W. Joseph Campbell

Posts Tagged ‘Getting It Wrong’

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Media myths, the ‘comfort food’ of journalism

In Debunking, Hurricane Katrina, Media myths on May 25, 2011 at 4:48 am

One of my favored characterizations of media-driven myths, those dubious tales about media power that masquerade as factual, is that they’re the “junk food of journalism.”

Not comforting at all

By that I mean they’re tasty and alluring, but not very nutritious, not very healthy.

The “junk food of journalism” is a turn of phrase suggested by an American University graduate student a few years ago. And, crediting him, I included that description in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, which came out almost a year ago.

At a recent Roads Scholar (formerly ElderHostel) program at which I spoke about media myths, a participant offered a variation on “junk food of journalism.”

Media myths, she suggested, also are akin to “comfort food of journalism.”

The comfort food of journalism.

I liked the phrase. Liked it immediately.

Media myths, after all, do tend to offer comfort to journalists, the practitioners of a profession that’s largely unloved.

Tales such as those about the mythical “Cronkite Moment” or the heroic journalists who exposed Watergate make newsgathering seem vital, central, and essential. Those and other tales speak to the potential of journalism to do good, to make a difference.

The tales are indeed much like comfort food.

Seeking reassurance about the relevance of journalism helps explain the myth of superlative reporting that marred the coverage of the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in late summer 2005.

The hurricane brought vast flooding to New Orleans, where levees failed.

“In the face of the deepening disaster, federal, state, and city emergency relief efforts proved sluggish, erratic, and stymied, especially in New Orleans,” I write in Getting It Wrong, adding:

“Evidence of government incompetence at all levels was abundant, and became a powerful story. People were suffering in New Orleans, and journalists went after the story vigorously, posing lacerating questions of federal, state, and city authorities: Where was the aid? Why had it not arrived? What was to be done to help the evacuees?”

In the turmoil, traditional news media seemed vital and authoritative. They were “essential again,” as American Journalism Review declared in a cover story both flattering and comforting.

“Those first days were a time for intrepid TV cameramen to take us into the stench and the sweat, the anger and the not knowing, the fear of those who seemed abandoned by their own country,” American Journalism Review asserted. “Those first days were a time for newspapers to put aside jitters about their declining importance and worries about layoffs and cutbacks. The old papers instead reasserted the comfort and utility of news you could hold in your hand.”

It added:

“In this era of blogs, pundits and shouted arguments, the coming of Katrina reunited the people and the reporters. In a time of travail, parts of the media landscape that had seemed faded, yea, even discarded, now felt true.”

Woah: “reunited the people and the reporters”? Talk about comfort food for the press.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, such self-reverential praise was “more than a little misleading.” The post-Katrina comfort-food story was largely wrong.

The reporting about Katrina’s aftermath was “no high, heroic moment in American journalism,” I note, adding:

“The coverage was in important respects flawed and exaggerated. On crucial details, journalists erred badly, and got it wrong.”

In the days immediately after Katrina’s landfall, news reports described apocalyptic horror supposedly unleashed by the hurricane. Journalists reported snipers firing at medical personnel. They reported shots were fired at helicopters, halting evacuations from the Convention Center. They told of bodies being stacked there like cordwood.

News reports spoke of roving gangs that preyed on tourists and terrorized the occupants of the Superdome. They said children were victims of sexual assault, that one seven-year-old was raped and her throat was slit. They reported that sharks were plying the flooded streets of New Orleans.

None of those reports, as it turned out, was verified or substantiated.

The exaggerated coverage not only delayed the arrival of aid to New Orleans; it impugned a battered city and defamed its residents, depicting them, inaccurately, as having shed all restraint in the face of a disaster.

WJC

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Area 51 book offers implausible, myth-based tale

In Debunking, Media myths, War of the Worlds on May 21, 2011 at 6:45 am

I had a chance yesterday to thumb through Area 51, Annie Jacobsen’s provocative new book, which says Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was behind the crash-landing of an alien-like spacecraft in New Mexico in 1947, in a one-off bid to sow panic in America — much like the fright supposedly caused by the War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938.

Welles and 'War of Worlds'

I found Jacobsen’s speculative claim as absurd and far-fetched as it is implausible.

It’s based on a single, unnamed source, and it draws sustenance from a media-driven myth.

According to Jacobsen, the strange craft contained children who had been “biologically and/or surgically reengineered” to look like space aliens, with large eyes and large heads.  “Stalin sent … the craft over New Mexico hoping it would land there,” she writes, adding:

“Stalin’s plan was for the children to climb out and be mistaken for visitors from Mars. Panic would ensue, just like it did after the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds.”

Oh, right. Sure.

As I discuss in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, “the panic and mass hysteria so readily associated with The War of The Worlds program did not occur on anything approaching nationwide dimension” when it aired October 30, 1938.

While some Americans may have been briefly frightened or disturbed by the program, “most listeners, overwhelmingly, were not: They recognized it for what it was — an imaginative and entertaining show on the night before Halloween,” I note in Getting It Wrong.

Had the radio program — which starred and was directed by Orson Welles — provoked widespread panic and hysteria, newspapers for days and even weeks afterward would have published details about the upheaval and its repercussions. As it was, though, newspapers dropped the overblown story after only a day or two.

Significantly, no deaths, serious injuries, or suicides were associated with Welles’ program. Had panic and hysteria indeed swept the country that night in 1938, many people surely would have been killed and badly injured in the tumult.

The War of the Worlds radio dramatization aired on a Sunday from 8-9 p.m. (Eastern), when most newspaper newsrooms were thinly staffed.

Reporting on the reactions to The War of The Worlds broadcast posed no small challenge for morning newspapers with tight deadlines.

“Given the constraints of time and staffing,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “relying on wire services such as the Associated Press became essential. This dependency, in turn, had the effect of promoting and deepening the notion that panic was widespread that night: On a late-breaking story of uncertain dimension and severity, many newspapers took their lead from wire service dispatches.

“They had little choice.”

The AP’s reports about the program essentially were roundups of reactions culled from the agency’s bureaus across the country, I write. Typically, AP roundups emphasized sweep — pithy, anecdotal reports quickly gathered from many places — over depth and searching detail.

The anecdotes about people frightened by the show tended to be sketchy, shallow, small-bore. But their scope contributed to a mistaken sense that radio-inspired fear was widespread that night.

The reliance on superficial wire service roundups helps explain the consensus among U.S. newspapers that the broadcast had created a lot of fright, even mass panic.

Stalin  may well have had intelligence resources to have known that, to have understood that U.S. news reports of mass panic and widespread hysteria following The War of the Worlds broadcast had been exaggerated.

Jacobsen’s far-fetched claim falters on another point: Why would sending bizarre-looking aviators to thinly populated, postwar New Mexico have created panic across the United States?

Rural New Mexico would have been among the least likely places in the country for Stalin to have deployed a mission to stir panic in the United States. Especially since the aviators were not armed with the kind of lethal heat rays that the invading Martians wielded in The War of the Worlds story.

WJC

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Recalling how a ‘debunker’s work is never done’

In Bay of Pigs, Bra-burning, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Furnish the war, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, New York Times, Reviews, War of the Worlds, Washington Post, Watergate myth, Yellow Journalism on May 20, 2011 at 5:45 am

It’s been a year since Jack Shafer, media critic for slate.com, posted his review of my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong. The review offered the telling observation that a “debunker’s work is never done.”

So true.

In the 52 weeks since the review went online, I’ve posted more than 275 essays at Media Myth Alert, nearly all of them calling attention to media-driven myths that have found their way into traditional or online media.

So, no, a debunker’s work is never done.

The top posts over the past 52 weeks, as measured by page views, were these:

Shafer’s review sent traffic to Media Myth Alert, too, as it linked to my post that critically discussed Evan Thomas’ book, The War Lovers.

The review, which appeared beneath the headline “The Master of Debunk,” noted that “the only way to debunk an enshrined falsehood is with maximum reportorial firepower.”

And repetitive firepower. Debunking media myths will happen no other way.

Even then, some myths are so deeply ingrained — so delicious, beloved, and readily at hand — that they’ll probably never be thoroughly uprooted and forgotten.

The tale about William Randolph Hearst’s vow to “furnish the war” with Spain at the end of the 19th century is an excellent example. It’s been around more than 100 years.

And it surely is apocryphal, for a long list of reasons I discuss in Getting It Wrong.

Even so, “furnish the war” lives on — hardy, robust, and apparently only slightly dented for all the debunking broadsides hurled its way. Evan Thomas turned to it in War Lovers. So, more recently, did the Nieman Watchdog blog.

Another especially hardy media myth is the presumptive “Cronkite Moment” of 1968, when Walter Cronkite’s on-air assessment that the U.S. military was “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam supposedly prompted President Lyndon Johnson to declare:

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Or something along those lines. Versions vary markedly.

That they do vary is among the many indicators the “Cronkite Moment” is media myth. Another, more direct indicator is that Johnson did not see the program when it aired.

The “Cronkite Moment” surely will live on, too, as it represents so well the news media conceit of the effects of telling truth to power, of serving as the indispensable watchdog of government.

Shafer noted the durability of media myths in one of his periodic dismantlings of the “pharm party” phenomenon, which in some form has circulated for 40-some years. (The mythical “pharm party” has it that teens swipe pharmaceuticals from medicine cabinets at home, dump the purloined pills into a bowl at a party, and take turns swallowing handfuls to see what sort of high they’ll reach.)

Shafer wrote early last year:

“I regret to inform you that this column has failed to eradicate the ‘pharm party’ meme. Since June 2006, I’ve written five columns … debunking pharm parties, and yet the press keeps on churning out stories that pretend the events are both real and ubiquitous.”

He added:

“Any myth hearty enough to survive and thrive for 40-plus years in the media is probably unkillable.”

The Hearstian vow is easily within the 40-plus-years category. So, too, are the “Cronkite Moment,” the Bay of Pigs suppression myth, and the War of the Worlds panic meme.

Irrepressible myths, all.

WJC

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The enduring appeal for journalists of the would-be apocalyptic

In Debunking, Hurricane Katrina, Media myths, Washington Post on May 16, 2011 at 6:54 am

The Wall Street Journal  over the weekend carried an intriguing commentary about the appeal of the apocalyptic, a commentary pegged to predictions of a Christian radio network that Saturday next will mark the end of days.

Terrible, but not apocalyptic

“Why are such apocalyptic prophecies so common in human history? What are their emotional and cognitive underpinnings?” the Journal commentary asked.

“In most doomsday scenarios,” it noted, “destruction is followed by redemption, giving us a sense of both fear and hope. The ostensible ‘end’ is usually seen as a transition to a new beginning and a better life to come.”

When posed in a slightly different manner, the question has relevance for journalists: What accounts for the perverse appeal of the would-be apocalyptic that often emerges in the reporting of upheaval and disasters?

As I discuss in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, which came out last year, the perverse appeal of the would-be apocalyptic helps define and animate such coverage. And it helps explain why news reporting of Hurricane Katrina‘s aftermath in 2005 and of the “crack baby” scare of the 1980s was so distorted and exaggerated.

By “perverse appeal of the would-be apocalyptic,” I mean a tendency or eagerness among journalists “to identify and report on trends and developments that seem so exceptional or frightening as to be without precedent.”

This is not to characterize journalists “as morbid or macabre in their newsgathering,” I write in Getting It Wrong. “But they respond with undeniable excitement and energy when trends of exceptional and hazardous proportion seem to being taking hold.”

I write in Getting It Wrong that Hurricane Katrina – which struck New Orleans and the Gulf Coast at the end of August 2005 – seemed in news reports to have unleashed “a disaster of almost biblical proportion: Storms and floods, death and mayhem; criminal gangs run amok in a city collapsing in chaos. New Orleans seemed to promise a descent into the truly apocalyptic. And for a time the reporting matched that premise: It was as if the some of most dreadful events imaginable were taking place in New Orleans.”

But little of the news media’s apocalyptic-like reporting of mayhem, violence, and anarchy in post-Katrina New Orleans proved true.

The “crack baby” scare, I write in Getting It Wrong, “was a media-driven myth based more on anecdote than solid, sustained research, a myth that had the effect of stigmatizing underprivileged children presumed to have been born damaged and despised as ‘crack babies.’”

The scare was based on the widely reported belief that prenatal exposure to crack cocaine would give rise to a generation of misfits, of children so mentally and physically damaged that they would forever be wards of the state.

Commentators turned to phrases such as “bio-underclass” to characterize the disaster they said lie ahead. Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer invoked “bio-underclass” in 1989, declaring in a column in the Washington Post:

“Theirs will be a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority.”

To be sure, smoking crack during pregnancy is hardly risk-free: “neither prudent nor sensible,” I write.

However, I note, “the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure have proved more subtle than sweeping.” And biomedical research has found nothing akin to the “bio-underclass” that Krauthammer and others warned about more than 20 years ago.

Revisiting the media-driven myth of the crack baby is important, I argue in Getting It Wrong, because doing so permits “insights into a tendency among journalists to neglect or disregard the tentativeness that characterizes serious scientific and biomedical research.” They seize upon the would-be apocalyptic instead.

WJC

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Pakistan facing its ‘Cronkite Moment’? That ‘Moment’ is a myth

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times on May 13, 2011 at 5:18 am

'Cronkite Moment' a media myth

This is a twist: The Pakistan military may be facing its “Cronkite Moment” in the fallout from the stunning Navy SEALs’ raid that took down terror leader Osama bin Laden.

That, at least, is what ABC News Radio reported yesterday, noting recent on-air criticism by Kamran Khan, a leading Pakistan television journalist whom it characterized as “typically pro-military.”

Khan said last week of Pakistan:

”We have become the biggest haven of terrorism in the world and we have failed to stop it.”

Khan’s criticism, according to ABC, may represent “the Pakistani military’s ‘Walter Cronkite moment,’ akin to when the United States’ most popular television anchor declared in 1968 that Vietnam was unwinnable — after which Lyndon Johnson said, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.'”

As is discussed in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the purported “Cronkite Moment” a prominent and hardy media-driven myth — a dubious tale about the news media masquerading as factual.

ABC’s claim notwithstanding, Cronkite did not declare the Vietnam War “unwinnable.” At the close of a special report televised on February 27, 1968, the CBS News anchorman said the U.S. military effort in Vietnam was “mired in stalemate.”

And that was a wholly unremarkable and unoriginal observation. The New York Times had for months been using “stalemate” to characterize the war effort.

I further note in Getting It Wrong that “a close reading of the transcript of Cronkite’s closing remarks reveals how hedged and cautious they really were. … Cronkite held open the possibility that the U.S. military efforts might still force the North Vietnamese to the bargaining table and suggested the U.S. forces be given a few months more to press the fight in Vietnam.”

So, no, Cronkite didn’t declare the war “unwinnable.”

Nor is there any documented evidence that President Lyndon Johnson had a powerful, visceral reaction to Cronkite’s fairly pedestrian commentary.

Johnson, as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, did not see the Cronkite special report when it aired.

Johnson at the time was in Austin, Texas, on the campus of the University of Texas, making light-hearted remarks at the 51st birthday party of a longtime political ally, Governor John Connally.

About the time Cronkite was intoning his “mired in stalemate” assessment, Johnson wasn’t lamenting the supposed loss of the anchorman’s support. He wasn’t lamenting the failings of his Vietnam policy.

Johnson was saying:  “Today you are 51, John. That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for — a simple majority.”

Now, that wasn’t the finest joke ever told by an American president. But it clearly demonstrated that Johnson wasn’t fretting about Cronkite that night.

In the days that followed the purported “Cronkite Moment,” Johnson remained forceful and adamant in public statements about the war effort in Vietnam. He was not despairing.

Indeed, just three days after Cronkite’s special report aired, Johnson took to the podium at a testimonial dinner in Texas and vowed that the United States would “not cut and run” from Vietnam.

“We’re not going to be Quislings,” the president said, invoking the surname of a Norwegian politician who helped the Nazis during World War II. “And we’re not going to be appeasers….”

Clearly, the presumptive “Cronkite Moment” was no epiphany for Lyndon Johnson.

WJC

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Lynch heroics not ‘the Pentagon’s story’; it was WaPo’s

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post on May 12, 2011 at 9:50 am

Private Lynch: No hero-warrior

The mythical tale that the Pentagon concocted the story about Jessica Lynch’s battlefield heroics early in the Iraq War probably is just too delicious ever to be thoroughly debunked and forgotten.

The tale about the Pentagon’s purported fabrication turned up today in a syndicated column published by the Modesto Bee.

The column deplored the exaggerated early accounts of the slaying of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. Initial reports offered by the Obama administration inaccurately described bin Laden as having used one of his wives as a shield during the Navy SEALS’ dramatic raid on his lair in Pakistan.

“To their credit,” wrote the columnist, Bob Franken, “Obama administration leaders quickly owned up, which is far better than some of the cover-ups attempted during the Bush years.”

Franken then invoked the Lynch case, writing: “In April 2003, she was captured after being seriously injured in southern Iraq. News media at the time bought the Pentagon’s story that PFC Lynch had been badly wounded and taken prisoner after she had blazed away during a firefight.”

Franken,  formerly a correspondent for CNN, also wrote: “The truth, as she acknowledged after her release, is that her injuries were the result of a Humvee crash that occurred as she and the others in her unit tried to flee.”

For starters, let’s check the date: Lynch was captured March 23, 2003, after Iraqis ambushed elements of Lynch’s unit, the 507th Maintenance Company, in Nasiriyah. She was rescued by a U.S. special forces team April 1, 2003.

More important, though, the Pentagon wasn’t the source for the hero-warrior tale about Jessica Lynch. It wasn’t “the Pentagon’s story.”

The story was thrust into the public domain exclusively by the Washington Post, which reported on April 3, 2003, that Lynch had fought fiercely in the ambush at Nasariyah, ” firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her….”

Above this dramatic story, the Post ran the headline: “‘She was fighting to the death.'”

The story was utterly false.

Lynch never fired a shot during the ambush; her weapon jammed.

She was neither shot nor stabbed, although the Post reported she had been so wounded. Lynch suffered shattering injuries in the crash of the Humvee, as Franken’s column mentions.

We know from Vernon Loeb, who shared a byline with Susan Schmidt on the original, inaccurate Lynch story, that the Pentagon wasn’t the source for that report.

As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, Loeb went on NPR’s Fresh Air program in December 2003 and declared, unequivocally:

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

Loeb then was the Post’s defense correspondent, and he and Schmidt reported the Lynch hero-warrior story from Washington, D.C. He also said in the NPR interview that Pentagon officials “wouldn’t say anything about Jessica Lynch.”

He also dismissed the interviewer’s suggestion that the Post’s “fighting to the death” report was the upshot of the Pentagon’s clever and cynical manipulation.

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

On another occasion, Loeb was quoted by the New York Times as saying:

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

Rarely do Loeb’s disclaimers find their way into articles, columns, blog posts, and other media discussions about the Lynch case. It’s far easier — and makes for a far better story — simply to embrace the false narrative about the Pentagon’s duplicity.

The false narrative, after all, conforms tidily and well to the curdled popular view that the Iraq War was a mistake, that it was a conflict waged on dubious grounds.

And yet no one who repeats or promotes the narrative about the Pentagon’s having concocted the story about Lynch ever explains how the Pentagon managed to dupe the Post so thoroughly that it published a bogus story.

I’d love to read a description about how that supposedly was accomplished.

WJC

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‘Getting It Wrong’ wins SPJ award for Research about Journalism

In Bay of Pigs, Bra-burning, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Furnish the war, Hurricane Katrina, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Media myths and radio, Murrow-McCarthy myth, New York Times, Spanish-American War, War of the Worlds, Washington Post, Watergate myth, Yellow Journalism on May 10, 2011 at 9:02 am

The Society of Professional Journalists announced today that my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, is the winner of the 2010 Sigma Delta Chi award for Research about Journalism.

The award will be presented in September at the Excellence in Journalism convention in New Orleans.

Getting It Wrong, which was published last year by the University of California Press, debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths, which are dubious tales about the news media that masquerade as factual.

Here’s a summary of the 10 myths dismantled in Getting It Wrong:

  1. Remington-Hearst: William Randolph Hearst’s famous vow “to furnish the war” with Spain is almost certainly apocryphal.
  2. War of Worlds: The notion that the War of Worlds radio dramatization in 1938 caused nationwide panic and mass hysteria is exaggerated.
  3. Murrow-McCarthy: Edward R. Murrow’s famous See It Now program in March 1954 did not end Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communists-in-government witch-hunt; Murrow in fact was very late to take on McCarthy.
  4. Bay of Pigs: The New York Times did not suppress its reporting in the run-up to the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961.
  5. Cronkite-Johnson: Walter Cronkite’s special report on Vietnam in February 1968 did not prompt an immediate reassessment or revision of U.S. war policy.
  6. Bra-burning: Humor columnist Art Buchwald helped spread the notion that feminist demonstrators dramatically burned their bras at a Miss America protest in September 1968.
  7. Watergate: The Washington Post’s intrepid reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, did not bring down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency. That they did is a trope that knows few bounds.
  8. Crack babies: The much-feared “bio-underclass” of children born to women who smoked crack cocaine during their pregnancies never materialized.
  9. Jessica Lynch: The Washington Post’s erroneous reporting about Jessica Lynch early in the Iraq War gave rise to several myths about her capture and rescue.
  10. Hurricane Katrina: News coverage of Katrina’s aftermath in New Orleans in early September 2005 was marred by wild exaggerations about extreme, Mad Max-like violence.

The “Research about Journalism” award recognizes “an investigative study about some aspect of journalism,” SPJ says, and “must be based on original research; either published or unpublished, and must have been completed during the 2010 calendar year. … Judges will consider value to the profession, significance of the subject matter, thoroughness of the research, and soundness of the conclusion.”

WJC

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As if Hearst were ‘back with us,’ vowing to ‘furnish the war’

In 1897, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on May 10, 2011 at 2:26 am

Nieman Watchdog, a blog that “seeks to encourage more informed reporting,” indulged yesterday in the mythical tale of William Randolph Hearst‘s famous vow to “furnish the war” with Spain in the late 19th century.

Remington in Cuba for Hearst

It was a case of the blog’s turning to a fiction about Hearst and treating it as if it were fact.

The occasion for invoking “furnish the war” was to call attention to inaccuracies in news graphics accompanying reports last week about the slaying of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden.

“Journalism is a serious business where credibility is paramount,” the blog post asserted. “Editors need, first and foremost, to get the facts right, in graphics as well as text and video.”

The post further noted that “some publications presented as facts what was just fiction. Sometimes there was no factual support whatsoever. It’s as though William Randolph Hearst was back with us, saying once again, ‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.'”

As I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the tale about Hearst’s vow to “furnish the war” is a hardy media-driven myth that lives on despite concerted attempts to discredit and dismantle it.

The vow supposedly was contained in a telegram sent to the famous artist, Frederic Remington, who was on assignment in Cuba for Hearst’s flamboyant New York Journal (see image, above). Remington and the correspondent Richard Harding Davis were assigned there to cover the insurrection against Spanish colonial rule — the conflict that gave rise in 1898 to the Spanish-American War.

They arrived in Havana in early January 1897; Remington stayed only six days.

Before leaving by passenger steamer for New York, Remington supposedly sent Hearst a cable, stating:

“Everything is quiet. There will be no war. I wish to return.”

Hearst replied with his famous vow:

“Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”

But Remington didn’t stay.

He promptly returned to New York, where his sketches were given prominent display in Hearst’s Journal. They appeared with such flattering headlines as: “Cuban War Sketches Gathered in the Field by Frederic Remington; The Gifted Artist, Visiting Cuba Especially for the Journal.”

That’s hardly the sort of tribute Hearst would have granted a wayward artist who ignored specific instructions to “remain” in Cuba.

I further note in Getting It Wrong that the anecdote about Hearst’s vow “lives on despite an irreconcilable internal inconsistency: It would have been absurd for Hearst to vow to ‘furnish the war’ because war — specifically, the Cuban rebellion against Spain’s colonial rule — was the very reason Hearst sent Remington to Cuba in the first place.”

Anyone reading U.S. newspapers in early 1897 “would have been well aware,” I write, “that Cuba was a theater of a nasty war,” which gave rise in April 1898 to the Spanish-American War.

Not only that, but the artifacts themselves — the telegrams reputedly sent by Remington and Hearst — have never surfaced. And Spanish censors monitored incoming and outgoing telegraphic traffic in Havana, and they surely would have intercepted Hearst’s incendiary message — had it been sent.

For those and other reasons, the tale about the Remington-Hearst exchange is surely apocryphal — fiction that too often masquerades as fact.

WJC

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Perceptive observations about Woodward, Bernstein, media power

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on May 9, 2011 at 5:26 am

From time to time at Media Myth Alert, I’ve noted how American media myths have been embraced with gusto by news outlets overseas.

Watergate and the notion that the investigative reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency have particularly powerful myth appeal among news media abroad.

So it’s commendable when an international news organization treats consensus narratives about the U.S. media with decided skepticism, as the Independent newspaper in London did over the weekend.

In a commentary by Patrick Cockburn, the Independent noted that the news media have “always been more dependent on the powers-that-be” than they prefer to acknowledge.”

“American journalists outside Washington often express revulsion and contempt at the slavish ways of the Washington press corps,” Cockburn wrote. “But it is difficult to report any government on a day-to-day basis without a cooperation that can be peremptorily withdrawn to bring critics into line.”

About the Watergate scandal, he added, perceptively:

“Woodward and Bernstein learned about Watergate almost entirely from secondary sources such as judges, prosecutors and government investigative agencies which could force witnesses to come clean by threatening to put them in jail.”

That’s very true.

Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate reporting often drew upon, and often prominently cited, government investigators such as the FBI.

WaPo report, October 10, 1972

The Watergate report they’ve often described as decisive — an article published October 10, 1972, that characterized the scandal as “a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election” — referred prominently to the FBI and the Justice Department.

(That article cited “FBI reports” in asserting that “at least 50 undercover Nixon operatives traveled throughout the country trying to disrupt and spy on Democratic campaigns.” That claim was dismissed as “absolutely false” in internal FBI memoranda, and was scoffed at by Edward Jay Epstein in his brilliant 1976 essay puncturing the purported effects of Woodward and Bernstein’s  Watergate reporting.)

And as I write in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, which came out last year, to characterize the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein as decisive in Watergate’s outcome “is to abridge and misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth.”

I also note that such a mediacentric interpretation of Watergate “minimizes the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office.”

Those forces included special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI, I note, adding:

“Even then, Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House. Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” of the crimes of Watergate.

I argue in Getting It Wrong that debunking media-driven myths “enhances a case for limited news media influence.”

Media power, I write, “tends to be modest, nuanced, diffused, and situational. But too often the ubiquitous presence of the news media is mistaken for power and influence.”

Cockburn’s commentary similarly suggested that media power can be overstated, exaggerated.

“In wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan,” he noted, “effective media criticism has tended to follow rather than precede public opinion.”

Quite so.

Walter Cronkite‘s famous on-air assessment in late February 1968 that the U.S. military was “mired in stalemate” in the war in Vietnam is sometimes said to have shifted American public opinion about the conflict.

In reality, though, Americans had begun turning against the war months before Cronkite aired his analysis in a special report on CBS television.

WJC

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Bay of Pigs suppression myth too rich and delicious to die away

In Anniversaries, Bay of Pigs, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times on May 7, 2011 at 5:31 am

The tale of the New York Times censoring itself in the runup to the Bay of Pigs invasion 50 years ago supposedly offers timeless lessons about the perils of journalists surrendering to the agenda of government.

That anecdote, I write in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, is “often cited as an object lesson … about what can happen when independent news media give in to power-wielding authorities.”

Supposedly, in early April 1961, the Times spiked or emasculated a detailed report about the invasion preparations — and did so at the urging of President John F. Kennedy.

But as I discuss in detail in Getting It Wrong, neither Kennedy nor anyone in his administration asked or lobbied the Times to kill or tone down that report — which was written by a veteran correspondents named Tad Szulc, ran to more than 1,000 words, and was published April 7, 1961, above the fold on the newspaper’s front page.

Like many consensus narratives and media-driven myths, though, the Times-Bay of Pigs suppression tale is too neat and tidy, too rich and delicious, ever to die away.

A hint of that came yesterday at the online site of CounterPunch, which touts itself as “America’s best political newsletter.”

CounterPunch posted an essay that referred to the Times’ purported act of self-censorship, stating:

“Back in April 1961, the Times deleted from Tad Szulc’s story the time and place of landing of the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion because President Kennedy told the Times’ publisher it would not serve U.S. National Security interests. (David Halberstam, The Powers That Be, p. 448).”

It’s neat the passage was cited. But the citation doesn’t render it accurate.

Halberstam‘s Powers That Be, after all, is no authoritative source on the tale of the Times‘ self-censorship. Far from it.

Halberstam’s account claimed that Kennedy called James (“Scotty”) Reston, the Times’ Washington bureau chief, “and tried to get him to kill” the Szulc story.

Szulc of the Times

According to Halberstam, Kennedy “argued strongly and passionately about what the Szulc story would do to his policy” and president warned that the Times would risk having blood on its hands were the article published and the invasion a failure.

Heady stuff, but it never happened.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, there is “no evidence that Kennedy spoke with anyone at the Times” on April 6, 1961, the day Szulc’s dispatch was written, edited, and prepared for publication.

“The Kennedy Library in Boston says that the White House telephone logs reveal no calls were placed to Reston” or other Times executives that day, I write, adding:

“Kennedy had almost no chance to speak with those executives during the interval from when Szulc’s story arrived at the Times building in midtown Manhattan and when it was set in type.”

That’s because the president spent the last half of the afternoon of April 6, 1961, playing host to Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, on a lengthy cruise down the Potomac River to Mount Vernon.

The outing ended around 6:30 p.m., leaving Kennedy only a tiny window of opportunity to call Times executives before the first edition of the newspaper hit the streets.

Harrison Salisbury, a Pulitzer-winning Times correspondent and editor, offered in his book, Without Fear of Favor the most detailed account of the Times’ deliberations on the Szulc article. And Salisbury was unequivocal:

“The government in April 1961,” he wrote, “did not … know that The Times was going to publish the Szulc story, although it was aware that The Times and other newsmen were probing in Miami. Nor did President Kennedy telephone [Times President Orvil] Dryfoos, Scotty Reston or [Managing Editor] Turner Catledge about the story.”

The editing that Szulc’s story received served to improve its accuracy. The reference to the invasion’s imminence was removed, as it represented “a prediction and not a fact,” as Reston wrote years later.

(The story Szulc submitted included no reference to “place of landing.”)

The invasion at the Bay of  Pigs was launched April 17, 1961, or 10 days after Szulc’s story appeared.

In the interim, as I point out in Getting It Wrong, the Times “did not abandon the Cuba-invasion story ….  Subsequent reporting in the Times, by Szulc and others, kept expanding the realm of what was publicly known about a coming assault against Castro.”

So Szulc’s article of April 7, 1961, was no one-off effort. And it wasn’t sanitized at the request of the Kennedy administration, either.

WJC

Many thanks to Little Miss Attila
for linking to this post

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