W. Joseph Campbell

Posts Tagged ‘Watergate’

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Woah, WaPo: Mythmaking in the movies

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on December 8, 2010 at 12:09 pm

I was traveling last week and only recently caught up with the eye-opening recent editorial in the Washington Post that took to task the makers of Fair Game, a just-released movie about the Valerie Plame-CIA leak affair, which stirred a lot of misplaced fury seven years ago.

The Post editorial is eye-opening in a revealing way, describing Fair Game as “full of distortions–not to mention outright inventions.”

Even more revealing–and pertinent to Media Myth Alert–was this observation:

“Hollywood has a habit of making movies about historical events without regard for the truth; ‘Fair Game’ is just one more example. But the film’s reception illustrates a more troubling trend of political debates in Washington in which established facts are willfully ignored.”

That’s akin to the point I make in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, about how cinema can propel and solidify media-driven myths.

On that point, I write in Getting It Wrong:

“High-quality cinematic treatments are powerful agents of media myth-making, and can enhance a myth’s durability.

“Untold millions of Americans born after 1954 were introduced to the Murrow-McCarthy confrontation through Good Night, and Good Luck, a critically acclaimed film released in 2005 that cleverly promoted the myth that Murrow stood up to McCarthy when no one else would or could.”

Good Night, and Good Luck is but one example of cinema’s mythmaking capacity.

Not surprisingly, comments made online about the Post editorial were largely critical. Said one: “You just reminded me why I stopped reading the Washington Post editorials and began subscribing to the New York Times.”

Said another: “This editorial proves the thesis that The Post is willing to go to any length to suck up to the power elite in order to maintain access to the same.”

And another, more perceptive comment read:

“The myth-making in ‘Fair Game’ is no more or less egregious than it was in ‘All the President’s Men.’ Hollywood loves simplistic story lines (which is why the likes of John Sirica and Archibald Cox were nowhere to be found in ‘ATPM’).”

Now that’s an excellent point.

As I note in Getting It Wrong:

“The 1976 cinematic version of All the President’s Men solidified the notion that young, diligent reporters for the Washington Post brought down President Richard Nixon. That myth of Watergate may be stronger than ever, given that All the President’s Men is the first and perhaps only extended exposure many people have to the complex scandal that was Watergate.

“Thanks in part to Hollywood, the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate has become the most familiar and readily accessible explanation about why Nixon left office in disgrace.”

Indeed, All the President’s Men has been a significant contributor to the misleading yet dominant popular narrative of Watergate, that the reporting of Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered evidence that forced Nixon’s resignation. The movie focuses on the reporters and their work, ignoring the more significant contributions of Sirica, a federal judge, and Cox, a special prosecutor, in unraveling the Watergate scandal.

As bold as it may have been, the Post editorial about Hollywood and Fair Game might have gone farther and ruminated about the effects of All the President’s Men.  Still, it was a telling and impressive commentary.

I not infrequently take the Post to task at Media Myth Alert, usually for its unwillingness to confront its singular role in thrusting the Jessica Lynch case into the public domain. The Post, I’ve argued, ought to disclose the sources for its electrifying but bogus story about Lynch’s supposed battlefield heroics in Iraq.

The newspaper’s unwillingness to do so has allowed the false popular narrative that the Pentagon concocted the story to emerge and become dominant. Even one of the reporters on the Lynch story has said, “Our sources for that story were not Pentagon sources.”

But for its clear-eyed editorial about Fair Game, the Post deserves a tip of the chapeau.

WJC

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Mythical ‘follow the money’ line turns up in sports

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on December 5, 2010 at 6:29 pm

I’ve noted at Media Myth Alert how media-driven myths–those dubious and improbable stories that masquerade as factual–can infiltrate the sports pages.

There was, for example, a sports column a month ago that invoked the mythical “Cronkite Moment” of 1968–a hardy media myth that I take up and debunk in my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

And today, the famous made-up line of Watergate, “follow the money,” popped up in the sports pages of a newspaper in Midland, Texas.

The phrase supposedly was offered as advice by “Deep Throat,” the high-level, anonymous source who met from time to time with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post during the newspaper’s Watergate investigation.

A sports writer for the Midland Reporter-Telegram, invoked the “follow the money” line in referring to the NCAA investigation of Auburn quarterback  Cam Newton, whose father is suspected of having sought more than $100,000 if his son would sign with Mississippi State University. (The NCAA recently said it had determined that Cam Newton knew nothing about the purported scheme.)

The Reporter-Telegram item stated:

“In the words of Bob Woodward’s famous Watergate source ‘Deep Throat’ it’s time to ‘follow the money’ when it comes to Cam Newton. Newton has been ruled eligible [to play], but I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this.”

While the NCAA ruling certain raises eyebrows, it’s the use of “follow the money” that most interests Media Myth Alert.

While the line often is attributed to “Deep Throat,” it never figured in the Post’s Watergate coverage.

I’ve conducted a search of an electronic archive of the issues of the Post from June 1, 1972, to October 1, 1974, the period embracing the Watergate scandal, and no article or editorial published during that time contained the phrase “follow the money.”

However, the line was uttered in the cinematic version of All the President’s Men by Hal Holbrook, the actor who played “Deep Throat.” (The movie, an adaptation of Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book by the same title, came out in 1976.)

“Follow the money,” Holbrook advises the Woodward character, played Robert Redford. The scene is a parking garage, not unlike the one in suburban Virginia where Woodward and “Deep Throat” sometimes conferred.

“What do you mean?” Redford asks in the garage scene. “Where?”

“Oh,” Holbrook says, “I can’t tell you that.”

“But you could tell me?”

“No,” Holbrook says. “I have to do this my way. You tell me what you know, and I’ll confirm. I’ll keep you in the right direction, if I can, but that’s all.

“Just follow the money.”

The most likely author of “follow the money” was William Goldman, the screenwriter of All the President’s Men. Frank Rich, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote in 2005 that Goldman told him, “I just want you to remember that I wrote, ‘Follow the money.'”

Goldman’s comment to Rich came shortly after the disclosure in Vanity Fair magazine that W. Mark Felt, a former senior FBI official, had been Woodward‘s “Deep Throat” source.

As I point out in Getting It Wrong, the 30-year guessing game about the identity of “Deep Throat” helped keep Woodward, the Post, and its Watergate coverage “in the public eye far longer than they otherwise would have been.”

And that guessing game is an important reason why the dominant popular narrative about Watergate is the notion that the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

But that, I note, is “a particularly beguiling media-driven myth.”

WJC

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In Wikileaks, a hint of Watergate? Not so much

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times, Washington Post, Watergate myth on December 1, 2010 at 12:30 pm

It was just a matter of time before someone found a hint of Watergate in the recent, massive Wikileaks disclosures of sensitive U.S. diplomatic traffic.

Voilá. A commentary posted today at examiner.com invokes such a linkage in arguing that leaked cables describing Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s misconduct underscore the importance of turning him from office.

The commentary refers to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who reported on Watergate for the Washington Post, and asserts that Wikileaks disclosures “add to the well-documented trail of President Karzai’s abuse of Presidential power and his incessant attempts to exceed his constitutional authority.

Nixon quits, August 1974

“I have written before and shall point out again,” the commentary’s author stated, “that there is … the same amount of evidence derived from open source intelligence alone to impeach Karzai as Woodward and Bernstein had amassed to force Nixon to resign.”

Of keen interest to Media Myth Alert is not so much Karzai’s brazenness but the extravagant claim about the Watergate reporting of Woodward and Bernstein, that they “amassed” evidence to “force” Nixon’s resignation. He quit in 1974.

As I point out in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, their reporting had at best only a marginal effect on the outcome of the scandal, in which 19 men associated with Nixon’s presidency or his 1972 reelection campaign went to jail.

“To roll 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.”

Efforts of that dimension were required to uncover evidence implicating Nixon and his top aides in what was a sprawling scandal.

And even then, Nixon likely would have served out his second term if not for secret audiorecordings he made of many conversations in the Oval Office–conversations that captured his guilty role in authorizing a coverup of the Watergate scandal.

“Only when compelled by the Supreme Court,” I note, “did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up and authorizing payments of thousands of dollars in hush money.”

So against that tableau, the contributions of Woodward, Bernstein, and the Washington Post recede to minor significance: They were not decisive to the outcome of Watergate.

But because the scandal was so intricate, and because it is no longer a day-to-day preoccupation, the details have become blurred and what I call the “heroic-journalist” interpretation has taken hold as the dominant popular narrative of Watergate.

And that’s the endlessly appealing notion–propelled by the mediacentric motion picture All the President’s Men–that Woodward and Bernstein’s tireless and dogged reporting brought down Nixon.

The heroic-journalist interpretation, I write in Getting It Wrong, “has become the most familiar storyline of Watergate,” noting that it’s “ready short-hand for understanding Watergate and its denouement, a proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity.”

It’s a view that’s widely held. Even the New York Times, the keenest rival of the Washington Post, has embraced the heroic-journalism interpretation of Watergate.

Interestingly, though, principals at the Post have over the years disputed the notion the newspaper was decisive in Nixon’s fall.

Katharine Graham, the newspaper’s publisher during and after the Watergate period, said in 1997, at the 25th anniversary of the foiled burglary at Democratic national headquarters that touched off the Watergate scandal:

“Sometimes people accuse us of bringing down a president, which of course we didn’t do. The processes that caused [Nixon’s] resignation were constitutional.”

And Woodward, himself, has concurred, if in earthier terms.  In an interview several years ago with American Journalism Review, Woodward declared:

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

WJC

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That made-up Watergate line resonates abroad

In Cinematic treatments, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Furnish the war, Murrow-McCarthy myth, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on November 30, 2010 at 9:38 am

Watergate’s most famous made-line up — “follow the money,” which was a cinematic invention not the revealing words of guidance — is often invoked by U.S. news outlets. Surprisingly, it resonates as well in news media abroad.

“Follow the money” is often attributed to “Deep Throat,” the stealthy, anonymous source to whom Bob Woodward of the Washington Post frequently turned during the newspaper’s Watergate investigation.

But the phrase “follow the money” never figured in the Post’s Watergate coverage, which is the topic of a chapter in my mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong.

What’s more, a search of the electronic archive of all issues of the Post from June 1, 1972, to October 1, 1974, the period embracing the Watergate scandal, produced no returns for the phrase “follow the money.”

The line, however, was uttered in the cinematic version of All the President’s Men by the character who played “Deep Throat.” The movie, which was released in 1976, was an adaptation of Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book by the same title.

The most likely inventor of “follow the money” was the screenwriter of All the President’s Men, William Goldman.

Testimony to the line’s impressive adaptability abroad appeared yesterday in an item posted at a South Africa news outlet called the Daily Maverick. The item included this passage:

“‘Follow the money,’ as the informant ‘Deep Throat’ famously told Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during the Watergate scandal.”

The line also popped up not long ago in Le Devoir, a French-language daily newspaper in Quebec. The article in Devoir stated:

“Comme Deep Throat disait dans l’affaire du Watergate: follow the money.” [As Deep Throat said in the Watergate affair: follow the money.]

So why does this made-up line from a long-ago motion picture possess such international appeal?

In a way, “follow the money” is like media-driven myths that have gained popularity abroad–among them, the mythical Cronkite Moment, the Murrow-McCarthy tale, the famous “furnish the war” vow attributed to William Randolph Hearst. And, of course, the heroic-journalist myth, according to which the investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency in the Watergate scandal.

They are decidedly American tales that offer reductive, mediacentric interpretations of important historical moments.  News outlets abroad–intrigued as they often are by American culture and politics–are scarcely immune from the temptation to offer up these tales. Or pithy lines like “follow the money,” which sums up fairly well an important path of inquiry in the Watergate scandal.

Pithiness can be a powerful propellant of movie lines–and media myths.

Besides, these tales are straightforward, unambiguous, and as such memorable. They can be readily invoked to make a telling point, usually about the power and importance of the news media.

But often, that message is misleading.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, “media-driven myths are neither trivial nor innocuous. They can and do have adverse consequences. Notably, they tend to distort understanding about the role and function of journalism in American society, conferring on the news media far more power and influence than they necessarily wield.”

Media myths, I add, “often emerge from an eagerness to find influence and lasting significance in what journalists do….”

Debunking these myths helps to place media influence in a more coherent context.

WJC

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He may be arrogant, but he’s right about presentism

In Debunking, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Watergate myth on November 29, 2010 at 6:57 am

Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt, is a bit of an arrogant twit. But he was absolutely on-target in dismissing as “presentist” an inane question raised yesterday by host Bob Schieffer on the Face the Nation interview program.

Morris on 'Face the Nation'

Schieffer asked Morris, who recently completed the third of three volumes about Roosevelt’s life and times:

“What would Teddy Roosevelt think of today’s politics, Edmund?”

To which the Kenya-born Morris, who has lived in the United States since 1968, replied:

“You keep asking these presentist questions, Bob. As the immortal Marisa Tomei said in [the movie] My Cousin Vinny, that’s a bullshit question. Because you cannot pluck people out of the past and expect them to comment on what’s happening today.

“I can only say that what he represented in his time was that what we look for in our presidents now, what we hope for in our presidents now and we’re increasingly disappointed. He was somebody who understood foreign cultures. He represented the dignity of the United States. He was forceful but at the same time civilized.

“And what I really feel these days is we’ve become such an insular people … I see an insular people who are insensitive to foreign sensibilities, who are lazy, obese, complacent, and increasingly perplexed as to why we are losing our place in the world to people who are more dynamic than us and more disciplined.”

Morris’ comments–especially his profanity and his condescending swipes at Americans–quickly drew flak in the blogosphere.

And it’s true enough, as Matt Schneider of mediate.com observed with tongue in check, that “nothing compares to the thrilling unpredictability of an uninhibited guest like Morris who in one breath idolizes America’s ‘immortal’ movie stars, but in the next laments the rest of America as fat and lazy.”

Still, Morris was quite right to challenge Schieffer’s question. He was quite right to say that “you cannot pluck people out of the past and expect them to comment on what’s happening today.” It was a useful lesson.

Morris in effect was calling attention to the fallacy of presentism–that of applying contemporary standards and ideals to events and characters of the past. In other words, reading the present into the past.

Earlier in the show, Schieffer had asked Morris:

“What would T.R. have thought about what’s going on today? … Is there any correlation that you see between what he thought about and his vision for the country and, say, the rise of the Tea Party movement?”

To which Morris replied: “Well, I’m not going to pluck him out of the past because you can’t do that. He lived in his time. And he represented his time.”

Presentism is one of the fallacies David Hackett Fischer discussed 40 years ago in his superb study, Historians’ Fallacies.

Fischer noted: “The fallacy of presentism is a common failing in historical writing by men who have never been trained in the discipline of history.” He also wrote: “Academic historians are not exempt from the same error.”

Morris, whose Colonel Roosevelt has just been published, appeared on Face the Nation with three other authors of recent historical or political books. Among them was Bob Woodward, he of the Washington Post Watergate fame and author most recently of Obama’s Wars.

I’ve previously discussed at Media Myth Alert another, even more common fallacy of history–the “golden age” fallacy.The fallacy also is addressed in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which debunks 10 prominent myths about the news media. Among them is the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate–the notion that the tireless reporting by Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

I note in Getting It Wrong that the “golden age” fallacy is a “flawed but enticing belief that there really was a time when journalism and its practitioners were respected and inspiring”—the time, say, of Woodward and Bernstein.

WJC

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Jessica Lynch one of ‘Time’ magazine’s ‘faces of decade’

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post on November 26, 2010 at 6:42 am

I’ve expressed astonishment at Media Myth Alert from time to time about how the national spotlight still finds Jessica Lynch, who became the most familiar face of the early Iraq War because of a botched, front page story in the Washington Post about her supposed battlefield heroics.

Lynch, before the war

That was a sensational account, picked up by news organizations across the country and around the world. The Times of London, for example, declared that “one thing is certain”–Lynch “has won a place in history as a gritty, all-American hero.”

But the Post story  was utterly in error: Lynch, then a 19-year-old Army private, never fired a shot in Iraq. She was neither shot nor stabbed, as the Post reported, but suffered shattering injuries in the crash of a Humvee as it tried to escape an Iraqi ambush in Nasiriyah on March 23, 2003.

She was no battlefield hero.

Over time, however, the singular role of the Washington Post in propelling Lynch into unmerited fame has receded in favor of a false narrative that says the Pentagon concocted the hero-warrior story about Lynch to bolster Americans’ support for the war.

Time magazine repeated the false narrative  the other day in a writeup about Lynch, whom it calls one of the “faces of the decade”–a handful of men and women the magazine says “became famous overnight not for glamour or riches or simply being famous but for the explosive public issues they represented.”

Time says flatly that Lynch “was a victim of the propaganda machine at the Pentagon, which exaggerated her heroics.”

Whether Lynch merits inclusion in the “faces of the debate” is highly debatable. What’s not debatable is the magazine’s inaccurate characterization of Lynch’s improbable emergence to unsought fame.

As I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the Pentagon was not the source for the botched report in the Post about Lynch’s supposed heroics in Iraq. The U.S. military was loath to discuss the sketchy reports from the battlefield that told of her heroic deeds.

I note in Getting It Wrong that Vernon Loeb, then the defense writer for the Post, went on an NPR program in late 2003 to say that he “could never get anybody from the Pentagon to talk about” the Lynch case.

“They wouldn’t say anything about Jessica Lynch,” Loeb said in an interview on the Fresh Air show.

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

Loeb declared: “Our sources for that story were not Pentagon sources.”

Not surprisingly, the Time writeup doesn’t say how the Pentagon (if it had been the source) so thoroughly duped the Post into publishing the bogus report: No one pushing the false narrative about the Pentagon’s having ginned up the Lynch story addresses that critical element.

The Post–to its discredit–has never disclosed the source of its botched story, which appeared April 3, 2003, beneath the headline:

“‘She was fighting to the death.'”

The botched story

Lynch told Time that she doesn’t know how the phony report about her battlefield derring-do took hold. In excerpts of an interview posted at the Time online site, Lynch says:

“Honestly, I have no idea where the stories were created.”

The interview excerpts make no reference to the Post or its erroneous report. (Interestingly, a separate article in Time that ruminates about errors by journalists does mention the Post, saying: “Lynch’s Iraq heroics grew out of a single inaccurate story in the Washington Post.”)

Like many media-driven myths, though, the notion that the Pentagon pushed the phony hero-warrior story is just too good, too delicious, to be disbelieved.

And so it lives on, a blight on the historical record.

WJC

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Thanksgiving and its permissible myths

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on November 25, 2010 at 7:37 am

Thanksgiving can be a busy time for mild and amusing varieties of myth-busting.

There’s the notion, for example, that eating roast turkey makes you want to doze off after the feast.  Not entirely accurate, says Bon Appetit magazine. “The real reason you’re sleepy? It’s likely the stress of the holiday, the hours spent cooking, the wine and spirits–and all the fat and calories you just consumed,” the magazine says.

Then there’s disputed history about the holiday: Pilgrims may not have been the hosts of North America’s first Thanksgiving.  The editor of History News Network, Rick Shenkman, has pointed out: “Texans claim the first Thanksgiving in America actually took place in little San Elizario, a community near El Paso, in 1598 — twenty-three years before the Pilgrims’ festival” in 1621.

Thanksgiving 1621 (Library of Congress)

There’s also the matter of what the Pilgrims served at the feast in 1621. “No one knows if they had turkey, although they were used to eating turkey,” Shenkman says. “The only food we know they had for sure was deer.”

There’s the question, too, of Pilgrim garb. They didn’t dress in black, Shenkman writes, and “they did not wear those funny buckles, weird shoes, or black steeple hats.”

The myths of Thanksgiving, while undeniably engaging, tend to be on the innocuous side, rather of the genre of  Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

They can be thought of, in a way, as permissible myths–misleading, perhaps, but quaint and mostly harmless.  They’re acceptable on a grander scale of things. (Of course, purists from time to time have campaigned against mythical characters like Santa Claus. As I discuss in my 2006 book, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, efforts arose in the late 19th century to discourage children from believing in Santa Claus on grounds that it simply was “wrong to poison the minds of the young with untruths.”)

Permissible myths, like those of Thanksgiving, are welcome and amusing elements of the holiday that often comes with too many stresses and pressures.

Permissible myths, to be sure, are quite unlike media-driven myths, the subject of my latest book, Getting It Wrong. Media-driven myths are false, dubious, improbable stories about and/or by the news media that masquerade as factual. I like to think of them as the “junk food” of journalism–as tasty and appealing as pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, but not terribly nutritious or healthy.

Media myths, I write in Getting It Wrong, “are neither trivial nor innocuous. They can and do have adverse consequences.

“Notably, they tend to distort understanding about the role and function of journalism in American society, conferring on the news media far more power and influence than they necessarily wield. Media myths 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,” I note.

Indeed, media myths can serve to promote the notion of the central importance of the news media at decisive moments in history.

The heroic-journalist myth of Watergate is a telling example.

The heroic-journalist meme–the scandal’s dominant popular narrative–maintains that Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, through their dogged and fearless coverage, brought down the corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon.

As I point out in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the work of Woodward and Bernstein was marginal to Watergate’s outcome–to the resignation of Nixon in 1974 and the jailing of some 20 of his top aides and reelection campaign officials.

Nixon’s fall, I write, “was the consequence of his criminal conduct, which was exposed in the convergence of many forces, newspaper reporting being among the least decisive.”

We can be thankful Nixon was forced from presidency because of his criminal misconduct. But it is of  little value to grant undeserved credit to the news media.

That’s hardly permissible.

WJC

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Palin’s new book invokes ‘bra-burning’ stereotype

In Bra-burning, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, Watergate myth on November 24, 2010 at 8:57 am

“Bra-burning,” I point out in my mythbusting book Getting It Wrong, was scarcely a common feature of feminist protests of the 1960s and 1970s, stereotypes and popular narratives notwithstanding.

The enduring and popular notion of numerous, demonstrative bra-burnings–that female protestors in those days set their bras afire and twirled them over their heads–“is fanciful and highly exaggerated,” I write.

At most, women’s liberation demonstrators at Atlantic City in September 1968, briefly set bras and other items afire, an episode that may best be described as “bra-smoldering.”

At most, ‘bra-smoldering’

But there was no flamboyant bra-burning that day at Atlantic City, no fiery spectacle, no bonfire of bras. (See photo.) “Fire at most was a modest and fleeting aspect of the protest that day,” I write in Getting It Wrong.

Despite the thin evidentiary record, “bra-burning” lives on as a convenient if misleading shorthand phrase in “describing the upheaval of the 1960s and early 1970s,” as I note in Getting It Wrong. I  point out that “bra-burning” long has been “invoked as a defining phrase, or cliché, of those troubled times—as in ‘the era of bra-burning,’ ‘the hysteria of bra-burning,’ the time of ‘raucous bra burning,'” and the like.

To those misleading turns of phrase, Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska, adds “1960s-era bra-burning militancy.”

The phrase appears in America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, Palin’s second book, which came out yesterday.

Palin offers up “bra-burning militancy” in writing:

“Remember Hillary Clinton’s famous rant, when her husband was running for president, that she wasn’t, in her words, ‘some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette’? Hillary … came across then as someone frozen in an attitude of 1960s-era bra-burning militancy. She told us in no uncertain terms that she ‘could have stayed and baked cookies and had teas’ but preferred to pursue a serious career.”

The passage has attracted some comment–for its jab at Clinton, not for its historically incorrect reference to “bra-burning militancy.”

It’s regrettable, and more than a little unfair, that a misnomer like flamboyant “bra-burning” is so casually invoked in characterizing the 1960s and 1970s.

It’s unfortunate, too: Those turbulent times are prone to mythical treatment as it is–the mythical “Cronkite Moment” of 1968 and the heroic-journalist meme of the Watergate scandal both figure in Getting It Wrong.

But there’s no denying the perverse appeal of the term. It trips off the tongue in a blithe, faintly sneering sort of way: “Bra-burning.”

Stereotyping can be a hazard of media-driven myths, and there’s also no denying that stereotype is embedded in the phrase.

“Bra burning,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “has long been an off-hand way of ridiculing feminists and mocking their sometimes-militant efforts to confront gender-based discrimination in the home and the work place. Characterizations such as ‘bra-burning feminists,’ ‘the bra-burning women’s movement,’ ‘loud-mouthed, bra-burning, men-hating feminists,’ and ‘a 1960s bra-burning feminist’ have had currency for years.”

In its passage mentioning “bra-burning,” Palin’s book casually, almost off-handedly, serves to reinforce the stereotype.

WJC

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“Bra burning” also has long been an off-hand way of ridiculing feminists and mocking their sometimes-militant efforts to confront gender-based discrimination in the home and the work place. Characterizations such as “bra-burning feminists,”[i] “the bra-burning women’s movement,” “loud-mouthed, bra-burning, men-hating feminists,” and “a 1960s bra-burning feminist” have had currency for years.

[i] Tony Chamberlain, “Berman’s A Women’s Movement Unto Herself with Three Official Wins,” Boston Globe (16 April 2006): C1.

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Jimmy Carter fumbles Watergate history

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on November 23, 2010 at 6:28 am

Former President Jimmy Carter went on CNN’s Reliable Sources the other day to plug his new book and offered up the heroic-journalist myth of the Watergate scandal.

Carter (1980 photo)

The heroic-journalist meme, which has become the scandal’s dominant popular narrative, maintains Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in their dogged coverage, brought down the corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon.

Carter invoked this media myth in response to a fairly pointed question from the show’s host, Howard Kurtz, about whether the former president felt “the press had it for you.”

Carter in reply referred to his term in office and said:

“I came in at a time when the press was in the post-Watergate period, and when two reporters in the Washington Post had become famous because they had revealed some secrets that had brought down the Nixon administration. And when I got there, shortly thereafter, I think a lot of the reporters were looking for something within my administration that might be scandalous or put them in the headlines as very notable investigative reporters.”

Hmm. “Brought down the Nixon administration.”

As notable as the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein may have been, it didn’t bring down the Nixon administration.

As I point out in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the work of Woodward and Bernstein was at best marginal to Watergate’s outcome–the resignation of Nixon in 1974 and the eventual jailing of nearly 20 of his top aides and reelection campaign officials.

“To roll up a scandal of such dimension,” I note 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 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.”

I further point out in Getting It Wrong that the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate “has become the most familiar storyline” of the scandal, because it is such an effective “proxy for grasping the scandal’s essence while avoiding its forbidding complexity.”

But to indulge in the heroic-journalist interpretation, I write, “is to abridge and misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth.

“The heroic-journalist interpretation minimizes the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office.”

As Carter’s comment suggests, though, the heroic-journalist trope offers an accessible and simplistic explanation for a sprawling scandal that unfolded many years ago.

It’s interesting to note that Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting–for which they won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1973–never disclosed the key “secrets” of the scandal.

They did not disclose the hush-money payments made in an attempt to cover up the seminal crime of Watergate, the break-in at Democratic party offices in June 1972. Nor did they disclose the existence of the taping system that Nixon had installed to record most of his conversations in the Oval Office.

So it’s really not clear what Carter had in mind in asserting that the Post reporters “revealed some secrets that … brought down the Nixon administration.”

Interestingly, Kurtz did not challenge Carter on that point. Kurtz formerly was the media writer for the Post who, in 2005, pointedly disputed the heroic-journalism myth of Watergate.

He wrote in a column for the Post:

“Despite the mythology, The Post didn’t force Richard Nixon from office—there were also two special prosecutors, a determined judge, bipartisan House and Senate committees, the belated honesty of [White House counsel] John Dean and those infamous White House tapes.”

That’s a fine summary of the forces that truly did bring down Nixon’s presidency.

WJC

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Mythbusting at the Smithsonian

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times, War of the Worlds, Washington Post, Watergate myth on November 19, 2010 at 7:03 pm

A fine crowd was on hand last night for my book talk at the Smithsonian’s Ripley Center about media-driven myths.

The talk was part of the Smithsonian Resident Associates Program, which organized the event superbly well.

During the talk, I reviewed three of the 10 media myths debunked in my latest book, Getting It Wrong: the heroic-journalist myth that has become the most popular narrative of the Watergate scandal; the mythical  “Cronkite Moment” of 1968 that supposedly forced President Lyndon Johnson to realize the futility of the war effort in Vietnam, and The War of the Worlds radio dramatization in 1938 that purportedly pitched tens of thousands of Americans into panic and mass hysteria.

I also offered a few suggestions about identifying and sidestepping media myths, suggestions that included being skeptical about turns of phrase that just sound too neat and tidy–almost too good to be true. Another bit of advice was to apply logic and healthy skepticism to extravagant claims about the news media and their presumed influence.

Questions and comments from the audience of 170 or so people were especially thoughtful.

One comment was about the notion the famous New York City blackout in November 1965 was followed nine months later by an uptick in births–a linkage suggested in reports by the New York Times in August 1966. The Times quoted a sociologist as saying then:

“The lights went out and people were left to interact with each other.”

Though not addressed in Getting It Wrong, it is an intriguing topic, one that could be considered in a sequel about media myths, I said.

I added that the blackout tale sounded a lot like more recent speculation that the major snowstorms along the East Coast in December 2009 and February 2010 would give rise to an increase in live births nine months later. A blizzard baby boom, as it were.

That correlation may be mythical, though.

Still, the notion there is such a linkage isn’t entirely far-fetched. It rests on the cusp of plausibility–as do many media myths addressed in Getting It Wrong, I said.

I also noted during the Q-and-A session that media myths that have appeal across the political spectrum can be especially tenacious and enduring. They are tales, I said, that offer something for everyone.

The “crack baby” scare of the late 1980s and 1990s is an example of a media-driven narrative that offered something for everyone.

As I write in Getting It Wrong:

“The crack baby was a rare social issue that had appeal across the political spectrum—appeal that made the phenomenon especially powerful, compelling, notable, and tenacious. For conservatives, the specter of crack babies underscored the importance of imposing stiff penalties in the country’s war on drugs. And penalties were stiffened for crack possession during the second half of the 1980s. For liberals, meanwhile, crack babies represented an opportunity to press for costly assistance programs aimed at helping crack users and their children.”

“Crack babies” were children born to women who had taken cocaine during pregnancy, and many news reports and commentaries predicted an epidemic of crack-damaged misfits.

Among the more overheated predictions was that of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who wrote in 1989:

“The inner-city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror: a bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth.”

Krauthammer likened the crack-induced “bio-underclass” to a “biologically determined underclass of the underclass.”

But it never happened.

The crack baby phenomenon turned out to be the epidemic that wasn’t, the product of over-the-top, anecdote-driven news reporting.

WJC

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