W. Joseph Campbell

Posts Tagged ‘Getting It Wrong’

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Launching ‘Getting It Wrong’ at Newseum

In Bay of Pigs, Bra-burning, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Furnish the war, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, War of the Worlds, Washington Post, Watergate myth on June 14, 2010 at 6:28 am

My new book, Getting It Wrong, will be launched Saturday, June 19, at an “Inside Media” program at the Newseum, the $450 million museum of news in downtown Washington, D.C.

The program will begin at 2:30 p.m. in the Knight TV Studio on the third level and will feature a discussion with the Newseum’s John Maynard, followed by audience Q-and-A.

I’ll be signing copies of Getting It Wrong afterward.

The book addresses, and debunks, 10 prominent media-driven myths–stories about and/or by the news media that are widely believed and often retold but which, on close inspection, proved to be apocryphal or wildly exaggerated.

Here is a brief description about each of the 10 myths:

  1. Remington-Hearst: William Randolph Hearst’s famous vow, “you furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war,” 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.

    Murrow in 1954

  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 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 of extreme, Mad Max-like violence.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, the myths debunked “are among American journalism’s best-known stories. Most of them are savory tales. And at least some of them seem almost too good to be false.”

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

WJC

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Newspapers ‘not dead yet’: But a slow death, still

In New York Times, Newspapers on June 12, 2010 at 10:03 am

The venerable and often-contrarian Economist magazine this week offers an intriguing if superficial defense of the newspaper, declaring in an editorial that they’re “not dead yet.”

Indeed, the Economist asks with a hint of snark, “Whatever happened to the death of newspapers? A year ago the end seemed near.”

It adds:

“The recession threatened to remove the advertising and readers that had not already fled to the internet. Newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle were chronicling their own doom. America’s Federal Trade Commission launched a round of talks about how to save newspapers. Should they become charitable corporations? Should the state subsidise them? It will hold another meeting on June 15th. But the discussions now seem out of date.”

The Economist notes that U.S. newspapers, “which inhabit the most troubled corner of the global industry, have not only survived but often returned to profit.”

But the data the Economist invokes point to another interpretation: Newspapers are still dying, albeit a slower death.

The pressures on American newspapers have scarcely abated. And I’m hardly ready to retreat from my view that their predicament “is as bleak as it is unprecedented.”

Despite the snark–“whatever happened to the death of newspapers?”–they are in peril still.

The Economist cites recent estimates of the American Society of News Editors that 13,500 newsroom jobs have been eliminated since 2007. (The Economist didn’t mention it, but ASNE also says that American newsrooms since 2001 have lost more than 25 per cent of their fulltime staff.)

“Car and film reviewers have gone,” the Economist notes. “So have science and general business reporters. Foreign bureaus have been savagely pruned. Newspapers are less complete as a result.”

Indeed, many U.S. dailies are mere husks of their former fat selves. They offer fewer pages, publish fewer articles, have fewer reporters–all of which often adds up to an uninteresting product little able to compete in the digital century.

To that point, the Economist says:

“It is grim to forecast still more writers losing their jobs. But whether newspapers are thrown onto doorsteps or distributed digitally, they need to deliver something that is distinctive.”

Readers, it says, invoking a familiar bromide, “will pay for news if they think it has value. Newspapers need to focus relentlessly on that.”

But there are great numbers of Americans who find the news routinely irrelevant.

Nearly 20 percent of adult Americans go without news during a typical day, according to a Pew Research Center’s media-use survey in 2008. (Ten years earlier, the percentage of American adults who went newsless was 14 percent.)

Among adults 18-to-24-years-old these days, 34 percent say they go newsless, according to Pew Research–data I cite in my new book, Getting It Wrong.

This declining constituency for news offers no encouragement for newspapers.

And newspapers have been complicit in their decline. Their credibility—the notion that they play it straight in reporting the news—is deeply doubted among Americans.

Slightly more than 20 percent of adult Americans believe all or most of what they read in their local newspaper, Pew data say. For the  New York Times, the believability quotient is 18 percent. It’s 16 percent for USA Today.

On top of all that, the worst recession in years has made it nearly impossible for prominent newspaper companies, such as the New York Times and the Chicago-based Tribune Co., to dig out from staggering loads of debt.

Another factor contributing to the long decline of newspapers is the fractured business model in which newspapers conveniently and effectively brought together buyers and sellers through advertising. For years, advertising has been deserting the press for the Internet, where bringing together buyers and sellers is cheaper and far more timely and efficient.

The Internet also has unbundled media content, meaning there’s no need for anyone to buy a newspaper just for sports news. Or international news. It’s all online, in discrete packages and in unmatched variety. News à la carte is irresistible in its appeal–and can’t be matched by printed newspapers.

None of these powerful trends has been reversed.

Alas, discussions about the death of newspapers scarcely are “out of date.”

WJC

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Helen Thomas and Iraq War: What’s she talking about?

In Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Newspapers on June 11, 2010 at 8:12 am

Helen Thomas, the cranky, now-disgraced columnist for Hearst newspapers who resigned under fire this week, claims in an interview that White House press corps bears some responsibility for the Iraq War.

Thomas, who quit after saying Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go to Germany and Poland, asserted in the interview posted yesterday by Vice magazine:

“Everyone rolled over and played dead at a time when they should have been really penetrating. … But in this case they bought all the propaganda. Or, whether they bought it or not, they took it and spouted it.”

Thomas, who is almost 90,  didn’t elaborate on her “rolled over and played dead” comment, which has the whiff of a gratuitous shot at her erstwhile colleagues.

She’s made similar comments before, claiming for example that the American news media were “comatose” in the run-up to the war. But seldom has she offered much in the way of specific, supporting detail. As in who “rolled over” when?

While her claims have hardened into something approaching conventional wisdom about pre-war coverage, Thomas’ views have been challenged, notably by David Gregory of NBC, who has asserted:

“I think the questions were asked [in the run-up to the war].  I think we pushed. I think we prodded. I think we challenged the president. I think not only those of us the White House press corps did that, but others in the rest of the landscape of the media did that.

“If there wasn’t a debate in this country,” Gregory has said, “then maybe the American people should think about, why not?  Where was Congress? Where was the House? Where was the Senate? Where was public opinion about the war?”

As to his last question, where was public opinion? It heavily favored the war in Iraq. And as I note in a chapter in my new book, Getting It Wrong, a Washington Post-ABC News poll, taken in the early days of the war found that 69 percent of Americans thought the invasion of Iraq was justified even if weapons of mass destruction were not found.

Reason magazine also has challenged the argument that the U.S. news media could have been more searching in the run-up to the war, asserting in a well-argued piece in 2007:

“The ‘we should have done more to head off this war’ argument assumes too much, exaggerates the media’s power to influence, removes the onus from politicians and infantilizes news consumers.”

Those are all good points. And blaming the news media does tend to deflect blame from Congress, which in 2002 authorized military force against Iraq.

What’s more, the content leading U.S. daily newspapers in the weeks before the Iraq War began included a sustained amount of searching coverage. A good deal of the coverage in February and March 2003 focused on diplomatic démarche at the United Nations, where the U.S. pro-war policy came under frequent attack by the French, Germans, Russians, and others.

Those challenges to U.S. policy were given prominence in U.S. newspapers, as were the massive anti-war demonstrations in Europe and in some American cities.

Thomas has never impressed me as a particularly incisive or even careful reporter. She notably indulged in media myth in her 2006 book, Watchdogs of Democracy?: The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public.

The book repeated the hoary anecdote about Hearst’s vowing to “furnish the war” with Spain in the late 19th century–one of the media-driven myths that I debunk in Getting It Wrong.

Thomas’ use of the “furnish the war” anecdote helped Watchdogs of Democracy? make the tail-end of my lineup of the dozen overrated books about journalism history–a roster I compiled in 2009 for the quarterly journal American Journalism.

Topping my “overrated” list was David Halberstam‘s The Powers That Be, followed by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward‘s All the President’s Men and Hadley Cantril’s The Invasion From Mars.

About Thomas’ Watchdogs of Democracy?, I wrote:

“The title of Thomas’ book promises far more than its disjointed and repetitive content delivers,” adding, “don’t turn to Watchdogs of Democracy? for searching analysis.”

WJC

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War, the ‘apex of yellow journalism’? Not so

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Spanish-American War on June 10, 2010 at 11:52 am

I’ve noted from time to time how some media-driven myths–those false, dubious, improbable stories about the news media that masquerade as factual–travel quite well, crossing linguistic barriers with frequency and ease.

Hearst's New York Evening Journal, 1898

One of the more hearty, adaptable, and internationally appealing media myths is that of American “yellow journalism,” and how its sensational and exaggerated content supposedly brought about the Spanish-American War in 1898.

That myth was debunked in my 2001 study, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies. But it is probably too deliciously appealing, too neat and tidy, ever to die away.

Indeed, it popped up in an international way yesterday, in a commentary in the English-language edition of China’s Global Times. The commentary appeared beneath the headline, “Yellow journalism creeping into Chinese media,” and declared:

“The term yellow journalism was coined during … late 19th century when media barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer’s respective newspapers, the New York Journal and the New York World, were in cutthroat competition. …

“The apex of US yellow journalism came when the two newspapers’ fear mongering and sensationalism led to the Spanish-American War in 1898.”

As I wrote in Yellow Journalism, the notion that the yellow press of Hearst and Pulitzer brought on the war with Spain over Cuba rests on a narrow, decidedly media-centric interpretation of the conflict’s causes.

That interpretation ignores, I noted, the “more relevant and immediate factors that give rise to armed conflict.

“In the case of the Spanish-American War,” I wrote in Yellow Journalism, “the policy objectives between the United States and Spain ultimately proved irreconcilable. Months of intricate diplomatic efforts ultimately failed to resolve what had become an intolerable state of affairs in Cuba, dramatized by the destruction of the [U.S. warship] Maine in a harbor under Spanish control and supervision.

“To indict the yellow press for causing the Spanish-American War is to misread the evidence and to ignore the intricacies of the diplomatic quandary that culminated in the spring of 1898 in an impasse that led to war.”

Failed diplomacy gave rise to the Spanish-American War, not the content of the yellow press of Hearst and Pulitzer.

Even so, it is intriguing how wartime can and does give rise to media-driven myths.

Of the 10 prominent myths addressed and debunked in my new book, Getting It Wrong, five of them (including the case of Jessica Lynch in the Iraq War) are related to conflict and upheaval.

I consider the linkage of war and media myth in Getting It Wrong, writing:

“That war can be a breeding ground for myth is scarcely surprising. The stakes in war are quite high, and the shock of combat is alien and unfamiliar to most people. Given their limited first-hand experience with war, media audiences usually find themselves in no position to challenge reports from the battlefield.

“The confusion and intensity inherent in warfare can lead journalists to place fragmented information that emerges from conflict into recognizable if sometimes misleading frames.

“In the process, distortion can arise and media myths can flourish.”

But unfamiliarity with warfare only partly explains the tenacity and international appeal of the myth that yellow journalism fomented the Spanish-American War.

Another, perhaps more important factor is that the anecdote outlines the purported extremes–the malevolent extremes–of media influence. That is, the news media can be so powerful that they can lead the country into war, if we’re not mindful.

Which is absurd.

WJC

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Puncturing the Times-suppression myth

In Bay of Pigs, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times on June 9, 2010 at 4:42 pm

In early April 1961, the New York Times supposedly bowed to pressure from the White House of President John F. Kennedy and “spiked,” or suppressed, its detailed report about the pending Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

The Times’ purported self-censorship took place a little more than a week before the invasion, which failed utterly in its objective of toppling the Cuban revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro.

The invasion force of CIA-trained Cuban exiles gave up in less than three days and the Kennedy presidency, as well as U.S. standing in the Caribbean and the world, suffered a humiliating setback.

Had the Times not censored itself, had the Times gone ahead and reported all that it knew, the ill-fated invasion may well have been scuttled and a national embarrassment avoided.

Or so the story goes.

Before the invasion: Front page, NYTimes

The tale of the Times’ purported self-censorship has been recounted in many books, journals, newspapers, and other periodicals over the years. The episode offers supposedly timeless lessons about the perils of self-censorship, about the risks of yielding to pressure to withhold sensitive information on national security grounds.

The anecdote about the Times’ self-censorship is potent, compelling, delicious and timeless.

But as I describe in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong, it is also a media-driven myth.

The Times did not suppress its reports about the pending invasion of Cuba. It did not censor itself.  As is discussed in Getting It Wrong, the Times’ reports about preparations for the invasion were fairly detailed, not to mention prominently displayed on the front page in the days before the Bay of Pigs invasion was launched.

Given the widely held notion that the Times censored itself, it was fairly surprising to find in my research just how much reporting there was in advance of the invasion. The run-up to the Bay of Pigs was no one-day story.

Not all pre-invasion news reports were accurate or on-target. Much of it was piecemeal.

But there was ample coverage in the Times and other U.S. newspapers so that readers knew something was afoot in the Caribbean, that an assault on Castro was in the works.

The coverage supposedly reached a point where Kennedy told his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, a week before the invasion:

“I can’t believe what I’m reading! Castro doesn’t need agents over here. All he has to do is read our papers. It’s all laid out for him.”

The notion that Kennedy asked or persuaded the Times to suppress, hold back, or dilute any of its reports about the pending Bay of Pigs invasion is utter fancy.

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, there is no evidence that Kennedy or his administration knew in advance about the content of the Times’ reporting about the pending invasion. There is no evidence that Kennedy or anyone in his administration lobbied or persuaded the Times to hold back or spike that story, as is so often said.

So what accounts for what I call the “suppression myth”?

I write in Getting It Wrong that the myth “stems from confusion with a separate episode during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when Kennedy did ask the Times to postpone publication of a report about the Soviets having deployed nuclear-tipped weapons in Cuba. On that occasion, when the prospect of a nuclear exchange seemed to be in the balance, the Times complied.”

As for the significance of debunking the suppression  myth, I write:

“Exposing the myth demonstrates how the Kennedy administration sought to deflect blame for the Bay of Pigs and make a scapegoat of the Times. On separate occasions in 1961 and 1962, Kennedy told the senior executives of the Times that had the newspaper published more about the pending assault on Cuba, the invasion might have been scuttled.

“Such an interpretation of course shifts responsibility away from the authorities who possessed the power to order an invasion of a sovereign state,” I write. “Puncturing the Timessuppression myth, then, allows blame for the Bay of Pigs fiasco to be more properly apportioned.”

WJC

A version of this post first appeared at the University of California Press blog.

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The wobbly components of the ‘Cronkite moment’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths on June 7, 2010 at 5:23 am

It’s often claimed that Walter Cronkite’s analysis in February 1968 that the U.S. military effort in Vietnam was “mired in stalemate” helped swing public opinion against the war.

Not to mention that Cronkite’s penetrating assessment brought President Lyndon Johnson face-to-face with the realization his war policy was a shambles.

And so incisive was Cronkite’s assessment that it supposedly was a factor in Johnson’s decision, announced a month later, not to seek reelection to the presidency.

Those are three components of an especially tenacious and popular media-driven myth, all of which I address in a chapter in my new book, Getting It Wrong.

The wide circulation of what I call the mythical “Cronkite moment” was evident in a commentary aired the other day on Vermont Public Radio, which asserted:

“In 1968, when CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite delivered a downbeat report on American progress in Vietnam, public opinion rapidly soured on the war. President Lyndon Johnson lamented, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.’  Several weeks later, Johnson decided not to run for re-election.”

In fact, as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, public opinion had begun shifting against the war weeks and months before Cronkite’s special report about Vietnam, which aired February 27, 1968.

By October 1967, 47 percent of Americans, a plurality, maintained that U.S. military presence in Vietnam was a mistake, according to Gallup surveys.

Moreover, Cronkite’s “mired in stalemate” assessment was, I write in Getting It Wrong, “neither notable nor extraordinary,” pointing out that Mark Kurlansky in his study of the year 1968 stated that Cronkite’s view was “hardly a radical position” for the time.

Indeed, nearly seven months before the “Cronkite moment,” the New York Times published on its front page as analysis that said victory in Vietnam “is not close at hand. It may be beyond reach.” The analysis was published in August 1967 beneath the headline:

“Vietnam: The Signs of Stalemate.”

As has been noted many times at MediaMythAlert, Johnson did not see the Cronkite program when it aired. The president at the time was in Austin, Texas, at the 51st birthday party of Governor John Connally.

So he could not have had “the abrupt yet resigned reaction that so often has been attributed to him,” I write in the book.

There is, moreover, no evidence that Johnson ever watched the Cronkite program on videotape.

And as I note in Getting It Wrong:

“The power of the ‘Cronkite moment’ resides in the sudden, unexpected, and decisive effect it supposedly had on the president. Such an effect would have been absent, or greatly diminished, had Johnson had seen the program on videotape at some later date.”

As for Johnson’s decision not to seek reelection, which he announced at the end of March 1968: The “Cronkite moment” certainly was a non-factor.

There’s evidence that Johnson never intended to seek reelection, that he had privately decided in 1967 against another campaign.

Also important in Johnson’s decision was Senator Eugene McCarthy’s surprisingly potent bid for the Democratic nomination for president in early 1968.

Under scrutiny, then, the components of the “Cronkite moment” prove to be wobbly: They don’t hold up to inspection. And that’s “not so surprising,” I write in Getting It Wrong, adding:

“Seldom, if ever, do the news media exert truly decisive influences in decisions to go to war or to seek negotiated peace. Such decisions typically are driven by forces and factors well beyond the news media’s ability to shape, alter, or significantly influence.”

So it was with the often-misinterpreted “Cronkite moment” of 1968.

WJC

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On Hearst, yellow journalism, and war

In Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on June 5, 2010 at 10:04 am

The dubious linkage of William Randolph Hearst, late 19th century yellow journalism,  and the Spanish-American War was invoked yesterday in a post at the Breaking Media online site.

The item discussed the latest deal by Hearst Corp., noting the reported acquisition was “not a newspaper, a magazine or even a website, but [iCrossing Inc.,] a company specializing in buying search keywords and performing social media“—and suggested that William Randolph, the company’s founder who died in 1951, would have approved.

Hearst before the war

Inevitably, perhaps, the Breaking Media item offered an historically flabby slice of context, asserting that “the Hearst name will forever be associated with yellow journalism techniques that led to a war and mainstream acceptance of all kinds of crazy pseudoscience.”

I don’t know about the last bit, the “acceptance of all kinds of crazy pseudoscience.”

But the claim about Hearst, yellow journalism, and war is an exaggeration, a media-driven myth.

The reference to “war” is, of course, to the Spanish-American War of 1898, the 114-day conflict in which the United States routed Spanish forces in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The myth is that Hearst and his flamboyant yellow journalism whipped American public opinion to such an extent that war with Spain (over its harsh colonial rule of Cuba) became inevitable.

The myth is addressed, and debunked, in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies. A slice of the myth–that notion that Hearst vowed to “furnish the war” with Spain–is discussed in a chapter my new book, Getting It Wrong.

In Yellow Journalism, I noted that the argument that Hearst fomented the war with Spain over Cuba rests on a decidedly narrow, media-centric interpretation of the conflict’s causes.

That interpretation ignores, I noted, the “more relevant and immediate factors that give rise to armed conflict.

“In the case of the Spanish-American War,” I wrote, “the policy objectives between the United States and Spain ultimately proved irreconcilable. Months of intricate diplomatic efforts ultimately failed to resolve what had become an intolerable state of affairs in Cuba, dramatized by the destruction of the [U.S. warship] Maine in a harbor under Spanish control and supervision.

“To indict the yellow press for causing the Spanish-American War is to misread the evidence and to ignore the intricacies of the diplomatic quandary that culminated in the spring of 1898 in an impasse that led to war.”

Failed diplomacy gave rise to the Spanish-American War, not the content of Hearst’s newspapers in New York and San Francisco.

I also pointed out in Yellow Journalism:

“The notion that the yellow press incited or fomented the Spanish-American War stands, moreover, as testimony to the supposedly powerful, even malevolent effects of the news media—that they can and sometimes do act in dangerous, devious, and manipulative ways.”

And that’s an important reason why the myth about Hearst, yellow journalism, and war has proved so tenacious. It offers a lesson, however misleading, about the extreme hazards of unchecked media power: Unscrupulous media moguls can take us into wars that otherwise we would not fight.

WJC

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‘Commentary’ reviews ‘Getting It Wrong’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Murrow-McCarthy myth, Reviews, Washington Post, Watergate myth on June 4, 2010 at 11:27 am

The June 2010 number of Commentary magazine includes a fine, favorable, and thoughtful review of Getting It Wrong, my new book about media-driven myths.

The reviewer, Andrew Ferguson, who writes the “Press Man” column for Commentary, says of Getting It Wrong:

“It may be the best book about journalism in recent memory; it is certainly the most subversive.”

A wonderful, telling line, that.

He also writes:

“Campbell does what journalists, and most journalism professors, seldom think to do when they exchange the oft-repeated tales: he checks them out. And through a pitiless accretion of detail, he dissolves them one by one.

“As he reveals, Edward R. Murrow did not ‘bring down Joe McCarthy’ with his famous 1954 episode of See It Now; Campbell looked up the poll numbers and found that McCarthy’s favorability ratings were in free fall well before Murrow took to the air.

“No, Cronkite did not turn the public against the Vietnam War with an on-air editorial in February 1968: five months earlier, Gallup had registered that a plurality of Americans, 47 percent, agreed that the war was a mistake.

“And no, Woodward and Bernstein were not responsible for uncovering the entirety of the Watergate scandal; as reporters, they had pretty much run out of scoops by October 1972, when congressional investigators, criminal prosecutors, and other newspapers took over the story and drove it till President Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

“And no, the bestselling author David Halberstam, who promoted each of these stories with unfailing pomposity, was not a reliable chronicler of even the most recent past.”

Ferguson wraps up his review by writing:

“Journalism’s myths about journalism, you’ll notice, are self-aggrandizing. They cast the journalist as hero. No wonder they’re so popular… among journalists. We warm ourselves by such tales, draw compensation and comfort from them, which is why they’re taught in our trade schools as elements of basic training.”

WJC

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‘Getting It Wrong’ goes ‘On Point’

In Cinematic treatments, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Media myths and radio, Spanish-American War, Washington Post, Watergate myth on June 3, 2010 at 8:52 pm

I was interviewed today by Tom Ashbrook, the engaging host of NPR’s On Point program, which is produced by WBUR in Boston.

We discussed Getting It Wrong, my new book about media-driven myths, and it was a fine show. (Audio is available here.)

As Ashbrook promised in his introduction, the conversation ranged over a variety of topics–or what he called “iconic media tales from the Spanish-American War to Hurricane Katrina.”

We were joined by Jack Beatty, the program’s news analyst, and discussed at some length the myth of the so-called “Cronkite Moment” of 1968, in which CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite characterized the war in Vietnam as a stalemate, supposedly prompting President Lyndon Johnson to alter his policy on the conflict.

We also took up myth surrounding the famous anecdote about William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain at the end of the 19th century, the dubious notion that Orson Welles’ 1938 radio dramatization of the War of the Worlds set off nationwide panic and mass hysteria, and what I call the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate, in which Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post supposedly brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

On the latter topic, I mentioned how the cinematic version of All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein’s book about their Watergate reporting, has become the vehicle by which people learn about and remember the scandal.

Watergate was, I noted, “so complex that people these days, many years removed from it, find it hard to keep it all straight. … The high-quality, cinematic treatment of the Watergate scandal, featuring Woodward and Bernstein and the Washington Post in All the President’s Men, does happen to be the way that many people remember the Watergate scandal. …

“The movie’s a great movie,” I added. “But it helped to solidify the notion that the Post, the Washington Post, and Woodward and Bernstein were at the center, were at the heart, of uncovering the scandal.”

On Point featured questions and comments from a few callers–including a guy named Phil in Bowling Green, Kentucky, who said about me:

“I think the professor has got too much time on his hands. ” I chuckled.

He added: “I lived through most of that–the Watergate and Vietnam War.  I think he’s underestimating the persuasive attitude that Walter Cronkite had on this country. … Everybody’s opinion turned on what Walter Cronkite thought.”

But another caller, Gary from Nashville, Tennessee, weighed in, saying he disagreed with Phil from Bowling Green, offered the thought that public opinion about Vietnam turned not on the views of one journalist but on “the unrelenting reporting on the war by the media.”

It was a lively, substantive program that has generated a few dozen or so comments at the On Point online site.

The discussion made me recognize anew how deeply embedded and tenaciously held some media-driven myths really are, and how an hour-long program is hardly enough to encourage people even to think about giving them up. As Jack Shafer noted in his review of Getting It Wrong, “a debunker’s work is never done.”

But perhaps the show’s content will entice some listeners to buy and read the book. Even then, though, I suspect some media myths will prove resistant to thorough debunking.

WJC

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A funny thing about media myths

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on June 2, 2010 at 6:03 pm

Media-driven myths are prominent tales of doubtful authenticity—false, dubious, or improbable stories about the news media that masquerade as factual.

A funny thing about media-driven myths is that some of them live on despite having been pooh-poohed by figures who were central to the story.

The heroic-journalist myth of Watergate offers a telling example of this peculiar feature of some media myths.

The Watergate myth—one of 10 that I debunk in my soon-to-be-published book, Getting It Wrong—maintains that the intrepid investigative reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency in the Watergate scandal.

“That Woodward and Bernstein exposed Nixon’s corruption is a favored theme in textbooks of journalism and mass communication,” I write in Getting It Wrong, noting how the tale has become “deeply ingrained in American journalism as one of the field’s most important and self-reverential stories.”

But leading figures at the Washington Post have sought periodically over the years to dismiss the notion that their newspaper took down a president.

Katharine Graham, the newspaper’s publisher during the Watergate years, insisted the Post did not topple Nixon. “Sometimes people accuse us of bringing down a president, which of course we didn’t do,” Graham said in 1997, at a program marking the scandal’s twenty-fifth anniversary. “The processes that caused [Nixon’s] resignation were constitutional.”

And Woodward has been quoted as saying, “To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.”

As I note in Getting It Wrong, to roll up a scandal of Watergate’s dimension and complexity “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 and authorizing payments of thousands of dollars in hush money.”

Similarly, Walter Cronkite long dismissed claims that his televised report in February 1968 about the Vietnam War had a powerful influence on President Lyndon Johnson.

In an editorial comment at the close of that report, Cronkite said the war effort in Vietnam was “mired in stalemate” and suggested that negotiations eventually might offer a way out for the United States.

Upon hearing Cronkite’s dire assessment, Johnson supposedly snapped off the television set and exclaimed: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Or something to that effect. Versions vary.

The program and Johnson’s despairing response have become the stuff of legend—another media-driven myth.

Interestingly, Cronkite scoffed at the suggestion his report on Vietnam had a great effect on Johnson. For years, he characterized the program in modest terms, writing in his 1997 memoir that the “mired in stalemate” assessment was for Johnson “just one more straw in the increasing burden of Vietnam.”

But in what may have been tacit acknowledgement of the appeal of media-driven myths, Cronkite late in his life came to embrace the view that the program on Vietnam was a significant moment.

For example, he told Esquire magazine in 2006, about three years before his death:

“To be honest, I was rather amazed that my reporting from Vietnam had such an effect on history.”

But as is discussed in Getting It Wrong, Johnson did not see the Cronkite program when it aired. The president at the time was in Austin, Texas, making an appearance at the 51st birthday of a longtime political ally, Governor John Connally.

“Today you are 51, John,” the president said at about the time Cronkite was offering his “mired in stalemate” commentary. “That,” Johnson said, “is the magic number that every man of politics prays for—a simple majority.”

WJC

An earlier version of this post first appeared at the University of California Press blog.