W. Joseph Campbell

Posts Tagged ‘Getting It Wrong’

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Counterpunching that made-up line, ‘follow the money’

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on March 15, 2011 at 9:45 am

Watergate’s most famous invented line showed up yesterday at the online site of CounterPunch, which touts itself as “America’s best political newsletter.”

That most famous invented line of Watergate is: “Follow the money.”

It was written into the script of All the President’s Men, the 1976 movie about the Watergate reporting of the Washington Post, and has since made a smooth, seamless transition to the vernacular.

Indeed, “follow the money” has become the passage most commonly associated with the Watergate scandal, which culminated in 1974 in the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

A commentary at the CounterPunch site referred to “follow the money” in a lengthy discussion of the perjury trial in Texas of a former CIA operative, Luis Posada Carriles, stating:

“During the investigation into the 1972 Watergate scandal, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward found a source, whom he referred to only as ‘Deep Throat,’ who told him to ‘follow the money.’ Woodward and fellow journalist Carl Bernstein followed the money trail and unraveled the mysteries behind the crimes and subsequent cover-ups of President Richard M. Nixon and his White House staff.”

Simple as all that, eh? “Follow the money” was key to unraveling “the mysteries behind the crimes” of America’s greatest political scandal?

Hardly.

As is the case with all media-driven myths, there are elements of accuracy in that narrative. Woodward did periodically discuss Watergate with a high-level government source to whom the Post referred as “Deep Throat.”

But in real life, “Deep Throat” never counseled Woodward to “follow the money.”

Nor does “follow the money” doesn’t appear in All the President’s Men, the book Woodward and Bernstein wrote about Watergate.

Nor does the line appear in any Post article or editorial published during the Watergate period.

Nor was unraveling Watergate a simple matter of pursuing a money trail.

Far from it.

As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths, rolling up a scandal of the dimension and complexity of Watergate “required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

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

The popularity of “follow the money” — a line for which screenwriter William Goldman has taken credit — highlights another characteristic of media myths: Their tendency to minimize complexity and offer simplistic and misleading interpretations instead.

I note in Getting It Wrong that high-quality cinematic treatments — and All the President’s Men is a telling example — can contribute significantly to solidifying and making believable mythical accounts of historical events.

“Follow the money” is just one of the distortions presented in All the President’s Men, the movie.

More broadly, the film promotes what I call the “heroic-journalist” interpretation” of Watergate.

The heroic-journalist meme is a trope that knows few bounds. It is the most familiar storyline of Watergate — the mediacentric version that Woodward and Bernstein, through their dogged and courageous reporting, brought down Nixon and his corrupt presidency.

It is one of American journalism’s most self-reverential stories — one propelled by the movie version of All the President’s Men.

As I point out in Getting It Wrong, the film placed Woodward and Bernstein “at the center of Watergate’s unraveling while denigrating the efforts of investigative agencies such as the FBI.

“The effect was to solidify and elevate the heroic-journalist myth, giving it dramatic power, and sustaining it in the collective memory.”

All the President’s Men offers no version of Watergate other than Woodward and Bernstein, with the help of “Deep Throat,” brought about the first-ever resignation of a U.S. president.

That’s an abridged and misleading interpretation, a misreading of history that deserves serious counterpunching.

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post

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Of media myths and false lessons abroad: Biden’s Moscow gaffe

In Bay of Pigs, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on March 14, 2011 at 7:57 am

Biden shows the way (White House photo)

Vice President Joe Biden embraced in Moscow last week one of American journalism’s most tenacious myths — the notion that reporting by the Washington Post “brought down” Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency in the Watergate scandal.

Unwittingly or otherwise, Biden offered up the Watergate myth as a telling example of the values and virtues of a free press. The vice president said in remarks at Moscow State University:

“Journalists must be able to publish without fear of retribution. In my country it was a newspaper, not the FBI, or the Justice Department, it was a newspaper, the Washington Post that brought down a President for illegal actions.”

As I’ve noted, not even the Post endorses that superficial and misleading reading of Watergate history. (Ben Bradlee, the newspaper’s executive editor during Watergate, has said for example: “[I]t must be remembered that Nixon got Nixon. The Post didn’t get Nixon.”)

The significance of Biden’s mischaracterization of Watergate goes beyond being merely curious; it’s more than just another example of the gaffe-prone vice president slipping up again.

His remarks demonstrated anew that media myths are not just intriguing curiosities of history. They showed how false lessons can worm their way into diplomacy and policymaking.

Biden’s speech represented pointed criticism of — and recommendations for — Russia and its legal and political systems.  Biden offered a laundry list of democratic reforms that autocratic Russia ought to undertake, stating that courts “must be empowered to uphold the rule of law and protect those playing by the rules.

“Non-governmental watchdogs should be applauded as patriots, not traitors. …

“Journalists,” he added, “must be able to publish without fear of retribution.” To buttress his point about a robust free press, he invoked the claim that “the Washington Post … brought down a President for illegal actions.”

Biden offered that anecdote as an example of the benefits of press freedom, which he called “the greatest guarantee of freedom there is….”

Invoking the myth that the Post “brought down” Nixon is to offer an international audience a false lesson about the power of the news media. Invoking the myth is to suggest, wrongly, that that news media can, when circumstances are right, force a sitting president from office.

As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, rolling up a scandal of the sweep and dimension of Watergate “required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.”

Even then, I write, “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 Watergate’s signal crime — the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972.

Considered against the tableau of subpoena-wielding investigators and special prosecutors, the Watergate reporting of the Post recedes in significance.

As Michael Getler, the newspaper’s ombudsman wrote in 2005: “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 also note in Getting It Wrong that “media-driven myths are neither trivial nor innocuous. They can and do have adverse consequences.”

They tend to offer simplistic and misleading interpretations of important historical events, and they “can blur lines of responsibility and deflect blame away from makers and sponsors of flawed public policy,” I write, citing as a case in point the New York Times-Bay of Pigs suppression myth.

Had the New York Times had reported all it knew 50 years ago about the run-up to the pending Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the administration of President John F. Kennedy likely would have scuttled the operation–thus sparing the country a stunning foreign policy reversal.

Or so the media myth has it.

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, that interpretation is not only misleading but it diverts responsibility away from Kennedy and his flawed decision to go ahead with the invasion.

The Times, after all, published a number detailed, front-page reports about the anticipated invasion in the days before the ill-fated assault. And there is no evidence that the newspaper censored itself under White House pressure in the run-up to the Bay of Pigs invasion.

And in the final analysis, I note, ” it was Kennedy, not American journalists, who gave the go-ahead in April 1961, sending a brigade of Cuban exiles to a disastrous rendezvous in the swamps of southwestern Cuba.”

The cause of independent-minded journalism in Russia would have been better served had Biden skipped the myth and urged the Kremlin to pursue serious investigations into unresolved cases of journalists who’ve been killed because of their work.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists says 19 journalists have been killed in Russia since 2000.

The country, CPJ says, has a “record of rampant impunity in resolving the killings of journalists.”

WJC

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Mythmaking in Moscow: Biden says WaPo brought down Nixon

In Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on March 12, 2011 at 7:23 am

Gaffe-prone Joe Biden offered Russians this week a mythical and distorted version of American history,  declaring at Moscow State University that the Washington Post “brought down” Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency in the Watergate scandal.

It’s an interpretation of Watergate that few serious historians embrace.

Gaffe-prone

And yet, according to the transcript of the vice president’s remarks posted online by the White House, Biden told his audience:

“In my country it was a newspaper, not the FBI, or the Justice Department, it was a newspaper, the Washington Post that brought down a President for illegal actions.”

Not even the Washington Post buys into that myth-encrusted version of history. Principals at the Post have from time to time over the years sought to distance the newspaper from such a misleading assessment.

For example, Katharine Graham, the newspaper’s doughty publisher during and after the Watergate scandal, said in 1997, at a program marking the 25th anniversary of the 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.”

Ben Bradlee,who was executive editor at the Post during Watergate, said on the “Meet the Press” interview show in 1997:

“[I]t must be remembered that Nixon got Nixon. The Post didn’t get Nixon.”

More recently, Michael Getler, then the newspaper’s ombudsman, wrote in 2005:

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

Their comments are not the representations of false modesty: They speak to a more accurate reading of the history of Watergate than Biden offered his audience in Moscow.

Watergate-related reporting in the Post — even though it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 — was scarcely enough to turn from office a sitting president.

As I write in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, rolling up a scandal of the dimension and magnitude of Watergate “required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.”

And even then, I write, “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 Watergate’s signal crime — the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972.

Biden’s remarks reflect an endorsement of I call the “heroic-journalist” myth of Watergate — the simplified and misleading interpretation that the reporting of  Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered evidence that forced Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

But not even Woodward endorses that interpretation. He said in 2004 in an interview with American Journalism Review:

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

But as I note in Getting It Wrong, the heroic-journalist meme has nonetheless “become the most familiar storyline of Watergate: ready short-hand for understanding Watergate and its denouement, a proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity.

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

But being deeply ingrained and popular doesn’t mean it’s accurate. Far from it.

I note in Getting It Wrong that “to explain Watergate through the lens of the heroic-journalist is to abridge and misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth.

“The heroic-journalist interpretation minimizes the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office.” And they included the very forces Biden dismissed in his remarks in Moscow –the FBI and the Justice Department.

The transcript of Biden’s speech, delivered Thursday, also shows that he flubbed the characterization of the news media, which sometimes are collectively referred to as the “Fourth Estate.”

According to Biden, they’re the “Third Estate.”

WJC

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Fact-checking Watergate advice that ‘worked’

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Washington Post, Watergate myth on March 11, 2011 at 8:32 am

In an online commentary posted yesterday, media critic Eric Alterman treated as factual the most famous invented line of the Watergate scandal, “Follow the money.”

As I’ve noted at Media Myth Alert, “follow the money” was advice written into the screenplay of All the President’s Men, the 1976 cinematic version of the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about their Watergate reporting for the Washington Post.

Felt: Didn't say it

The line was spoken by the actor Hal Holbrook, who in the movie played Woodward’s secretive high-level source, “Deep Throat” (who in real life turned out to be W. Mark Felt, formerly the second-ranking official at the FBI).

“Follow the money” doesn’t appear in All the President’s Men, the book.

It appears in no Post article or editorial published during the Watergate period.

And in his periodic meetings with Woodward (he never spoke with Bernstein during Watergate), “Deep Throat”/Felt never uttered the line.

Alterman, the author of  What Liberal Media? and other books, ruminated in his commentary about what he called the willingness of people in politics and the media “to debase themselves for cash.”

His essay appeared beneath the headline, “Think Again: ‘Follow the Money’,” and opened with an allusion to “follow the money,” declaring:

“Deep Throat’s advice worked for Woodward and Bernstein, and it remains useful today.”

Maybe it is “useful” still.

But it is a made-up line.

Screenwriter William Goldman has taken credit for writing “follow the  money” into the script of All the President’s Men, which came out in April 1976 — 20 months after Watergate reached a denouement with the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Since then, millions of people have repeated the evocative and pithy line, oblivious to its derivation and unaware of its falsity.

As I point out in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, “Turns of phrase that sound too neat and tidy often are too perfect to be true.”

So it is with “follow the money”: Too good to be true.

In that respect, it’s akin to William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain. That famous line is almost certainly apocryphal, as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, which addresses and debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths.

But why bother calling attention to “follow the money”? After all, the movie into which the line was written is nearly 35 years old.

It matters because historical accuracy matters.

As I’ve noted, “follow the money” suggests that rolling up Watergate was a case of identifying and pursuing a money trail. There was, though, much more to the scandal than that.

Nixon lost the presidency not because of illegal campaign contributions but because he obstructed justice in the investigation of the scandal’s signal crime, the break-in in June 1972 at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

All the President’s Men the movie doesn’t reach that level of complexity.

Calling attention to “follow the money” also matters because of the power and influence invested in the cinema.

I note in Getting It Wrong that high-quality cinematic treatments can be “powerful agents of media myth-making, and can enhance a myth’s durability.”

Richard Bernstein, in an essay published in 1989 in the New York Times, offered a thoughtful discussion about cinema’s capacity to shape perceptions about historical events. Although Bernstein didn’t mention All the President’s Men, his essay is germane nonetheless.

He noted that “even small details have value as history.

“To change them is the rough cinematic equivalent of a newspaper’s inventing quotations on the grounds that, even if nobody actually made the quoted statement, it represents what people were thinking or feeling at the time.”

Indeed.

Bernstein’s essay quoted Richard Slotkin, a Wesleyan University English and American studies professor, as saying:

”Even when you know that something didn’t happen, movie photography gives you the illusion that it did.”

And that helps explain the wide and enduring appeal of “follow the money”: The made-up line was delivered by Holbrook with such quiet assurance and dramatic effect that it offered the illusion of having been advice essential to investigating Watergate.

That is, to being advice that “worked.”

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post

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Pumping up Watergate’s heroic-journalist myth

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on March 10, 2011 at 8:42 am

Bob Woodward of Watergate fame has been on the lecture circuit of late and his talks have stirred reference to the myth that his reporting for the Washington Post brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency in 1974.

'Nixon got Nixon'

It’s not that Woodward has been making such mythical claims. Rather, they pop up in fawning news reports about his talks.

For notable example, consider the article posted yesterday at the online site of the Indianapolis Star. The article, a preview of Woodward’s talk in that city Friday, declared glowingly:

“For 40 years, Bob Woodward has pried open some of the toughest secrets in government, from the Watergate scandal to the secret war in Pakistan.

“His reporting has exposed corruption, helped to send people to jail and pressured a president to resign.”

The writeup continued much in that frothy vein, declaring:

“As a young reporter at The Post, Woodward teamed up with Carl Bernstein to dig into a ‘third-rate burglary’ of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex. Over many months, through hundreds of stories, the two exposed political dirty tricks and abuse of power in the Nixon White House that eventually forced Nixon from office.”

Let’s address and untangle the myths invoked here.

For starters, the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein did not pressure or force Nixon to resign.

While their reporting won a Pulitzer Prize for the Post in 1973, it did not break open the Watergate scandal. It did not uncover the evidence that led or contributed to Nixon’s resignation.

To argue otherwise it did is to indulge in the beguiling “heroic-journalist myth,”  which, as I write in my latest book,  Getting It Wrong, has become “the most familiar storyline of Watergate.”

The heroic-journalist meme, I note, offers “ready short-hand for understanding Watergate and its denouement, a proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity.

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

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

And even then, Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for disclosures about the audiotape recordings he secretly made of his 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 Watergate break-in, I write in Getting It Wrong.

So against the tableau of prosecutors, courts, federal investigations, and bipartisan congressional panels, and the Supreme Court, the contributions of Woodward and Bernstein recede in importance.

Their contributions were modest, I write, “and certainly not decisive” to the outcome of Watergate.

This is not to say their reporting on Watergate was without distinction.

I note in Getting It Wrong that the Post was the first news organization to report a connection between the Watergate burglars and the White House, the first to demonstrate that campaign money was diverted to fund the break-in, the first to tie former Attorney General John Mitchell to the scandal, the first to link top Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman to Watergate.

But those reports were scarcely enough to unseat a president.

Put another way, Woodward and Bernstein did not uncover the evidence vital to understanding and unraveling the scandal.

They did not disclose the White House-led cover-up and payment of hush money to the Watergate burglars. Nor did they reveal the existence of Nixon’s secret White House tapes, which proved decisive to Watergate’s outcome.

No, Woodward and Bernstein and the Post did not force Nixon from office. As Ben Bradlee, the newspaper’s executive editor during the Watergate period, said in 1997:

“[I]t must be remembered that Nixon got Nixon. The Post didn’t get Nixon.”

Or as Woodward put it in an interview with American Journalism Review in 2004:

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

Now there’s an emphatic line that Woodward might consider working into his speeches.

WJC

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57 years on: Was it really TV’s ‘finest half hour’?

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth on March 9, 2011 at 12:07 am

Murrow

Today’s the 57th anniversary of what has been called the “finest half hour” in television history — when Edward R. Murrow took to the small screen to confront Joseph R. McCarthy and the senator’s red-baiting ways.

Murrow’s on-air analysis of McCarthy and his tactics was so powerful, so revealing, that it marked an abrupt end to the senator’s witch-hunt for communists in government.

Or so the media myth has it.

The occasion was Murrow’s 30-minute See It Now program that aired on CBS on March 9, 1954.

As I write in my mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, the program supposedly affirmed the potential power of television and confirmed the courage of Murrow.

I also write:

“The never-ending accolades notwithstanding, the evidence is overwhelming that Murrow’s famous program on McCarthy had no such decisive effect, that Murrow in fact was very late in confronting McCarthy, that he did so only after other journalists had challenged the senator and his tactics for months, even years.”

Indeed, the legendary status accorded the Murrow program has effectively “obscured and diminished the contributions of journalists who took on McCarthy years earlier, at a time when doing so was quite risky,” I point out in Getting It Wrong.

These journalists deserve more credit than Murrow for courage in confronting the McCarthy menace when it was most virulent.

One of them was James A. Wechsler, editor of the New York Post, which in 1951 published a bare-knuckle, 17-part series about McCarthy.

The closing installment characterized McCarthy as “a drunk at a party who was funny half an hour ago but now won’t go home. McCarthy is camped in America’s front room trying to impress everybody by singing all the dirty songs and using all the four-letter words he knows. The jokes are pointless, the songs unfunny, the profanity a bore.”

The series appeared in the Post 2½ years before Murrow’s program on McCarthy.

Wechsler was called before McCarthy’s investigative subcommittee and grilled about having been a member before in the Communist Youth League.

Wechsler said his being summoned to the closed-door hearing was “a reprisal against a newspaper and its editor for their opposition to the methods of this committee’s chairman.”

He sparred effectively with McCarthy, telling the senator at one point that the New York Post “is as bitterly opposed to Joe Stalin as it is to Joe McCarthy, and we believe that a free society can combat both.”

But in the end, Wechsler complied, reluctantly, with the subcommittee’s demand for names of people he had known to be communists during his time in the Youth League.

During McCarthy’s communists-in-government campaign, which lasted from 1950 to 1954, the senator had no more relentless or scathing foe in the news media than muckraking columnist Drew Pearson.

He wrote the widely published “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column — and was quick off the dime, taking on McCarthy soon after the senator first raised his reckless claims about communists in high places in the U.S. government and military.

Pearson wrote in February 1950, in one of his first columns about McCarthy’s charges, that “the alleged communists which he claims are sheltered in the State Department just aren’t.”

Pearson noted that he had covered the State Department for years and had been “the career boys’ severest critic.

“However,” he added, “knowing something about State Department personnel, it is my opinion that Senator McCarthy is way off base.”

And he was.

Pearson’s frequent challenges angered McCarthy who in December 1950, physically assaulted the columnist after a dinner at the hush-hush Sulgrave Club on DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C.

McCarthy confronted Pearson in the Sulgrave’s coat check room and either slapped, kneed, or punched the columnist. Accounts vary.

Richard Nixon, who recently had been sworn in as a U.S. Senator, intervened to break up the encounter. In his memoir RN, Nixon wrote that Pearson “grabbed his coat and ran from the room” and “McCarthy said, ‘You shouldn’t have stopped me, Dick.’”

So by the time Murrow took on McCarthy 57 years ago tonight, Americans really weren’t “waiting for a white knight like Murrow to tell them about the toxic threat the senator posed,” I write in Getting It Wrong, adding:

“By then, McCarthy and his tactics were well-known and he had become a target of withering ridicule — a sign of diminished capacity to inspire dread. On the day the See It Now program aired, former president Harry Truman reacted to reports of an anonymous threat against McCarthy’s life by saying:

“‘We’d have no entertainment at all if they killed him.'”

The notion that Murrow and his television program brought down McCarthy is a delicious story of presumptive media power:  More accurately, it is a tenacious media-driven myth.

WJC

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Bra-burning ‘never happened’?

In Anniversaries, Bra-burning, Debunking, Media myths, Photographs on March 8, 2011 at 8:40 am

Toronto, 32 years ago today (Bettmann/Corbis)

“Bra-burning has long been associated with the feminist movement, but it never happened.”

So asserted an article published the other day in the Sacramento Bee.

It’s a not-infrequent claim, that feminist bra-burning was a media invention, a media myth.

But there were at least a couple of occasions when feminist protesters set fire to bras.

One of the occasions came 32 years ago today, when members of Women Against Violence Against Women demonstrated outside city hall in Toronto. Near the close of the demonstration, a protester named Pat Murphy dropped a white bra into the hungry flames of a burn barrel (see photo).

The demonstration in Toronto on March 8, 1979, coincided with International Women’s Day and was aimed at denouncing a report on rape prepared by the Ontario Provincial Police.

The police report said that of 337 rapes investigated, 140 were “unprovoked.” The report also said “promiscuity” was a factor in many rapes.

The Women Against Violence Against Women group scorned the report as outrageous and “dazzling in its illogic.” Protesters carried signs saying: “Take a Rapist to Lunch — Charcoal Broiled” and “Hookers Who Wink Go to the Clink! Men Who Rape Escape.”

The Globe and Mail newspaper reported that the protesters lighted “a fire in a garbage can, to the obvious annoyance of about a dozen watchful constables, [and] shouted: ‘Burn the rapists, burn the city, burn the OPP,’” acronym for Ontario Provincial Police.

The newspaper’s account did not mention the bra-burning which, one participant recently told me, “wasn’t a focal point” of the protest.

But it did happen.

Another participant recently recalled that “weighing in on the stereotype of ‘feminist bra-burners’ was actually an effective way [for protesters] to say: Women will control our own bodies, thank you!

“The bra burning,” she said, “was a way to entice the media as well as [offer] a critique of the police report.”

A little more than 10 years before the demonstration in Toronto, about 100 women gathered on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, New Jersey, to protest the 1968 Miss America pageant. The demonstration was organized by a small group called New York Radical Women and has been recognized as an early manifestation of the women’s liberation movement.

In Getting It Wrong, my mythbusting book that came out last year, I offer evidence that denials to the contrary, bras were briefly set afire at Atlantic City.

The evidence is from two witness accounts — one of which was published in the Press of Atlantic City on September 8, 1968, the day after the protest.

Boucher (1949 photo)

That account appeared beneath the byline of a veteran reporter named John L. Boucher and carried the headline:

“Bra-burners blitz boardwalk.”

Boucher’s article referred to the burn barrel that demonstrators had dubbed the “Freedom Trash Can” and stated:

“As the bras, girdles, falsies, curlers, and copies of popular women’s magazines burned in the ‘Freedom Trash Can,’ the demonstration reached the pinnacle of ridicule when the participants paraded a small lamb wearing a gold banner worded ‘Miss America.’”

That account was buttressed by recollections of the writer Jon Katz, who in 1968 was a young reporter for the Atlantic City Press. Katz was on the Atlantic City boardwalk the day of the protest, gathering material for a sidebar article about reactions to the demonstration.

Katz’s sidebar didn’t mention the fire in the “Freedom Trash Can.”

But in correspondence with me, Katz stated:

“I quite clearly remember the ‘Freedom Trash Can,’ and also remember some protestors putting their bras into it along with other articles of clothing, and some Pageant brochures, and setting the can on fire.

“I am quite certain of this.”

WJC

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Enticing the media: More on bra-burning in Toronto, 1979

In Bra-burning, Debunking, Media myths, Photographs on March 4, 2011 at 7:00 am

Toronto, 1979 (Bettman/Corbis)

Another participant at the 1979 bra-burning protest in Toronto has offered recollections of the event, at which the group Women Against Violence Against Women protested a controversial police report about the causes of rape.

The participant, Amy Gottlieb, said in an email forwarded to me that the photograph (left) “definitely is not doctored.”

(I had had my suspicions given that it looked almost too good to be true — which can be a marker of an unethically edited photograph and a media-driven myth.)

Gottlieb referred to Pat Murphy, who is shown in the photograph dangling the bra above the hungry flames, and wrote:

“Pat was threatening to burn a bra because the movement was media savvy and felt that weighing in on the stereotype of ‘feminist bra-burners’ was actually an effective way to say: Women will control our own bodies, thank you!

“The bra burning was a way to entice the media as well as [offer] a critique of the police report.”

I spoke recently with Vicki Trerise, who is shown at the far right in the photograph; she, too, said the demonstrators were media-savvy and “knew that if they burned a bra, someone would take their picture.”

Interestingly, the leading Toronto newspapers at the time didn’t mention the bra-burning in reports about the demonstration, which took place near Toronto city hall on March 8, 1979.

The Globe and Mail, in a fairly detailed account published the following day, characterized the demonstration as “boisterous” and reported:

“The women carried signs saying: ‘Take a Rapist to Lunch — Charcoal Broiled’ and ‘Hookers Who Wink Go to the Clink! Men Who Rape Escape.’

“The women, after lighting a fire in a garbage can, to the obvious annoyance of about a dozen watchful constables, shouted: ‘Burn the rapists, burn the city, burn the OPP,” acronym for the Ontario Provincial Police, which had issued the disputed report about rape.

The Globe and Mail also reported: “The women charged that the OPP report was nothing less than state approval of rape and that no serious study of rape had even been done by the Government.

“The women then sang a surprisingly obscene song describing male domination of women and marched off, chanting anti-male slogans ….”

Before the demonstrators moved on, the Globe and Mail reported, a “few chuckles from male onlookers provoked a slight shoving match, including one reporter by a large lady in lavender brandishing a cat-o-nine tails.”

The issue of the Toronto Star of March 9, 1979, carried a brief report about the Women Against Violence Against Women demonstration, noting the protesters’ anger at the police report, which had identified hitchhiking, alcohol consumption, and drug use as causes of many rapes.

“The women lit sparklers and set a garbage can on fire as they booed the report’s findings,” reported the Star, which did not mention the bra-burning.

Lighted sparklers held aloft are clearly visible in the bra-burning photograph. Rights to the photograph are held by the Bettmann/Corbis archive, which says it does not know the identity of the photographer.

It is sometimes claimed said that no bras were ever burned at a feminist protest in the 1960s or 1970s. The photograph of the demonstration in Toronto proves otherwise.

Moreover, I offer evidence in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, that bras were burned, briefly, at the famous women’s liberation protest against the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

“This evidence,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “cannot be taken lightly, dismissed or ignored,” and suggests “that the myth of mass or demonstrative bra-burning needs to be modified.”

The bra-burning in Toronto in 1979 further calls for revision of the notion that feminist bra-burning was a media myth.

WJC

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‘Those bra-burning times’: And just when were they?

In Bra-burning, Debunking, Media myths on March 1, 2011 at 8:44 am

Atlantic City, 1968

“Bra-burning” is a euphonic term that emerged in the late 1960s to dismiss the women’s liberation movement as trivial, shallow, and even a bit primitive.

The epithet is still used to insult feminist advocacy.

“Bra-burning” also lives on as a cliché — “convenient shorthand,” as I write in my mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, “for describing the upheaval” of the 1960s and 1970s.

The term sometimes is invoked quite casually, as in “the era of bra-burning,” the “hysteria of bra-burning,” and “the bra-burning days of the turbulent 1960s.”

A commentary the other day in the Detroit Free Press offered up “those bra-burning times” in characterizing the 1970s.

The commentary’s author, the Free Press business and autos editor, recalled that in the 1970s, her mother had given her a book titled Women Who Dared to be Different.

“It certainly was a book for those bra-burning times,” she wrote, “and it told the stories of women who pioneered in professions once reserved for men.”

Of particular interest to Media Myth Alert is the casual reference to “those bra-burning times.”

“Bra-burning” may be an enduring turn of phrase. But the act of “bra-burning” neither defined nor figured prominently in feminist protests of the 1970s. Or of the 1960s.

There was hardly any bra-burning back in the day. Or at any time since.

I offer in Getting It Wrong evidence that bras were set afire, briefly, at the famous women’s liberation protest in 1968 against the Miss America pageant at Atlantic City, New Jersey.

The evidence comes from two witness accounts — one of them published in the local newspaper, the Press of Atlantic City, on September 8, 1968, the day after the protest.

That account appeared beneath the byline of a veteran reporter named John L. Boucher and carried the headline:

“Bra-burners blitz boardwalk.”

Boucher’s article referred to the burn barrel that demonstrators had dubbed the “Freedom Trash Can” and stated:

“As the bras, girdles, falsies, curlers, and copies of popular women’s magazines burned in the ‘Freedom Trash Can,’ the demonstration reached the pinnacle of ridicule when the participants paraded a small lamb wearing a gold banner worded ‘Miss America.’”

Boucher’s account, as I note in Getting It Wrong, “did not elaborate about the fire and the articles burning in the Freedom Trash Can, nor did it suggest the fire was all that important. Rather, the article conveyed a sense of astonishment that an event such as the women’s liberation protest could take place near the venue of the pageant.”

That account was buttressed by the recollections of Jon Katz, a prolific writer who in 1968 was a young reporter for the Atlantic City Press.

He was on the boardwalk the day of the protest, gathering material for a sidebar article about reactions to the demonstration.

Katz’s article did not mention the burning bras. But in correspondence with me, Katz has stated:

“I quite clearly remember the ‘Freedom Trash Can,’ and also remember some protestors putting their bras into it along with other articles of clothing, and some Pageant brochures, and setting the can on fire. I am quite certain of this.”

He added: “I recall and remember noting at the time that the fire was small, and quickly was extinguished, and didn’t pose a credible threat to the Boardwalk. I noted this as a reporter in case a fire did erupt ….”

Boucher’s long-overlooked article and Katz’s more recent recollections represent strong evidence that “bras and other items were set afire, if briefly, at the 1968 Miss America protest in Atlantic City,” I write in Getting It Wrong. “This evidence cannot be taken lightly, dismissed or ignored.

“But it must be said as well,” I add, “that the witness accounts of Boucher and Katz lend no support to the far more vivid and popular imagery that many bras went up in flames in flamboyant protest that September day.”

Bra-burning did figure, flamboyantly, at a women’s protest in Toronto in March 1979.

But as I discussed in a recent post at Media Myth Alert, bra-burning wasn’t that demonstration’s focal point. Setting fire to a bra was a way for the media-savvy protesters to call attention to their grievances — specifically, a controversial police report about rape.

Otherwise, the evidence is scant at best of feminist protesters in the 1960s and 1970s setting fire to bras and tossing the flaming undergarments into spectacular bonfires.

WJC

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‘Furnish the war’ finds a place in sports

In 1897, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on February 28, 2011 at 8:13 am

Hearst: Didn't say it

William Randolph Hearst’s famous vow to “furnish the war” with Spain is one of American journalism’s most enduring myths. It’s a stunningly hardy though dubious tale that has been deployed in discussing journalistic sins and shortcomings of all sorts.

As I write in my myth-debunking book Getting It Wrong, the Hearstian vow “has been invoked to illustrate the media’s willingness to compromise impartiality, promote political agendas, and indulge in sensationalism.

“It has been used, more broadly, to suggest the media’s capacity to inject malign influence into international affairs.”

It even has application in news about collegiate sports.

An online sports-news site, Bleacher Report, turned to “furnish the war” in a commentary posted yesterday about the whiff of scandal around Auburn University’s championship football program.

Hearst’s reputed vow was a way to set up the commentary, which defended the program from what it called “the incessant beating of the investigation drum by Auburn detractors” suspicious of player-recruitment violations.

Of interest to Media Myth Alert is the commentary’s total buy-in of the Hearst anecdote, which, as evidence offered in Getting It Wrong clearly shows, is counterfeit, a discredited media myth.

The Bleacher Report commentary declared:

“When photographer Frederic Remington was dispatched to Cuba in the late 1800s to document a war and found none, he sent a message to publisher William Randolph Hearst: ‘There is no war.’

“Hearst allegedly responded: ‘Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.’

“In the ensuing months Hearst’s newspaper fanned the flames with sensationalized front page articles that were of dubious accuracy and in many cases patently false. His articles stirred passions among a readership that neither knew nor cared if the reports were accurate. His relentless attacks eventually helped push U.S. administration into declaring war on Spain.  Hearst got his war.

“Since October, the Auburn football program has endured a similar smear campaign. …”

Reasons for doubting that Hearst ever made such a vow are many, and include the anecdote’s breathtaking illogic.

War was the reason Hearst, owner of the flamboyant New York Journal, sent Remington (an artist, not a “photographer”) to Cuba in the first place. That war was the Cuban rebellion against Spain’s colonial rule, which began in February 1895.

Remington

Remington was in Cuba briefly in January 1897.

By that time, I note in Getting It Wrong, newspaper readers “would have been well aware that Cuba was a theater of a nasty war. By then, the Cuban rebellion had reached island-wide proportion and not a single province had been pacified by Spain’s armed forces.”

It would have made no sense for Hearst to vow to “furnish the war.”

In addition, Hearst denied having made such a statement. Remington, apparently, never discussed it. And the telegrams bearing the content of the purported Remington-Hearst exchange have never surfaced.

Moreover, as I point out in Getting It Wrong, “there was no chance” that the telegrams “would have flowed freely between Remington in Havana and Hearst in New York.

“Spanish control of the cable traffic in Havana was too vigilant and severe to have allowed such an exchange to have gone unnoticed and unremarked upon,” I write, adding:

“A vow such as Hearst’s to ‘furnish the war‘ surely would have been intercepted and publicized by Spanish authorities as a clear-cut example of Yankee meddling in Cuba.”

Like many media myths, the tale of the Hearstian vow is accessible, pithy, and easily recalled. It supposedly illuminates larger lessons about the news media — in this case, the media’s malign potential to bring about a war the country otherwise wouldn’t have fought.

Which is nonsense, and historically inaccurate.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 was hardly a matter of Hearst’s having “got his war.” Rather, the conflict was the consequence of an intractable, three-sided standoff.

Cuba’s rebels would settle for nothing short of political independence. Spain refused to grant self-rule to the most important remnant of its once-sprawling American empire. And the United States, for economic and humanitarian reasons, could no longer tolerate an inconclusive war just 90 miles from its shores.

Simply put, Hearst and newspaper content were non-factors in the decision to go to war.

WJC

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