W. Joseph Campbell

Posts Tagged ‘Yellow Journalism’

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BBC calls Hearst vow apocryphal, quotes it anyway

In 1897, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on July 15, 2011 at 10:28 am

Apocryphal but still quotable.

That’s how Britain’s venerable broadcaster, the BBC, treated the mythical anecdote about media titan William Randolph Hearst and his purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain in the late 19th century.

In an article posted online yesterday, the BBC described Hearst as the “definitive [news] baron” and declared:

“He’s credited with the invention of tabloid journalism in the 1890s when his New York Journal began a bitter circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. He also had a reputation as a warmonger.

“‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,’ goes an apocryphal instruction he was supposed to have sent in a telegram to an illustrator in Havana.”

That’s right, the line is apocryphal. What, then, is the point in using it? As a none-too-clever, back-handed way of buttressing the dubious notion that Hearst and his newspapers were capable of fomenting a war?

That’s sloppy journalism from a leading international news organization.

As I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain is a particularly tenacious media-driven myth — a prominent but dubious tale about journalism that masquerades as factual.

I note that the tale about Hearst’s vow “has achieved unique status as an adaptable, hardy, all-purpose anecdote, useful in illustrating any number of media sins and shortcomings.

“It has been invoked to illustrate the media’s willingness to compromise impartiality, promote political agendas, and indulge in sensationalism. It has been used, more broadly, to suggest the media’s capacity to inject malign influence into international affairs.”

Hearst: Didn't say it

Reasons for doubting the presumptive Hearstian vow are many, I point out in Getting It Wrong, and include the fact that the telegram in which Hearst supposedly made the statement — in an exchange with the artist Frederic Remington, on assignment to Cuba — has never turned up.

Plus, Hearst denied making such a vow.

Not only that, but the anecdote lives on lives on despite what I call “an irreconcilable internal inconsistency.” That is, it would have been absurd for Hearst to vow to “furnish the war” because war— specifically, the Cuban rebellion against Spanish colonial rule— was the reason he sent Remington to Cuba in the first place.

The artist was in Cuba for just six days in January 1897. By that time, the Cuban rebellion — a war for political independence — had reached islandwide proportions. “Anyone reading U.S. newspapers in early 1897 would have been well aware that Cuba was a theater of a nasty war,” I write in Getting It Wrong.

Given the context, Hearst’s purported vow is utterly illogical.

And to invoke the anecdote knowing that it’s apocryphal is little short of disingenuous.

The BBC’s reference to Hearst’s being “credited with the invention of tabloid journalism in the 1890s” also is questionable.

Hearst’s style of flamboyant journalism certainly helped inspire the epithet “yellow journalism,” but he was no father of tabloid journalism.

If anything, Hearst was a latecomer to that genre.

As David Nasaw wrote in The Chief, his admirably even-handed biography of Hearst, the press baron didn’t embrace the tabloid until the 1920s “because he was not comfortable with the format.

“He  had no interest in publishing a picture newspaper that had little room for political coverage, columns, cartoons, and the editorials he cared so much about.”

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post.

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Scandalously wrong: AP roundup on media scandals errs on yellow press

In Debunking, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on July 14, 2011 at 7:37 am

The Associated Press wire service cobbled together a superficial roundup about scandals in American journalism — and in doing so exaggerated the role of the yellow press in bringing on war with Spain in 1898.

The roundup, posted yesterday, was pegged to Rupert Murdoch’s troubles in Britain and the recent demise of the media mogul’s scandal-ridden Sunday tabloid, News of the World.

“Before the technology existed for Rupert Murdoch’s journalists to hack into phone records,” the roundup began, “past generations of dubious reporters have given readers 4-foot-tall furry creatures living on the moon, a bogus 8-year-old heroin addict and a nonexistent interview with a sick president that won a Pulitzer Prize.”

All sounds interesting.

But the roundup soon turned listy, bouncing from case to case with scant detail or analysis — a failing common to hurriedly prepared wire service compilations.

And the roundup was scandalously wrong in stating unsubstantiated claims about the yellow press and the Spanish-American War.

“During the ‘yellow journalism’ era of the 1890s,” AP’s roundup declared, “powerful publishers Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal whipped up a frenzy with false or exaggerated stories about Spanish rulers in Cuba, leading to the Spanish-American War.”

Let’s unpack that paragraph.

First, there’s little to no evidence that the content of the Hearst and Pulitzer’s newspapers “whipped up” any kind of frenzy related to Spain’s rule of Cuba. Second, the yellow press wasn’t much exaggerating in reporting about the effects of Spain’s harsh policies on the Cuban people.

Hearst and Pulitzer’s newspapers certainly were advocates of Cuban self-rule. But even at their most egregious — in the days following the destruction in February 1898 of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbor — the content of those newspapers stirred little frenzy among Americans.

As I wrote in my 2001 work, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, Hearst’s Journal and Pulitzer’s World “were undeniably extreme in their reporting, especially in the aftermath of the Maine’s destruction.

“But their excesses,” I noted, “were not widely shared in the U.S. press; the excesses in fact were roundly deplored and even ridiculed. That they influenced many people, or whipped Americans ‘to a white heat’ is doubtful: Several contemporaneous sources describe the sober calm with which the American public and many newspapers awaited the official U.S. report about the cause of the Maine’s destruction.”

The Nation, for example, observed in March 1898: “Nothing could be more curious than the contrast between the wild aspect of the first pages of our [yellow journals] and the calm of the persons who are seen reading them.”

Nor was the yellow press exaggerating the deplorable conditions in Spanish-ruled Cuba, where a rebellion begun in 1895 had soon reached islandwide proportions.

Humanitarian disaster

Spain not only sent 200,000 troops in an attempt to put down the rising; senior Spanish leaders in Cuba imposed what they called a policy of reconcentración, or reconcentration, in which old men, women, and children — non-combattants — were herded into garrison towns.

The policy was intended to deprive Cuban rebels of food, supplies, and logistical support.

But the consequences were disastrous.

The Cuban non-combattants suffered enormously under reconcentración; tens of thousands of them died from hunger, disease, and malnutrition.

The effects of reconcentración drew the frequent attention of U.S. newspapers of all kinds — yellow and otherwise.

It was the humanitarian crisis on Cuba — and Spain’s inability to resolve the crisis — that weighed significantly in the U.S. decision to go to war in April 1898. The often-flamboyant yellow press was a non-factor.

WJC

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Yellow journalism ‘brought about Spanish-American War’? But how?

In Debunking, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on July 13, 2011 at 8:03 am

Not to blame: Hearst’s ‘Evening Journal’

The hoary claim that the yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer brought on the Spanish-American War is often asserted but never persuasively substantiated.

It’s a notion that suggests the worst tendencies of the news media — that in extreme cases, they media can plunge the country into war, as Hearst and Pulitzer supposedly did with the sometimes-inflammatory content of their New York City newspapers.

Although the claim was long ago demolished as a media-driven myth, it remains too good not to be true, too delicious to resist.

It was asserted without substantiation the other day in a commentary posted online by the Scripps Howard news service.

“In fact,” wrote the commentary’s author, Dan K. Thomasson, “yellow journalism was founded in New York by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst and even brought about the Spanish-American War. But as the competition began to thin and more truth-smitten journalists took over, respectability began making inroads and ultimately won the day — with an exception or two.”

Left unaddressed was just how the yellow journalism of Hearst and Pulitzer managed to accomplish that trick: By what mechanism was the content of their newspapers transformed into policy and military action?

In fact, there was no such mechanism.

As I noted in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, top officials in the administration of President William McKinley largely disregarded the content of the yellow press. They certainly didn’t turn to it for guidance in policymaking.

“There is,” I wrote, “almost no evidence that the content of the yellow press, especially during the decisive weeks following the Maine’s destruction [in Havana harbor in February 1898], shaped the thinking, influenced the policy formulation, or informed the conduct of key White House officials.

“If the yellow press did foment the war,” I added, “researchers should be able to find some hint of, some reference to, that influence in the personal papers and the reminiscences of policymakers of the time.

“But neither the diary entries of Cabinet officers nor the contemporaneous private exchanges among American diplomats indicate that the yellow newspapers exerted any influence at all. When it was discussed within the McKinley administration, the yellow press was dismissed as a nuisance or scoffed at as a complicating factor.”

The content of the yellow press, I wrote, was “regarded neither as a source of insight into popular thinking in the United States nor as a useful guide in pursuing the delicate and ultimately futile negotiations with Spain” that preceded the declaration of war in April 1898.

So why is the myth so enduring that the yellow press fomented the war?

In part because it’s simplistic tale that’s often taught in high schools and colleges.

It’s also a ready way to excoriate 19th century yellow journalism, to summarize its flamboyant excesses and to point to its supposedly malign potential.

But to indict the yellow press for bringing on the Spanish-American War is, I wrote in Yellow Journalism, “to misread the evidence and thus do disservice to the broader understanding of a much-misunderstood conflict.

“It does disservice as well to keener appreciation of the much-maligned genre of yellow journalism.”

WJC

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‘News of World’ closure breaks link to 19th century yellow journalism

In 1897, Debunking, Year studies on July 10, 2011 at 12:04 am

The abrupt closure of Britain’s largest Sunday tabloid, Rupert Murdoch’s raunchy, scandal-ridden News of the World, breaks a link to the yellow journalism that flared in urban America at the end of the 19th century.

Jail-breaking journalism

I’m not referring to the News of the World’s tabloid flamboyance, which certainly evoked the typographic boldness of William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, a broadsheet that was the leading exemplar of American yellow journalism.

The link went deeper than appearances.

The News of the World was an heir to Hearst’s activist-oriented, participatory journalism — a self-engaging, self-promoting style of newspapering unheard of these days in the United States.

As I note in my book The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, Hearst’s Journal at the end of the 19th century sought to set a standard for the American press, insisting, I write, “that newspapers were obliged to inject themselves, conspicuously and vigorously, in righting the wrongs of public life, and in filling the void of government inaction and incompetence.”

The year 1897 brought memorable evidence of Hearst’s style of activist journalism.

In the summer that year, Hearst deployed a phalanx of Journal reporters to solve the grisly case of headless torso murder in New York.

Later that year, a reporter for the Journal broke from jail in Havana a 19-year-old political prisoner named Evangelina Cisneros. The Journal — and more than a few other U.S. newspapers — celebrated the breathtaking breach of international law.

For the Journal, the Cisneros jailbreak (see image, above) was “epochal” and represented the “supreme achievement” of its paradigm of activist journalism.

It acknowledged that freeing Cisneros had violated Spanish law and flouted international convention — and the Journal seemed delighted to have done so, saying:

“The Journal is quite aware of the rank illegality of its action. It knows very well that the whole proceeding is lawlessly out of tune with the prosaic and commercial nineteenth century. We shall not be surprised at international complications, nor at solemn and rebuking assurances that the age of knight errantry is dead. To that it can be answered that if innocent maidens are still imprisoned by tyrants, the knight errant is yet needed.”

That sort of willingness to wink at illegality was demonstrated by the News of the World well before it became swept up in a cellphone-voicemail hacking scandal that brought about its demise.

Final edition

The News of the World, which published its final issue today, had been for years one of the world’s most controversial titles, due in part to its activist-oriented undercover operations, ostensibly undertaken to bring drug dealers, fugitive financiers, and other criminals to justice.

As I noted in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, the targets of the News of the World often were “small-time celebrities and wayward sports figures dabbling in modest quantities of illegal drugs. The undercover methods were criticized as entrapment and dismissed as ‘a kind of investigative reporting without much investigating.'”

I also described a notorious case in 1999, in which reporters for News of the World “posed as wealthy Arabs and enticed a British earl to buy cocaine and share the drug with them. A detailed report about the peer’s conduct — he was depicted as drunkenly snorting cocaine with a £5 note — soon after was splashed across News of the World. He was arrested and convicted of selling drugs.

“But the presiding judge declined to send the peer to jail, citing the subterfuge of the News of the World. If not for the journalists’ sting, the judge observed, the crimes likely would not have been committed.”

Such outlandishness hinted at the tabloid’s more recent and more egregious misconduct of breaking into the cellular phone voicemail of hundreds of people, including members of Britain’s royal family and perhaps victims of the terror attack on London’s subway system July 2005.

Phone-hacking, of course, wasn’t an element in the repertoire of the yellow press of Hearst or of his mean-spirited rival, Joseph Pulitzer. Nor did they did bring on the war with Spain in 1898, as is often alleged.

But on occasion they turned to deception, misrepresentation, and self-motivated activism in pursuit of their lusty brand of big-time journalism.

WJC

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Noting the anniversary of Twain’s ‘report of my death’ comment

In 1897, Anniversaries, Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Yellow Journalism on June 1, 2011 at 7:02 am

Tomorrow marks the 114th anniversary of Mark Twain‘s well-known, much-quoted, often-distorted observation: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

As is discussed in my 2006 book, The Year That Defined American Journalism, Twain’s remark was prompted by an article published June 1, 1897, in the New York Herald.

Mark Twain, 1907

The Herald, which then was regarded as one of the top daily newspapers in America, reported Twain, then 61, to be “grievously ill and possibly dying. Worse still, we are told that his brilliant intellect is shattered and that he is sorely in need of money.”

Twain was in London then, preparing to cover Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee for William Randolph Hearst’s flamboyant New York Journal. That association allowed the Journal to puncture the Herald’s account as false.

In an article published June 2, 1897, beneath the headline, “Mark Twain Amused,” the Journal skewered the Herald’s story and offered Twain’s timeless denial: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

Twain’s line is often quoted as “the news of my death has been greatly exaggerated” and, sometimes, the Journal is said to have been the source for the erroneous report rather than the agent of its swift debunking.

According to the Journal, Twain said the likely source of the Herald’s error was the serious illness of his cousin, J.R. Clemens, who had been in London a few weeks before.

Ever eager to indulge in self-promotion, Hearst’s Journal enthusiastically embraced its brief association with Twain. Even so, it couldn’t have been much pleased with what the humorist filed about Victoria’s Jubilee.

As I wrote in The Year That Defined American Journalism, “Twain’s reporting about Victoria’s jubilee seemed half-hearted and hardly inspired. The spectacle was easily the most regal international story of 1897, and came at a time when the British empire was at or near its height. But Twain found the celebration overwhelming,” calling it “a spectacle for the kodak [camera], not the pen.”

Twain’s dispatch to the Journal also included this strange observation:

“I was not dreaming of so stunning a show. All the nations seemed to be filing by. They all seemed to be represented. It was a sort of allegorical suggestion of the Last Day, and some who live to see that day will probably recall this one if they are not too much disturbed in the mind at the time.”

Lining up Twain to cover the Jubilee was emblematic of Hearst’s inclination to spend lavishly to recruit big-name talent, if only for spot assignments.

Hearst was the leading practitioner of yellow journalism, or what he called the “journalism of action,” which embraced an activist vision for American newspapering.

His Journal argued that “a newspaper may fitly render any public service within its power. Acting on this principle, it has fed the hungry, brought criminals to justice and enforced by legal methods the responsibility of public officials.”

Not everyone was comfortable with or admired such an activist vision, especially as it came with such heavy and frequent doses of acute self-promotion.

Twain didn’t much like it, either. In his autobiography, he likened Hearstian yellow journalism to “that calamity of calamities.”

WJC

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<!–[if !mso]> –> Twain’s reporting about Victoria’s jubilee seemed half-hearted and hardly inspired. The spectacle was easily the most regal international story of 1897, and came at a time when the British empire at or near its height. But Twain found the celebration overwhelming—“a spectacle for the kodak [camera], not the pen.”[i] His dispatch included this strange observation: “I was not dreaming of so stunning a show. All the nations seemed to be filing by. They all seemed to be represented. It was a sort of allegorical suggestion of the Last Day, and some who live to see that day will probably recall this one if they are not too much disturbed in mind at the time.”

[i]. Mark Twain, “The Great Jubilee As Described by the Journal’s Special Writers: Mark Twain’s Pen Picture of the Great Pageant in Honor of Victoria’s Sixtieth Anniversary,” New York Journal (23 June 1897): 1.

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As if Hearst were ‘back with us,’ vowing to ‘furnish the war’

In 1897, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on May 10, 2011 at 2:26 am

Nieman Watchdog, a blog that “seeks to encourage more informed reporting,” indulged yesterday in the mythical tale of William Randolph Hearst‘s famous vow to “furnish the war” with Spain in the late 19th century.

Remington in Cuba for Hearst

It was a case of the blog’s turning to a fiction about Hearst and treating it as if it were fact.

The occasion for invoking “furnish the war” was to call attention to inaccuracies in news graphics accompanying reports last week about the slaying of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden.

“Journalism is a serious business where credibility is paramount,” the blog post asserted. “Editors need, first and foremost, to get the facts right, in graphics as well as text and video.”

The post further noted that “some publications presented as facts what was just fiction. Sometimes there was no factual support whatsoever. It’s as though William Randolph Hearst was back with us, saying once again, ‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.'”

As I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the tale about Hearst’s vow to “furnish the war” is a hardy media-driven myth that lives on despite concerted attempts to discredit and dismantle it.

The vow supposedly was contained in a telegram sent to the famous artist, Frederic Remington, who was on assignment in Cuba for Hearst’s flamboyant New York Journal (see image, above). Remington and the correspondent Richard Harding Davis were assigned there to cover the insurrection against Spanish colonial rule — the conflict that gave rise in 1898 to the Spanish-American War.

They arrived in Havana in early January 1897; Remington stayed only six days.

Before leaving by passenger steamer for New York, Remington supposedly sent Hearst a cable, stating:

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

Hearst replied with his famous vow:

“Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”

But Remington didn’t stay.

He promptly returned to New York, where his sketches were given prominent display in Hearst’s Journal. They appeared with such flattering headlines as: “Cuban War Sketches Gathered in the Field by Frederic Remington; The Gifted Artist, Visiting Cuba Especially for the Journal.”

That’s hardly the sort of tribute Hearst would have granted a wayward artist who ignored specific instructions to “remain” in Cuba.

I further note in Getting It Wrong that the anecdote about Hearst’s vow “lives on despite an irreconcilable internal inconsistency: It would have been absurd for Hearst to vow to ‘furnish the war’ because war — specifically, the Cuban rebellion against Spain’s colonial rule — was the very reason Hearst sent Remington to Cuba in the first place.”

Anyone reading U.S. newspapers in early 1897 “would have been well aware,” I write, “that Cuba was a theater of a nasty war,” which gave rise in April 1898 to the Spanish-American War.

Not only that, but the artifacts themselves — the telegrams reputedly sent by Remington and Hearst — have never surfaced. And Spanish censors monitored incoming and outgoing telegraphic traffic in Havana, and they surely would have intercepted Hearst’s incendiary message — had it been sent.

For those and other reasons, the tale about the Remington-Hearst exchange is surely apocryphal — fiction that too often masquerades as fact.

WJC

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News media indispensable to democracy? Some evidence would be nice

In Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post, Yellow Journalism on May 1, 2011 at 9:49 am

The Washington Post ombudsman invokes in his column today the defining conceit of American journalism: That without truth-telling reporters and editors, democracy would be imperiled.

Or, as he puts it, rather simplistically:

“What we do is report, write and edit stories. We take and publish photographs (and now video, too). We publish the stories and images as news through compelling design and graphics. And, in columns and blogs, we analyze the news. Through this painstaking process, we reveal truths. The country cannot long survive as a democracy, or as a capitalist economy, without this kind of independent journalism.”

But how does the ombudsman, Patrick B. Pexton, know that? What evidence does he offer to buttress the notion that the news media are indispensable bulwarks of democracy and capitalism?

None. He presents the self-congratulatory claim about journalism’s value as self-evident.

It is true that robust journalism and media pluralism are hallmarks of democratic governance.

But democratic rule typically enables independent journalism rather than the other way round.

We see this phenomenon across the world: Whenever the heavy hand of authoritarian rule is lifted, non-official news media flourish, usually as partisan platforms. It’s a point I made in my first book, The Emergent Independent Press in Benin and Côte d’Ivoire, which examined the rise of media pluralism in two states in Francophone West Africa.

But emergent independent journalism, or well-established journalism, isn’t a variable essential to a thriving democracy. I’m reminded of a superb essay on this topic that the inestimable media critic Jack Shafer wrote in 2009 for slate.com.

As Shafer correctly pointed out:

“Democracy thrived in the United States in the 1800s, long before the invention of what we call quality journalism. Between 1856 and 1888, when most newspapers were crap and controlled by, or beholden to, a political party, voter turnout hovered around 80 percent for presidential elections. Compare that with the 55.3 percent and 56.8 percent turnouts in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections.”

And party-oriented journalism lasted well beyond 1888. It stretched through the period of the yellow press at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century. The leading newspapers of those days were often overtly partisan.

The leading practitioner of yellow journalism, William Randolph Hearst, turned his newspapers into a platform for his mostly unfulfilled political objectives. He unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for president and the governorship of New York, ambitions that were boosted by, but not contingent upon, his activist-oriented newspapers.

Shafer’s column also noted:

“Could it be that deep-dish reporting that uncovers governmental malfeasance and waste … doesn’t promote activism or participation? Could it be that such exposés end up souring the public on democracy and other institutions?”

It’s an interesting point. Aggressive, searching journalism that offers a stream of reporting about the flaws, shortcomings, and corruption in democratic institutions also may be a reason many adult Americans have tired of the news and have turned it off completely.

According to data compiled by the Pew Research Center and released last year, 17 percent of adult Americans go newsless on a typical day. That is, they eschew the news despite ready access to a variety of news-delivery options and platforms, both traditional and digital.

The going-newsless phenomenon in a news-drenched society is highest among 18-to-24-years-old; 31 percent of those young Americans go without the news on a typical day.

“Large numbers of Americans are beyond media influence,” I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which addresses and debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths.

So how are news outlets so vital to American democracy when so many Americans ignore them completely? Pexton’s assertion about the indispensable character of the media ignores such complexity.

Pexton’s claim is the kind of thin platitude that serves to reassure journalists in a time of great upheaval in the field, a time when the direction of the profession is uncertain, when the longevity of once-superior newspapers like the Washington Post is in doubt.

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds, and Little Miss Attila,
for linking to this post

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Hearst and war: A newspaper misreads history

In Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on March 28, 2011 at 8:30 am

American journalists, to put it charitably, can be quite unfamiliar with the history of their profession.

The field, as I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, “seldom is seriously introspective, or very mindful of its history.”

As such, journalists are known to flub it — or indulge in media myths — when they do take up the past. Consider, for example, the Bangor Daily News in Maine, which both flubs it and offers up a hardy media myth in an editorial posted online last night.

The media myth centers around the hoary notion, rejected by serious historians, that William Randolph Hearst’s yellow journalism fomented or brought about the Spanish-American War in 1898.

In invoking the myth of Hearst and the long-ago war, the Bangor newspaper sought to describe the context for the multiple military missions the United States is pursuing these days.

The newspaper declared:

“U.S. forces have been in Afghanistan since 2001. They’ve been in Iraq since 2003. And they soon could be in Libya. This is not to mention standing U.S. military bases in Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, Greece, Spain, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Brazil, Greenland, the Philippines, Cuba, Guam and on and on. How and when did this happen?

“The year the United States began its ascendancy as a world power was 1898, beginning with the Spanish-American War, a conflict of dubious progeny fanned into flames by the partisan journalism practiced by William Randolph Hearst.”

How simplistic. And how illogical.

Just think it through: wars can begin because of overheated newspaper content?

Quite simply, that’s a misreading of history, a lazy interpretation that ascribes too much power to Hearst and his yellow press while ignoring the human rights disaster on Cuba that helped precipitate the war in April 1898.

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 forces far beyond the control or direct influence of even the most aggressive of the yellow newspapers, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.”

In 1898, Hearst published the Journal, the New York Evening Journal, and the San Francisco Examiner. The three titles wielded at best modest agenda-setting influence on the rest of the American press, which then numbered more than 2,200 daily newspapers.

Indeed, as I pointed out in Yellow Journalism:

“There is little evidence that the press beyond New York City, especially in small-town and rural America, was influenced by the content of the yellow journals, including their demands for war after the destruction of the Maine,” an American battleship that blew up in Havana harbor in February 1898, killing 266 officers and sailors.

The destruction of the Maine was a triggering event of the war. But it was not the sole factor, or even necessarily the decisive factor.

What galvanized American public opinion were Spain’s brutal efforts to suppress an islandwide rebellion on Cuba, a nasty conflict that began in February 1895 and ultimately gave rise to the Spanish-American War.

A centerpiece of Spain’s attempt to crush the rebellion was to force Cuban non-combattants – old men, women, and children– into what the Spanish called “reconcentration centers,” to prevent the non-combattants from giving aid, succor, and supplies to the Cuban rebels.

The “reconcentration” policy was a disaster. Tens of thousands of Cubans fell victim to disease and starvation. U.S. newspapers — including but certainly not limited to Hearst’s dailies — were aware of, and reported extensively about, the humanitarian crisis that had taken hold on Cuba by early 1898.

That crisis, not the content of the yellow press, was what “fanned” the flames for war with Spain.

As the historian David Trask has written, Americans in 1898 “went to war convinced that they had embarked upon an entirely selfless mission for humanity,” to end Spain’s brutal rule of Cuba.

The war hardly was “a conflict of dubious progeny,” as the Bangor Daily News dismissively put it. And it surely wasn’t a war driven by Hearst and his yellow press.

WJC

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‘Furnish the war’ finds a place in sports

In 1897, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on February 28, 2011 at 8:13 am

Hearst: Didn't say it

William Randolph Hearst’s famous vow to “furnish the war” with Spain is one of American journalism’s most enduring myths. It’s a stunningly hardy though dubious tale that has been deployed in discussing journalistic sins and shortcomings of all sorts.

As I write in my myth-debunking book Getting It Wrong, the Hearstian vow “has been invoked to illustrate the media’s willingness to compromise impartiality, promote political agendas, and indulge in sensationalism.

“It has been used, more broadly, to suggest the media’s capacity to inject malign influence into international affairs.”

It even has application in news about collegiate sports.

An online sports-news site, Bleacher Report, turned to “furnish the war” in a commentary posted yesterday about the whiff of scandal around Auburn University’s championship football program.

Hearst’s reputed vow was a way to set up the commentary, which defended the program from what it called “the incessant beating of the investigation drum by Auburn detractors” suspicious of player-recruitment violations.

Of interest to Media Myth Alert is the commentary’s total buy-in of the Hearst anecdote, which, as evidence offered in Getting It Wrong clearly shows, is counterfeit, a discredited media myth.

The Bleacher Report commentary declared:

“When photographer Frederic Remington was dispatched to Cuba in the late 1800s to document a war and found none, he sent a message to publisher William Randolph Hearst: ‘There is no war.’

“Hearst allegedly responded: ‘Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.’

“In the ensuing months Hearst’s newspaper fanned the flames with sensationalized front page articles that were of dubious accuracy and in many cases patently false. His articles stirred passions among a readership that neither knew nor cared if the reports were accurate. His relentless attacks eventually helped push U.S. administration into declaring war on Spain.  Hearst got his war.

“Since October, the Auburn football program has endured a similar smear campaign. …”

Reasons for doubting that Hearst ever made such a vow are many, and include the anecdote’s breathtaking illogic.

War was the reason Hearst, owner of the flamboyant New York Journal, sent Remington (an artist, not a “photographer”) to Cuba in the first place. That war was the Cuban rebellion against Spain’s colonial rule, which began in February 1895.

Remington

Remington was in Cuba briefly in January 1897.

By that time, I note in Getting It Wrong, newspaper readers “would have been well aware that Cuba was a theater of a nasty war. By then, the Cuban rebellion had reached island-wide proportion and not a single province had been pacified by Spain’s armed forces.”

It would have made no sense for Hearst to vow to “furnish the war.”

In addition, Hearst denied having made such a statement. Remington, apparently, never discussed it. And the telegrams bearing the content of the purported Remington-Hearst exchange have never surfaced.

Moreover, as I point out in Getting It Wrong, “there was no chance” that the telegrams “would have flowed freely between Remington in Havana and Hearst in New York.

“Spanish control of the cable traffic in Havana was too vigilant and severe to have allowed such an exchange to have gone unnoticed and unremarked upon,” I write, adding:

“A vow such as Hearst’s to ‘furnish the war‘ surely would have been intercepted and publicized by Spanish authorities as a clear-cut example of Yankee meddling in Cuba.”

Like many media myths, the tale of the Hearstian vow is accessible, pithy, and easily recalled. It supposedly illuminates larger lessons about the news media — in this case, the media’s malign potential to bring about a war the country otherwise wouldn’t have fought.

Which is nonsense, and historically inaccurate.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 was hardly a matter of Hearst’s having “got his war.” Rather, the conflict was the consequence of an intractable, three-sided standoff.

Cuba’s rebels would settle for nothing short of political independence. Spain refused to grant self-rule to the most important remnant of its once-sprawling American empire. And the United States, for economic and humanitarian reasons, could no longer tolerate an inconclusive war just 90 miles from its shores.

Simply put, Hearst and newspaper content were non-factors in the decision to go to war.

WJC

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Remembering the ‘Maine,’ Hearst, and Remington

In 1897, Anniversaries, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Spanish-American War on February 16, 2011 at 7:01 am

Wreckage of the 'Maine'

The battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor 113 years ago yesterday, a development that rocked Americans and helped trigger the brief but decisive Spanish-American War.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle recalled the battleship’s destruction in a post yesterday that invoked one of American journalism’s most tenacious myths — the purported vow of William Randolph Hearst to “furnish the war” with Spain.

The item in the Eagle — a latter-day version of the storied Brooklyn Daily Eagle that was published from 1841 until 1955 — said in its post that after the Maine blew up, Hearst “sent artist Frederic Remington to cover the war story in Cuba.

“When Remington found little happening there, he asked about coming home. Hearst wired back: ‘Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.'”

As I discuss in the first chapter of my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the Hearstian vow, while well-known and often retold, is almost surely apocryphal.

I note in Getting It Wrong that that the vow “has achieved unique status” in American journalism “as an adaptable, hardy, all-purpose anecdote, useful in illustrating any number of media sins and shortcomings.

“It has been invoked to illustrate the media’s willingness to compromise impartiality, promote political agendas, and indulge in sensationalism. It has been used, more broadly, to suggest the media’s capacity to inject malign influence into international affairs.”

Reasons for doubting that Hearst ever sent such a message are many, and include the fact that the artifacts — the purported telegrams exchanged between Remington and Hearst — have never turned up.

Hearst

Hearst, moreover, denied ever having sent such a message, and there’s no known record of Remington ever having discussed the purported exchange.

I note in Getting It Wrong that the Remington-Hearst anecdote “lives on despite an irreconcilable internal inconsistency: It would have been absurd for Hearst to vow to ‘furnish the war’ because war — specifically, the Cuban rebellion against Spain’s colonial rule — was the very reason Hearst sent Remington to Cuba in the first place.”

Had the Remingt0n-Hearst exchange taken place, it would have been in mid-January 1897, at the end of Remington’s lone visit to Cuba in the months before the loss of the Maine.

We know that because the sole original source of the anecdote, a self-centered journalist named James Creelman, claimed in a book of reminiscences that exchange took place “some time before the destruction of the battleship Maine in the harbor of Havana” on February 15, 1898.

Creelman, who titled his book On the Great Highway, did not say how he learned about the purported exchange. In early 1897, Creelman was not in New York with Hearst, nor in Cuba with Remington. Creelman was in Spain, on assignment for Hearst’s New York Journal, the leading exemplar of what was called “yellow journalism.”

It is exceedingly unlikely that the telegrams would have flowed freely between Hearst and Remington as Creelman suggested. Spanish authorities in Havana, after all, had imposed strict censorship of international cable traffic. As I note in Getting It Wrong:

“Spanish control of the cable traffic in Havana was too vigilant and severe to have allowed such an exchange to have gone unnoticed and unremarked upon. A vow such as Hearst’s to ‘furnish the war’ surely would have been intercepted and publicized by Spanish authorities as a clear-cut example of Yankee meddling in Cuba.”

I also note in Getting It Wrong that the purported Hearstian vow is a telling example of a quote that’s so neat and tidy that it should immediately trigger suspicions.

“Like many media-driven myths,” I write, “it is succinct, savory, and easily remembered.

“It is almost too good not to be true.”

WJC

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