W. Joseph Campbell

Posts Tagged ‘Yellow Journalism’

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Taking stock: Top mythbusting posts of 2022

In 1897, Cuba, Debunking, Error, Furnish the war, Media myths, Newspapers, Quotes, Reviews, Scandal, Spanish-American War, Washington Post, Watergate myth, Yellow Journalism on December 27, 2022 at 7:10 am

Media Myth Alert directed attention periodically in 2022 to the appearance of well-known media-driven myths, those prominent tales about the news media that are widely believed and often retold but which, under scrutiny, dissolve as apocryphal or wildly exaggerated.

Here’s a look at the year’s five top posts at Media Myth Alert, a year in which myths associated with the 50th anniversary of the origins of the Watergate scandal figured conspicuously, although not exclusively. (The demands of other projects necessarily trimmed the volume of blog posts in 2022.)

■ ‘I’ll furnish the war’: 25 reasons why it’s a towering media myth (posted January 10): William Randolph Hearst’s supposed vow to “furnish the war” with Spain at the end of the 19th century is one of the best-known anecdotes in American journalism. The aphorism has been presented as genuine in innumerable histories, biographies, newspaper and magazine accounts, broadcast reports, podcasts, and essays posted online.

And yet, the evidence is overwhelming that Hearst made no such pledge.

On assignment for Hearst, 1897

Media Myth Alert thoroughly dissected the tale in January, at what would have the 125th anniversary of the Hearstian vow, had it been made.

Among the 25 reasons presented in the post was that the artifact — a telegram from Hearst to the artist Frederic Remington that supposedly contained the pledge — has never turned up.

The anecdote — which I have examined in my media-mythbusting book Getting It Wrong and in an earlier work, Yellow Journalism — founders on an internal inconsistency. That is, why would Hearst pledge to “furnish the war” when war — the island-wide Cuban rebellion against Spain — was the very reason he sent Remington to Cuba in the first place? The armed struggle had begun in February 1895, or almost two years before Remington traveled to Cuba to draw illustrations of the conflict for Hearst’s New York Journal.

Despite its repeated debunking, the tale lives on, largely because it represents apparent evidence for the  notion that Hearst and his newspapers fomented the Spanish-American War. That dubious, media-centric interpretation is, however, endorsed by no serious contemporary historian of that war.

Not only that, but Hearst denied making such a statement. So, too, did his son, William Randolph Heart Jr. In a memoir published in 1991, the son wrote:

“Pop told me he never sent any such cable. And there has never been any proof that he did.”

■ WaPo review indulges in myth, claims Bernstein’s ‘work brought down a president’ (posted January 16): The Washington Post published in mid-January a glowing review of Chasing History, Carl Bernstein’s memoir about his early days in journalism. A passage in the review said Bernstein’s “work brought down a president” — a reference to the popular and irrepressible “heroic-journalist myth” of the Watergate scandal of 1972-74.

The myth has it that Bernstein and his Post colleague, Bob Woodward, uncovered in their tireless reporting evidence that forced President Richard Nixon’s resignation in Watergate.

WJC and Woodward, at the Watergate in 2022

The brought-down-a-president claim not only is mythical; it runs counter to unequivocal denials by the likes of Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher during the Watergate period.

At the 25th anniversary of the seminal crime of Watergate — the foiled break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington in June 1972 — Graham declared at a program at the former Newseum in suburban Washington:

“Sometimes, people accuse us of bringing down a president, which of course we didn’t do, and shouldn’t have done. The processes that caused [Nixon’s] resignation were constitutional.” She was broadly alluding to the work of investigative bodies such as panels of both houses of Congress, special prosecutors, federal judges, the FBI, and the Supreme Court.

In earthier but no less unequivocal terms, Woodward also disputed the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate, once stating in an interview with the now-defunct American Journalism Review:

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

■ They ‘lit the kindling’: New memoir exaggerates Woodward, Bernstein’s agenda-setting effect in Watergate (posted October 25): A variant of the tenacious “heroic-journalist” myth is that Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate reporting had important agenda-setting effects. This, too, is a dubious interpretation. But it found expression in a memoir by the Post’s former media columnist Margaret Sullivan.

She claimed their Watergate reporting “lit the kindling” that set off investigations that brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency.

Sullivan

The Woodward-Bernstein agenda-setting effect in Watergate was weak at best. The influence of their reporting, if it much existed at all, was shared influence.

Woodward and Bernstein had plenty of company in reporting on the unfolding Watergate scandal in the summer and fall of 1972.

While Woodward and Bernstein did some commendable reporting during those early days — such as tying the likes of former Attorney General John Mitchell to the scandal — other corporate news outlets scored significant beats as well.

The New York Times was first to report about the repeated phone calls placed to Nixon’s reelection campaign by one of the five burglars arrested June 17, 1972, inside Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. The calls were made before the break-in, which was the crime that touched off the scandal.

One way to gauge Woodward and Bernstein’s agenda-setting effects is to seek traces of their reporting in the three articles of impeachment drawn up against Nixon by the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives. (Nixon resigned the presidency before the House could act on the articles of impeachment.)

Garrett M. Graff, author of the book Watergate: A New History, which came out early in the year, has pointed out that the articles of impeachment did not reflect Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting.

“In the end,” Graff wrote, “none of the Post’s exclusives through the summer and fall of 1972 would be part of the narrative told by a House committee in 1974 as it drew up its three articles of impeachment for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress.”

Graff characterized the impact of Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting as “subtle, less revelatory in the moment than it seemed in hindsight.”

Thin kindling, in other words.

■ How ‘alone’ was WaPo in reporting emergent Watergate scandal? Not very (posted May 30): Before her retirement, Sullivan made another dubious claim about the Post’s Watergate reporting, declaring in a column that Woodward and Bernstein “were almost alone on the story for months.”

That, too, is another misleading element in the media lore of Watergate.

As I pointed out in Getting It Wrong, the Post certainly had company: “rival news organizations such as the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times did not ignore Watergate as the scandal slowly took dimension during the summer and fall of 1972.

“The Los Angeles Times, for example, published an unprecedented first-person account in early October 1972 by Alfred C. Baldwin III, a former FBI agent who had acted as the lookout man in the Watergate burglary.”

As Edward Jay Epstein noted in his classic essay for Commentary about the press and Watergate, the Post and other newspapers were joined in the summer of 1972 by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, and Common Cause, a foundation promoting accountability in government, in calling attention to the emergent scandal.

Moreover, the Democratic National Committee filed a civil lawsuit against Nixon’s reelection committee, the Committee to Re-elect the President, which ultimately compelled statements under oath.

And Nixon’s Democratic opponent for president, George McGovern, often invoked Watergate in campaign appearances in summer and fall of 1972. At one point, McGovern charged that Nixon was “at least indirectly responsible” for the Watergate burglary. And McGovern termed the break-in ‘the kind of thing you expect under a person like Hitler.’”

So, no, the Post was very much not alone in reporting the emergent Watergate scandal.

Moreover, as Epstein wrote in Commentary a month before Nixon resigned in 1974, “the fact remains that it was not the press which exposed Watergate; it was agencies of government itself.”

■ Watergate footnote: WaPo’s Pulitzer-winning entry included a false story (posted August 21): Media Myth Alert contributed an intriguing footnote to the Watergate saga with a post addressing a little-known oddity in the Post’s entry that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for reporting about the emergent scandal.

The Post’s entry included an article by Bernstein and Woodward that proved false.

Media Myth Alert previously was unaware that a false story had been part of the Pulitzer-winning package.

The false report was published October 6, 1972, on the Post’s front page beneath the headline:

“Bug memos sent to Nixon aides.”

In the article, Bernstein and Woodward identified by name three men associated with Nixon’s White House or his reelection campaign. The trio supposedly had been sent “memos describing wiretapped conversations of Democratic Party officials” at offices of Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in Washington. The illegal wiretaps had been planted in late May 1972.

As it turned out, none of the men had been sent the wiretap memos. In other words, they had been falsely accused by Bernstein and Woodward — as the journalists acknowledged in All the President’s Men, their 1974 memoir about reporting the Watergate scandal.

So how did the “Bug memos” article come to be part of the Post’s Pulitzer-winning entry?

That’s a mild mystery, and Media Myth Alert — no friend of the notion that Bernstein and Woodward’s reporting brought down Nixon — doesn’t believe the Post intentionally entered a false report.

More likely, the “Bug memos” article was thought credible at the Post until sometime after the submission deadline for Pulitzer entries in 1973. The deadline that year was February 1.

As late as January 20 that year, the Post’s reporting on Watergate indicated its belief the “Bug memos” story was accurate.

While it wasn’t a major Watergate story, “Bug memos” turned out to be a story in major error. And a search of Washington Post contents at the ProQuest historical newspapers database does not indicate that it was specifically corrected by the newspaper.

The correction, as it were, appeared in All the President’s Men, which was published in June 1974, about 20 months after the “Bug Memos” article appeared.

“Three men had been wronged,” Bernstein and Woodward wrote in the book. “They had been unfairly accused on the front page of the Washington Post, the hometown newspaper of their families, neighbors, and friends.” Bernstein and Woodward said in the book they “[e]ventually became convinced” that memos the three men received “had nothing to do with wiretapping.”

WJC

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News media foment wars? Debunking a superficial history lesson

In 1897, Cuba, Debunking, Error, Furnish the war, Media myths, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on March 20, 2022 at 10:32 am

In the weeks since Russia launched its brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, a critique has tentatively emerged that hawkish media commentary is intended to push the United States to intervene in the conflict.

U.S. military intervention is a very remote prospect and the critique was only murmured before gaining full-throated expression the other day in an essay posted at the Federalist website beneath this feverish headline:

“The press has lied to drag the United States into war before. Don’t think they won’t again.”

Declared the essay: “When you see talking heads uncritically parroting propagandist stories about Ukraine that turn out to be false … you should be asking why the corporate media is so willing to spread such fake news …. It wouldn’t be the first time the press lied to pull Americans into war.”

What followed was a superficial history lesson that rested on the media myth that overheated newspaper coverage — particularly in the aftermath of the destruction of the battleship Maine in Havana’s harbor in February 1898 — pushed the country into war with Spain that year.

Almost predictably, the essay turned for support to a related media myth, that of William Randolph Hearst’s purported pledge to “furnish” a war with Spain.

“As the story goes,” the Federalist stated, “in the year before the Maine exploded, Hearst had commissioned reporter Frederic Remington to go to Cuba, where Cuban revolutionaries were skirmishing with their Spanish colonizers. When Remington sent Hearst a wire to explain he was leaving Cuba because there was no war to cover, Hearst reportedly replied, ‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.'”

The “furnish the war” anecdote has been thoroughly debunked, as readers of Media Myth Alert are aware. Qualifying the anecdote’s use with “reportedly” in no way lets the essayist off the hook for repeating an utterly dubious tale.

So let’s unpack the Federalist’s exaggeration-studded claims about Remington, Hearst, Cuba, and war.

Cuban insurgents were engaged in much more than “skirmishing with their Spanish colonizers” when Remington, an artist, traveled to the island in January 1897. He was on assignment from Hearst’s New York Journal to sketch scenes of an armed struggle that had begun in 1895. The Cuban guerilla war against Spanish rule was no trivial matter, no mere “skirmishing.” 

Such a notion is belied by the sketches Remington drew during his brief stay in Cuba. The artist’s sketches, which were given prominent display in the Journal, depicted such scenes as a scouting party of Spanish cavalry with rifles at the ready; a cluster of Cuban non-combatants trussed and bound and being herded into Spanish lines; a scruffy Cuban rebel taking aim at a small Spanish fort; a knot of Spanish soldiers dressing a comrade’s leg wound, and a formation of Spanish troops firing at insurgents.

While they weren’t Remington’s best work, the sketches made clear that he had seen war-related turmoil and violence in Cuba. There was indeed a “war to cover” when he was there.

And “war” was commonly invoked then to described the conflict. Remington’s travel companion to Cuba, Richard Harding Davis, turned readily to that word.

Remington, Davis in Cuba for Hearst

Davis, a self-absorbed novelist, playwright, and aspiring war correspondent, declared in a letter from Cuba in mid-January 1897, for example: “There is war here and no mistake.” (Later in 1897, Davis repurposed the dispatches to Hearst’s Journal as a book titled Cuba in War Time.)

War in Cuba had reached island-wide dimension by early 1897; he U.S. consul-general in Havana, Fitzhugh Lee, reported in February 1897 that Spanish forces had pacified not one Cuban province.

The conflict prompted Spain to impose harsh counter measures. These included “reconcentration” centers where Cuban non-combatants were kept effectively as prisoners amid deplorable and unsanitary conditions.

Content in newspapers other than Hearst’s further undercut the notion “there was no war to cover” in Cuba in early 1897. The New York Sun described the Cuban rebellion as a Spanish-led “war of extermination” and assailed the Spanish leader on the island, Captain-General Valeriano Weyler, as a “savage” who had turned Cuba into “a place of extermination.”

The notion that Hearst vowed in a telegram to Remington to “furnish the war” with Spain is little short of risible. The tale, after all, founders on an irreconcilable internal inconsistency: Why would Hearst pledge to “furnish the war” when war — the island-wide Cuban rebellion against Spanish rule — was the reason he sent Remington and Davis to Cuba in the first place?

The internal inconsistency reduces the “furnish the war” anecdote to an absurdity.

Nonetheless, the anecdote lives on as presumptive evidence that Hearst and his newspapers did bring about the U.S. war with Spain.

But as I wrote in my book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, the newspapers of Hearst and his rival, Joseph Pulitzer, “did not force — [they] could not have forced — the United States into hostilities with Spain over Cuba in 1898. The conflict was, rather, the result of a convergence of forces far beyond the control or direct influence of even … Hearst’s New York Journal.”

Assertions that the so-called “yellow press” of Hearst and Pulitzer brought about the war in 1898 are, I wrote, “exceedingly media-centric, often rest on the selective use of evidence, and tend to ignore more relevant and immediate factors that give rise to armed conflict.”

Foremost among those factors was Spain’s “reconcentration” policy, which caused the deaths from disease and starvation of tens of thousands of Cuban non-combatants.

That humanitarian disaster “inevitably stirred outrage and condemnation in the United States,” I wrote in Yellow Journalism. The desperate conditions in Cuba were in 1897 and early 1898 a frequent topic of reporting in the American press.

Effects of ‘reconcentration’

The newspapers of Hearst and his rivals reported on, but assuredly did not create, the terrible effects of Spain’s “reconcentration” policy.

A leading historian of that period, Ivan Musicant, has correctly observed that the abuses and suffering caused by that policy “did more to bring on the Spanish-American War than anything else the Spanish could have done.”

In the end, the humanitarian crisis on Cuba, and Spain’s inability to resolve the crisis, weighed decisively in the U.S. decision to go to war in 1898.

It was assuredly not a war brought about by newspapers.

Conspicuously absent in argument that Hearst fomented war are explanations about just how the contents of his newspapers were transformed into policy and military action. What was that mechanism?

In truth, there was no such mechanism.

As I pointed out in Yellow Journalism, there is almost no evidence that the content of the yellow press — especially during the decisive weeks following the destruction of the Maine while on a friendly visit to Havana — shaped the thinking or informed the conduct of key officials in the administration of President William McKinley.

“If the yellow press did foment the war,” I wrote, “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 [of Hearst and Pulitzer] 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.”

No, the news media do not foment war. That’s the reserve of government leaders and policymakers, inept and otherwise.

WJC

More from Media Myth Alert:

 

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‘I’ll furnish the war’: 25 reasons why it’s a towering media myth

In 1897, Anniversaries, Cuba, Debunking, Error, Furnish the war, Media myths, New York Sun, Newspapers, Quotes, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on January 10, 2022 at 9:30 am

If William Randolph Hearst ever promised to “furnish the war” with Spain in the late 19th century, the vow would have been made 125 years ago next week, in a purported exchange of telegrams with the artist Frederic Remington.

Young publisher Hearst

Although Hearst’s supposed vow is one of American journalism’s most memorable anecdotes — it has been presented as genuine in innumerable histories, biographies, newspaper and magazine accounts, broadcast reports, podcasts, and essays posted online — the evidence is overwhelming the publisher made no such pledge.

The anniversary of what is a towering media-driven myth offers an appropriate occasion to revisit the “furnish the war” anecdote and understand why embracing it as accurate is little more than sloppy history.

Considered dispassionately, the evidence offers a powerful case that Hearst, then the 33-year-old publisher of the New York Journal and San Francisco Examiner, never made such a vow.

Here are 25 reasons why:

  1. The artifacts — the telegrams between Remington and Hearst — have never turned up. Remington was in Cuba for six days in January 1897, on assignment to draw sketches for Hearst’s Journal of scenes of the Cuban armed rebellion against Spanish colonial rule. The artist purportedly cabled Hearst, requesting permission to return to New York, saying “everything is quiet” and “there will be no war.”
    Hearst supposedly replied by stating: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”
  2. The anecdote — which I have examined in my media-mythbusting book Getting It Wrong and in an earlier work, Yellow Journalism — founders on an internal inconsistency. That is, why would Hearst pledge to “furnish the war” when war — the island-wide Cuban rebellion against Spain — was the very reason he sent Remington to Cuba in the first place? The armed struggle had begun in February 1895, or almost two years before Remington traveled to Cuba on assignment.
  3. Hearst publicly denied the tale in 1907 as so much “clotted nonsense.”
  4. His eldest son also quoted Hearst as denying the anecdote. In a memoir published in 1991, Hearst’s son wrote: “Pop told me he never sent any such cable. And there has never been any proof that he did.”
    Of course, Hearst’s denials have never counted for much. That’s because he’s routinely caricatured as one of American journalism’s most disreputable characters.
  5. The anecdote lives on because it represents apparently unequivocal evidence for the  notion that Hearst brought about the Spanish-American War. That dubious, media-centric interpretation is, however, endorsed by no serious contemporary historian of the Spanish-American War.
  6. Spanish censors who rigorously controlled Cuba’s in-coming and outgoing telegraphic traffic surely would have intercepted the telegrams — had they been sent. Hearst’s presumptive vow to “furnish the war” was so provocative that undoubtedly it would have caught the attention of the censors.
    At the time of Remington’s assignment to Cuba, Spanish censorship was reported by the New York Tribune to be “more rigorous than ever.” As such, telegrams would not have flowed freely between Remington in Cuba and Hearst in New York.
  7. The censors not only would have intercepted Hearst’s provocative message, they could have been expected to share its incendiary contents with friendly Spanish (and American) newspaper correspondents on the island — leading to contemporaneous publication of the “furnish the war” exchange. There was, however, no such reporting.
  8. No one can say precisely when the purported exchange of telegrams took place. Some sources have placed the date in 1898, which clearly is in error. Remington’s only trip to Cuba before the Spanish-American War of 1898 was in January 1987. He spent six days there before leaving for New York on 16 January 1897 — 125 years ago next week — aboard the passenger steamer Seneca.

    Cuba in War Time: Repurposed dispatches

  9. After returning from Cuba, Remington privately criticized Hearst but made no mention of the presumptive exchange of telegrams. Rather, Remington complained in a letter to the journalist and author Poultney Bigelow about the mediocre techniques at Hearst’s Journal for reproducing artist sketches.
  10. Nonetheless, the illustrations Remington made in Cuba depicted unmistakable scenes of a rebellion — a scouting party of Spanish cavalry with rifles at the ready; a cluster of Cuban noncombatants trussed and bound and being herded into Spanish lines; a scruffy Cuban rebel kneeling to fire at a small Spanish fort; a knot of Spanish soldiers dressing a comrade’s leg wound, and a formation of Spanish troops firing at insurgents.
    Although they hardly were his best work, Remington’s sketches from Cuba belie the notion that he had found “everything … quiet” there.
  11. Additionally, Remington’s writings make clear he had seen a good deal of war-related violence and disruption in Cuba. Soon after his return to New York, Remington wrote a letter to the Journal’s keenest rival, the New York World, in which he disparaged the Spanish regime as a “woman-killing outfit down there in Cuba.”
    In a short magazine article in 1899, Remington recalled his assignment to Cuba for the Journal,  stating: “I saw ill-clad, ill-fed Spanish soldiers bring their dead and wounded into” Havana, “dragging slowly along in ragged columns. I saw scarred Cubans with their arms bound stiffly behind them being marched to the Cabanas,” the grim fortress overlooking the Havana harbor.
  12. Richard Harding Davis, the writer with whom Remington traveled to Cuba, never discussed the anecdote. His private correspondence, though, made clear that he loathed Hearst, indicating that Davis would not have kept silent had he been aware of a vow to “furnish the war.”

    On assignment for Hearst, 1897

  13. It was Davis who persuaded Remington to return home after just six days in Cuba. Davis’ role is quite clear from his contemporaneous correspondence, which includes no mention of Remington’s exchanging telegrams with Hearst.
    That Davis was the prime mover in Remington’s departure significantly minimizes Hearst’s presumed role in Remington’s leaving Cuba — further diminishing the likelihood the artist ever sent Hearst a telegram seeking permission to return to New York.
  14. Davis’s contemporaneous correspondence underscores that contrary to the content of Remington’s purported telegram to Hearst, “everything” was hardly “quiet” in Cuba at the time Remington would have sent the cable. In fact, Davis bluntly declared in a contemporaneous letter from Cuba:
    “There is war here and no mistake.”
    Davis repurposed his dispatches to the Journal (as well as Remington’s sketches) in a book published in 1897; its title: Cuba in War Time.
  15. Commentary in rival New York newspapers also disputes the notion that “everything” was “quiet” in Cuba in January 1897. The New York Sun, a fierce critic of Hearst’s Journal, described the rebellion as a Spanish-led “war of extermination” and condemned the Spanish leader on the island, Captain-General Valeriano Weyler, as a “savage” who had turned Cuba into “a place of extermination.”
    Even the New York Herald, which advocated diplomatic resolution to the Cuban war, referred in late January 1897 to the “destructive conflict in which neither side is able to vanquish the other by force.”
    The U.S. consul-general in Havana, a former Confederate cavalry officer named Fitzhugh Lee, wrote in early February 1897: “As a matter of fact, the war here is not drawing to a close. Not a single province is pacified.”
  16. The “furnish the war” anecdote first appeared in 1901, in a book of reminiscences by James Creelman, a self-important journalist with acute and widely known credibility problems. In the period from 1894 to 1898, Creelman’s reporting was respectively disputed in an official U.S. government report, condemned by Spanish authorities who kicked him out of Cuba, and openly mocked by fellow journalists. Given his blighted credibility, it is not out of the question that Creelman concocted the tale for the book, On the Great Highway.
  17. Creelman never explained how, where, or when he learned about the purported anecdote. It had to have been second- or third-hand, as he was not with Remington in Cuba, nor was he with Hearst in New York. Creelman at the time was in Spain.
  18. Reading Creelman’s 1901 account in context makes clear that he intended the “furnish the war” anecdote as a compliment to Hearst, as an example of Hearst’s aggressive, activist, and forward-looking “yellow journalism.” Creelman did not mean the anecdote as the condemnation it has become.

    Creelman, of blighted credibility

  19. The anecdote lie mostly dormant for years after Creelman’s book came out. It was resuscitated about the time of Hearst’s political break with the Democratic party of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hearst, a lifelong Democrat who had served in Congress, endorsed Republican Alf Landon for president over Roosevelt in 1936. Ferdinand Lundberg, the most truculent of Hearst’s biographers, uncritically cited Creelman’s account of “furnish the war” in Imperial Hearst, a slim polemic that appeared in 1936  and called for “a Congressional inquiry into the Hearst enterprises from top to bottom lest they smash American democracy.”
    The Remington-Hearst anecdote was paraphrased and incorporated in Orson Welles’ outstanding (if unmistakably anti-Hearst) film, Citizen Kane, ensuring that the tale would live on. Kane, which was released in 1941, is recognized as one of the best motion pictures, ever.
  20. It is far-fetched to suggest that Remington’s supposed claim that “everything is quiet” in Cuba, and Hearst’s presumed “I’ll furnish the war” reply were encrypted messages. In describing the Remington-Hearst exchange, Creelman gave no indication that the purported telegrams were coded, or indirect expressions in any way.
  21. Credulously embracing this tale is to believe that Hearst — a tough-minded young publisher seeking to establish a permanent foothold in New York City journalism — would have tolerated insubordination by Remington.
    Hearst gave prominent display to Remington’s sketches in the Journal, touting them in headlines as the work of the “gifted artist.” It is extremely unlikely that Hearst and his flagship newspaper would have been so generous to Remington had the artist disregarded the publisher’s explicit instructions to “remain” in Cuba.
  22. Far from being irritated and displeased with Remington, Hearst, as I pointed out in Getting It Wrong, “was delighted with his work.” He recalled years later that Remington, and Davis, “did their work admirably and aroused much indignation among Americans” about Spain’s harsh rule of the island.
  23. Hearst’s supposed vow to “furnish the war” runs counter to the Journal’s editorial positions in January 1897. In editorials at the time, the Journal was neither campaigning nor calling for U.S. military intervention in Cuba. It was, rather, anticipating the collapse of Spanish efforts to put down the rebellion.
    For example, the Journal declared at the end of January, while Davis was still in Cuba, that the insurgents needed only to persevere to secure the island’s independence. “They must now know that it is but a little more battle and struggle to win, even without the help of the great Republic where dearth of action matched verbal exuberance of sympathy,” the newspaper said in an editorial. The Journal added that Spain had “practically already lost her magnificent colony.”
    It is highly unlikely that Hearst, a hands-on publisher, would have contradicted his newspaper’s editorial views by pledging to “furnish the war.”
  24. The epigrammatic character of the purported reply to Remington is atypical of Hearst’s telegrams. He usually offered specific suggestions and instructions in messages to his representatives assigned to important tasks and missions. Had Hearst exchanged telegrams with Remington in January 1897, his messages likely would have contained much detail.
  25. The purported anecdote bears hallmarks of other prominent media myths, in that it is (a) pithy, (b) easy to remember and retell, and (c) suggestive of the presumed vast power of news media — in this case, malign power to bring about a war the country otherwise wouldn’t have entered.

As those 25 factors make clear, the Remington-Hearst anecdote is an exceedingly dubious and improbable tale, richly deserving the epithet “media-driven myth.” The weight of the evidence is overwhelmingly against the veracity of the “furnish the war” anecdote, which bears no resemblance to conditions prevailing in Cuba in January 1897.

The tale, in a word, is untenable.

WJC

More from Media Myth Alert about the Remington-Hearst myth:

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Taking stock: Top mythbusting posts of 2021

In 1897, Anniversaries, Cinematic treatments, Cuba, Debunking, Error, Hurricane Katrina, Media myths, PBS, Scandal, Television, Watergate myth, Yellow Journalism on December 28, 2021 at 9:01 am

Media Myth Alert directed attention periodically in 2021 to the appearance of well-known media-driven myths, those prominent tales about and/or by the news media that are widely believed and often retold but which, under scrutiny, dissolve as apocryphal or wildly exaggerated.

Here’s a look at the year’s five top posts at Media Myth Alert, a year that featured the media’s retelling a variety of dubious tales.

■ Watergate myth, extravagant version: Press ‘dethroned’ Nixon (posted April 24): The dominant narrative of the Watergate scandal — the signal crime of which took place nearly 50 years ago — has it that dogged reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post uncovered the crimes that brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

Nixon, before being ‘dethroned’

That I call the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate and it lives on as a mythical and irresistible fillip to journalists seeking inspiration amid the gloom pervasive in their field.

Rarely has the Watergate myth been presented as extravagantly as it was in an Esquire UK essay pegged to the 45th anniversary of the release of All the President’s Men, the movie that did much to embed the heroic-journalist trope in popular consciousness.

“It’s easy to romantici[z]e a time when people bought newspapers and presidents could be shamed,” the essay stated. “We think of simpler as better. Which is perhaps why, on its 45th anniversary, All the President’s Men, is ostensibly heralded as something of a shiny art[i]fact from an even shinier era.

“Because back then, presidents couldn’t only be shamed by the free-ish and fair-ish press, but dethroned entirely – a rare event that serves as the true life narrative backbone of All the President’s Men as it retells the Watergate scandal and The Washington Post reporters behind its excavation.”

Dethroned entirely? Heh.

All the President’s Men, the movie

Of course that’s not what happened in Watergate. Forces far more powerful than Woodward and Bernstein and the Washington Post brought about the fall of Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

As I wrote in the media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, breaking open the Watergate scandal “required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.”

Even then, I noted, “Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House. Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” of the foiled break-in at Democratic National Headquarters in June 1972.

It is, moreover, instructive to remember what Woodward has said about Watergate. He told an interviewer in 2004, 30 years after Nixon resigned:

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

PBS’ Hearst: uneddifying portrait

■  PBS’ ‘easy caricature’ of media mogul Hearst (posted September 28):  PBS documentaries are nothing if not uneven. The public broadcaster seldom hesitates to make clear which subjects it favors and which it deplores.

Fair-minded the documentaries tend not to be.

For example, the tyrannical publisher Joseph Pulitzer received fawning PBS treatment a couple of years ago, while his younger, late 19th century rival, William Randolph Hearst, was the subject of an unedifying, two-part documentary that was long on stereotype and short on fresh insight.

PBS presented Hearst essentially as a profligate rich kid who never quite grew up, who loved hi-jinks and fireworks, and possessed scant commitment to truth-telling in journalism.

Such assessments, I noted, “have been around for decades, promoted by a succession of bad biographies such as Ferdinand Lundberg’s polemical Imperial Hearst in 1936 and W.A. Swanberg’s dreadful Citizen Hearst in 1961. A more considered and even-handed treatment of Hearst was offered in David Nasaw’s The Chief, which came out in 2000.”

So it was rather odd that the PBS documentary pressed the frivolous rich-kid theme, given that it claimed to be “based on” Nasaw’s biography. And Nasaw was shown in the film frequently, offering comments about Hearst. (He was the sole Hearst biographer among the program’s several talking heads, nearly all of whom seemed eager to describe Hearst in unflattering terms.)

It was as if PBS producers settled on the frivolous rich-kid theme and ignored evidence of Hearst as a complex and innovative character whose journalism — especially his “yellow journalism” or “journalism of action” of the late 19th century — defied easy caricature.

The PBS portrait was at times tedious, and often gossipy. It emphasized Hearst’s flamboyance but regarded it as frivolous.

Hearst was flamboyant. But he and his journalism were scarcely frivolous.

■  Botched Afghanistan withdrawal was ‘Biden’s Katrina’? (posted August 27): The death and chaos that accompanied Joe Biden’s botched and precipitous withdrawal of U.S. military personnel from Afghanistan was likened to a kind of Hurricane Katrina for the president.

Misreporting Katrina, 2005

The allusion was to the damage done to President George W. Bush’s administration by its fitful federal response to the hurricane that tore into the U.S. Gulf Coast in late summer 2005, leaving much of New Orleans under water.

While faintly interesting, the analogy was cliched and badly misplaced: the hasty and unprovoked flight that Biden ordered from Afghanistan after a 20-year military commitment there, and the country’s swift takeover by Taliban extremists, was a foreign policy debacle of towering dimension.

The Afghanistan withdrawal was hardly “Biden’s Katrina.” It was scandalously worse.

Katrina was a powerful, destructive natural disaster, the aftermath of which was badly misreported. The dominant media narrative in late summer 2005 told of mayhem and unimaginable horror supposedly unleashed across New Orleans.

But as I discussed in Getting It Wrong, much of the reporting about Katrina’s aftermath — the horror, the anarchy, the city’s social disintegration — was highly exaggerated and erroneous. Few if any of the nightmarish accounts that coursed through the media proved true.

The U.S. exit from Afghanistan, on the other hand, was a bloody, self-inflicted disaster, borne of Biden’s blundering and impatience.

Hundreds of Americans and their Afghan allies were stranded as Biden’s ill-planned withdrawal effectively turned Afghanistan over to the Taliban and undid years of effort to stabilize the country where the deadly terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were plotted.

The president’s ineptitude brought reminders of the devastating observation by former defense secretary Robert Gates who, in a memoir published in 2014, wrote that Biden had “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

■  Challenging the mantra that 9/11 ‘changed everything’ (posted September 10): From the first hours after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, news outlets have promoted a mantra that the assault on commercial and military landmarks in New York and suburban Washington “changed everything” in America.

To posit that 9/11 “changed everything” has been a way to make fathomable the shock, horror, and grim theatricality of that infamous day, a way to invest September 11, 2001, with exceptional and enduring significance.

But exactly what “changed everything” meant has remained definitionally elusive — and subject to dispute. “Nothing changes everything,” columnist George Will wrote at the fifth anniversary of 9/11. (The activist Jesse Jackson said at the first anniversary that “9/11 did not change everything. It did change the subject.”)

In September, at the 20th anniversary of the attacks, the Washington Post determinedly took up the “changed everything” mantra. It devoted much of its Sunday magazine (see cover image nearby) to a collection of brief, solicited opinions purporting to describe how 9/11 wrought change in journalism, television, movies, art, fashion, theater, policing, architecture, editorial cartooning, and other fields and pursuits.

The collection was introduced with a sweeping claim that “9/11 changed the world in demonstrable, massive and heartbreaking ways.” But it ultimately was a superficial and unpersuasive attempt to support and bring dimension to the “changed everything” catchcry.

Indeed, it was striking how the Post’s collection presented at best mixed evidence of significant change incontrovertibly linked to the attacks. Many of its entries were impressionistic. Or vague. Or both.

Here, for example, is one puzzling contribution: “The post-9/11 fashion industry puts a premium on fresh faces and wily entrepreneurs. And while those celebrated young talents often move with reckless speed, the desire to create and a belief in the impossible were salvaged from the wreckage.”

The attacks of 9/11 certainly led to change — and fresh intrusions — in airport security and personal privacy. The reach of the federal government was expanded. The country went to war in Afghanistan.

But when considered closely, it is quite clear that the 9/11 attacks did not “change everything.”

They were not fatal to American political or economic power. Public opinion polls taken after 9/11 found that many Americans sensed a surge of patriotic fervor, a deeper commitment to the religious and spiritual side of life, and a newfound sense of political unity.

Such responses, however, proved fleeting. Given time, they faded.

■  The impressive and enduring appeal of journalism’s most famous jailbreak narrative (posted May 29): The remarkable and enduring appeal of American journalism’s most famous jailbreak narrative — the escape of Evangelina Cisneros from a Havana prison in October 1897 — was demonstrated anew in 2021.

The jailbreak, which was organized by a Havana-based reporter for William Randolph Hearst’s brash New York Journal, was the centerpiece of the third treatment by a novelist since the early 1990s.

Jail-breaking journalism, 1897

The escape of Cisneros, then a teenage political prisoner, represented the zenith of Hearst’s “journalism of action,” a paradigm that envisioned newspapers taking high-profile participatory roles in addressing, and remedying, wrongs of society.

The jailbreak was central to Chanel Cleeton’s The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba, which was published in May. It also was a narrative centerpiece of Daniel Lynch’s amusing if improbable Yellow, which came out in 1992, and of Amy Ephron’s White Rose, which was published in 1999 and billed as part romance, part thriller.

I read portions of Cleeton’s novel and was struck to find that it included details  first described in my 2006 book, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms. (I also reported findings about the jailbreak in an article, “Not a Hoax: New Evidence in the New York Journal’s Rescue of Evangelina Cisneros,” that was published in 2002 in the peer-reviewed scholarly journal American Journalism.)

Cleeton, however, acknowledged no debt to The Year That Defined American Journalism, which rejected the persistent but evidence-thin notion that the jailbreak was a hoax, that Cisneros was freed because Spanish authorities then ruling Cuba had been bribed to look the other way.

As I wrote in The Year That Defined American Journalism, the Cisneros jailbreak was “the successful result of an intricate plot in which Cuba-based operatives and U.S. diplomatic personnel filled vital roles” — roles that had remained obscure for more than 100 years.

To her credit, Cleeton did not embrace the jailbreak-as-hoax notion.

But her discussion of the main actors who conspired to break Cisneros from jail would be familiar to readers of The Year That Defined American Journalism.

Given her novel’s reliance on details first published in The Year That Defined American Journalism, Cleeton’s acknowledging the book by title would have been appropriate. And appreciated.

WJC

Other memorable posts of 2021:

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Media Myth Alert at 12: Recalling memorable myth-busting posts

In 'Napalm girl', Anniversaries, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Error, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Newspapers, PBS, Spanish-American War, Washington Post, Watergate myth, Yellow Journalism on October 31, 2021 at 8:59 am

Media Myth Alert today marks its 12th anniversary of calling attention to the publication or posting of prominent but exaggerated tales about media prowess and the presumed power and influence of journalists.

screen-shot-2016-09-23-at-3-53-56-pmTwelve years offers a fitting occasion to recall some memorable posts — posts that tweaked often-arrogant media outlets such as the Washington Post and PBS, called out media lapses and hypocrisy, and supported the two editions of my myth-busting book, Getting It Wrong.

The lineup that unfolds below is admittedly subjective and represents but a slice of the hundreds of essays posted since the launch of Media Myth Alert on the afternoon of Halloween, 2009. It’s nonetheless a slice that makes for pleasant reminiscence. What follows are headlines and descriptions of five of the posts that for varying reasons have stood out over the years:

■ Why Trump-Russia is hardly Watergate-Nixon (posted March 5, 2017): Long before the special counsel’s report punctured the notion that then-President Donald Trump conspired with the Russians to steal the 2016 presidential election, Media Myth Alert scoffed at the notion afoot among American journalists that the suspected Trump-Russia scandal was akin to Watergate redux.

“’Overstated’ hardly suffices in describing the media’s eagerness to find in President Donald Trump’s odd affinity for Russia parallels or echoes that bring to mind Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal,” I wrote. “Such stuff is overstated. Premature. Facile. And ahistoric.”

I added: “Casually invoking such parallels is to ignore and diminish Watergate’s exceptionality. Watergate was a constitutional crisis of unique dimension in which some 20 men, associated either with Nixon’s administration or his reelection campaign in 1972, went to prison.

“Watergate’s dénouement — Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 — was driven not by dogged reporting of the Washington Post but by Nixon’s self-destructive decision to tape-record conversations at the White House. Thousands of hours of audiotape recordings were secretly made, from February 1971 to July 1973.” (Disclosing the Watergate tapes was a story the Post missed, by the way.)

I followed up in another post a little more than two months later, writing:

“The murky Trump-Russia suspicions are still far, far from the constitutional crisis that was Watergate, the scandal that took down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency and sent some 20 of his associates to jail.”

The Trump-Russia special counsel, Robert Mueller, released his report in May 2019, rejecting suspicions that the Trump campaign or its associates conspired or coordinated with Russia — thus short-circuited eager speculation about a Watergate-type scandal that would bring down a president.

■ WaPo’s ‘five myths’ feature about Vietnam ignores ‘Cronkite Moment,’ Nixon ‘secret plan,’ ‘Napalm Girl’ (posted October 2, 2017): The Washington Post has figured often in posts at Media Myth Alert over the years. A favorite topic has been the newspaper’s unwillingness to explain or take much responsibility for its deeply erroneous reporting about Pfc. Jessica Lynch’s purported heroics early in the Iraq War.

I’ve referred to that reporting as “the most sensational, electrifying, and thoroughly botched front-page story about the early Iraq War.”

In its Sunday editions, the Post runs a fussy feature  called “five myths,” a rundown of uneven quality on a fresh topic each week.

In 2017, the newspaper addressed “five Myths” of the Vietnam War — and mentioned none of the prominent media myths of that conflicts. Not the “Cronkite Moment” of 1968, when CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, in an hour-long special report, supposedly swung public opinion against the war. Not the notion Nixon campaigned for the presidency in 1968 on a “secret plan” to end the conflict. Not the myths of the “Napalm Girl” photograph which was taken in June 1972 and supposedly hastened an end to the conflict.

No prominent media myth figured in the Post’s rundown about what it called five “deeply entrenched myths” about Vietnam. Instead, the compilation included such “myths” as: “The refugees who came to the U.S. [after the war] were Vietnam’s elite” and “American soldiers [in Vietnam] were mostly draftees.”

Those were not unimportant aspects of the war. But “deeply entrenched myths”? Certainly not as entrenched as the “Cronkite Moment.” As “Nixon’s secret plan.” As the myths of “Napalm Girl.”

■ It’s like 1948 all over again for American media (posted November 9, 2016): This essay makes the subjective short list because it was a starting point for a project that culminated in publication last year of my seventh book, Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections.

The “like 1948” essay was posted the morning after Trump’s shocking electoral college victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election — an election that Clinton, the news media, and maybe even Trump figured she would win, perhaps decisively.

Truman triumphant, 1948

The depth of surprise on the day after the election brought reminders of the 1948 election, when incumbent Harry S. Truman defeated the odds-on frontrunner, Thomas E. Dewey (see photo nearby of Truman with a Chicago Tribune front page that got it wrong).

In the day-after post, I noted that notable among the misplaced predictions of Clinton’s sure win was that of Stuart Rothenberg, who had written in August 2016 at the Washington Post’s PowerPost blog:

“Three months from now, with the 2016 presidential election in the rearview mirror, we will look back and agree that the presidential election was over on Aug. 9th.

Rothenberg added that “a dispassionate examination of the data, combined with a coldblooded look at the candidates, the campaigns and presidential elections, produces only one possible conclusion: Hillary Clinton will defeat Donald Trump in November, and the margin isn’t likely to be as close as Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney” in 2012.

screen-shot-2016-11-09-at-2-32-48-amObama defeated Romney by an electoral count of 332-206.

Trump defeated Clinton by 304 electoral votes to 227.

Clinton won the national popular vote on the strength of lopsided support among California voters. She lost the presidency by failing to carry three key Great Lakes states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — where polls and poll-based forecasts suggested she would win clearly, if not overwhelmingly.

Had Clinton won those states, she would have won the White House.

The shock outcome of 2016 is one of eight high-profile polling failures taken up in chapters of Lost in a Gallup.

The book noted that in 2016, “polls and poll-based statistical forecasts had set an election narrative that the news media embraced and locked into place. The final polling estimates showed little to challenge the dominant narrative. The election might be close, but an upset? That seemed implausible.”

Lost in a Gallup quoted Natalie Jackson, the Huffington Post analyst who forecast that Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency stood at 98.2 percent, as saying after the election that “when there are hundreds of polls all saying the same thing — as most polls did when they indicated Clinton would win—it’s easy to develop a false sense of certainty and safety in concluding that that’s what will happen.”

■ ‘They even started wars’: Nonsense in Economist’s holiday double issue (posted December 22, 2012): I’ve noted from time to time at Media Myth Alert how international news outlets are known to invoke prominent myths about American news media.

A notable example was found in the year-end double issue of Britain’s Economist magazine in 2012, in an off-beat essay about the Internet-borne resurgence of cartooning. Embedded in that account was reference to the hoary media myth of yellow journalism. It said:

“In the United States, the modern comic strip emerged as a by-product of the New York newspaper wars between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst in the late 19th century. In 1895 Pulitzer’s Sunday World published a cartoon of a bald child with jug ears and buck teeth dressed in a simple yellow shirt: the Yellow Kid. The cartoon gave the name to the new mass media that followed: ‘yellow journalism.’”

The yellow kid character was a contributing factor in the naming of “yellow journalism.” But not the sole factor.

What attracted the attention of Media Myth Alert was this passage:

“Newspapers filled with sensationalist reporting sold millions. They even started wars.”

They even started wars?

That’s a reference to the myth that in their overheated reporting of Cuba’s rebellion against Spanish colonial rule, the yellow press of Hearst and Pulitzer whipped up war fever to the extent that American military intervention against Spain became inevitable..

Economist double issue_2012The yellow press certainly reported closely about the runup to the Spanish-American War of 1898. But no serious historian believes the newspapers were important factors in bringing about the conflict.

Simply put, the yellow press did not create, nor was responsible for, the irreconcilable differences that led to war between the United States and Spain.

As I wrote in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies:

“The yellow press is not to blame for the Spanish-American-War. It did not force — it could not have forced — the United States into hostilities with Spain over Cuba in 1898. The conflict was, rather, the result of a convergence of [geopolitical and humanitarian] forces far beyond the control or direct influence of even the most aggressive of the yellow newspapers, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.”

■ Adulation for a tyrannical publisher: The Pulitzer documentary on PBS (April 14, 2019): I noted not long ago that “PBS documentaries are nothing if not uneven. … They can promote erroneous interpretations, such as the notion the American press was unwilling to stand up to red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy,” who was the subject of an “American Experience” program in 2020.

PBS documentaries also can give fawning treatment to subjects it regards highly, such as Joseph Pulitzer, the newspaper mogul who endowed the Pulitzer prizes. Pulitzer was, as I wrote in 2019 in reviewing the PBS documentary, “the beneficiary of exceptionally generous biographers.

“Now to that lineup of adulation, we can add the flattery of documentary-filmmakers.”

The PBS documentary was an 83-minute, “mostly hagiographic study of the Hungarian-born Pulitzer who, for a time in the late 19th century, was a dominant figure in New York City newspaper journalism. Pulitzer’s talents and commitments, according to the PBS treatment, were exceptional and endlessly laudatory.”

The effect of all the docu-gushing, I wrote, “was misleading.

“True, Pulitzer led a crowded, remarkable life. He did have a Midas-like touch — he became enormously wealthy as a newspaper champion of the poor, and his riches allowed him to buy opulent homes and live out his infirmity-wracked final years aboard a luxury yacht.

Pulitzer (Library of Congress)

“Pulitzer also was an irritable tyrant who routinely made enemies, who regularly upbraided subordinates, who didn’t think much of his three sons, and whose wife worked like a slave to please him. This darker side to Pulitzer wasn’t entirely ignored in the program …. It just wasn’t examined in much revealing depth.

“In the end Pulitzer’s failings, personal and journalistic, were mostly excused.”

For years, Pulitzer ran the World by remote control, as an absentee owner. “From retreats in Maine, Georgia, and Europe,” I wrote, “Pulitzer fired off a steady stream of telegrams and letters of instruction, guidance, and reproach to his editors and managers. The correspondence reveals a harsh, bullying, and dictatorial side to Pulitzer,” noting that “the effects and implications of Pulitzer’s long absences, infirmities, and distant management were not much explored” by PBS.

The topic is not insignificant because the closing years of the 19th century gave rise to one of the most controversial and poorly understood periods in American media history — the rise of yellow journalism and the at-times exaggerated reporting of the Spanish-American War and its antecedent events.

WJC

More memorable posts at Media Myth Alert:

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An easy caricature: PBS portrait of media mogul Hearst is unedifying, superficial

In 1897, Cuba, Debunking, Error, Media myths, Newspapers, Reviews, Spanish-American War, Television, Yellow Journalism on September 28, 2021 at 6:01 am

PBS documentaries are nothing if not uneven.

They can devote fawning treatment to some subjects, such as the tyrannical publisher Joseph Pulitzer, whom it profiled a couple of years ago. They can promote erroneous interpretations, such as the notion the American press was unwilling to stand up to red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy, subject of an “American Experience” program early last year.

Citizen Hearst: A superficial treatment

And they can minimize complexity about their subjects, as is the case with Citizen Hearst, a mostly superficial “American Experience” portrtait of media mogul William Randolph Hearst.

The first of two parts aired last night, and it proved unedifying. Hearst was presented as little more than a profligate rich kid who never quite grew up, who loved hi-jinks and fireworks, yet possessed scant commitment to truth-telling.

Such assessments have been around for decades, promoted by a succession of bad biographies such as Ferdinand Lundberg’s polemical Imperial Hearst in 1936 and W.A. Swanberg’s dreadful Citizen Hearst in 1961. A more considered and even-handed treatment of Hearst was offered in David Nasaw’s The Chief, which came out in 2000. 

So it is a bit odd that the PBS documentary presses the frivolous rich-kid theme, given that it claims to be “based on” Nasaw’s biography. And Nasaw is shown in the film frequently, offering comments about Hearst. (He is the sole Hearst biographer among the program’s several talking heads.)

It’s as if PBS producers settled on the frivolous rich-kid theme and ignored evidence of Hearst as a complex character whose journalism — his “yellow journalism” — defies easy caricature.

As practiced in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, “yellow journalism” was  more than merely sensational. It was a distinctive genre of newspapering. Its defining features, as I discussed in my 2001 book,Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, included:

  • the frequent use of multicolumn headlines, some of which stretched across the front page.
  • a variety of topics reported on the front page, including news of politics, war,international diplomacy, sports, and society.
  • the generous and imaginative use of illustrations, including photographs and graphic representations such as locator maps.
  • bold and experimental layouts, including those in which one report and illustration would dominate the front page. Such layouts sometimes were enhanced by the use of color.
  • a tendency to rely on anonymous sources, particularly in dispatches of leading correspondents.
  • a penchant for self-promotion, to call attention eagerly to the newspaper’s accomplishments. This tendency was notably evident in crusades against monopolies and municipal corruption.

Those elements were adopted by newspapers other than Hearst’s. Pulitzer’s World was another exponent of “yellow journalism,” as were some titles in Boston, Denver, and San Francisco, where Hearst owned and published the Examiner. But Hearst’s Journal was the newspaper most closely associated with the extremes of  “yellow journalism,” which  the PBS documentary emphasizes in considering the Spanish-American War of 1898, a controversial chapter of Hearst’s life.

The Journal, the documentary claims, offered little more than unfounded, exaggerated, and unverified reporting about the destruction in Havana harbor of the U.S. battleship Maine, a triggering event for the conflict that ended Spain’s harsh colonial rule of Cuba. At this point, the documentary would have benefited from the insight of Kenneth Whyte, author of The Uncrowned King, an outstanding biography of the early Hearst.

Whyte pointed out that when stripped from the context New York’s highly competitive newspaper market — where the Cuban struggle against Spanish rule had been an important story for several newspapers for many months — Hearst’s reporting of the Maine disaster in February 1898 and other events in the run-up to the war seems extreme and repellent.

But context matters, Whyte observed, noting:

“Hearst’s coverage [in the run-up to the war] was part of an uproarious national dialogue. His voice sounds freakish when plucked out and examined in isolation, but in the context of the journalistic conversation that erupted as the Maine sank, it sounds quite different.”

Hearst’s Evening Journal, April 1898

Indeed.

PBS often ignores context in pushing its frivolous rich-kid portrait. It misconstrues the fundamental motivation of Hearst’s approach to news-gathering in the late 19th century. Hearst called it the “journalism of action,” which meant newspapers were obliged to take high-profile participatory roles in addressing, and remedying, wrongs of society.

Hearst deployed the “journalism of action” on several fronts — from solving crimes and aiding storm victims to springing a 19-year-old political prisoner from jail in Havana in 1897.

It was an energetic brand of journalism that allowed Hearst’s newspapers to stand out. But the “journalism of action” was not, sustained. It was expensive to pursue, and Hearst’s interests in the early Twentieth Century turned decidedly to politics. Hearst expanded his stable of newspapers but made them platforms for his unfulfilled ambition to win the presidency or the New York governorship.

That Hearst failed in politics ought to tell us something about the presumed power of the press. It’s a topic that PBS sidesteps even while insisting repeatedly that Hearst wielded great influence through his media outlets.

The PBS documentary, which resumes tonight, offers little that is fresh about its subject. It turns tedious at times, and often feels gossipy. It seems impressed by Hearst’s flamboyance but regards it as frivolous.

Hearst was flamboyant. But he and his journalism were scarcely frivolous.

WJC

More from Media Myth Alert:

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The impressive and enduring appeal of journalism’s most famous jailbreak narrative

In 1897, Newspapers, Scandal, Spanish-American War, Year studies, Yellow Journalism on May 29, 2021 at 4:50 pm

American journalism’s most famous jailbreak narrative — the escape of Evangelina Cisneros from a Havana prison in October 1897 — once again has demonstrated remarkable and enduring appeal.

The jailbreak, which was organized by a Havana-based reporter for William Randolph Hearst’s brash New York Journal, is the centerpiece of a recently published fictional account —  the third treatment by a novelist since the early 1990s.

The rescue of Cisneros, then a teenage political prisoner, represented the zenith of Hearst’s “journalism of action,” a paradigm that envisioned newspapers taking high-profile participatory roles in addressing, and remedying, wrongs of society.

The jailbreak is central to Chanel Cleeton’s The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba, which was published early this month. It also was a narrative centerpiece of Daniel Lynch’s amusing if improbable Yellow, which was published in 1992, and of Amy Ephron’s White Rose, which came out in 1999 and was billed as part romance, part thriller.

I read portions of Cleeton’s novel and was struck by the reminiscence to details first described in my 2006 book, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms. (I also reported findings about the jailbreak in an article, “Not a Hoax: New Evidence in the New York Journal’s Rescue of Evangelina Cisneros,” that was published in 2002 in the peer-reviewed scholarly journal American Journalism.)

Cleeton, however, acknowledges no debt to The Year That Defined American Journalism, which specifically rejected the persistent but evidence-thin notion that the jailbreak was a hoax, that Cisneros was freed because Spanish authorities then ruling Cuba had been bribed to look the other way.

I wrote in The Year That Defined American Journalism that the Cisneros jailbreak instead was “the successful result of an intricate plot in which Cuba-based operatives and U.S. diplomatic personnel filled vital roles” — roles that had remained obscure for more than 100 years.

To her credit, Cleeton does not embrace the jailbreak-as-hoax notion.

But her discussion of the main actors who conspired to break Cisneros from jail certainly would be familiar to readers of The Year That Defined American Journalism.

Cisneros in 1898

Indeed, several characters discussed in The Year That Defined American Journalism figure in Cleeron’s novel.

They include:

Karl Decker, the jailbreak’s organizer who nominally was the Journal’s correspondent in Havana; Carlos Carbonnel, the Cuban-American banker who secluded Cisneros at his home after the jailbreak and who married her several months later; Walter B. Barker, the headstrong U.S. consular officer in north-central Cuba who acted as Cisneros’ guardian aboard the New York-bound steamer on the final leg of her escape from Havana, and William B. MacDonald and Francisco (Paco) DeBesche, who were Decker’s accomplices in the jailbreak.

Several previously undisclosed details about the Cisneros escape were found in my review of an unpublished manuscript of Fitzhugh Lee, the senior U.S. diplomat in Cuba from 1896 until the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in April 1898. The manuscript offered insights “not to be found in other sources,” I noted in The Year That Defined American Journalism.

Lee’s manuscript and his other papers at the University of Virginia — which, at my urging, were opened to scholars in 2001 — also make clear that he, his wife, and daughter took exceptional interest in the plight of Cisneros (whose full name was Evangelina Cossio y Cisneros).

At the time of her escape, she was 19-years-old and had spent 15 months in captivity in Havana’s notorious jail for women, Casa de Recogidas, without being tried.

She was suspected by Spanish authorities of complicity in an assault on a senior Spanish officer on the Isle of Pines (now the Isle of Youth); Cisneros said the officer, Colonel José Bérriz, had made unwelcome advances toward her. The Cisneros case unfolded during the Cuban rebellion against Spain’s colonial rule, an insurgency that began in 1895 and had spread across Cuba by 1897.

Spanish authorities imposed harsh conditions on Cubans in a failed attempt to put down the rebellion, which eventually brought U.S. intervention and the Spanish-American War.

His manuscript suggests that Fitzhugh Lee, a nephew of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, was aware of the plot to free Cisneros. But he had plausible deniability, given that he was on home leave in the United States when Cisneros escaped in the small hours of October 7, 1897.

Two days later, Cisneros was dressed as a boy and brought aboard the steamer Seneca, which reached New York October 13.

In keeping with his paradigm of activist journalism, Hearst organized a thunderous outdoor reception for Cisneros and Decker, who, under an assumed name, had separately fled Cuba aboard a Spanish-flagged vessel. Nearly 75,000 people came to Madison Square, a turnout the Journal described as “the greatest gathering New York has seen since the close of the [civil] war” in 1865.

The jailbreak and flight of Evangelina Cisneros make for a remarkable story, one without direct equivalent in American journalism. It is a complex and untidy narrative, too. As I wrote in The Year That Defined American Journalism, “to examine the Cisneros affair in any detailed way is to confront a tangle of contradiction, exaggeration, and misdirection.”

Scrubbing jailhouse floors (New York Journal)

The Journal, for example, probably exaggerated the conditions of her confinement, suggesting that among other indignities she was commanded to scrub the jailhouse floors. Fitzhugh Lee publicly scoffed at such accounts.

Cleeton hinted at the complexity of the jailbreak narrative, writing in an author’s note at the close of her novel, “There were times in telling Evangelina’s story that truth felt stranger than fiction,” adding that “there was no need for dramatic embellishment.”

She said her primary source was The Story of Evangelina Cisneros, which the Journal had arranged for publication in late 1897, based on reporting by Decker and others. The book, however, contained almost no detail about the plot to free her; no reference by name to Decker’s co-conspirators; no specific mention of Carlos Carbonell, the bachelor-banker who, as Lee’s manuscript makes clear, was vital to the success of the covert operation.

Story of Evangelina Cisneros was the only work cited specifically by Cleeton, who she said she “utilized” more than 100 sources “to research different aspects of the novel.”

Given the novel’s reliance on details first published in The Year That Defined American Journalism, acknowledging the book by name would have been fitting.

WJC

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Taking stock: Top mythbusting posts of 2019

In Debunking, Error, Media myths, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Washington Post, Watergate myth on December 28, 2019 at 7:44 am

Media Myth Alert directed attention in 2019 to the appearance of well-known media-driven myths, those prominent tales about and/or by the news media that are widely believed and often retold but which, under scrutiny, dissolve as apocryphal or wildly exaggerated.

Here’s a look back at the year’s five top posts at Media Myth Alert which, in late October, marked its 10th anniversary. The Washington Post figured in three of the year’s top posts.

■ Impeachment hearings prompt media references to heroic-journalist myth of Watergate (posted November 27): It doesn’t take much for journalists to conjure the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate. It’s a trope that’s readily invoked but often too good to check out.

An almost-predictable by-product of the impeachment hearings conducted late in the year by the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee were media references to the myth that the Post’s reporting brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency in the Watergate scandal.

Among the references was that of the Post’s own managing editor, Cameron Barr, who declared in a speech in November at the University of Oxford that “Nixon’s resignation was brought to pass by our coverage of the political scandal known as Watergate.”

Brought to pass?

The phrase means caused to happen, and the Post’s reporting did not cause Nixon’s resignation to happen.

For years, senior staff at the Post dismissed or scoffed at the mythical notion the newspaper’s reporting brought down Nixon. Katharine Graham, the newspaper’s publisher during Watergate, said in 1997, at the 25th anniversary of the scandal’s seminal crime, the burglary at Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972:

“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.”

When asked about his “brought to pass” remarks at Oxford, Barr replied by parsing his words:

“You’ll note that I didn’t say that The Post brought down Nixon or took Nixon down or got Nixon – those mischaracterizations [sic] my colleagues have rejected and rightly so. As do you.

“I said The Post’s reporting brought it to pass, and my evidence for that is the historical record. We did our jobs as journalists, setting in motion other factors and forces that compelled him to step down.”

Nice try.

Not only did the Post’s reporting not bring to pass Nixon’s resignation, it’s quite a stretch to say that the Post’s reporting set in motion, or even much contributed to, the vastly more important investigations by subpoena-wielding federal authorities who did uncover the evidence that brought to pass Nixon’s resignation.

As Edward Jay Epstein pointed out in his classic essay about the news media and Watergate, “even in publicizing Watergate, the press was only one among a number of institutions at work.”

■ TV made all the difference in McCarthy’s fall, Watergate? Hardly (posted September 29): The Post’s media columnist, Margaret Sullivan, made sweeping claims in late September that television had “made all the difference in 1954″ in exposing and bringing down the red-baiting senator, Joseph R. McCarthy. She further wrote that during the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973, television had had a “disastrous effect on Richard Nixon’s presidency.”

Such interpretations may reassure journalists, reminding them of their presumed power and influence. Media-driven myths tend to have such an effect. But it’s exceedingly mediacentric to claim television was decisive in McCarthy’s fall or in Watergate’s outcome.

If anything, television was a lagging factor in raising challenges to McCarthy and his communists-in-government witch hunt. As for the Watergate hearings, it wasn’t their televised character that had a “disastrous effect” on Nixon’s presidency; it was what the hearings uncovered that proved decisive.

Sullivan wrote in her column: “The moment of truth for McCarthy … came in televised hearings when a lawyer for the U.S. Army shut down the senator with his damning accusation: ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?’”

That encounter took place June 9, 1954. But it hardly “shut down the senator.”

McCarthy at map; Welch, head in hand

The hearing transcript show that McCarthy was quick to reply to the “no sense of decency” remark by the Army’s chief counsel, Joseph N. Welch. McCarthy then launched into a riff about a communist-linked organization to which a young colleague of Welch had belonged.

Television came late to the McCarthy scourge. For months, even years, before 1954, print journalists such as Drew Pearson, a nationally syndicated columnist, and Richard Rovere, a writer for the New Yorker, had directed attention to the McCarthy’s exaggerated allegations.

And Pearson, for his work, was physically assaulted by McCarthy in December 1950.

Televised coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973 was riveting. But the greatest contribution came from what Senate staffers learned: They found that Nixon had secretly made audio tapes of conversations in the Oval Office of the White House.

Ultimately, when they were pried from Nixon’s possession, the tapes revealed that the president knew about and approved a plan to divert the FBI’s investigation into the scandal’s signal crime — the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972.

Without the tapes, it’s unlikely Nixon’s guilt in Watergate would have been conclusively demonstrated. That was the interpretation of, among others, Watergate’s preeminent historian, Stanley I. Kutler.

“Absent the tapes, Nixon walks,” Kutler said several years ago. “You had to have that kind of corroborative evidence to nail the president of the United States.”

■ Newspaper rant deplores “debasement of reality” but invokes prominent media myth (posted January 8): The Seattle Times seemed almost apoplectic early in the year in deploring what it termed “the debasement of reality” in “the age of Trumpism,” asseting that “lies” had become “the new currency of political discourse.”

It was an over-the-top screed that appeared in the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. It also extolled journalism, saying “more often than not” over the years, “reporters got it right, from uncovering the ghastly conditions in slaughterhouses [presumably a reference to Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle] to forcing a president’s resignation in the Watergate scandal.”

The allusion to “forcing a president’s resignation” was, of course, to the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for the Post; around them revolve the heroic-journalist trope, which long ago became the mythical dominant narrative of Watergate.

In reality, forcing Nixon’s resignation in Watergate wasn’t the work of Woodward and Bernstein. Or of any journalist or news organization.

As Woodward once said, in an interview with the old American Journalism Review:

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

Or as Ben Bradlee, the Post’s executive editor during Watergate, once declared:

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

And as I noted in my media-mythbusting book Getting It Wrong, rolling up a sprawling scandal like Watergate required the collective if not always coordinated efforts of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

And even then, I wrote, Nixon likely would have completed his presidential term if not for revelations about the recordings he secretly made of conversations at the Oval Office — a pivotal Watergate story that Woodward and Bernstein missed, by the way.

“Only when compelled by the Supreme Court,” I wrote in Getting It Wrong, “did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” of the June 1972 break-in at Democratic National Headquarters, the Watergate scandal’s seminal crime.

Nixon resigned in August 1974.

■ “Fake news about fake news”: Enlisting media myth to condemn Trump’s national emergency (posted February 17): Early in the year, the Salt Lake Tribune turned editorially to the hoary media myth about William Randolph Hearst and his purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain in the late 19th century. The Tribube invoked the myth as a way to condemn President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to add miles of barriers along the southern U.S.border, to stem illegal immigration.

“You want fake news?” the Tribune‘s editorial stated. “Here’s some fake news about fake news.”

In discussing Hearst’s debunked vow (which supposedly was contained in a telegram to the artist Frederic Remington, who was on assignment in Spanish-ruled Cuba in early 1897), the newspaper said:

“The story goes that when he was told by Frederick [sic] Remington, the already-famous illustrator he had sent to Cuba to document supposed battles there, that there were no battles to record, Hearst famously replied, ‘You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.’”

The Remington-Hearst exchange supposedly was done by cable. But the telegrams have never turned up. Hearst denied having sent such a message and Remington, apparently, never discussed it.

Had such messages been sent, moreover, Spanish authorities surely would have intercepted and denounced them as Yankee meddling.

Remington sketch of ‘Cuban war’ (New York Journal)

Not only that, but the “furnish the war” anecdote is illogical because war — the rebellion in Cuba against Spanish rule — was the reason Hearst sent Remington to the island. Remington was to draw sketches of the uprising. And he did.

Given the context — given the war in Cuba — it would have made no sense at all for Hearst to send a telegram, vowing to “furnish the war.”

The Tribune editorial acknowledged the Remington-Hearst tale is “thought to be apocryphal at best.” Even so, the newspaper said, the anecdote was “too good” not to turn to at “appropriate moments.”

Interesting argument.

But if it’s “apocryphal at best,” why would any news organization invoke the anecdote, given that media myths inevitably impugn and undermine the truth-telling objective of American journalism? Enlisting myth and falsehood scarcely makes an editorial argument more compelling. Or more coherent.

Not Hearst’s war

The Tribune’s editorial didn’t stop there. It also claimed that Hearst and the activist “yellow journalism“ he practiced “basically started the Spanish-American War as a stunt to boost newspaper sales.”

Hearst “basically started the Spanish-American War as a stunt to boost newspaper sales”?

Hardly.

The war’s causes went far beyond newspaper content, however exaggerated, and centered on the humanitarian crisis resulting from Spain’s cruel tactics to put down the Cuban rebellion.

Of course, it’s far less complicated to blame the long ago war on Hearst and his flamboyant yellow journalism.

Media myths are nothing if not simplistic.

■ Adulation for a tyrannical publisher: The Pulitzer documentary on PBS (posted April 14): PBS aired in April an 83-minute, mostly hagiographic study of the Hungarian-born Joseph Pulitzer who, for a time in the late 19th century, was a dominant figure in New York City newspaper journalism.

In the PBS treatment, Pulitzer’s talents and commitments seemed endlessly laudatory.

The documentary tells us that Pulitzer was an avid reader, a polyglot, a natural reporter, an accomplished chess player, an unstoppable workaholic. He possessed a Midas-like touch, an uncompromising commitment to investigative journalism, and a “lifelong passion for democratic idealism.” He was a quick study who, before coming to New York, established the most successful newspaper in St. Louis. He served briefly in Congress. He led the fund-raising campaign for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal. He faced down criminal libel while taking on a U.S. president. He was a fearless crusader who gave voice to the voiceless. He was devoted to the interests of poor people, from whom he commanded unswerving loyalty.

Quite a guy, that Joseph Pulitzer. Not even his shooting and wounding a building contractor in Missouri derailed his career or darkened his reputation.

But the effect of the documentary’s gushing wasn’t uplifting or inspiring.

It was misleading.

True, Pulitzer led a crowded, remarkable life. He did have a Midas-like touch — he became enormously wealthy as a newspaper publisher, and his riches allowed him to buy opulent homes and live out his infirmity-wracked final years aboard a luxury yacht.

Pulitzer the irritable (Library of Congress)

Pulitzer was an irritable tyrant who routinely made enemies, who regularly upbraided subordinates, who didn’t think much of his three sons, and whose wife worked like a slave to please him.

The meaner, darker side to Pulitzer wasn’t entirely ignored in the program, which PBS titled “Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People.” It just wasn’t examined in much revealing depth.

In the end Pulitzer’s profound failings, personal and journalistic, were mostly excused.

There was more complexity to Pulitzer’s career and character than PBS seemed inclined to investigate.

It was not made very clear, for example, that Pulitzer’s time in New York City journalism was relatively brief. He acquired the New York World in 1883, launched an evening edition in 1887, and left the city in 1890 when he was in his early 40s. Deteriorating health and failing eyesight forced him into absentee ownership until his death in 1911.

After 1890, Pulitzer rarely visited the World building.

For years, he tried to run the newspaper by remote control, from retreats in Maine, Georgia, and Europe. To his editors and managers, he regularly fired off telegrams and letters that were full of instructions, guidance, and reproach. This correspondence reveals a harsh, bullying, and dictatorial component to Pulitzer’s personality.

The documentary-makers might well have plumbed the correspondence for its insights. And they might have considered how effectively, or poorly, Pulitzer ran his newspapers from afar, in what was a fin-de-siècle experiment in mobile, long-distance executive management.

But the effects and implications of Pulitzer’s long absences, infirmities, and remote-control management were not much explored.

The memory of Joseph Pulitzer has been boosted over the decades by a succession of exceptionally generous biographers.

To that lineup of adulation, the flattery of documentary-filmmakers can now be added.

WJC

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In ‘Writer’s Almanac’ podcast, Garrison Keillor recycles ‘furnish the war’ media myth

In 1897, Debunking, Error, Furnish the war, Media myths, Quotes, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on May 29, 2019 at 2:49 pm

Four years ago, storyteller Garrison Keillor dredged up the tale of William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain in 1898. It’s a hoary media myth that Keillor passed off as true on his “Writer’s Almanac” podcast.

Not long ago, Keillor recycled the same claim, in the same words, on the same platform.

As he had in 2015, Keillor declared on “Writer’s Almanac”:

“In 1898, Hearst sent the artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to cover the war. And Remington wrote home, ‘There is no war. Request to be recalled.’

“And he was told, ‘You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.’ And the Hearst newspapers did their best to promulgate what came to be called the Spanish-American War.”

So let’s again unpack Keillor’s claims:

For starters, Hearst denied sending such a message (a denial typically overlooked or ignored) and Remington apparently never addressed it.

Moreover, as I discussed in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, the tale lives on despite a near-total absence of supporting documentation. True, Hearst sent Remington to Cuba. That was in January 1897 and the artist’s assignment for Hearst’s flamboyant New York Journal was to draw sketches of the Cuban rebellion against Spanish colonial rule — an island-wide uprising that gave rise in April 1898 to the Spanish-American War.

The timing and context of Remington’s trip to Cuba undercuts the “furnish the war” anecdote. Indeed, it poses an irreconcilable internal inconsistency, as it would have been illogical of Hearst to have vowed to “furnish the war” because war — the Cuban rebellion — was the reason he sent Remington to Cuba in the first place.

In any case, the telegrams Remington and Hearst supposedly exchanged have never turned up. And Spanish authorities, who then controlled telegraphic traffic to and from Cuba, surely would have intercepted and called attention to an incendiary message such as Hearst’s — had it been sent.

Remington

The original source of the “furnish the war” anecdote was On the Great Highway, a slim volume of reminiscences published in 1901. The author, James Creelman, was a portly, cigar-chomping journalist prone to hyperbole, self-promotion, and exaggeration.

Creelman mentioned Hearst’s presumed “vow” in passing in On the Great Highway and did not say how or where he learned about the purported Remington-Hearst exchange.

Nor did he say exactly when the supposed exchange took place, writing only that it was “some time before the destruction of the battleship Maine in the harbor of Havana,” which was in mid-February 1898. The only time Remington was in Cuba before the explosion that destroyed the Maine was in January 1897, on the assignment for Hearst.

The Remington-Hearst anecdote is often invoked, as Keillor has, to promote a superficial and misleading image of Hearst as war-monger, as an unscrupulous newspaper publisher whose recklessness brought on the Spanish-American War.

But that, too, is a hoary if tenacious media myth.

By email sent last week through the “Writer’s Almanac” website, I asked why Keillor “periodically recycles the media myth about William Randolph Hearst and the purported vow to ‘furnish the war’ with Spain.” I shared links in the email to Getting It Wrong and to Media Myth Alert.

The email went unacknowledged and unanswered.

WJC

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Adulation for a tyrannical publisher: The Pulitzer documentary on PBS

In 1897, Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Reviews, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on April 14, 2019 at 1:07 pm

Pulitzer (Library of Congress)

Joseph Pulitzer, the newspaper mogul who endowed the Pulitzer prizes, was the beneficiary of exceptionally generous biographers.

Now to that lineup of adulation, we can add the flattery of documentary-filmmakers.

PBS the other night aired an 83-minute, mostly hagiographic study of the Hungarian-born Pulitzer who, for a time in the late 19th century, was a dominant figure in New York City newspaper journalism. Pulitzer’s talents and commitments, according to the PBS treatment, were exceptional and endlessly laudatory.

At various points in the program we’re told that Pulitzer was an avid reader, an accomplished chess player, a polyglot, a natural reporter, an unstoppable workaholic who devoted day and night to the office. He possessed a Midas-like touch, an uncompromising commitment to investigative journalism, and a “lifelong passion for democratic idealism.” He was a quick study who, before coming to New York, established the most successful newspaper in St. Louis. He served briefly in Congress. He led the fund-raising campaign for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal. He faced down criminal libel while taking on a U.S. president. He was a fearless crusader who gave voice to the voiceless. He was devoted to the interests of poor people, from whom he commanded unswerving loyalty.

Quite a guy, Joseph Pulitzer. Not even his shooting and wounding a building contractor in Missouri could derail his career.

The effect of all the gushing wasn’t exactly stirring or uplifting. It was misleading.

True, Pulitzer led a crowded, remarkable life. He did have a Midas-like touch — he became enormously wealthy as a newspaper champion of the poor, and his riches allowed him to buy opulent homes and live out his infirmity-wracked final years aboard a luxury yacht.

Pulitzer also was an irritable tyrant who routinely made enemies, who regularly upbraided subordinates, who didn’t think much of his four three sons, and whose wife worked like a slave to please him. This darker side to Pulitzer wasn’t entirely ignored in the program, which PBS titled “Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People.” It just wasn’t examined in much revealing depth. In the end Pulitzer’s failings, personal and journalistic, were mostly excused.

There was more complexity to Pulitzer’s career and character than PBS seemed inclined to investigate in a program that may have been intended  as a tonic and reminder to contemporary American journalism.

It was not made very clear, for example, that Pulitzer’s time in New York City journalism was relatively brief. He acquired the New York World in 1883, launched an evening edition in 1887, and left the city in 1890 when he was in his early 40s. Deteriorating health and failing eyesight forced him into absentee ownership until his death in 1911.

After 1890 Pulitzer pursued a peripatetic life, traveling constantly in search of relief as his health declined. He suffered nervous ailments and depression. He was acutely sensitive to noise. He went blind. Pulitzer seldom returned to the World.

And yet for years, he tried to run the newspaper by remote control. From retreats in Maine, Georgia, and Europe, Pulitzer fired off a steady stream of  telegrams and letters of instruction, guidance, and reproach to his editors and managers. The correspondence reveals a harsh, bullying, and dictatorial side to Pulitzer.

The documentary-makers might have plumbed that correspondence for its insights. They might have considered how effectively, or poorly, Pulitzer ran his newspapers from afar, in a fin-de-siècle experiment in mobile, long-distance executive management.

But the effects and implications of Pulitzer’s long absences, infirmities, and distant management were not much explored. The topic is not unimportant because the closing years of the 19th century gave rise to one of the most controversial and poorly understood periods in American media history — the rise of yellow journalism and the at-times exaggerated reporting of the Spanish-American War and its antecedent events.

Among the antecedents was the emergence in New York City journalism of William Randolph Hearst, a wealthy miner’s son who was just 32-years-old in 1895 when he bought the moribund New York Journal and promptly challenged Pulitzer’s dominant but declining World.

Hearst’s arrival, as I discussed in my book, 1897: The Year that Defined American Journalism, was “a seismic event in the city’s journalism.”

The impression left by PBS was that Hearst came to New York from newspapering success in San Francisco to take on Pulitzer, mano-a-mano. But that was more effect than guiding objective. As Kenneth Whyte made clear in his outstanding biography, The Uncrowned King, Hearst recognized that success in New York was vital to his establishing and securing a media empire. His interests went beyond besting Pulitzer and the World.

Hearst, under the pen of Homer Davenport

Hearst, as drawn by Homer Davenport

Pulitzer’s correspondence showed that he was well aware of Hearst and his Journal, which offered aggressive, colorful journalism for a penny. The World sold for two cents.

While the PBS documentary makes no mention of this, the challenge of Hearst’s Journal prompted Pulitzer to halve the price of the World — an ill-advised move that disrupted the newspaper‘s revenue stream.

By 1897, Pulitzer was remotely ordering up staff reductions and cost-cutting measures. In May that year, for example, Pulitzer told the World’s general manager:

“I want a radical reduction of expenses from beginning to end of every department, wherever it is reasonable and feasable[sic]. … Retrenchment should be based upon the idea of absolute necessity. Unless you do something neither morning nor the evening [editions] can pay expenses the next three months. … There is a lot of deadwood on the payroll anyhow.”

War with Spain further battered the newspaper’s bottom line. That conflict was brief but enormously expensive to cover. While readership surged, advertising revenues dropped off, and newsprint prices climbed. (Hearst’s Journal figured its war-reporting expenses exceeded $750,000 — the equivalent today of almost $23 million. The World‘s expenses were likely less than that, but were substantial in any case.)

PBS seemed keen to excuse Pulitzer for the newspaper’s overheated coverage of the runup to the war, especially its graphic and at times exaggerated reporting of the destruction of the USS Maine.

For reasons that remain disputed, the Maine blew up in Havana harbor in mid-February 1898, killing 266 American sailors. It was a triggering event for the Spanish-American War, which was waged in theaters in the Caribbean and in Asia and ended Spain’s harsh colonial rule of Cuba and the Philippines.

To his “great credit,” we’re told by one of the experts PBS interviewed, Pulitzer “later regretted his role in that episode.” Hearst, we’re also told, entertained no second thoughts. The apologia was emblematic of the program’s eagerness to look beyond Pulitzer’s failings and flaws.

Commendably, the treatment of the Spanish-American War veered clear of the hoary media myth that sensational newspaper reporting whipped up public opinion to such an extent that the conflict became inevitable.

But the documentary did present a clichéd description of “yellow journalism,” calling it “overheated, entertaining, and often inaccurate news reporting.”

In fact, “yellow journalism” was a genre of urban American journalism characterized by bold typography, frequent use of multicolumn headlines, generous use of illustrations, a keen taste for self-promotion, and an inclination to take an activist role in news reporting.

Shorthand for sensationalism “yellow journalism” was not.

WJC

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