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this.”

While the NCAA ruling certain raises eyebrows, it’s the use of “follow the money” that most interests Media Myth Alert.

While the line often is attributed to “Deep Throat,” it never figured in the Post’s Watergate coverage.

I’ve conducted a search of an electronic archive of the issues of the Post from June 1, 1972, to October 1, 1974, the period embracing the Watergate scandal, and no article or editorial published during that time contained the phrase “follow the money.”

However, the line was uttered in the cinematic version of All the President’s Men by Hal Holbrook, the actor who played “Deep Throat.” (The movie, an adaptation of Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book by the same title, came out in 1976.)

“Follow the money,” Holbrook advises the Woodward character, played Robert Redford. The scene is a parking garage, not unlike the one in suburban Virginia where Woodward and “Deep Throat” sometimes conferred.

“What do you mean?” Redford asks in the garage scene. “Where?”

“Oh,” Holbrook says, “I can’t tell you that.”

“But you could tell me?”

“No,” Holbrook says. “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 most likely author of “follow the money” was William Goldman, the screenwriter of All the President’s Men. Frank Rich, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote in 2005 that Goldman told him, “I just want you to remember that I wrote, ‘Follow the money.'”

Goldman’s comment to Rich came shortly after the disclosure in Vanity Fair magazine that W. Mark Felt, a former senior FBI official, had been Woodward‘s “Deep Throat” source.

As I point out in Getting It Wrong, the 30-year guessing game about the identity of “Deep Throat” helped keep Woodward, the Post, and its Watergate coverage “in the public eye far longer than they otherwise would have been.”

And that guessing game is an important reason why the dominant popular narrative about Watergate is the notion that the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

But that, I note, is “a particularly beguiling media-driven myth.”

WJC

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , ,

In Wikileaks, a hint of Watergate? Not so much

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times, Washington Post, Watergate myth on December 1, 2010 at 12:30 pm

It was just a matter of time before someone found a hint of Watergate in the recent, massive Wikileaks disclosures of sensitive U.S. diplomatic traffic.

Voilá. A commentary posted today at examiner.com invokes such a linkage in arguing that leaked cables describing Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s misconduct underscore the importance of turning him from office.

The commentary refers to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who reported on Watergate for the Washington Post, and asserts that Wikileaks disclosures “add to the well-documented trail of President Karzai’s abuse of Presidential power and his incessant attempts to exceed his constitutional authority.

Nixon quits, August 1974

“I have written before and shall point out again,” the commentary’s author stated, “that there is … the same amount of evidence derived from open source intelligence alone to impeach Karzai as Woodward and Bernstein had amassed to force Nixon to resign.”

Of keen interest to Media Myth Alert is not so much Karzai’s brazenness but the extravagant claim about the Watergate reporting of Woodward and Bernstein, that they “amassed” evidence to “force” Nixon’s resignation. He quit in 1974.

As I point out in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, their reporting had at best only a marginal effect on the outcome of the scandal, in which 19 men associated with Nixon’s presidency or his 1972 reelection campaign went to jail.

“To roll 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.”

Efforts of that dimension were required to uncover evidence implicating Nixon and his top aides in what was a sprawling scandal.

And even then, Nixon likely would have served out his second term if not for secret audiorecordings he made of many conversations in the Oval Office–conversations that captured his guilty role in authorizing a coverup of the Watergate scandal.

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

So against that tableau, the contributions of Woodward, Bernstein, and the Washington Post recede to minor significance: They were not decisive to the outcome of Watergate.

But because the scandal was so intricate, and because it is no longer a day-to-day preoccupation, the details have become blurred and what I call the “heroic-journalist” interpretation has taken hold as the dominant popular narrative of Watergate.

And that’s the endlessly appealing notion–propelled by the mediacentric motion picture All the President’s Men–that Woodward and Bernstein’s tireless and dogged reporting brought down Nixon.

The heroic-journalist interpretation, I write in Getting It Wrong, “has become the most familiar storyline of Watergate,” noting that it’s “ready short-hand for understanding Watergate and its denouement, a proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity.”

It’s a view that’s widely held. Even the New York Times, the keenest rival of the Washington Post, has embraced the heroic-journalism interpretation of Watergate.

Interestingly, though, principals at the Post have over the years disputed the notion the newspaper was decisive in Nixon’s fall.

Katharine Graham, the newspaper’s publisher during and after the Watergate period, said in 1997, at the 25th anniversary of the foiled burglary at Democratic national headquarters that touched off the Watergate scandal:

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

And Woodward, himself, has concurred, if in earthier terms.  In an interview several years ago with American Journalism Review, Woodward declared:

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

WJC

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , , , ,

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/

, , , , , , ,

‘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

Recent and related:

Many thanks to fivefeetoffury and
to Ed Driscoll for linking to this post.

, , , , , ,

Suspicious Murrow quote reemerges

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, Newspapers on October 25, 2010 at 10:06 am

A comment of uncertain authenticity but attributed to legendary broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow resurfaced the other day, in an item posted at the online site of the Salem-News a news service in Oregon.

Witch-hunting senator

The item included this passage:

“As Edward R. Murrow noted, ‘We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.'”

The first portion of the quote–“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty”–is genuine. Murrow uttered the line during the closing portion of his myth-enveloped television report in March 1954 about Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (above) and his witch-hunting ways.

The second part– “When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it”–is highly suspect.

Murrow didn’t say it during his program about McCarthy, the mythical elements of which I address in my new book, Getting It Wrong.

Here’s what Murrow said on that occasion, immediately after his remark about not confusing “dissent with disloyalty”:

“We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.”

That’s not  even remotely suggestive of “When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”

So it’s pretty certain that “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty” was not followed by “When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”

This dubious Murrow quotation has been the topic of a previous discussion at Media Myth Alert. I noted then that if the quotation were genuine–if Murrow really said it–then its derivation shouldn’t be too difficult to determine.

But its derivation remains unknown.

I’ve searched the “historical newspapers” database for the suspect quote. The database includes the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times; no articles quoting “the loyal opposition” passage were returned.

As I’ve noted previously, a search of the LexisNexis database produced a few returns–and none dated before 2001. And none stated when and where Murrow supposedly made the comment.

Among the LexisNexis returns was a book review published in 2003 in the Washington Post. The review invoked “the loyal opposition” passage and said Murrow made the remark “half a century ago, at the height of the McCarthy era.” But exactly when and where was left unsaid.

I couldn’t find “the loyal opposition” passage in A.M. Sperber’s hefty biography of Murrow; nor could I locate it in Bob Edwards’ more recent and much thinner treatment.

The 2005 movie Good Night and Good Luck, which revisited the Murrow-McCarthy encounter, didn’t invoke the quote, either. The line is not to be found in the film’s script.

So why bother running this down? What’s the point?

Several reasons offer themselves.

As I point out in Getting It Wrong, there is intrinsic value in correcting the historical record, in insisting on “a demarcation between fact and fiction.” As is the case with many media-driven myths, the suspect quotation seems too neat, too tidy to be authentic.

Falsely attributing quotations is unsavory, off-putting, and distorts the historical record. The Murrow-McCarthy encounter is myth-choked as it is, in that it’s widely believed that the Murrow show in 1954 stopped the senator’s witch-hunt in its tracks.

What’s more, the dubious Murrow quote seems to possess particular relevance and resonance today. But to invoke without knowing its derivation is an abuse of history.

WJC

Recent and related:

, , , , ,

How late was Ed Murrow in taking on Joe McCarthy?

In Cinematic treatments, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth on September 28, 2010 at 4:25 pm

Murrow in 1954

Edward R. Murrow, the “white knight” of American broadcasting, is often credited with having ended the communists-in-government witch-hunt of Senator Joseph McCarthy at the height of the Cold War.

Murrow supposedly demolished the McCarthy scourge in a 30-minute television program, See It Now, that aired on CBS on March 9, 1954. The show made notably effective use of footage of the senator’s words, actions, and sometimes-bizarre conduct.

By doing that show, it is said, Murrow stood up to McCarthy when no one else would–or dared.

That, however, is a media-driven myth–a dubious tale about the news media that masquerades as factual.

As I write in my new myth-busting book, Getting It Wrong, Murrow was very late in confronting McCarthy, doing so long after other journalists–among them muckraking columnist Drew Pearson–had become persistent and searching critics of the senator, his record, and his tactics.

Pearson wrote critically about McCarthy as early as February 1950–just days after the senator first raised claims about communists having infiltrated the U.S. State Department.

Pearson also raised searching questions years before Murrow’s program about McCarthy’s tax troubles, his accepting suspicious campaign contributions, and his taking a $10,000 payment from a U.S. government contractor for a 7,000 word article.

McCarthy, I write, “had no more relentless, implacable, or scathing foe in the news media than Drew Pearson.”

And there were other journalists, too, who challenged McCarthy and his ways long before Murrow’s See It Now program in 1954.

So undeniably, Murrow’s on-air takedown of McCarthy was belated.

But it wasn’t quite as late as historian Alan Brinkley suggested in a post yesterday at the Speakeasy blog, sponsored by the Wall Street Journal.

Brinkley wrote:

“Anyone who saw the George Clooney film ‘Good Night, and Good Luck,’ about Edward R. Murrow’s decision to attack Joe McCarthy in 1954, will remember the pervasive fear, indeed terror, of employees of CBS who have hidden their leftist political views. (Even Murrow waited until after the Army-McCarthy hearings began before he took on McCarthy.)”

That last bit isn’t correct.

The Army-McCarthy hearings were convened in April 1954, six or so weeks after Murrow’s program, and ran until June 1954. The Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago has called the hearings “the first nationally televised congressional inquiry.” And they led to McCarthy’s censure by the Senate in late 1954.

“What made the real difference” in toppling McCarthy, Fred Friendly, Murrow’s producer, later wrote, “wasn’t the Murrow program but the fact that ABC decided to run the Army-McCarthy hearings. People saw the evil right there on the tube. ABC helped put the mirror up to Joe McCarthy.”

The Clooney film that Brinkley mentioned, Good Night, and Good Luck, was an imaginative and clever cinematic treatment of Murrow’s See It Now program about McCarthy. The film came out in 2005 and included archival footage from Murrow’s show.

“While the movie never explicitly said as much,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “it left an inescapable impression that Murrow courageously and single-handedly stopped McCarthy. Many reviewers saw it that way, too.”

For example, the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert, said Good Night, and Good Luck was about “a group of professional newsmen who with surgical precision remove a cancer from the body politic. They believe in the fundamental American freedoms, and in Sen. Joseph McCarthy they see a man who would destroy those freedoms in the name of defending them. … The instrument of his destruction is Edward R. Murrow, a television journalist above reproach.”

But Murrow wasn’t such a “white knight.”

As I note in Getting It Wrong, Murrow claimed a master’s degree he never earned, added five years to his age in his employment application at CBS, and in 1956 privately counseled Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate, on techniques of speaking before a television camera.

Such lapses today, I write in Getting It Wrong, would “almost surely disqualify Murrow, or any journalist, from prominent positions in America’s mainstream news media.”

WJC

Recent and related: