W. Joseph Campbell

Posts Tagged ‘Research’

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Doing more than casting ‘doubt’ on Hearst’s famous vow

In 1897, Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on October 9, 2010 at 7:15 am

In a thoughtful essay posted the other day about “Hollywood and the Power of Myth,” the director of new media at the Wharton School invoked my research into William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain, saying that I’ve cast “doubt” on the often-repeated anecdote.

I like to think that I’ve pretty much demolished that tale.

The Wharton new media director is Kendall Whitehouse, who referred in his essay to my 2000 article in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly that challenges the Hearstian vow as improbable. In that article, I wrote that the anecdote deserved “relegation to the closet of historical imprecision.”

I revisited the tale in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths–dubious and improbable stories about the news media that masquerade as factual.

Chapter One in Getting It Wrong is devoted to the Hearstian tale, which I flatly describe as a media-driven myth, calling it “perhaps the hardiest myth in American journalism.”

I note:

“Hearst’s famous vow to ‘furnish the war’ has achieved unique status as an adaptable, hardy, all-purpose anecdote, useful in illustrating any number of media sins and shortcomings. It has been invoked to illustrate the media’s willingness to compromise impartiality, promote political agendas, and indulge in sensationalism. It has been used, more broadly, to suggest the media’s capacity to inject malign influence into international affairs.”

Its versatility and its pithiness are two of the reasons the Hearstian myth has lived on.

The anecdote stems from Hearst’s assigning Frederic Remington, the famous artist of the American West, to Cuba, to draw illustrations for the New York Journal of the island-wide rebellion against Spanish colonial rule. Remington and the writer Richard Harding Davis, who also was on Hearst’s payroll, reached Cuba in January 1897. (Both are shown in the front-page image above.)

Remington was in Cuba six days before returning to New York. He suffered in the tropical heat and didn’t along with the self-important Davis, who called the rotund Remington “a large, blundering bear.”

Before returning, the media myth has it, Remington sent Hearst a telegram stating:

“Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return.”

Hearst supposedly cabled the artist reply: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”

In most tellings of the anecdote, Hearst supposedly made good on his promise and brought on the war with Spain, which was declared 15 months later.

The Remington-Hearst anecdote is riven with flaw and incongruity. For starters, Hearst at least twice denied ever having sent such a message. And Remington apparently never discussed the anecdote.

Moreover, as I write in Getting It Wrong, “the anecdote lives on despite a nearly complete absence of supporting documentation. It lives on even though telegrams supposedly exchanged by Remington and Hearst have never turned up.”

And it lives on despite what I call “an irreconcilable internal inconsistency.” That is, it would have been absurd for Hearst to have vowed to “furnish the war” because war—specifically, the Cuban rebellion against Spain’s colonial rule—was the very reason Hearst sent Remington and Davis 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,” I write in Getting It Wrong. “By then, the Cuban rebellion had reached islandwide proportions and not a single province had been pacified by Spain’s armed forces.”

Despite those and other flaws, the tale lives on as too good to check out, too good not to be true.

And as I note in Getting It Wrong:

“What firmly and finally pressed Hearst’s purported vow to ‘furnish the war’ into the public’s consciousness was Citizen Kane, the 1941 motion picture that was based loosely on Hearst’s life and times.”

In a scene early in the film, Orson Welles in the role of Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper tycoon who readily invites comparisons to Hearst, paraphrases the purported Remington-Hearst exchange.

Whitehouse noted in his essay: “Rightly or wrongly, Orson Welles’s … Citizen Kane has largely shaped our popular perception of William Randolph Hearst.” True enough.

Kane certainly helped solidify a robust media-driven myth.

WJC

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‘War of the Worlds’ radio panic was overstated

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Media myths, Media myths and radio, War of the Worlds on October 3, 2010 at 8:02 am

Welles in bronze

October always brings frequent reminders about radio’s most memorable and myth-beclouded program–Orson Welles’ superb dramatization of the War of the Worlds that aired on Halloween eve 1938.

So realistic was Welles’ show, so alarming were its simulated news reports of invading Martians, that listeners by the tens of thousands—or more—were convulsed in panic and hysteria.

Fright beyond measure gripped the country that night; it was the night that panicked America.

Or so the media myth has it.

The delicious, ever-appealing tale of mass hysteria sown by the War of the Worlds program is one of the 10 prominent media-driven myths that I address and debunk in my new book, Getting It Wrong.

I note that some Americans were frightened by the program. But most listeners, in overwhelming numbers, were not. They recognized it for what it was—an imaginative and entertaining radio show that aired in its usual Sunday evening time slot.

Still, this media myth is just too well-known, too entrenched in the American consciousness, ever to fall into disuse.

That’s why October brings numerous references to the War of the Worlds show and the panic it supposedly caused. Indeed, just the other day, an item posted at examiner.com said the program fooled “over a million people into thinking the world was actually under attack by Martians.”

But there’s simply no data to support such claims.

Hadley Cantril, a psychologist at Princeton University who helped promote the notion that the Welles’ program caused widespread panic, drew on surveys to estimate that at least 6 million people listened to the hour-long program, which aired live over the CBS radio network.

Of those listeners, Cantril estimated, 1.2 million were “frightened,” “disturbed,” or “excited” by what they heard.

But as I note in Getting It Wrong, “Cantril left unclear the distinctions among ‘frightened,’ ‘disturbed,’ or ‘excited.’ Nor did Cantril not estimate how many listeners acted on their fears and excitement,” a critical element had there indeed been widespread panic that night.

I further note that “one can watch a horror movie and feel ‘frightened,’ ‘disturbed,’ or ‘excited,’ but such responses are hardly synonymous with panic or hysteria.” Far from it.

The notion that mass panic had accompanied the airing the War of the Worlds program spread quickly, mostly by U.S. newspapers which reported the day after the show that hysteria had swept the country.

Their reports, however, “were almost entirely anecdotal,” I note, “and largely based on sketchy wire service roundups that emphasized breadth over in-depth detail.”

Newspapers simply had no reliable way of testing or ascertaining the validity of the sweeping claims they made about the War of the Worlds program.

Here’s why.

The War of the Worlds dramatization aired from 8-9 on Sunday night in the East, a time when most newspaper newsrooms were thinly staffed.

Reporting on the reactions to The War of The Worlds broadcast represented no small challenge, especially for morning newspapers having late-night deadlines.

“Given the constraints of time and staffing,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “relying on wire services such as the Associated Press became essential. This dependency, in turn, had the effect of promoting and deepening the notion that panic was widespread that night: On a late-breaking story of uncertain dimension and severity, many newspapers took their lead from wire service dispatches.

“They had little choice.”

The AP’s reports about the program essentially were roundups of reactions culled from the agency’s bureaus across the country, I write. Typically, AP roundups emphasized sweep—pithy anecdotal reports from many places—over depth and detail.

The anecdotes about people frightened by the show tended to be sketchy, shallow, and small-bore. But their scope contributed to and confirmed the sense that widespread panic was afoot that night.

The reliance on wire service roundups helps explain the consensus among U.S. newspapers that the broadcast had created mass panic.

Interestingly, newspaper content also helps to undercut the notion that panic and hysteria  swept the country that night.  Had that happened, the resulting trauma and turmoil surely would have led to many deaths and serious injuries.

But newspaper reports were notably silent on extensive casualties.

No deaths were attributed to the War of the Worlds broadcast. And as Michael J. Socolow wrote in his fine essay about the program, no suicides could “be traced to the broadcast,” either.

WJC

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Pew: Woodward, Bernstein ‘unraveled Watergate cover-up’

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on October 1, 2010 at 8:27 am

Bob  Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, was the single most-discussed topic in news links posted at Web logs Monday through Friday last week,  the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism said yesterday.

Woodward (Library of Congress)

Pew said that 35 percent of news links at blogs during the period September 20-24 were about the book, which has received mostly so-so reviews. (For example, the Wall Street Journal said in its critique yesterday, “To read ‘Obama’s Wars’ is to feel trapped in a daylong meeting in an airless room. That’s because much of the book consists of a near-verbatim account of meetings—specifically the National Security Council meetings last fall where the administration hashed out its Afghanistan policy.”)

The book and blog posts about it are of mild interest to Media Myth Alert.

What caught this blog’s attention was assertion in Pew’s news release–duplicated in a separate release by the Project for Excellence in Journalism–that referred to Woodward as “a Washington Post associate editor and half of the famous reporting duo that unraveled the Watergate cover-up.”

That last bit, about having “unraveled the Watergate cover-up,” is in error.

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, my new book that debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths, Woodward and his Post colleague Carl Bernstein, “did not uncover defining and decisive elements” of Watergate—including the cover-up of the break-in at offices of the Democratic National Committee, the scandal’s signal crime.

The Watergate cover-up was exposed incrementally in 1973 and 1974 by the combined forces of such subpoena-wielding entities as federal prosecutors, federal grand juries, and U.S. Senate investigators. Ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court ordered President Richard Nixon to hand over audiotapes of secretly recorded conversations at the White House that unequivocally demonstrated Nixon’s guilty role in the cover-up.

The Supreme Court decision was handed down in July 1974. Nixon resigned soon after.

Woodward and Bernstein’s award-winning reporting on Watergate was published in summer and fall 1972, as the scandal slowly unfolded during the weeks and months following the break-in at Democratic headquarters.

By late October 1972, I note in Getting It Wrong, “the Post’s investigation into Watergate ‘ran out of gas,’ as Barry Sussman, then the newspaper’s city editor, acknowledged.”

Edward Jay Epstein pointed out in his classic essay about the press and Watergate that “it was not because of the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein, but because of the pressures put on the conspirators by Judge John Sirica, the grand jury, and Congressional committees that the cover-up was unraveled.”

Sirica, a federal judge, presided at the trial of the Watergate burglars that ended in guilty pleas in January 1973. Afterward, the judge “made it abundantly clear,” Epstein wrote, that the convicted burglars “could expect long prison sentences unless they cooperated with the investigation” of the Senate select committee on Watergate.

One of the burglars, James McCord, soon wrote to Sirica, saying that “perjury had been committed at the trial and the defendants had been induced by ‘higher-ups’ to remain silent,” Epstein pointed out.

McCord’s letter thus began the unraveling of the Watergate cover-up.

I discuss in Getting It Wrong factors that help account for the tenacity of the “heroic-journalist” interpretation of Watergate–the erroneous notion that the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein brought down Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

“Media myths,” I write, “often emerge from an eagerness to find influence and lasting significance in what journalists do and tend to extend credit where credit is not entirely due.

“The heroic-journalist myth of Watergate is a telling example. The myth holds that the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the Washington Post brought down Richard Nixon. In reality, the Post and other news organizations were marginal factors in unraveling the Watergate scandal.”

Media myths thus can be self-flattering; they offer heroes like Woodward and Bernstein to a profession that is more used to criticism than applause.

Besides, claiming that Woodward and Bernstein brought down Nixon, or that they “unraveled the Watergate cover-up,” long ago became a ready if misleading way for journalists to distill what was a sprawling scandal.

WJC

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Going newsless, and its implications

In Debunking, Media myths on September 13, 2010 at 7:47 am

The biennial news consumption survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press invariably is full of intriguing data about how Americans use, or shun, the news media.

A particularly telling data point is the percentage of adults Americans who get no news on a typical day.

The 2010 Pew biennial news consumption survey, released yesterday, says that 17 percent of Americans go newsless: That is, they avoid getting news despite the wide variety of options offered by new media technologies.

This data point is not highlighted by Pew researchers; you have to dig a bit into the voluminous report to find a mention of Americans who go newsless.

“The vast majority of Americans (83 percent) get news in one form or another as part of their daily life,” Pew says in the report, adding:

“But even with the availability of news over a wide range of new technologies, 17% of Americans say they got no news yesterday, a figure that is virtually unchanged from previous years.”

Pew notes that in its news consumption survey conducted in 2008, 19 percent of adult Americans said they went newsless–and that survey “did not ask about getting news on a given day via cell phones or other digital technologies.”

Moreover, Pew says, 27 percent of American adults younger than 30 get no news on a typical day.

And among the 18-to-24-year-old cohort, 31 percent go newsless.

Pew offers neither commentary nor detailed tables about its “going newsless” data. And it presents no breakdown by age cohort, as it did in its 2008 report.

But the implications are fairly obvious: Choosing to go newsless suggests that a significant segment of the adult population has little interest, and probably little trust, in the U.S. news media and their content.

I mention the “going newsless” phenomenon in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths–dubious tales about the news media that masquerade as factual.

Referring to Pew’s 2008 news consumption study, I write:

“Large numbers of Americans are beyond media influence in any case. They choose to go newsless—they mostly ignore the news altogether. They are nonaudiences for news.”

Indeed, it is difficult to make a persuasive case for the sweeping influence of the news media if nearly one American adult in five chooses to eschew the news.

Moreover, the U.S. news media are far too splintered and diverse—print, broadcast, cable, satellite, online—to exert much in the way of collective and sustained influence on policymakers or media audiences, I write in Getting It Wrong. And  I quote the sociologist Herbert Gans who has pointed out:

“If news audiences had to respond to all the news to which they are exposed, they would not have time to live their own lives. In fact, people screen out many things, including news, that could interfere with their own lives.”

The 2010 news consumption study contained another surprising finding, that slightly less than half of young adult Americans get news on a typical day from a digital platform.

Pew notes that “Internet usage among those younger than 30 is nearly universal,” that four in five “have profiles on social networking sites and 58 percent go online using their cell phones.” And yet just 48 percent of that cohort “got news over any kind of digital platform yesterday.”

In fact, Pew says, “more of those younger than 30 (57 percent) got news from traditional sources” than from digital technology.

Americans in their 30s, Pew said, “are the most likely to use digital technologies to get news. Fully 57 percent of those in their 30s say they got news through a digital platform yesterday – either online or mobile – the highest percentage of any age group. And 21 percent of those 30 to 39 say they got news through social networking or Twitter.”

In conducting its 2010 news consumption study, Pew researchers interviewed 3,006 adults via cell phones or land line telephones from June 8 to June 28.

WJC

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Many thanks to Jim Romenesko for linking to this post