W. Joseph Campbell

Posts Tagged ‘Research’

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Cronkite ‘the most-trusted’? Where’s the evidence?

In Debunking, Media myths on June 9, 2012 at 8:45 am

The notion that Walter Cronkite was “the most trusted man in America” has received fresh stimulus from the recently published biography about the avuncular CBS News anchorman.

‘Most trusted’? How so?

Author Douglas David Brinkley refers often in the book, titled Cronkite, to the anchorman’s “most trusted” status. But Cronkite contains no searching assessment about whether the epithet was justified or based on much empirical evidence.

It’s really a dubious characterization that has  morphed into a tiresome cliché. It was not credibly supported by public opinion polling: It was propelled by CBS advertising.

The “most trusted” epithet can be traced to a survey conducted in 1972 of 8,780 respondents in 18 states. The pollster, Oliver Quayle and Company, sought to assess and compare public trust among then-prominent U.S. politicians.

Inexplicably, Cronkite was included in the Quayle poll, which meant he was compared to the likes of Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Edmund S. Muskie,  George McGovern, Edward Kennedy, and Spiro T. Agnew.

Cronkite topped the Quayle poll, receiving a “trust index” score of 73 percent. The generic “average senator” was next with 67 percent. Muskie was third with 61%.

The results were not much of a surprise. As the inestimable media critic Jack Shafer wrote in a column shortly after Cronkite’s death in 2009, the anchorman’s score “seemed impressive until you considered the skunks polled alongside him.”

Brinkley mentions the poll in Cronkite and says it was strange that the anchorman was included.

But he raises no challenge to the odd methodology (the survey was highly unrepresentative) or to the unsurprising result. Instead, he writes:

“The poll confirmed overnight what had long been apparent: Cronkite was the ultimate reliable source.”

Confirmed? Including Cronkite’s name with those of mostly uninspiring politicians was scarcely a precision measure of “trust.” It was a dubious basis on which to build the claim of “most trusted.”

But the claim was enthusiastically embraced, and propelled, by CBS advertising.

On Election Day in November 1972, CBS published prominent display advertisements in leading U.S. newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

The ads carried this headline:

“Re-elect the Most Trusted Man in America.”

In what seems a quaint reference to the limited broadcast news options of the early 1970s, the ad copy read:

“You’ll have three viewing choices on Election Night. … A good reason for watching us is because we’ve got a man on our slate who was recently voted the most trusted American in public life” — an allusion to the Quayle poll.

In italics, the ad copy referred to Cronkite as “The most trusted American in public life.”

CBS later modified the sweeping claim, characterizing Cronkite in an ad in the Washington Post in 1976 as “one of the most trusted men in America” (emphasis added).

Interestingly, Cronkite in the 1970s wasn’t always regarded as the most trusted television newsman, let alone “the most trusted” person in America.

A Phillips-Sindlinger survey conducted by telephone in 1973 rated Howard K. Smith of ABC News the most trusted and objective U.S. newscaster. Cronkite that year came in fourth.

The following year, the Phillips-Sindlinger survey had Cronkite in first place among newscasters, followed by John Chancellor of NBC.

So what did Cronkite have to say about this “trust” stuff? He was quoted in USA Today in 2002 as sort of pooh-poohing it all:

“Trust is such an individual thing. I don’t think it’s definable.”

Then what accounts for the enduring inclination to characterize Cronkite as having been the “most trusted man in America”?

One reason is that the epithet isn’t entirely outlandish.  Like many media myths, the “most trusted” claim rests on the cusp of plausibility. Cronkite was an esteemed anchorman. He cut an unthreatening-yet-authoritative presence on TV. His voice — what Shafer called a “furry baritone” — was as engaging as it was unmistakable.

But it’s the “golden age” fallacy that best accounts for the tenacity of the “most trusted” cliché.

As I describe in my 2010 book, Getting It Wrong, the “golden age” fallacy is that “flawed but enticing belief that there really was a time when journalism and its practitioners were respected and inspiring.” Such as the 1960s and 1970s, when Cronkite became a dominant figure in American broadcast journalism.

Writer Andrew Ferguson deftly identified this dynamic in an essay in the Weekly Standard in 2008.

Cronkite, Ferguson wrote, “is a kind of synecdoche for American journalism. … From the 1960s onward Cronkite was transformed by some mysterious process into a … spiritual force as imposing and weightless as a dirigible. He was an oracle, a teller of truths, the conscience of a nation, ‘the most trusted man in America.’

“American journalism followed the same trajectory into self-importance, borne aloft on the same draft of hot air and vanity.”

Voilá. The “golden age” fallacy, in full flight.

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post

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A glowing, hagiographic treatment of the ‘Cronkite Moment’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths on May 31, 2012 at 8:41 am

The evidence that the mythical “Cronkite Moment” was of minor consequence is compelling and multidimensional.

The “Cronkite Moment” was the televised report in February 1968 when CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite said the U.S. war effort in Vietnam was “mired in stalemate.” Legend has it that President Lyndon B. Johnson was profoundly moved by Cronkite’s assessment.

Among the elements of the minor-consequence brief are these:

  • Cronkite said nothing about the war that hadn’t been said by leading journalists many times before. By early 1968, “stalemate” was a decidedly unoriginal way of characterizing the conflict.
  • Public opinion had begun shifting against the war months before Cronkite’s commentary. Indeed, Cronkite followed rather than led the changing views about Vietnam.
  • Johnson did not see the Cronkite program when it aired on February 27, 1968, and remained publicly hawkish about the war in the days afterward.
  • Cronkite, until late in his life, pooh-poohed the notion his pronouncement had much effect on Johnson, likening its impact to that of a straw.

But little in the minor-consequence brief has kept historian Douglas Brinkley from offering in his new book about Cronkite a glowing, hagiographic interpretation of the “Cronkite Moment.”

Brinkley’s hefty biography is eager to find exceptionality in the “Cronkite Moment,” asserting that it “guaranteed” Cronkite’s “status as a legend.”

Brinkley, however, offers more assertion than compelling evidence in writing that the “aftershock” of Cronkite’s report about Vietnam “was seismic” and in declaring that the report “signaled a major shift in the public’s view of the war.”

As evidence of the purported “seismic” effect, Brinkley claims that Cronkite’s assessment “opened the door for NBC News’ Frank McGee to take a similar stand in a documentary on Vietnam that aired two weeks later.”

But as I point out in my 2010 book, Getting It Wrong, Cronkite’s “stalemate” characterization was “far less emphatic” McGee’s on-air remarks on March 10, 1968. “The war,” McGee declared on that occasion, “is being lost by the administration’s definition.”

So McGee’s interpretation wasn’t  “similar” to Cronkite’s at all; he didn’t hedge and invoke the safe characterization of “stalemate.” McGee said the war was being lost.

Brinkley also writes in discussing the supposed “seismic” effect: “Even the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page said, ‘The whole Vietnam effort may be doomed.'”

The Journal certainly said so — four days before Cronkite’s broadcast. To invoke the Journal’s editorial as evidence of the “seismic” effect of the “Cronkite Moment” is misleading, to say the least.

Brinkley’s writes that “Cronkite had grabbed America’s attention about Vietnam in a way that would have been impossible for Johnson” to have missed. But, again, supporting evidence is thin.

Did opinion polls at the time suggest that “Cronkite had grabbed America’s attention about Vietnam”?

Brinkley offers no such evidence.

Public opinion polling about the war did show that Americans had begun turning against the war by fall 1967, well before the “Cronkite Moment.”

Specifically, Gallup surveys found in October 1967 that a plurality of Americans (47%) said sending U.S. forces to Vietnam had been a mistake. That question was often asked by Gallup and was a sort of proxy for gauging popular sentiment about the war.

In August-September 1965, only 24 percent of Gallup’s respondents said it was a mistake to send troops. Thereafter, as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, the percentage of respondents saying the U.S. military presence in Vietnam was a mistake increased steadily, reaching a plurality in October 1967.

That moment was 3½ months before the communist Tet offensive across South Vietnam, an extensive and coordinated series of attacks that prompted Cronkite to pay a reporting trip to southeast Asia in early February 1968.

Brinkley, moreover, dismisses as insignificant the pronounced version variability that characterizes Lyndon Johnson’s supposed reaction to Cronkite’s report about Vietnam.

Depending on the source, the president is said to have said in reacting to Cronkite’s assessment:

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Or, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the war.”

Or, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the American people.”

Or, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”

Or, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the nation.”

Or, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America.”

Or, “Well, that’s the end of the war.”

Brinkley doesn’t interpret these varying versions indicating the apocryphal quality of Johnson’s purported reaction. He waves it off, writing:

“It doesn’t make any real difference.”

Oh, but it does.

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, “version variability” of such dimension “signals implausibility.

“It is a marker of a media-driven myth.”

Indeed, if anyone’s words should be captured with precision, they  should be the president’s. Especially on matters as important as shifting popular support for war policy.

It is quite interesting that Cronkite never spoke with Johnson about the purported “Cronkite Moment” and, as Brinkley notes, the president had nothing to say about it in his memoir.

There’s little contemporaneous evidence that the “Cronkite Moment” was profoundly shocking or moving. Or seismic. But there are plenty of claims to its significance, years after the fact.

The “Cronkite Moment” took on importance not in 1968 but by 1979, when David Halberstam wrote in The Powers That Be that Cronkite’s report “was the first time in American history a war had been declared over by an anchorman.” Which was nonsense, of course.

But Halberstam’s over-the-top characterization signaled how the “Cronkite Moment” was becoming a memorable and supposedly revealing example about how journalists can have powerful and immediate effects, how they can bring to bear decisive impacts on major issues facing the country.

Even Cronkite embraced the presumptive power of the “Cronkite Moment.” It took him a while, though.

In his 1997 memoir, Cronkite characterized the program in modest terms, saying that his “stalemate” assessment was, for Johnson, “just one more straw in the increasing burden of Vietnam.” He repeated the analogy in the years immediately afterward, saying on a CNN program in 1999, for example:

“I think our broadcast simply was another straw on the back of a crippled camel.”

But in the years before his death in 2009, Cronkite claimed greater significance for the program. For example, he told Esquire magazine in an interview in 2006:

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

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post

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Four weeks on: No answer from WaPo about empty links to Jessica Lynch stories

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post on May 25, 2012 at 6:55 am

Lynch photo at WaPo’s Iraq archive

Want to read the Washington Post article of April 10, 2003, about the fall of Baghdad to U.S. forces? The article’s online link is here.

How about the Post’s report about the Iraqi lawyer who helped lead U.S. rescuers to Jessica Lynch, the Army private taken prisoner and hospitalized following a deadly ambush in the war’s early days? Here’s the link to that story,  which the Post published on its front page April 4, 2003.

How about the Post’s front-page article of the day before, which told of Lynch’s supposed heroism in the ambush, how she had fought fiercely and “continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her”?

It was an electrifying report, one picked up by news organizations around the world.

But it turned out that the Post’s hero-warrior tale about Lynch was embarrassingly wrong in all important details. Lynch never fired a shot in Iraq; she was neither shot nor stabbed, as the Post had reported, but badly injured in the crash of a Humvee as it fled the ambush.

Try finding the botched hero-warrior story at the Post’s online site. All that turns up is a headline, byline, and date of publication. Otherwise, it’s an empty link. No content, in other words.

That’s also true for a column published April 20, 2003, by Michael Getler, the newspaper’s then-ombudsman, who criticized the hero-warrior story: Another empty, no-content link.

Same for the Post’s partial rollback of the hero-warrior story, published in mid-June 2003: Also an empty link.

So what gives? Why is some of the Post’s content about the Iraq War — and Jessica Lynch — freely available online while the more embarrassing material shows up as empty links?

Is this a matter of digital scrubbing, akin to Vogue magazine’s excising of a flattering profile of the wife of the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Asad? The Post last month described the Vogue matter as “an almost-unheard-of step for a mainstream media organization.”

Periodically over the past four weeks, I’ve asked the Post’s ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, about the digitally unavailable versions of the newspaper’s reports about Lynch.

Pexton has  promised to look into my questions.

But four weeks on, he has yet to offer a substantive reply.

I have asked him: “Does the embarrassment quotient explain this apparent inconsistency?” That is, is the Post too embarrassed by its botched reporting about Lynch to make the links freely available online?

I suspect it is.

In his most recent email to me, on May 16, Pexton said he receives “200 to 300 e-mails per day and we’re always behind. We are working on trying to get you some answers on this.”

I replied the following day, thanking him for the update and saying I hoped to hear from him soon.

I also wrote:

“I believe my request can be distilled thusly:

“Why is some Lynch-related content from 2003 freely available online (see here), while content more embarrassing to the Post (see empty links here, here, and here) not available? Shouldn’t those empty links be restored, and added to the Post’s link-rich Iraq War archive, where Lynch’s name and image already appear?”

That email produced no response from Pexton, however.

The Post‘s digital archive of the Iraq War offers a functioning link to the article about the Iraqi lawyer who helped guide rescuers to Lynch.

In fact, the only U.S. soldier identified by name and image at the archive is Jessica Lynch.

I discuss the Post’s reporting of the Lynch case in a chapter in my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

WJC

Many thanks for Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post

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Two weeks on: Still waiting for WaPo on missing Jessica Lynch online content

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post on May 11, 2012 at 9:41 am

Lynch photo at WaPo’s Iraq archive

Two weeks ago, the Washington Post ombudsman promised to look into questions I had posed about the unavailable digital versions of the newspaper’s embarrassingly wrong reports about Jessica Lynch’s supposed heroics during the Iraq War.

I’m still waiting a response from the ombudsman, Patrick Pexton.

At issue are empty links for at least three articles and commentaries about Lynch that appeared in the Post in 2003 — all of which are keenly embarrassing to the newspaper. Among them is the Post’s infamous “Fighting to the Death” story of April 3, 2003, which is at the heart of the bogus hero-warrior tale about Lynch.

That story — which isn’t available at the Post’s online site — described Lynch’s purported derring-do on the battlefield, saying she fought fiercely in an ambush in Nasiriyah and was captured only after running out of ammunition.

As it turned out, the story was utterly wrong in all important details. Lynch never fired a shot in Iraq; she was neither shot nor stabbed, as the Post had reported, but badly injured in the crash of a Humvee as it fled the ambush. (I discuss the Post’s handling of the Lynch case in a chapter in my latest book, Getting It Wrong.)

Another element of the Post’s narrative about Lynch that’s missing online is a column written several days later by Michael Getler, then the newspaper’s ombudsman. Getler criticized the hero-warrior story, noting that readers thought it suspicious.

In mid-June 2003, the Post grudgingly walked back from aspects of its hero-warrior tale — an embarrassment that media critic Christopher Hansen characterized as “the journalistic equivalent of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.”

The Post’s walk-back article also is unavailable online.

But at least one of the Post’s  stories about Lynch in 2003 is freely available online, as I’ve noted in email messages to Pexton.

That article — which is decidedly non-embarrassing to the Post — was published April 4, 2003; there’s a functioning link to it at the newspaper’s link-rich digital archive about the Iraq War. Interestingly, the only U.S. soldier identified by name and image at the archive site is Jessica Lynch.

So why aren’t the Post’s other reports about Lynch available at that online archive? If some Lynch-related content from 2003 is freely available, why not the rest? Wouldn’t restoring all Lynch content make the digital archive richer, more comprehensive, and more balanced?

I believe it would.

I’ve asked Pexton: “Does the embarrassment quotient explain this apparent inconsistency?” In other words, is the Post too embarrassed by its botched reporting about Lynch to make the links freely available online?

I suspect so.

Pexton did say in an email 14 days ago that his looking into my questions “will take some considerable time to research, but I’ll check into it. It’s very hard to trace some of this back when The Post has gone through several computer systems since that time, but I’ll make an effort.”

In reply, I suggested that the matter could be readily distilled by focusing on this question:

“Why is some Lynch-related content from 2003 freely available online (see here), while other and more embarrassing content (see empty links here, here, and here) not available?”

I sent Pexton follow-up email messages on May 1 and May 7. In those email, I asked why the empty links about the Lynch case couldn’t be restored and added to the digital archive about the Iraq War.

I have received no reply.

And that’s a bit odd because Pexton, in a column in March, pointedly urged Post staffers to be responsive to inquiries, writing:

“Return the blessed phone calls and e-mails from readers! And do it with courtesy, respect and politeness, even when the caller, or writer, is persistent or even unpleasant. Please.”

That’s advice too good to be ignored.

WJC

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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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Digitally scrubbing WaPo’s embarrassment on Jessica Lynch?

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post on April 27, 2012 at 2:15 pm

The Washington Post carried a fine story yesterday about Vogue magazine’s apparent removal from its online site of an unaccountably flattering profile of Asma al-Assad, wife of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Where's the digital version?

The Post said the 3,200-word puff piece in Vogue “apparently proved so embarrassing to the magazine that it scrubbed it from its Web site, an almost-unheard-of step for a mainstream media organization and a generally acknowledged violation of digital etiquette.”

That observation — “violation of digital etiquette” — evoked for me the unavailability online of the Post’s embarrassingly wrong-headed reports in 2003 about Jessica Lynch and her supposed heroism early in the Iraq War.

In an electrifying account published on its front page April 3, 2003, the Post reported that Lynch, then a 19-year-old Army private, had fought fiercely in the ambush of her unit in Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq.

Lynch, according to the Post,  “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,” which took place March 23, 2003.

The hero-warrior tale about Lynch turned out to be utterly wrong in all crucial details. She was neither shot nor stabbed, as the Post reported; she suffered shattering injuries in the crash of a Humvee fleeing the ambush.

Lynch was taken prisoner and moved to an Iraqi hospital where she lingered near death until her rescue by U.S. special forces on April 1, 2003.

The Post’s hero-warrior tale appeared two days later.

But try finding the Post’s digitized version of that story. Here’s the link; but clicking through turns up the article’s headline, byline, date of publication, and page placement. But no text.

(The Post’s story is available in full at the online site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)

Later in April 2003, the Post’s then-ombudsman, Michael Getler, published a critical column about the hero-warrior story, noting that “several readers wrote to complain, saying they did not doubt ‘the gravity of Lynch’s situation,’ as one put it, but that The Post, ‘using unnamed sources,’ was ‘creating a sensationalist story riddled with inaccuracies.’ ‘I smell an agenda,’ said one reader, suspecting wartime ‘propaganda.’ Another was suspicious of the ‘Hollywood-like telling of the story.'”

Try finding Getler’s column online.

Here’s the link; but in this case, too, just the headline, byline, publication date, and page reference are available.

In mid-June 2003, the Post revisited and grudgingly walked back from aspects of its hero-warrior story about Lynch. One media critic characterized the article as “the journalistic equivalent of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.”

(And as I point out in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the walk-back story “included a nervy attempt by the Post to deflect blame from its central role in spreading the hero-warrior myth of Jessica Lynch.”

(The Post, I note, “faulted the U.S. military and the administration of President George Bush for failing to correct an error for which the Post was responsible. ‘Neither the Pentagon nor the White House publicly dispelled the more romanticized initial version of her capture,’ the Post said, ‘helping to foster the myth surrounding Lynch and fuel accusations that the Bush administration stage-managed parts of Lynch’s story.’  It was an astounding assertion: The Post, alone, was responsible for propagating the ‘romanticized initial version’ that created the hero-warrior myth. To claim the Pentagon and the White House should have done more to dispel that report was, in short, exceedingly brazen.”)

Well, good luck in finding the Post’s walk-back story online.

Here’s the link; but, again, only the headline, byline, publication date, and page reference show up.

So has the Post excised the digital reminders of an embarrassing misstep, of a dramatic story that it thoroughly and singularly botched? Has it, at a minimum, committed a “violation of digital etiquette”?

Rather looks like it. (The Post’s ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, promised to “check into” my questions. He also said in an email today: “It’s very hard to trace some of this back when The Post has gone through several computer systems since that time, but I’ll make an effort.”)

Separately, I’ve been told that Post stories published before 2005 have largely been placed behind a paywall. For the most part, that is, they’re not freely available online.

But some special sections are accessible online without payment — and they include the Post’s link-rich “War in Iraq” digital archive.

And in a box at the lower right corner of the digital archive is an Army photograph of none other than Jessica Lynch.

Lynch photo at WaPo's Iraq War archive

The box carries the headline, “Saving Pfc Lynch,” and offers a link to an article published in the Post April 4, 2003, a day after the botched hero-warrior tale.

The April 4 article ran to 1,500 words in discussing the Iraqi lawyer who helped set in motion Lynch’s rescue.

And that article is available in full.

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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Carl Bernstein, naive and over the top

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on February 17, 2012 at 2:20 pm

Rupert Murdoch, the global media mogul beset by scandal at his British tabloids, may be the greatest menace to press freedom in world.

So says Carl Bernstein, the former Watergate reporter for the Washington Post, in an over-the-top characterization of Murdoch and what he calls Murdoch’s “gutter instincts.”

Bernstein: Murdoch a press freedom threat

Bernstein was referring to the police and parliamentary investigations into practices at Murdoch’s London tabloids, inquiries that have led to the arrests of numerous employes and the closure last summer of the Sunday News of the World.

The suspected misconduct in Britain also may have consequences for Murdoch’s News Corp. under U.S. anti-corruption laws.

Bernstein, a frequent and frankly sanctimonious critic of Murdoch since the scandals broke in London last year, declared in a recent interview on CNN:

“It’s really ironic that the greatest threat to freedom of the press in Great Britain today, and around the world today perhaps, has come from Rupert Murdoch because of his own excesses.”

What a foolish, misleading, and naive statement: The “greatest threat to freedom of the press …  around the world today perhaps” is Rupert Murdoch.

Sure, Murdoch’s hard-ball tactics and raunchy media outlets are offensive to polite company.

But the 80-year-old mogul is scarcely the world’s leading menace to press freedom. To suggest that he is is to insult the nearly 180 journalists who are in jail because of their work in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

The true contenders for the epithet of the world’s leading press-freedom menace are many, and include the ayatollahs in Iran.

According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, Iran is the world’s leading jailer of journalists: Forty-two of the 179 journalists behind bars in late 2011 were imprisoned in Iran.

Journalists are in jail typically because their reporting in traditional or online media offended power-wielding authorities or violated censorship laws.

In Iran, CPJ points out, the “authorities seem intent on silencing any independent or critical voices.”

Bernstein’s naive remark also ignores Eritrea and China, where, respectively, 28 and 27 journalists were in jail in late 2011, according to CPJ.

The organization notes that other journalists “may languish” in Chinese jails “without coming to the notice of news organizations or advocacy groups.”

Bernstein’s comment about Murdoch likewise ignores the Castro regime in Cuba, which long has been a jailer of journalists. As many as 29 dissident journalists were arrested in 2003 in a sweeping crackdown on dissent. The last of them was released in April last year.

While CPJ counted no Cuban journalists in jail in late 2011, the organization says authorities there “continue to detain reporters and editors on a short-term basis as a form of harassment.”

Bernstein’s comment also ignored the Stalinist regime in North Korea, which ranks dead last in the annual Freedom House ranking of press freedom in the world.

Freedom House, a New York-based organization that promotes democratic governance, assesses levels of press freedom in more than 190 countries and territories on a scale of zero to 100 points. The more points, the worse the ranking.

Finland ranked first, with 10 points. The United States and Britain were rated “free,” with 17 points and 19 points, respectively.

North Korea ranked last, with 97 points.

The regime in Pyongyang “owns all media, attempts to regulate all communication, and rigorously limits the ability of North Koreans to access information,” Freedom House noted, adding that all journalists “are members of the ruling party, and all media outlets are mouthpieces for the regime.”

His recent remarks about Murdoch’s threat to press freedom were the latest of Bernstein’s over-the-top characterizations of the mogul whose media and entertainment company has holdings around the globe.

As the tabloid scandal in Britain exploded last summer, prompting the closure of the News of the World, Bernstein likened the misconduct to Watergate, the  unprecedented U.S. constitutional crisis that led to Nixon’s departure from office in disgrace in 1974.

But Watergate was sui generis. The scandal not only toppled Nixon but sent to jail 19 men associated with his presidency or his 1972 reelection campaign.

What’s more, as I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the Watergate reporting by Bernstein and Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward was neither central to, nor decisive in, bringing down Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

WJC

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‘Accurately, it turned out’? Hardly, in the Jefferson-Hemings allegations

In Debunking, Media myths, Scandal on February 13, 2012 at 9:30 am

Media critic Jonathan Alter treated as settled history the other day the disputed and probably dubious claim that President Thomas Jefferson took as a mistress a slave named Sally Hemings.

In a  column for Bloomberg News, Alter wrote:

“Politics has been a contact sport since at least the election of 1804, when President Thomas Jefferson was accused (accurately, it turned out) of having an affair with ‘Dusky Sally’ Hemings, a slave.”

Accurately, it turned out?

That may hew to the dominant narrative about the purported Jefferson-Hemings liaison. But it’s far from proven, far from “accurate.”

Indeed, it’s quite unlikely.

Key evidence in the controversy centers around DNA testing conducted in 1998. The evidence indicated that the former president was among more than two dozen Jefferson men who were in Virginia at the time Hemings’ youngest child, Eston, was conceived in 1807.

Thomas Jefferson then was 64-years-old, making him an unlikely paternity candidate.

The DNA results were widely misreported when released, giving rise to the mistaken notion that the tests had confirmed Jefferson’s paternity.

However, as a detailed scholarly study published last year points out:

“The problem [in misinterpreting the DNA evidence] lies not only with a news media prone to over simplifying and sensationalizing complex stories.  Numerous prominent scholars have contributed to the misunderstanding by characterizing the DNA study as ‘confirming’ or ‘clinching’ the case for Thomas Jefferson’s paternity.”

The scholarly study, an impressive work titled The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission, further notes that the DNA tests “were never designed to prove, and in fact could not have proven, that Thomas Jefferson was the father of any of Sally Hemings’ children.”

The book — which has received scant attention from mainstream American media — presents a circumstantial case pointing to Jefferson’s younger brother, Randolph (or his sons), in the question of Eston Hemings’ paternity.

Randolph Jefferson, the book says, was known to have socialized with the slaves at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home in Virginia.

Randolph Jefferson was a dozen years younger than the president, and the available record offers no evidence that Thomas Jefferson “enjoyed socializing at night with Monticello slaves,” the book says.

The scholars commission that compiled the volume describes the case as closed by no means.

Indeed, the scholars commission writes in The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy that a “more rational conclusion, from the totality of the evidence before us, is that Sally Hemings was not Thomas Jefferson’s lover, and her children were not his children.”

To assert otherwise — to insist on the accuracy of claims about Jefferson’s purported sexual relationship with a slave — is to indulge in a sort of sloppy, take-it-for-granted kind of reporting.

Sloppy, take-it-for-granted reporting can be a factor in the emergence and durability of media-driven myths, the subject of my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

I note in Getting It Wrong, for example, that hurried and sloppy reporting propelled the media myth of “crack babies,” in which journalists in the 1980s and 1990s “pushed too hard and eagerly on preliminary and inconclusive research. And the horrors they predicted, that ‘crack babies‘ would grow up to be a vast, permanently dependent class — a ‘bio-underclass’ of staggering dimension — proved quite wrong.”

Decidedly wrong.

WJC

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Fox News reiterates dubious Lynch-source claim, ignores WaPo role

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Washington Post on January 16, 2012 at 3:52 pm

Fox News repeated today its dubious claim about the source of the mythical hero-warrior tale about Jessica Lynch, saying without supporting evidence that the “U.S. government” was behind the bogus story.

The Fox News claim was offered in an online commentary posted four days after an anchor for the cable network, Shepard Smith, made a similarly vague assertion in a televised interview with Lynch.

In both the commentary and the interview, Fox ignored the singular role of the Washington Post in placing the hero-warrior tale about Lynch into the public domain in what was a sensational, front page story published April 3, 2003.

The Post erroneously reported that Lynch, an Army supply clerk, had fought fiercely in the ambush of her unit in Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq. In fact, Lynch never fired a shot in the attack.

In the years since, the Post has never fully explained how it got the story so utterly wrong, effectively permitting a tenacious false narrative to take hold that the “government” — or the “military” — concocted the story for cynical propaganda purposes.

The commentary posted today at the Fox News online site ruminated about the quality of heroes and declared:

“Truth is an unavoidable casualty in catastrophe.

“Just last week former Private Jessica Lynch appeared on the FOX News Channel to share her side of the story of her famous capture and rescue in Iraq in 2003. The U.S. government initially claimed that then 19-year-old Lynch kept firing her weapon during an Iraqi ambush on her convoy in which she was the lone survivor.”

As I noted at Media Myth Alert last week in discussing Smith’s comments, the inclination by commentators on the political left and the right has been to overlook  the journalistic origins of the bogus hero-warrior tale about Lynch and assign blame vaguely to such faceless entities as “the government” or “the military.”

I further noted that never when such claims are raised is a specific culprit singled out. Just as rarely is the Post’s botched reporting on the bogus hero-warrior tale recalled or much discussed.

But quite simply, to ignore the Post’s central role in the tale about Lynch is to mislead and to assign fault improperly.

The Post’s report about Lynch was published beneath the headline:

“‘She was fighting to the death.'”

The report cited “U.S. officials” as sources in saying:

“Lynch, a 19-year-old supply clerk, 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” in Nasiriyah on March 23, 2003.

While the Post has never specifically identified the “U.S. officials” to whom it referred in the Lynch story, it is clear the Pentagon had little to do with pushing or promoting the story.

We know this from Vernon Loeb, one of the Post reporters on the botched story about Lynch.

In an interview on an NPR program in December 2003, Loeb referred to the newspaper’s  sources on the Lynch story as “some really good intelligence sources here in Washington” who had received “indications that she had, you know, fired back and resisted her capture and actually been shot and possibly stabbed doing so.”

Loeb also said:

“Our sources for that story were not Pentagon sources.  And, in fact, I could never get anybody from the Pentagon to talk about those [battlefield intelligence] reports at all. I got indications that they had, in fact, received those intelligence reports, but the Pentagon was completely unwilling to comment on those reports at all.

“They 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.”

And as I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, Loeb on another occasion was quoted as saying:

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

So from where did this false narrative arise about Lynch?

A contributing factor certainly was the claim by best-selling author Jon Krakauer, who inaccurately asserted that the Post’s source was a former White House official named Jim Wilkinson. In 2003, Wilkinson was director of strategic communications for General Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.

In his 2009 book,  Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, Krakauer wrote that Wilkinson was “a master propagandist” who “duped reporters and editors at the Washington Post.”

Wilkinson vigorously denied the unattributed claims and Krakauer last year quietly rolled back the assertions. A correction was inserted in a recent printing of the paperback edition of Where Men Win Glory, stating:

“Earlier editions of this book stated that it was Jim Wilkinson ‘who arranged to give the Washington Post exclusive access’ to this leaked intelligence [about Jessica Lynch]. This is incorrect. Wilkinson had nothing to do with the leak.”

WJC

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