W. Joseph Campbell

Posts Tagged ‘Journalism’

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Those ‘warmongering’ papers of William Randolph Hearst

In 1897, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on May 1, 2012 at 5:35 am

The first major engagement of the Spanish-American War took place 114 years ago today — in the Philippines, where U.S. warships attacked and destroyed a Spanish naval squadron in Manila Bay.

Warmonger?

The battle was a thoroughly unexpected development in a conflict fought over Spain’s harsh rule of Cuba, a conflict often but inaccurately blamed on the yellow press of William Randolph Hearst.

A commentary in the Tennessean newspaper took up that hoary myth the other day and added for good measure the apocryphal tale of Hearst’s having vowed to bring on the war.

The commentary said of Hearst:

“His most infamous manipulation was the warmongering his papers did in pushing the U.S. into war with Spain in 1898. He sent artist Frederick Remington to Cuba to cover the native uprising against Spain. Remington reportedly cabled Hearst that there was no war in Cuba. Hearst responded, ‘You get me the pictures; I’ll get you the war.’ He was true to his word.”

No serious historian embraces the notion that Hearst’s newspapers were decisive or much of a factor at all in the U.S. declaration of war against Spain in April 1898. That is a simplistic explanation about a war that was fought largely on humanitarian grounds — those of ending Spain’s long and harsh rule of Cuba.

As often is the case when such mediacentric claims are advanced, the commentary in the Tennessean left wholly unaddressed the method or mechanism by which the content of Hearst’s newspapers — he published three in 1898 —  was transformed into military action.

Three was, in fact, no such mechanism.

As I pointed out in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, top officials in the administration of President William McKinley largely disregarded the content of the Hearst press. They certainly didn’t turn to it for policy guidance.

“If the yellow press did foment the war,” I wrote in Yellow Journalism, “researchers should be able to find some hint of, some reference to, that influence in the personal papers and the reminiscences of policymakers of the time.

“But neither the diary entries of Cabinet officers nor the contemporaneous private exchanges among American diplomats indicate that the yellow newspapers exerted any influence at all. When it was discussed within the McKinley administration, the yellow press was dismissed as a nuisance or scoffed at as a complicating factor.”

Advocates of the mediacentric interpretation of the Spanish-American War invariably cite — as the Tennessean did — the tale about Hearst’s vowing to furnish the war. It’s their Exhibit A.

While colorful, the tale of the purported Hearstian vow is a media-driven myth, one of the hardiest in American journalism.

It’s more than 110-years-old; during that time, no compelling evidence has ever emerged to support or document the tale.

Hearst denied making such a vow, which he purportedly sent in a telegram to Remington, an artist on assignment to Spanish-ruled Cuba in early 1897 for Hearst’s New York Journal.

The telegram to Remington has never surfaced. And Remington apparently never discussed the tale, which was first recounted in 1901, in a brief, unsourced passage in memoir by James Creelman, a blowhard journalist known for frequent exaggeration.

Creelman

Perhaps the most compelling reason for doubting Creelman’s undocumented account rests on an irreconcilable internal inconsistency.

As I write in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, 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 that Cuba was a theater of a nasty war.”

WJC

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On bra-burning, Erica Jong is wrong

In Bra-burning, Debunking, Media myths, Photographs on March 28, 2012 at 4:25 pm

Bra-burning in Toronto, 1979 (Bettmann/Corbis)

The writer Erica Jong asserts in a rambling commentary posted yesterday at the Daily Beast that bra-burning “never actually occurred.”

The mischaracterization of bra-burning was an element of Jong’s defense of feminism and the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

Jong wrote in the commentary:

“The fact that the so-called mainstream press reduced our valid struggles to sex, drugs, rock and roll, and bra burning (which, btw, never actually occurred) was their attempt to further disempower us. And they surely prevailed.”

It’s not an infrequent claim, that feminist bra-burning was a media trope, a media myth. That it “never actually occurred.”

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

One occasion came 33 years ago this month, when members of Women Against Violence Against Women demonstrated outside Toronto City Hall. As the demonstration neared its end, a protester named Pat Murphy dropped a white bra into the hungry flames of a burn barrel (see photo, above).

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 “promiscuity” was a factor in many rapes.

The Women Against Violence Against Women group assailed 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 specifically mention bra-burning which, one participant has told me, “wasn’t a focal point” of the protest.

But bra-burning did happen there.

Another participant has 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, some 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 was an early manifestation of the women’s liberation movement.

In Getting It Wrong, my mythbusting book that came out in 2010, I offer evidence that bras were set afire, briefly, during the demonstration at Atlantic City.

The evidence is from two witness accounts, one of which was published in the local newspaper, 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 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 published account was buttressed by recollections of the writer Jon Katz, who in 1968 was a young reporter for the Atlantic City newspaper. 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

Many thanks to Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post.

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Assessing the propellant effect: Was Watergate a powerful stimulant to journalism?

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Scandal, Washington Post, Watergate myth on March 10, 2012 at 4:34 am

The April number of Vanity Fair brushes against an entrenched media myth in declaring that the cinematic depiction of the Washington Post’s Watergate reporting stimulated great interest in careers in journalism.

Vanity Fair, April 2012

Alas,Vanity Fair offered no data or documentation to support its claim.

Instead, the magazine referred broadly to “the noble, sleeves-rolled sleuthing of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as [Bob] Woodward and [Carl] Bernstein in All the President’s Men,” saying the movie which came out in 1976 “prompted legions of baby-boomers to dream of careers in journalism.”

Legions?

Anecdotally, it’s not uncommon to hear that the movie, or Woodward and Bernstein’s award-winning reporting for the Post, did inspire boomers to become journalists.

But beyond impression and anecdote, what supports the claim that Watergate reporting — or All the President’s Men — was a powerful stimulant for career-seeking in journalism?

Not much, as it turns out.

As I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong (which includes a chapter on what I call the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate), two scholarly studies about enrollments in collegiate journalism programs found no evidence that Watergate was a propellant.

Enrollment data are reasonably good proxies, in that they would have captured heightened interest in careers in the profession. If Watergate and All the President’s Men inspired broad interest in careers in journalism, evidence of the stimulus should be apparent in surging in college enrollments.

But the evidence is not there.

A study conducted for the Freedom Forum media foundation and released in 1995 found that “growth in journalism education result[ed] not from specific events as Watergate … but rather to a larger extent from the appeal of the field to women, who ha[d] been attending universities in record numbers. The growth also in part reflect[ed] the applied nature of the field and its link to specific job skills.”

The study’s author, Lee Becker and Joseph Graf, stated flatly:

“There is no evidence … that Watergate had any effect on enrollments.”

A separate study, conducted by veteran journalism scholar Maxwell E. McCombs and published in 1988, reported that “the boom in journalism education was underway at least five years before” the Watergate break-in in 1972.

McCombs also wrote:

“It is frequently, and wrongly, asserted that the investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein provided popular role models for students, and led to a boom in journalism school enrollments. The data … reveal, however, that enrollments already had doubled between 1967 and 1972….”

I write in Getting It Wrong that the notion that Watergate reporting made journalism appealing and sexy endures “because it seems irresistibly logical and straightforward— too obvious, almost, not to be true.”

The presumed stimulus on journalism is an appealing yet simplistic story, easy to grasp and easy to understand.

And such characteristics — easy to grasp, easy to understand — often are propellants. Propellants of media-driven myths.

WJC

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Online at BBC News: Recalling the derivation of ‘All the news that’s fit to print’

In 1897, Anniversaries, New York Times, Newspapers, Yellow Journalism on February 11, 2012 at 12:10 am

The most famous seven words in American journalism — “All the news that’s fit to print” — took a permanent place 115 years ago yesterday in the upper left corner, or left “ear,” of the New York Times masthead.

On front page for 115 years

And I recalled that occasion in a piece for the BBC News online site, writing:

“The motto appeared on the Times’ front page without notice, commentary, or fanfare. In the years since, the phrase has been admired as a timeless statement of purpose, interpreted as a ‘war cry’ for honest journalism, and scoffed at as pretentious, overweening, and impossibly vague.

“Even the Times hasn’t been entirely consistent in its embrace and interpretation of those seven words. In 1901, at the 50th anniversary of its founding, the Times referred to ‘All the news that’s fit to print’ as its ‘covenant. In 2001, a Times article commemorating the newspaper’s 150th anniversary said of the motto:

“’What, exactly, does it mean? You decide. The phrase has been debated, and endlessly parodied, both inside and outside the Times for more than a century.’

“On occasion, the motto has been taken far too seriously, as in 1960 when Wright Patman, a U.S. congressman from Texas, asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether ‘All the news that’s fit to print’ amounted to false and misleading advertising.

“’Surely this questionable claim has a tendency to make the public believe, and probably does make the public believe, that the New York Times is superior to other newspapers,’ Patman wrote.

“The Trade Commission declined to investigate, saying: ‘We do not believe there are any apparent objective standards by which to measure whether “news” is or is not “fit to print.”’

“No matter how it’s interpreted, the motto certainly is remarkable in its permanence. One-hundred fifteen years on the front page has invested the motto with a certain gravitas. It often has been associated with fairness, restraint, and impartiality — objectives that nominally define mainstream American journalism.

“A commentary in the Wall Street Journal in 2001 addressed those sentiments, describing the motto as the ‘leitmotif not merely for the Times, but also, by a process of osmosis and emulation, for most other general-interest papers in the country, as well as for much of the broadcast media.

“Interestingly, the ‘leitmotif’ of American journalism had its origins in marketing and advertising.

“’All the news that’s fit to print’ first appeared on an illuminated advertising sign, spelled out in red lights above New York’s Madison Square in early October 1896. That was about six weeks after Adolph S. Ochs had acquired the newspaper in bankruptcy court.

“Ochs, patriarch of the family that still controls and publishes the Times, had come to New York from Tennessee. His task was to differentiate the Times from its larger, aggressive, and wealthier rivals — notably the yellow press of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. It was a tall order, given the beleaguered status of the Times in New York’s crowded newspaper market.

“Ochs possessed a keen sense of promotion and turned to a number of techniques to call attention to the Times. The illuminated sign at Madison Square was one. An even more successful promotion was a contest inviting readers to propose a better motto.

“In late October 1896, the Times announced it was offering $100 for the phrase of ten words or fewer that ‘more aptly’ captured the newspaper’s ‘distinguishing characteristics’ than ‘All the news that’s fit to print.’

“Hundreds of entries poured in. …  As the contest unfolded in the fall of 1896, the Times amended the rules, making clear it would not abandon ‘All the news that’s fit to print’ but would still pay $100 for the best suggestion. And entries kept coming in.

“A committee of Times staff narrowed the field to 150, which in turn was winnowed to four by the motto contest judge, Richard W. Gilder, editor of The Century magazine. The finalists were:

  • “Always decent; never dull”
  • “The news of the day; not the rubbish”
  • “A decent newspaper for decent people”
  • “All the world’s news, but not a School for Scandal”

“The latter entry, Gilder determined, was the best of the lot, and the Times paid the prize money to the author of the phrase, D.M. Redfield of New Haven, Connecticut.

“What exactly prompted Ochs to move ‘All the news that’s fit to print’ to the front page 115 years ago is not entirely clear. But his intent was unmistakable — to throw down a challenge to the yellow press, a challenge that Ochs ultimately won. The Times has long outlived the New York newspapers of Hearst and Pulitzer.

“So the motto lives on as a reminder, as a daily rebuke to the flamboyant extremes of fin-de-siècle American journalism that helped inspire ‘All the news that’s fit to print.'”

WJC

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‘Yellow journalism’: The back story to a sneer, 115 years on

In 1897, Anniversaries, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on January 31, 2012 at 6:35 am

Wardman: Gave us 'yellow journalism'

“Yellow journalism” is a disparaging epithet often invoked in journalism, even though its derivation is little known.

This is the back story to a sneer that trips easily off the tongue with scorn and condescension.

The first verified use of the term was 115 years ago today, when “yellow journalism” appeared in the old New York Press.

The phrase “the Yellow Journalism” appeared in a small headline on the Press’ editorial page on January 31, 1897. The phrase also appeared that day in the newspaper;s editorial page gossip column, “On the Tip of the Tongue.”

“Yellow journalism” was quickly embraced in American newspapering, as a way to disparage and denigrate the freewheeling practices of William Randolph Hearst and his New York Journal as well as Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World.

Within weeks of the first use of the term, references to “yellow journalism” had appeared in newspapers in Providence, Richmond, and San Francisco.

In the 115 years since then, “yellow journalism” has turned into a derisive if vague shorthand for denouncing sensationalism and journalistic misconduct of all kinds.

“It is,” I wrote in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, “an evocative term that has been diffused internationally, in contexts as diverse as Greece and Nigeria, as Israel and India.”

I also noted that yellow journalism emerged in “a lusty, fiercely competitive, and intolerant time, when newspapers routinely traded brickbats and insults” and even threats.

Just how Wardman and the Press came up with “yellow journalism” is not clear.

The newspaper’s own, brief discussion of the term’s derivation was decidedly unrevealing. “We called them Yellow because they are Yellow,” the Press said in 1898 in a comment about the Journal and the World.

In the 1890s, the color yellow sometimes was associated with depraved literature, which may have been an inspiration to Wardman, an austere figure largely lost to New York newspaper history. (The New York Times said in 1923 in its obituary of Wardman: “Like many another anonymous worker in journalism, his name was not often conspicuously before the public, and he was content to sink his personality in that of the papers which he served.”)

Wardman, who earned a bachelor’s degree in three years at Harvard University, once was described as showing “Calvinistic ancestry in every line of his face.” He did little to conceal his contempt for Hearst and Hearst’s flamboyant style of journalism.

Disdain routinely spilled into the columns of the Press, of which Wardman became editor in chief in 1896 at the age of 31. (The Press ceased publication in 1916.)

The Press took to taunting Hearst, Hearst’s mother, and Hearst’s support for Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 presidential election. Hearst’s Journal was virtually alone among New York newspapers in supporting Bryan’s “free silver” candidacy.

The Press taunted Hearst, then 34, as a mama’s boy and “little Willie.” It referred to the Journal as “our silverite, or silver-wrong, contemporary.”

The Press also experimented with pithy if stilted turns of phrase to denounce “new journalism,” Hearst’s preferred term to characterize his style of newspapering.

“The ‘new journalism,’” the Press said in early January 1897 “continues to think up a varied assortment of new lies.”

Later in the month, the Press asked in a single-line editorial comment:

“Why not call it nude journalism?”

It clearly was a play on “new journalism” and was meant to suggest the absence of “even the veneer of decency.”

It wasn’t long before Wardman and the Press seized upon the phrase “yellow-kid journalism,” which evoked the Hearst-Pulitzer rivalry over a popular cartoon character known as the “Yellow Kid.” Both the Journal and the World at the time were publishing versions of the kid.

The Yellow Kid (Library of Congress)

At the end of January 1897, the phrase “yellow-kid journalism” was modified  to “the Yellow Journalism,” and the sneer was born.

Wardman turned often to this delicious pejorative, invoking it in a number of brief editorial comments such as:

“The Yellow Journalism is now so overripe that the little insects which light upon it quickly turn yellow, too.”

The diffusion of “yellow journalism” was confirmed when Hearst’s Journal embraced the term in mid-May 1898, during the Spanish-American War. With typical immodesty, it declared:

“… the sun in heaven is yellow—the sun which is to this earth what the Journal is to American journalism.”

WJC

Adapted from an essay posted in 2010 at Media Myth Alert.

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Virginia (of ‘Yes, Virginia’) tells of her famous letter, 97 years ago

In 1897, Anniversaries, New York Sun, Newspapers on December 23, 2011 at 4:55 am

Young Virginia O'Hanlon

In a newspaper database of the Library of Congress, I found a long-overlooked interview conducted 97 years ago with Virginia O’Hanlon, who as an 8-year-old in 1897 wrote the letter that prompted the most famous newspaper editorial in American journalism.

O’Hanlon said in the interview on Christmas Eve 1914 that she had sent her letter despite her father’s admonition:

“A newspaper has no time to waste on a little girl.”

The editorial that became a classic was published in the old New York Sun, in response to Virginia’s imploring: “Please tell me the truth. Is there a Santa Claus?”

The Sun in its timeless reply reassured young Virginia as well as generations of children who have read the editorial, which memorably declares:

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias.”

The editorial’s closing passages were similarly reassuring in saying:

“No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”

In the interview with the Sun 97 years ago, Virginia O’Hanlon discussed her motivation in writing to the newspaper and her proud reaction when the essay was published — comments that offer revealing insight about the back story to the famous editorial.

“I think that I have never been so happy in my life as when the Sun told me that there was a Santa Claus and that he would live forever,” she said in the interview.

Virginia O’Hanlon was then 25-years-old and had been married 18 months to Edwin Malcolm Douglas. Her only child, Laura Virginia Douglas, was nine months old.

O’Hanlon said in the 1914 interview that she decided to write to the Sun in part because of its importance in her family’s household.

She said her father, Philip, “was always talking about the Sun and how you could always find what you wanted in the Sun, and how mother, who loved whist, wrote letters to the whist editor.”

O’Hanlon recalled telling her father: “I am going to write to the Sun and ask it to tell me the truth, the honest to goodness truth, about Santa Claus,” whose existence her schoolmates had scoffed at.

She added: “If the Sun says there isn’t any [Santa Claus] I’ll believe it; if it tells me Santa Claus is real I’ll make those girls at school sorry they ever teased me.

“Father laughed,” she recalled, quoting him as saying:

“The Sun is too busy writing about Presidents and Governors and important people, Virgina. … A newspaper has no time to waste on a little girl. Write if you want to, but don’t be disappointed if you never hear from your letter.”

“Well,” Virginia said, “I sat down and wrote a short letter, trying to say just what was in my heart. Day after day I looked for a letter in reply. I never for a minute thought the Sun would print a long editorial mentioning me by name and using my whole letter.

“Father teased me now and then,” she said, “but I kept hoping and finally” her letter was answered, in an essay published September 21, 1897, in the third of three columns of editorials.

(O’Hanlon indicated on another occasion that she wrote her letter shortly after her eighth birthday in July 1897. “My birthday was in July and, as a child, I just existed from July to December, wondering what Santa Claus would bring me,” she told an audience of Connecticut high school students in 1959. “I think I was a brat.”)

Word that the newspaper had published an editorial to answer her letter prompted Philip O’Hanlon to rush from their home on West 95th Street in Manhattan to buy a stack of that day’s Sun.

“Father hustled out and came back loaded down like a pack mule,” she said. “He scattered them all over town, I think, he was so proud.

“And me? It spoiled me for a while until I was big enough to understand that I, Virginia O’Hanlon, didn’t count for much in the editorial but that the important thing was the beautiful thoughts expressed by Mr. Church and the charming English in which he put his philosophy.”

She was referring to Francis P. Church, a veteran journalist who wrote the essay in the course of a day’s work, without an inkling it would become a classic.

His authorship was revealed by the Sun shortly after his death in April 1906.

The Sun’s editorial, O’Hanlon said in the interview, “was a wonderful thing in my life, and I mean it to be a wonderful thing in my baby’s. As soon as she masters her A B C’s, it will be the first thing she will read.”

The comment anticipated the commitment of her descendants who, over the years, have embraced the obligations associated with the much-remembered and often-reprinted editorial.

O’Hanlon’s grandchildren, notably, have become what the New York Times last year described as “ambassadors of the Christmas spirit, crossing the country to appear at events honoring her, and reading the letter and the response to children in schools and to their own children at home.”

Virginia O’Hanlon was 81 when she died in 1971. The Times reported her death on its front page.

But by then, though, the Sun had ceased to exist as an independent publication. It was merged with another New York newspaper, the World-Telegram, in January 1950.

WJC

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‘Yes, Virginia’: History does trump TV animation

In 1897, Debunking, Media myths on December 9, 2011 at 11:28 am

CBS is to air tonight its vapid Christmas season special, “Yes Virginia,” which is based on the old New York Sun’s timeless editorial reply to an 8-year-old girl, who in 1897 inquired about the existence of Santa Claus.

The charmless, animated CBS program takes great liberties with the real back story to the “Yes, Virginia” editorial, which was published in the Sun on September 21, 1897, in the third of three columns on editorials.

The Sun’s editorial was a response to young Virginia O’Hanlon who shortly after her 8th birthday in July 1897 wrote to the newspaper, imploring:

“Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?”

Francis P. Church

The Sun’s reply, written by a retiring editorial writer named Francis P. Church, said in part:

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias.”

In the CBS interpretation, Virginia is waddling, round-headed, and strangely obsessed with the existence of Santa Claus.

Church, the editorial’s author, is depicted as scowling, abrupt, hard-hearted.

Neither portrayal is convincing, neither is realistic.

Church is cast as the editor of the Sun, which is shown as a tabloid newspaper. Church wasn’t editor; he was an editorial writer. And the Sun of 1897 was no tabloid.

What’s more, the CBS show had Virginia writing her letter, and the Sun publishing its reply, in December, as Christmas approached.

Not so.

As I discussed in my 2006 book, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, Virginia wrote the letter in the summer of 1897. The Sun published its editorial-reply on page 6 of its issue of September 21, 1897.

What became the famous essay in American journalism was, in its first appearance, inconspicuous and obscure: It certainly was not introduced with large headlines on the front page, as the CBS show has it.

Its headline posted a timeless question:

“Is There A Santa Claus?”

The editorial was no instant sensation. It was not an immediate hit. And the Sun did not reprint the editorial every year at Christmastime, as is commonly believed.

Indeed, it took years for the newspaper to embrace “Is There A Santa Claus?”

As I noted in The Year That Defined American Journalism, it wasn’t until the mid-1920s when the Sun began routinely publishing the essay in its editorial columns at Christmastime.

What helped kept the editorial alive were the newspaper’s readers.

They found it memorable. They found joy, solace, and inspiration in the passages of “Is There A Santa Claus?”

In untold numbers over the years, readers asked the Sun to reprint the essay.

A letter-writer told the newspaper in 1926 that the editorial offered “fine relief from the commercialism and unsentimental greed” of the Christmas season.

In 1940, a writer to the Sun likened the essay to “a ray of hope on the path to human understanding in our troubled times.”

The CBS program hints at none of that. It offers no indication that the editorial’s fame rests at least in part on generations of readers who, collectively, proved to be far more perceptive than editors of the Sun in identifying the essay’s significance and enduring appeal.

If anything, the tedious CBS show demonstrates anew that history’s back story is often far richer, and far more interesting, than TV fare.

There’s of course little surprise in that observation. As Richard Bernstein wrote in 1989 in a terrific essay about movies and history:

“There are, after all, times when the facts speak far more dramatically than any fictionalized account of them ever could.”

WJC

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Cronkite, Johnson, and the deceptive ‘yardstick’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths on December 7, 2011 at 11:25 am

Cronkite: Wasn't watching Cronkite

The Huffington Post blog bit on the mythical “Cronkite Moment” yesterday, declaring it “a yardstick for how much things have changed.”

That is, how news media once were trusted and respected and influential. Nowadays, not so much.

But if the “Cronkite Moment” is a yardstick of any kind, it’s a measure of how profoundly the media myth has become embedded in the lore of American journalism.

The purported “Cronkite Moment” was on February 27, 1968, when CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite declared the U.S. military was “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam and suggested that negotiations ultimately might offer a way out.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, as the myth has it, watched the Cronkite report at the White House and, upon hearing the “mired in stalemate” assessment, declared:

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” (Or something to that effect.)

The Huffington Post essay invoked the president’s purported comment in referring to the presumptive “Cronkite Moment,” asserting:

“LBJ famously commented, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America,’ after the beloved journalist called the war ‘unwinnable.’ Several weeks later, Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection as president.”

That paragraph embraces some of the most prominent myths and misunderstandings that have grown up around the presumptive “Cronkite Moment.” Let’s peel them back.

First, Cronkite did not declare the war in Vietnam “unwinnable.” He said the U.S. military was “mired in stalemate” — which hardly was a novel or stunning assessment in early 1968. Many news organizations in fact had used “stalemate” months before Cronkite’s program to characterize the war.

Second, Johnson’s decision not to seek reelection in 1968 had nothing to do with Cronkite’s program. Indeed, there’s strong evidence that Johnson never intended to seek another term, that in 1967, or even earlier, he had decided against another campaign for the presidency.

Johnson wrote in his memoir, The Vantage Point: “Long before I settled on the proper forum to make my announcement, I had told a number of people of my intention not to run again.”

Third, and perhaps most important, is that Johnson did not see Cronkite’s report about Vietnam when it aired.

As I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, Johnson at the time wasn’t at the White House but at a black-tie party in Austin, Texas, marking the 51st birthday of Governor John Connally.

The president wasn’t agonizing that night over the supposed loss of Cronkite’s support; he wasn’t lamenting having “lost Cronkite.”

Instead, Johnson was offering light-hearted comments about Connally’s age, saying:

“Today you are 51, John. That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for—a simple majority. Throughout the years we have worked long and hard—and I might say late—trying to maintain it, too.”

As I note in Getting It Wrong, there’s no evidence Johnson saw the Cronkite program at a later date, on videotape.

Even if he had, it made no difference to his thinking about Vietnam.

Not long after Cronkite’s program, Johnson delivered a rousing speech in Minneapolis, where he urged “a total national effort” to win the war in Vietnam. That speech was given March 18, 1968, and in it, the president declared:

“We love nothing more than peace, but we hate nothing worse than surrender and cowardice.”

Under scrutiny, then, the presumptive “Cronkite Moment” dissolves as illusory. And not  surprisingly so.

As I point out in Getting It Wrong:

“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 in Vietnam, where the war ground on for years after the “Cronkite moment.”

WJC

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USAT evokes mythical ‘crack baby’ scare in report on drug-dependent newborns

In Debunking, Media myths on November 15, 2011 at 7:56 am

USA Today evoked the media-hyped crack baby scare yesterday in a front page report telling of “explosive growth” in numbers of newborns supposedly hooked on prescription drugs.

The report, which appeared with the headline “Surge in babies addicted to drugs,” offered scant hard data and over-the-top word choice, not unlike news accounts of the supposed crack baby epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s.

As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the crack baby scare “was a media-driven myth based more on anecdote than solid, sustained research.” It turned out to be, as the New York Times put it in 2009, “the epidemic that wasn’t.”

The USA Today article opened with alarming-sounding news that medical authorities “are witnessing explosive growth in the number of newborn babies hooked on prescription painkillers, innocent victims of their mothers’ addictions.

“The trend,” the newspaper declared, “reflects how deeply rooted abuse of powerful narcotics, such as OxyContin and Vicodin, has become.”

To support the claim of “explosive growth,” USA Today turned to a lawyer-politician, the Florida attorney general, who was quoted as saying:

“I’m scared to death this will become the crack-baby epidemic.”

Which, of course, proved mostly an epidemic of media hype.

It didn’t take long for the USA Today account to turn squishy, acknowledging in the fourth paragraph a lack of hard data on this “explosive” topic.

“National statistics on the number of babies who go through withdrawal are not available,” we’re told, “and states with the worst problems have only begun to collect data.”

So USA Today really doesn’t know whether, or just where, the “explosive growth” in drug-dependent newborns is taking place.

The article offered data from Florida, stating that “the number of babies with withdrawal syndrome soared from 354 in 2006 to 1,374 in 2010,” without explaining how the data were collected, or for how long. Or without saying how many children were born those years in Florida.

Lamely, the article stated:

“Scattered reports show the number of addicted newborns has doubled, tripled or more over the past decade.” Which hardly supports the assertion of “explosive growth” in addicted newborns.

Readers also were told of a range of symptoms that drug-hooked newborns exhibit: “They scream, twitch and vomit. They have trouble breathing and eating. They rub their noses with their fists so much their skin bleeds.”

It’s all evocative of the news media’s crack-baby hype, especially in what Jane Brody of the New York Times called “a wide spectrum of ill effects that can result from fetal exposure to cocaine.”

Those effects, Brody wrote in 1988, “include retarded growth in the womb and subtle neurological abnormalities, which may afflict a majority of exposed newborns. In more extreme cases, cocaine can cause loss of the small intestine and brain-damaging strokes. … The litany of threats to newborns is long and growing.”

Indeed, Brody declared, so powerful was the drug that “research suggests that a single cocaine ‘hit’ during pregnancy can cause lasting fetal damage.”

Which was an extraordinary overstatement.

The much-predicted social catastrophe of crack babies, I write in Getting It Wrong, “never materialized.”

Fears that American society “would be overwhelmed by a lost generation of crack-damaged misfits proved wildly exaggerated, a ‘grotesque media stereotype,’ in the words of Deborah A. Frank, one of the country’s leading authorities on prenatal drug exposure.”

I also note:

“The adverse effects that journalists so often attributed in the late 1980s and early 1990s to prenatal exposure to crack turned out to be associated with a variety of factors — such as use during pregnancy of tobacco, alcohol, or marijuana — as well as the quality of the newborn’s environment and the quality of the mother’s prenatal care.”

The crack-baby myth was buoyed, I write, by a tendency among journalists “to neglect or disregard the tentativeness that characterizes serious scientific and biomedical research, and to reach for certainty and definitiveness that are not often found in preliminary findings.”

Journalists pushed too hard on thin, preliminary, and sketchy data, and extrapolated rather extravagantly from small numbers of anecdotes.

It’s a pattern that tends to repeat itself, as journalists fail to take lessons from misreported drug scares of the past.

“What reporters need to do,” the inestimable media critic Jack Shafer has written,  “is challenge their sources in criminal justice, medicine, drug treatment, legislatures, and the user community when they make assertions of fact.

“Among the great failings of the press corps during the crack panic was its enthusiastic endorsement of the trend of ‘crack babies.’ Experts of all stripes lectured the press about these infants, whose chances at normal, healthy lives had been destroyed because their mothers were habituated to cocaine or crack.

“It was all lies.”

None of this is intended to endorse, advocate, or excuse the misuse of prescription drugs.

It is, rather, to underscore and call out the easy temptations of drug-scare stories.

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post

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Historian dismisses as ‘self-promotion’ the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on October 25, 2011 at 5:44 am

Kutler

Stanley I. Kutler, the preeminent historian of the Watergate scandal, was on campus yesterday to speak to a government class, and he told me after his talk that the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate is grounded in reportorial “self-promotion.”

The heroic-journalist narrative has it that Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency was brought down through the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for the Washington Post.

It’s a myth, as I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong. But it long ago became the dominant narrative of how Watergate was rolled up — a simplistic narrative that Kutler effectively dismantled during his appearance at American University.

In response to a question I posed afterward, Kutler said “self-promotion” by Woodward and Bernstein — notably their book about their Watergate reporting — explains the tenacity of what I call the heroic-journalist narrative.

Kutler, an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin, is the author, among other works, of The Wars of Watergate, a thorough and definitive treatment of the scandal that unfolded from 1972-74.

His talk at American was organized around the question, “Who really unraveled Watergate?”

In the final analysis, Kutler said, Nixon “was primarily responsible” for bringing down Nixon.

If not for the evidence of Nixon’s complicity — captured on audiotapes that he secretly recorded of conversations at the Oval Office of the White House — Nixon would have survived the scandal, Kutler said.

“Absent the tapes, Nixon walks,” he said. “You had to have that kind of corroborative evidence to nail the president of the United States.”

The tapes, which Nixon surrendered when compelled by the U.S. Supreme Court, captured the president participating in June 1972 in a clumsy attempt to cover up the signal crime of Watergate, the break-in a few days before at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

Kutler devoted little time in his talk to the contributions of Woodward and Bernstein, whose book about their reporting, All the President’s Men, was an immediate best-seller when it came out in June 1974, less than two months before Nixon resigned.

Kutler said the book “is a potboiler in many, many ways” and offered “a layman’s brief for understanding Watergate.”

The book, he added, is “important in that way.”

Kutler praised the work of Earl Silbert, the U.S. attorney in Washington whose office investigated the unfolding scandal in 1972-73, until a special Watergate prosecutor was named. The criminal cases against Nixon’s closest aides were “made by these guys,” Kutler said of Silbert and his investigators.

The Senate select committee on Watergate, he added, “did incredible work” in investigating the scandal — notably in extracting testimony that revealed Nixon’s secret tape-recordings. “The whole story changes,” Kutler said, with the disclosure in July 1973 of the tapes’ existence.

Kutler also lauded the contributions of federal Judge John J. Sirica, of the Watergate special prosecutors, and of the House Judiciary Committee, which approved four articles of impeachment against Nixon before his resignation in August 1974.

“Everybody has a role to play” in unraveling Watergate, Kutler said. “But let’s face it: Richard Nixon was primarily responsible” for bringing down Nixon. “The tapes damn him.”

Kutler has been at the forefront of efforts to win release of transcripts of grand jury testimony that Nixon gave in June 1975.

He won a judge’s order to unseal the testimony, which is to be made available November 10 at the online site of the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

“We just don’t know what’s in there,” Kutler said of the grand jury testimony, adding, however, that he expects it to contain “no spectacular fireworks.”

Kutler said that Nixon in going before the grand jury was “not going to lie. … He knew how to give non-answers.”

WJC

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