W. Joseph Campbell

Posts Tagged ‘Media-driven myths’

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Just what we need: Barbra Streisand, media critic

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth on February 5, 2012 at 9:25 am

Celebrities and movie stars rarely make thoughtful, searching media critics, as Barbra Streisand demonstrated in a tedious and predictable essay the other day at Huffington Post.

The actress indulged a bit in the golden age fallacy, recalling broadcast journalists Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite as exemplary newsmen whose talents these days are sorely missed.

“Americans,” Streisand wrote, “are busy, working hard to support and provide for their families. They don’t have time to parcel out fact from fiction. They depend on the Fourth Estate to guide them and to hold individuals running for office, especially the highest office in our country, accountable.”

The claim that Americans “depend on the Fourth Estate to guide them” is surely overstated, given evidence that many Americans go newsless and ignore media content altogether.

Streisand went on, extolling media icons of the past:

Murrow

“Journalists like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow knew it was their duty to know the facts and disseminate them to the public. That responsibility in today’s media world seems to be diminishing.”

Murrow, who came to fame on CBS radio in the 1940s and on CBS television in 1950s, was no white knight, though. He hardly was above the political fray.

As I note in my media mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, Murrow privately donated time and expertise in acquainting Adlai Stevenson, the 1956 Democratic presidential candidate, with television.

I cite A.M. Sperber, one of Murrow’s leading biographers, who wrote that Murrow agreed “to help the Democrats” in offering Stevenson tips on “the finer points of speaking to the camera.”

Sperber, who characterized Murrow’s move “a radical departure from his usual practice,” said Stevenson “barely endured” the tutoring.

What’s more, Murrow is the subject of one of American journalism’s more savory and tenacious myths — that he stood up to the red-baiting senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, when no other journalist would, or dared.

Which is nonsense.

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, Murrow was quite late in confronting McCarthy, doing so long after a number of journalists – including the muckraking columnist Drew Pearson– had become persistent and searching critics of the senator, his record, and his tactics.

Cronkite, the famous CBS News anchorman from 1963 to 1981, likewise is the subject of a durable media-driven myth — that his editorializing about the war in Vietnam in February 1968 forced President Lyndon B. Johnson to realize the folly of his policy.

Legend has it that Johnson was watching at the White House when Cronkite pronounced the U.S. military “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam. Cronkite also suggested the negotiations might offer a way out of the morass.

Upon hearing Cronkite’s downbeat assessment, Johnson supposedly leaned over and snapped off the television set, telling an aide or aides, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Or something to that effect. Versions vary, markedly.

But as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, Johnson did not see the program in which Cronkite made his editorial comment.

Johnson in Austin: Didn't see Cronkite show

Johnson at the time was in Austin, Texas, attending the 51st birthday party of Governor John Connally, a longtime political ally. About the time Cronkite was intoning “mired in stalemate,” Johnson was joking 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.”

It’s illogical to argue that Johnson could have been much moved by a television report he hadn’t seen.

Granted, Cronkite’s editorial comment about Vietnam — tepid though it was — represented something of a departure for the avuncular anchorman. He usually tried to play it straight, because he had to.

As media critic Jack Shafer pointed out shortly after Cronkite’s death in 2009, the anchorman’s impartiality was partly a function of the federal “Fairness Doctrine,” which sought to encourage balanced reporting on the air.

Shafer wrote that “between 1949 and 1987 — which come pretty close to bookending Cronkite’s TV career — news broadcasters were governed by the federal ‘Fairness Doctrine.’ The doctrine required broadcast station licensees to address controversial issues of public importance but also to allow contrasting points of view to be included in the discussion.

“One way around the Fairness Doctrine was to tamp down controversy,” which he notes, the three U.S. television networks of the time “often did.”

So, no: Murrow and Cronkite weren’t exactly paragons of play-it-straight journalism. Pining for them while deploring today’s freewheeling media landscape is neither very sophisticated nor very useful.

Nor even fair to the historical record.

WJC

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Bill Clinton: Overstating social media influence in regime change

In Debunking, Media myths on January 28, 2012 at 12:30 pm

Bill Clinton went to the American University campus last night to accept an award for wonkiness. In remarks accepting the award, Clinton made the outsize assertion that “whole governments have now been brought down by social media sites.”

It’s a tempting claim of new media triumphalism that begs a one-word question: Where?

Where have social media taken down repressive governments?

Certainly not in Iran, where anti-regime protests sparked by a rigged presidential election in June 2009 gave rise to the misnomer, “Twitter Revolution.”

Twitter surely helped in organizing the demonstrations in Tehran. But social media proved no match for the Islamic government’s brutal crackdown that snuffed out the protests and shut down the threat to the regime.

Besides, Twitter became a channel for erroneous information — and disinformation — during the Iranian protests. Media critic Jack Shafer wrote at the time that Twitter was “more noise than signal in understanding the Iranian upheaval.”

So where else?

Egypt? A somewhat stronger case can be made there, that new media platforms contributed to the downfall nearly a year ago of Hosni Mubarak’s corrupt, 29-year authoritarian regime.

But even there, social media cannot be seen as decisive. They acted more as propellants in Egypt than as causal or precipitating agents.

Evgeny Morozov, writing last year in the Wall Street Journal, observed that the “Egyptian experience suggests that social media can greatly accelerate the death of already dying authoritarian regimes.”

Morozov, author of the insightful book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, also noted that the anti-regime protesters in Egypt “were blessed with a government that didn’t know a tweet from a poke.”

In other words, the regime was mostly clueless about online countermeasures, how to turn social media to perverse use as instruments for identifying, spying on, and sidelining malcontents and regime foes.

Morozov wrote that “dictators learn fast and are perfectly capable of mastering the Internet” in countering populist threats to their regimes. He also noted that some authoritarian governments “have turned mostly to Western companies and consultants for advice about the technology of repression.”

A recent, searching study about social media and political upheaval across the Middle East notes:

“There can be no doubt that online activism is a significant phenomenon that has had a major impact on the Arab Spring.

“Yet, we would be wise not to exaggerate its influence.”

Mubarak’s fall, the study adds, wasn’t “the result of online activism alone. This would ignore the major roles played by those [in Egypt] who had likely not even heard of Facebook or Twitter.”

The study, written by Tim Eaton and posted online this month at New Diplomacy Platform, says social media helped mobilize opposition to Mubarak’s unpopular regime.

But Eaton adds that “events in Tunisia … appear to have been the game-changer. The success of Tunisian activists in ousting President [Zine el-Abidine] Ben Ali motivated many Egyptians to seek to replicate their feat.”

That phenomenon is known as a demonstration effect, in which tactics and events in one context serve as a model or inspiration elsewhere.

Mubarak’s regime did shut down the Internet in Egypt last year, from January 28 to February 1, in a bungled attempt to cut off the flow of online information to anti-regime activists. But the move backfired.

“It wasn’t the Internet that destroyed Mr. Mubarak,” Morozov wrote, ” it was Mr. Mubarak’s ignorance of the Internet that destroyed Mr. Mubarak.”

To assert, as Clinton did last night, that social media can take down repressive governments is to offer a simplistic message of media triumphalism, one thinly supported by empirical evidence.

It is, moreover, an explanation that shortchanges understanding of the complex mechanics of regime change.

And embracing simplistic explanations is an important way in which media-driven myths — those false, dubious, improbable stories about the news media that masquerade as factual — can take hold.

As I write in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, more than a few media-driven myths have emerged “from an impulse to offer easy answers to complex issues, to abridge and simplify topics that are thorny and intricate.”

Social media are not inherently democratic. Nor have they proved decisive in bringing down authoritarian regimes.

WJC

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‘Getting It Wrong’ goes on ‘One Hour of Hope’

In Anniversaries, Cinematic treatments, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on January 10, 2012 at 12:15 pm

I recently was on “One Hour of Hope,” a satirically named radio show in Gainesville, Florida, to speak about several of the media-driven myths debunked in my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

Among them are the heroic-journalist trope of Watergate, the so-called “Cronkite Moment” of 1968, and the battlefield derring-do misattributed to Jessica Lynch early in the Iraq War.

The host of “One Hour of Hope,” Doug Clifford, noted at the outset of the interview that 2012 marks the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal’s signal crime, the breakin in June 1972 at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

I am sure the anniversary will give rise  to a resurgence of the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate, which holds that the dogged investigative reporting of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered the scandal and brought about President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

That media myth has become the dominant narrative of Watergate, I noted during the radio interview, which aired on WSKY-FM.

The persistence of that misreading narrative, I said, can be traced to All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 book about their Watergate reporting, and especially to the 1976 movie by the same title.

The movie, by focusing on the exploits of Woodward and Bernstein, projects the notion that the reporters, with help from a the stealthy, high-level source code-named “Deep Throat,” unearthed the evidence that forced Nixon to quit.

That, I said, is a very simplistic interpretation, “a serious misreading of history” that ignores the far more powerful forces and factors that combined to uncover evidence of Nixon’s culpability.

Those forces, I noted, were typically subpoena-wielding and included committees of both houses of Congress, the Justice Department, the FBI, and a federal judge in Washington named John Sirica.

(Interestingly, the Washington Post, in its obituary of Sirica, said the judge’s “persistence in searching for the facts while presiding over the Watergate cases led to President Nixon’s resignation.”)

The myth of the “Cronkite Moment” represents another serious misreading of history, I said.

Clifford summarized the purported “Cronkite Moment,” that President Lyndon Johnson, in reaction to the CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite’s pessimistic assessment of the Vietnam War, said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America.”

I noted that versions of what the president said vary markedly and also include:

  • “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”
  • “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”
  • “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the war.”

(Version variability of such magnitude, I write in Getting It Wrong, is a revealing marker of a media-driven myth.)

I noted in the interview that there’s no evidence Johnson saw Cronkite’s television report about Vietnam when it aired February 27, 1968. At the time, the president was attending a birthday party for Governor John Connally on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin.

Nor is there any credible evidence that Cronkite’s reporting about Vietnam influenced  Johnson’s decision, announced in late March 1968, not to seek reelection.

Clifford asked about reporting of the Jessica Lynch case, and I said the bogus tale of her battlefield heroics was largely due to “sloppy reporting by the Washington Post.”

I described the newspaper’s electrifying report, published April 3, 2003, that cited otherwise unidentified “U.S. officials” in saying Lynch had fought fiercely in the ambush of Army unit in Iraq, that she had kept firing at Iraqi attackers even as she suffered gunshot and stab wounds.

But none of that proved true. Lynch fired not a shot in the attack. She was wounded not in the firefight with the Iraqis but in the crash of her Humvee as it tried to flee the ambush.

I also noted in the interview how a “false narrative that the military made up the story” has come to define the Lynch tale.

One of the reporters on the Post’s botched story, I pointed out, has said that the Pentagon wasn’t the newspaper’s source, and also has said that far “from promoting stories about Lynch, the military didn’t like the story.”

The false narrative, I added, has had the additional effect of obscuring recognition of the heroics of Donald Walters, a cook-sergeant who apparently performed the heroics deeds wrongly attributed to Lynch.

Walters laid down covering fire as Lynch and others in their unit sought to escape. He was captured when he ran out of ammunition, and soon afterward executed.

Clifford said his show’s title, “One Hour of Hope,” is a satiric gesture; his once-weekly, 60-minute program leans left while much of the rest of the station’s talk-show content is conservative in political orientation.

WJC

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The debunking of the year, 2011

In Debunking, Media myths on December 29, 2011 at 5:15 am

Freeman (Middle East Policy Council)

The nod for the most notable debunking of 2011 goes to retired U.S. diplomat Charles W. (Chas) Freeman Jr. for puncturing the popular tale about Zhou Enlai’s remark in 1972 that it was “too early to say” what the effects would be of the French Revolution.

Freeman told a panel in Washington, D.C., in June that the Chinese premier was referring to the turmoil in France in 1968, not the years of revolutionary upheaval that began in 1789.

His remarks debunking the Zhou misinterpretation were first published by London’s Financial Times.

Zhou’s “too early” comment was made during President Richard M. Nixon’s historic visit to China in February 1972. Freeman, then 28-years-old, was the president’s interpreter on the trip and heard Zhou’s remark.

Freeman said during the panel discussion in June that the misinterpretation “was too delightful to set straight” at the time.

In a subsequent interview with me, Freeman said it was “absolutely clear” from the context of the conversation that Zhou’s comment was a reference to the turmoil of 1968.

Freeman described Zhou’s remark as “a classic of the genre of a constantly repeated misunderstanding that has taken on a life of its own.”

(In an oral history interview in 1995, Freeman said Zhou possessed  “enormous grace and charm.”)

The conventional interpretation of Zhou’s “too early” comment lives on because it suggests that Chinese leaders are inclined to a long and patient view of history.

“I cannot explain the confusion about Zhou’s comment except in terms of the extent to which it conveniently bolstered a stereotype (as usual with all stereotypes, partly perceptive) about Chinese statesmen as far-sighted individuals who think in longer terms than their Western counterparts,” Freeman said, adding:

“It was what people wanted to hear and believe, so it took” hold.

Indeed, it did. The misinterpretation persists — and even has been invoked when it’s acknowledged as apocryphal.

The puncturing of the Zhou misinterpretation rates as the “debunking of the year” not only because of its significance but because of its relevance to busting media myths, those delicious but dubious tales that masquerade as factual and offer distorted views of historical events.

In designating Freeman’s disclosure as the “debunking of the year,” I’m reminded of high-minded observations offered in 1998 by Max Frankel, formerly the executive editor of the New York Times.

In observations that go to the heart of the importance of busting media myths, Frankel wrote:

“What’s wrong with a little mendacity — so goes the theory — to give a tale velocity? It is unforgivably wrong to give fanciful stories the luster of fact, or to use facts to let fictions parade as truths.”

Puncturing the Zhou misinterpretation seems in keeping with that objective. The debunking, moreover, offers us a more accurate, more telling, and more realistic view of history and historical figures.

Media Myth Alert‘s first “debunking of the year” went in 2009 to the Spanish researchers who challenged the authenticity of Robert Capa’s iconic “Falling Soldier” image, taken in September 1936 during the Spanish Civil War.

Capa’s photograph purports to show a charging loyalist militiaman at the instant he is fatally death.

No “debunking of the year” was designated in 2010, the year of publication of my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which punctures 10 prominent media-driven myths.

WJC

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

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Apocryphal, but still quotable

In Debunking, Media myths, Quotes on December 24, 2011 at 7:24 am

Apocryphal, but still quotable.

That’s the takeaway from a commentary posted yesterday at the online site of the Nation. The commentary invoked Zhou Enlai’s misinterpreted comment about the upshot of the French Revolution.

Zhou supposedly said in 1972 that it was “too early to say” what the effects would be. But Zhou was speaking about the political turmoil in France in 1968, not the years-long upheaval that began in 1789.

The Nation’s commentary, “The Soviet Union’s Afterlife,” tried to have it both ways with Zhou’s remark; the opening paragraph asserted:

“Asked to evaluate the French Revolution nearly 200 years later, the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was famously reported to have replied, ‘Too early to say.’ Though apocryphal, the long perspective attributed to Zhou is better informed than the certitudes of American commentators about the causes and consequences of the end of the Soviet Union only twenty years ago.”

If it’s apocryphal, then why invoke it? To do is to distort and confuse and even mislead.

The temptation to invoke telling quotes of dubious derivation can be too powerful to avoid. 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.”

Craig Silverman, author of Regret The Error and a columnist for Columbia Journalism Review, has likened dubious quotes to “little gems that supposedly tell a story in just a few words. They lodge themselves in our culture and consciousness.”

So it is with Zhou’s remark, which was made during President Richard Nixon’s historic trip to China in February 1972.

The conventional interpretation — which the Nation commentary invoked — is that the comment stands as evidence of the sage and far-sighted ways of Chinese leaders.

But we know from a retired U.S. diplomat, Charles W. (Chas) Freeman, that Zhou in his talks with Nixon in 1972 was taking a decidedly shorter and more immediate view of turmoil in France.

Freeman was Nixon’s interpreter during the trip and was present when Zhou made the “too early” comment.

Freeman has said that Zhou’s remark came during a discussion about revolutions that had succeeded and failed. The revolutions cited, Freeman said, included the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Hungarian uprising of 1956, both of which the Soviet Union crushed.

Freeman said it was clear from the context that in saying it was “too early to say,” Zhou was speaking about the events in France in May 1968.

How Zhou’s “too early” remark came to be so badly misinterpreted, Freeman was unable to say.

“I cannot explain the confusion about Zhou’s comment except in terms of the extent to which it conveniently bolstered a stereotype (as usual with all stereotypes, partly perceptive) about Chinese statesmen as far-sighted individuals who think in longer terms than their Western counterparts,” he said, adding:

“It was what people wanted to hear and believe, so it took” hold.

First to report Freeman’s debunking was Richard McGregor, a journalist and China expert writing for London’s Financial Times.

As I’ve pointed out, the appeal and tenacity of Zhou’s misinterpreted remark is reminiscent of William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain at the end of the 19th century.

Hearst’s reputed vow  supposedly was made in an exchange of telegrams with the artist Frederic Remington, who was on assignment in Cuba for Hearst’s New York Journal.

As I point out in 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.”

“Like many media-driven myths,” I further note, the purported Hearstian vow “is succinct, savory, and easily remembered.

“It is almost too good not to be true.”

WJC

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

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Lynch blames ‘military, media’ for bogus hero story, ignores WaPo

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post on December 19, 2011 at 8:09 am

Jessica Lynch has blamed the “military and the media” for the bogus story about her battlefield heroics in the opening days of the Iraq War — but ignored mentioning the Washington Post, which was solely responsible for circulating the erroneous if electrifying tale.

Lynch’s remarks were made in an as-told-to article posted yesterday at the Daily Beast, an online site affiliated with Newsweek magazine.

“Though I didn’t know it at the time,” she said, “the military and the media labeled me a hero. They said I’d gone down guns blazing, like Rambo, when really my rifle had jammed and I hadn’t shot a soul.”

She was referring to the hero-warrior tale the Washington Post thrust into the public domain in a sensational, front-page report on April 3, 2003.

The Post said Lynch, then a 19-year-old Army private, had fought fiercely in the ambush of her unit, the 507th Maintenance Company, at Nasariyah in March 2003.

The botched hero-warrior story

The Post referred anonymously to “U.S. officials” in reporting that Lynch shot several enemy soldiers” in the ambush and “continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her” in the fighting.

The hero-warrior tale — published beneath the headline “‘She was fighting to the death'” — made terrific copy, and news organizations around the world picked up the story.

As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, Lynch became the best-known Army private of the war.

But the story soon proved thoroughly in error. Lynch never fired a shot in the ambush. She was neither shot nor stabbed. She suffered shattering injuries in the crash of a Humvee as it attempted to flee the ambush.

The bogus story clearly wasn’t the work of multiple news organizations. It was the Post’s story, exclusively.

The Post has never fully explained how it got the dramatic story about Lynch so utterly wrong; nor has the newspaper disclosed the identity of its sources on the bogus story.

Its silence about the sources has allowed a false narrative to fester and spread — namely, that the military concocted the story about Lynch’s heroics and fed it to the Post in a cynical attempt to bolster popular support in the United States for the war in Iraq.

That version, though quite vague, has proved very popular, as suggested by Lynch’s comments posted at the Daily Beast.

But we know from one of the Post reporters on the botched hero-warrior story that the Pentagon wasn’t the newspaper’s source.

The reporter, Vernon Loeb, told NPR in mid-December 2003: “Our sources for that story were not Pentagon sources.”

He also said in the NPR interview that military officials “wouldn’t say anything about Jessica Lynch.

“I’ve never believed that at least as far as the story we wrote goes, that it was a Pentagon attempt to create a hero there.”

Loeb said that “we basically told our readers that day what basically the U.S. intelligence community was telling senior members of the U.S. government. It just kind of goes back to the old adage, you know, that initial reports from the battlefield are almost always wrong.”

It bears repeating: Responsibility for spreading the erroneous account lies neither with the “military” nor with the “media”; it rests solely with the Washington Post.

WJC

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ABC News invokes false narrative of Jessica Lynch case

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post on December 17, 2011 at 10:22 am

ABC News yesterday invoked the false derivation of the hero-warrior myth about Jessica Lynch, declaring that “the U.S. government portrayed her as a fearless heroine who had gone down fighting” early in the Iraq War.

Not so. The Washington Post did that.

The Post — alone — placed the bogus tale about Lynch and her battlefield derring-do into the public domain in April 2003, in an electrifying, front-page article that was picked up by news organizations around the world.

The “U.S. government” — specifically, the Pentagon — was loath to embrace the tale about Lynch and her heroics.

Indeed, as one of the Post reporters on the botched report about Lynch later said:

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

The reporter, Vernon Loeb, also said in an interview on NPR: “They wouldn’t say anything about Jessica Lynch.”

Loeb and another Post reporter, Susan Schmidt, had reported on April 3, 2003, that Lynch fought fiercely in the ambush of her unit, the 507th Maintenance Company, on March 23, 2003. Neither Loeb nor Schmidt was with Lynch’s unit; no journalist was.

Loeb and Schmidt wrote that Lynch “shot several enemy soldiers” and  “continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting” at Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq.

Loeb and Schmidt quoted a source, to whom they referred as a “U.S. official,” as saying:

“She was fighting to the death. She did not want to be taken alive.”

Though dramatic, and even cinematic, the Post report was utterly wrong.

Lynch had not fired a shot in the ambush; her weapon jammed. Lynch was neither shot nor stabbed; she suffered shattering injuries in the crash of a Humvee as it tried to escape the ambush.

The Post has never fully explained how it botched the hero-warrior story about Lynch. It has never disclosed the identities of the anonymous sources that led it so badly awry on the Lynch story.

The murkiness of the newspaper’s sourcing has not only encouraged the rise of the false narrative, which ABC News cited in asserting, without attribution, that the “U.S. government portrayed” Lynch as a hero.

The Post’s obscure sourcing also has given rise to false allegations. The author Jon Krakauer, for example, wrongly accused Jim Wilkinson, a communications official in the administration of President George Bush, of having “arranged to give the Washington Post exclusive access” to the Lynch hero-warrior tale.

Krakauer called Wilkinson a “master propagandist” who “deserves top billing for creating the myth of Jessica Lynch.”

Krakauer has since quietly rescinded those allegations, which he had included in his 2009 book, Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman.

Another upshot of the false narrative is that it has obscured wide recognition of a real hero at Nasiriyah, a sergeant in Lynch’s unit named Donald Walters.

Sgt. Walters

As I write in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, Walters’ battlefield heroics were likely misattributed to Lynch, owing to mistranslation of Iraqi radio transmissions from the battlefield.

“During the ambush in Nasiriyah,” I write, “… Walters either stayed behind, or was left behind, to lay down covering fire as his fellow soldiers tried to make their escape. Walters fought his attackers in a fashion that the Post attributed to Lynch.”

I point out that the most detailed account of Walters’ bravery appears in Richard Lowry’s fine study of the fighting at Nasiriyah, Marines in the Garden of Eden.

Lowry wrote that Walters killed “several Iraqis before he was surrounded and captured” by Iraqi irregulars, the Fedayeen, and executed.

“We will never really know the details of Walters’ horrible ordeal,” Lowry wrote. “We do know that he risked his life to save his comrades and was separated from the rest of the convoy, deep in enemy territory.

“We know that he fought until he could no longer resist.”

The Post, though, has shown scant interest in Walters’ heroism.

A database search of Post articles published since April 2003 revealed just four stories in which Walters was mentioned. None of those articles discussed in any detail his bravery at Nasiriyah.

WJC

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WaPo still dodging responsibility in Jessica Lynch case

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Washington Post on December 14, 2011 at 2:01 pm

Lynch in 2003

The Washington Post — the newspaper that brought the world the bogus hero-warrior tale about Jessica Lynch early in the Iraq War — placed at its Web site today a wire service report about Lynch’s completing an education degree at the University of West Virginia at Parkersburg.

The 900-word report made no mention about the Post’s singular role in pressing the hero-warrior tale into the public domain but instead invoked the false narrative that the U.S. military made up the account about Lynch’s battlefield heroics to bolster support at home for the war.

“To make her seem more heroic and rally public support for the war,” said the report by the Associated Press, which the Post placed online, “the military claimed she’d gone down firing — when, in fact, her rifle had jammed.”

How arrogant: It was the Post that reported Lynch had “gone down firing,” that she had fought ferociously in the ambush of her unit, the 507th Maintenance Company, at Nasariyah in March 2003.

It was the Post — citing otherwise unnamed “U.S. officials” — that presented the electrifying tale that Lynch had “shot several enemy soldiers” in the ambush.

It was the Post that reported Lynch “continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her” in the fighting.

It was the Post that said Lynch also suffered stab wounds in the ambush.

But none of it was true.

Lynch never fired a shot in Iraq. Her weapon jammed during the ambush.

She suffered shattering injuries not in battling Iraqi soldiers but in the crash of a Humvee as it fled the ambush.

As I discuss in a chapter in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the Post has never fully explained how it got the Lynch story so badly wrong.

It has never disclosed the anonymous sources it cited in presenting the bogus hero-warrior tale.

Indeed, the Post has largely sidestepped accountability for the bogus hero-warrior narrative, which has allowed the false narrative about the military’s concocting the Lynch story to take hold and proliferate.

We know it’s a false narrative from one of the Post reporters whose byline appeared on the botched Lynch story, which was published April 3, 2003, beneath the headline:

“‘She was fighting to the death.'”

Vernon Loeb, a veteran journalist whose byline appeared on that report, said in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air program in December 2003:

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

He also said in the interview:

“They wouldn’t say anything about Jessica Lynch.”

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

Loeb said the Post based its story on the accounts of “some really good intelligence sources” in Washington, D.C., adding:

“We wrote a story that turned out to be wrong because intelligence information we were given was wrong. That happens quite often.”

As I note in Getting It Wrong, Loeb on another occasion was quoted in a commentary in the New York Times as saying:

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

Loeb also was quoted in the commentary as saying that “the sources for this information [about Lynch’s derring-do] were apparently Iraqis, both Iraqi informants and intercepts.”

Loeb’s disclaimers notwithstanding, the notion that the Pentagon’s made up the story to bolster domestic U.S. support for the war makes little sense. The American public, after all, supported the Iraq War in overwhelming numbers in its early days and weeks, as I point out in Getting It Wrong.

But it’s clear that if not for the Post’s erroneous reporting, the bogus tale of Lynch’s battlefield heroism never would have circulated as widely and as profoundly as it did.

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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