W. Joseph Campbell

Posts Tagged ‘News’

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‘Follow the money,’ again and again

In Anniversaries, Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on March 21, 2011 at 7:24 am

“Follow the money.

“That advice from Watergate informant ‘Deep Throat’ led Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to the truth that uncovered corruption in the nation’s public office. The concept applies to situations beyond the Oval Office, though. The commitment of a significant amount of money reveals the motivation (and the identity) of the spender.”

So read the opening lines of a commentary posted yesterday at the online site of the Terre Haute Tribune-Star in Indiana — yet another news outlet to indulge in the most famous made-up line of Watergate, “follow the money.”

The guidance to “follow the money” wasn’t offered by Woodward’s stealthy “Deep Throat” source during the Watergate scandal, which broke in 1972 with the break-in at headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C. (“Deep Throat” was revealed in 2005 to have been W. Mark Felt, the second-ranking FBI official in the early days of Watergate.)

What’s more, the line “follow the money” didn’t appear in any Watergate-related article or commentary published by the Post until 1981 — years after the scandal had brought about the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

As I’ve noted at Media Myth Alert, the line was written into the screenplay of All the President’s Men, the cinematic version of the book Woodward and his colleague, Carl Bernstein, wrote about their Watergate reporting.

The line was spoken by the actor Hal Holbrook, who turned in a marvelous performance as the “Deep Throat” source in All the President’s Men, the movie.

Holbrook, who recently turned 86, delivered his lines about “follow the money” with such quiet assurance and knowing insistence that it sounded for all the world as if it really were guidance vital to rolling up Watergate and identifying Nixon’s misconduct.

Except that in real life, such advice wouldn’t have taken Woodward very far — certainly not to the point of determining Nixon’s guilty role in the crimes of Watergate, certainly not “to the truth” about the scandal.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, my mythbusting book that came out last year, some 20 men associated with Nixon’s administration or his 1972 reelection campaign went to jail for crimes linked to Watergate.

Rolling up a scandal of such dimension, I write in Getting It Wrong, “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 add, “Nixon likely would have served out his [second] 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.”

What cost Nixon the presidency wasn’t of the improper use of campaign funds but his efforts to obstruct justice in the FBI’s investigation of the break-in and related crimes.

It’s likely we’ll encounter many other references in weeks ahead to “follow the money.” After all, the 35th anniversary of the release of All the President’s Men falls next month.

And already, the University of Texas at Austin — repository for Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate papers — has scheduled three programs related to All the President’s Men, the movie.

WJC

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WaPo ‘broke the Watergate scandal’? No way

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on March 17, 2011 at 7:04 am

I like to see blogs calling out the Washington Post, an unevenly edited shell of its former self.

The “Texas on the Potomac” blog did just that the other day, calling out the Post for misidentifying two Houston congressmen named Green.

But in adding a snarky dig of its own, the blog committed a more notable lapse, declaring that the Post “broke the Watergate scandal.”

Here’s what the blog post said:

”Oops! The Washington Post has apologized to Houston congressmen Al Green and Gene Green for mixing them up in its coverage of last week’s controversial House hearing on Muslim extremism. At the hearing, you’ll recall, Al Green criticized Republicans for focusing on Islamic terrorism while ignoring other forms of terrorism such as the Ku Klux Klan.

“But the newspaper that broke the Watergate scandal identified the Houston congressman as Gene Green.”

Oops, indeed. Flubbing the identities of the congressmen Green was unfortunate; more troubling was declaring that the Post “broke the Watergate scandal.”

It did no such thing.

The signal crime of Watergate — the June 1972 burglary at Democratic National Committee headquarters — wasn’t broken by the Post. The break-in was interrupted by police and, within hours, news was circulating of the arrest of five burglars at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.

The story in the Post about the break-in appeared beneath the byline of Alfred E. Lewis, a veteran police reporter, and its opening paragraph made clear that the information came from investigators:

“Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. yesterday in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here.”

Watergate reporting by the Post did not expose the cover-up of crimes linked to the break-in or the payment of hush money to the burglars, either.

As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which includes a chapter about the media myths of Watergate, Post reporter Bob Woodward was quoted as saying in 1973 that those crucial aspects of the scandal were “held too close. Too few people knew. We couldn’t get that high.”

Nor did Woodward and his Watergate reporting colleague Carl Bernstein uncover or disclose the existence of the White House audiotaping system, which was decisive to the outcome of Watergate.

Audiotapes secretly made by President Richard Nixon captured him approving a plan in June 1972 to impede the FBI in its investigation of the Watergate break-in.

That contents of that tape — the so-called “smoking gun” of Watergate — sealed Nixon’s fate and led to his resignation in August 1974.

The White House taping system had been disclosed 11 months before, by investigators of the Senate select committee on Watergate, which convened hearing in spring and summer 1973.

As I point out in Getting It Wrong, Woodward and Bernstein later claimed to have had a solid lead about the existence of the taping system.

In All the President’s Men, the book he wrote with Bernstein, Woodward recalled having spoken with Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee about the lead. Bradlee advised, “I wouldn’t bust one on it.”

Had they followed that lead, Woodward and Bernstein may well have broken a pivotal story about Watergate.

But they didn’t.

So, clearly, the disclosures about the pivotal events that led to Nixon’s resignation in Watergate weren’t the work of the Post.

As I’ve noted in previous postings at Media Myth Alert, it’s intriguing to note how the Post from time to time has sought to emphasize that its reporting was not decisive in Nixon’s resignation.

In 2005, for example, Michael Getler, then the newspaper’s ombudsman, wrote:

“Ultimately, it was not The Post, but the FBI, a Congress acting in bipartisan fashion and the courts that brought down the Nixon administration. They saw Watergate and the attempt to cover it up as a vast abuse of power and attempted corruption of U.S. institutions.”

And Bradlee, the executive editor during Watergate, said on a “Meet the Press” interview show in 1997, 25 years after the break-in:

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

WJC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hardly.

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

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

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

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

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

Far from it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post

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

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

Biden shows the way (White House photo)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even then, I write, “Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House.

“Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” of Watergate’s signal crime — the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972.

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

As Michael Getler, the newspaper’s ombudsman wrote in 2005: “Ultimately, it was not The Post, but the FBI, a Congress acting in bipartisan fashion and the courts that brought down the Nixon administration.”

I also note in Getting It Wrong that “media-driven myths are neither trivial nor innocuous. They can and do have adverse consequences.”

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

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

Or so the media myth has it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

WJC

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Fact-checking Watergate advice that ‘worked’

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

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

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

Felt: Didn't say it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe it is “useful” still.

But it is a made-up line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It matters because historical accuracy matters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed.

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

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

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

That is, to being advice that “worked.”

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post

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Pumping up Watergate’s heroic-journalist myth

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

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

'Nixon got Nixon'

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

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

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

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

The writeup continued much in that frothy vein, declaring:

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

Let’s address and untangle the myths invoked here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And even then, Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for disclosures about the audiotape recordings he secretly made of his conversations in the Oval Office of the White House.

“Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” of the Watergate break-in, I write in Getting It Wrong.

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

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

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

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

But those reports were scarcely enough to unseat a president.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WJC

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

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

Murrow

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

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

Or so the media myth has it.

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

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

I also write:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WJC

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Bra-burning ‘never happened’?

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

Toronto, 32 years ago today (Bettmann/Corbis)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it did happen.

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

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

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

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

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

Boucher (1949 photo)

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

“Bra-burners blitz boardwalk.”

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

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

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

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

But in correspondence with me, Katz stated:

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

“I am quite certain of this.”

WJC

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Exaggerating Cleveland as ’70s Belfast on the lake

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers on March 7, 2011 at 7:36 am

Advance publicity about Kill the Irishman, Hollywood’s portrayal of a long-dead Cleveland hood mostly unknown outside Northeast Ohio, erroneously casts the city in the mid-1970s as rivaling the shattering violence of Belfast or Beirut.

Cleveland’s daily newspaper, the Plain Dealer, for which I reported in the mid- and late-1970s, offered that allusion — or illusion — in an otherwise thoughtful article yesterday about Kill the Irishman, which opens Friday in limited release.

The movie dramatizes — and no doubt seeks to mythologize — the life and death of Danny Greene, a brazen Cleveland rackets figure and FBI informant killed by his foes in a car bombing in October 1977.

The Plain Dealer article asserted that “Cleveland in the mid-’70s echoed Belfast or Beirut.”

That characterization is glib, unfortunate, and  fails to distinguish between the bloodletting and terror of politically inspired violence in Belfast or Beirut and the bombings of far smaller scale, perpetrated by mobsters against mobsters, in Cleveland and vicinity in the mid-1970s.

Demonstrating anew that Hollywood often has little aversion to hyperbole, publicity material for Kill the Irishman carries the mischaracterization of bombing-prone Cleveland to an absurd extreme.

That material says in summer of 1976, “thirty-six bombs detonate[d] in the heart of Cleveland while a turf war raged between Irish mobster Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson) and the Italian mafia.”

The claim has been reiterated in descriptions of the film posted by online movie guides, including those of the Washington Post and  CBS Detroit. It appeared in a recent online review of Kill the Irishman.

Thirty-six bombings “in the heart of Cleveland” in any summer would have so dramatic as to have attracted national media attention. But a search of an archive of leading U.S. newspapers — including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Post — turned up no reports about such a bombing spree in Cleveland that year.

I lived and worked in downtown Cleveland then, and recall no such rampage. That’s not to say that Cleveland was a particularly hospitable place. But the heart of the city on Lake Erie quite simply did not shudder that summer with anything akin to a succession of three dozen bombings.

Such a claim is preposterous.

The figure of 36 bombings appears to have been misappropriated from an article published in May 1977 in the Plain Dealer, as a sidebar to the account of the bombing death of John A. Nardi, a mob figure allied with Greene.

The sidebar article said “there were 21 bombings in the city last year [1976], a total of 37 in Cuyahoga County,” a political district of 458 square miles that embraces Cleveland and many of its suburbs.

Sure, 21 bombings in a year is a lot, in any city. But it is less than two per month, a frequency considerably less dramatic and sustained than 36 “in the heart of Cleveland” in a single summer (which corresponds to 13 a month or more than one a week).

Gritty Cleveland gets beaten up routinely. It was Forbes magazine’s choice as America’s “most miserable city” in 2010. Cleveland’s population is about half of what it was 50 years ago; it may be America’s most leave-able city. Abandoned buildings blight the cityscape.

Cleveland is in a long, grinding, unending decline. It’s a magnet for sneer and insult. But it was no Belfast, and it sure doesn’t merit the exaggeration and imprecision that’s come its way in the run-up to the release of Kill the Irishman.

WJC

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‘Sigue el dinero’: That made-up Watergate line gets around

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on March 5, 2011 at 7:53 am

“Follow the money” is pitch-perfect advice that’s found application in all sorts of contexts. It popped up the other day at  Spanish-language a blog in Castro’s Cuba , appearing as “sigue el dinero.”

And in Canada, the Globe and Mail newspaper invoked the phrase in a hockey story published yesterday.

Felt: Didn't say it

Without doubt, “follow the money” is the best-known line associated with the Washington Post and its reporting of the Watergate scandal.

Except that the Post never used the phrase in its articles or editorials about Watergate.

The passage was written into the script of All the President’s Men, the 1976 motion picture that dramatized the Watergate reporting of Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

“Follow the money” long ago crossed smoothly  from the silver screen to the vernacular — as suggested by the lead paragraph in an article posted the other day at the online site of an alternative newspaper in California. The lead declared:

“Watergate’s ‘Deep Throat,’ Mark Felt, advised investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to ‘follow the money’ to uncover the truth behind the Watergate scandal.”

Felt was a top FBI official whose identity as the stealthy “Deep Throat” source was kept secret until 2005. Periodically in 1972 and 1973, he conferred secretly with Woodward about the unfolding Watergate scandal. They sometimes met late at night in an underground parking garage in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington.

Felt, though, never spoke with Bernstein during the Watergate investigation. He was strictly Woodward’s source.

And Felt never counseled Woodward to “follow the money.”

That was actor Hal Holbrook’s line, spoken in All the President’s Men, the movie.

Holbrook, who turned 85 not long ago, was terrific in All the President’s Men, playing “Deep Throat” as a torn, twitchy, sometimes-irritable source.

In The Secret Man, his 2005 book about Felt, Woodward wrote of Holbrook’s portrayal of “Deep Throat”:

“It was a powerful performance, capturing the authoritative and seasoned intensity, cynicism and gruffness of the man in the underground garage.”

But of course there was much more to Watergate than Holbrook’s cinematic advice; there was more to it than following the money to “uncover the truth behind the … scandal.”

As I note in Getting It Wrong, my mythbusting book that came out last year, some 20 men associated with the presidency or reelection campaign of Richard Nixon went to jail for crimes linked to Watergate.

Rolling up a scandal of such dimension, I write in Getting It Wrong, “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 add, “Nixon likely would have served out his [second] 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.”

Those disclosures forced Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

It’s clear that advice such as “follow the money” would have taken Woodward and Bernstein only so far. It would not have unlocked “the truth” about Watergate. For even now, Watergate still has not offered up all its secrets.

For example, we still don’t know what was said between Nixon and his top aide, H.R. Haldemann, on June 20, 1972; their conversation at the White House was recorded, but the portion of the discussion about Watergate was deliberately erased.

The conversation came just three days after the breakin at Democratic National Committee headquarters, the signal crime of Watergate. The deliberate erasure left a sound gap of 18 1/2 minutes — a gap that audio experts for the National Archives were unable to restore.

“Follow the money” would have been advice useless in ferreting out decisive elements of Watergate. The existence of Nixon’s Oval Office tapes, for example, was disclosed not by Woodward and Bernstein; it was revealed in testimony in July 1973 given to the Senate select committee on Watergate.

But for a line that would have offered little guidance had it been spoken during Watergate, “follow the money” sure gets around.

WJC

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