Archive for the 'Error' Category
Debunking, Distortion, Fact-checking, Getting It Wrong, History, Nixon, Research, Scandal, Washington Post, Watergate
Impeachment hearings prompt media references to heroic-journalist myth of Watergate
In Debunking, Error, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on November 27, 2019 at 9:01 am
It doesn't take much for journalists to conjure the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate. The trope has such narrative power that it's easy to invoke, if usually too good to check.
Perhaps an inevitable by-product of the recent bombshell-free and wholly unrevealing impeachment hearings conducted by the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee were news media references to the Watergate scandal and the myth that the Washington Post's reporting brought down Richard Nixon's presidency in 1974.
Not the Post's doing: Nixon quits
That's the heroic-journalist trope of Watergate. It centers around the work of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Post's lead reporters on the scandal, and it was invoked blithely.
Last week, for example, the Guardian of London referred to the Post as "the paper that owned the [Watergate] story and ultimately brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon."
As the House committee's hearings were about to go public, David Zurawik, television critic for the Baltimore Sun, wrote that televised hearings during the Watergate scandal "didn't bring [Nixon] down," but "the grinding, steady work of the Washington Post led by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did along with some courageous members of Congress, who signaled their willingness to vote for impeachment across party lines."
A speech the other day at the University of Oxford was the occasion for Cameron Barr, the Post's managing editor, to recall Watergate. His remarks included this myth-evocative passage:
"Nixon's resignation was brought to pass by our coverage of the political scandal known as Watergate."
That means caused to happen, and the Post's reporting didn't cause Nixon's resignation to happen.
For years, in fact, senior staff at the Washington Post dismissed or scoffed at the mythical notion the Post's reporting brought down Nixon.
None other than Katharine Graham, the newspaper's publisher during Watergate, declared in 1997, at the 25th anniversary of the scandal's seminal crime, the burglary at Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972:
In starkly cruder terms, Woodward concurred, telling an interviewer in 2004:
"To say that the press brought down Nixon, that's horseshit."
More Watergate mythologizing
As I noted in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, unraveling a scandal as sweeping and complex as Watergate required the combined if not always coordinated forces of special prosecutors and federal judges, FBI agents, and bipartisan congressional panels. Not to mention the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled that Nixon had to surrender to prosecutors White House audiotapes that captured his guilty participation in the Watergate coverup.
That's what Katharine Graham was referring to in saying that the "processes that caused [Nixon's] resignation were constitutional."
By email, I asked Barr about evidence supporting his claim that "Nixon's resignation was brought to pass by" the Post's reporting.
He replied by parsing his claim, saying:
Not only did the Post's reporting not bring to pass Nixon's resignation, it's highly unlikely that the Post's reporting set in motion, or even much contributed to, the vastly more important investigations by subpoena-wielding 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, Woodward and Bernstein "were not the only ones publicizing the case" in the summer of 1972. "Immediately after the arrest of the Watergate burglars and throughout the [presidential] campaign, Senator George McGovern denounced Watergate in most of his speeches and suggested in no uncertain terms that the White House was behind the burglary."
Additionally, Epstein noted, the Democratic National Committee brought a civil lawsuit against Nixon's reelection committee. "The General Accounting Office, an arm of Congress, and Common Cause, a quasi-public foundation, meanwhile forced Republican officials to disclose information about campaign contributions which indirectly added to the publicity about Watergate," Epstein wrote, adding:
"In short, even in publicizing Watergate, the press was only one among a number of institutions at work."
Epstein also correctly noted that federal prosecutors had developed "an airtight case" the the Watergate burglars and their handlers in the summer of 1972, "well in advance of, and without any assistance from, Woodward, Bernstein, or any other reporters."
Barr's remarks at Oxford were an occasion to extol the news media and what he called "high-risk, high-impact journalism."
He also shed some light on the adoption of the Post's smug and heavy-handed motto, "Democracy dies in darkness," saying it was embraced "at the urging of Jeff Bezos, who has owned The Post since 2013." Bezos is the multi-billionaire boss of Amazon.com.
That motto was adopted soon after President Donald Trump took office and was promptly ridiculed by, among others, Jack Shafer, the prominent media critic. Shafer said on Twitter that "'Democracy Dies in Darkness' is something a sincere goofball would say in a Preston Sturges movie."
The executive editor of the New York Times, Dean Baquet, said "Democracy dies in darkness" reminded him of "the next Batman movie."
Katharine Graham, the 'Economist,' and bringing down Nixon
The Nixon tapes: A pivotal Watergate story that WaPo missed
Why Trump-Russia still is not Watergate redux
WaPo 'played pivotal role' in Watergate? Think again
No, Politico: WaPo didn't bring down Nixon
Inflating the exploits of WaPo's Watergate reporters
Pumping up Watergate's heroic-journalist myth
WaPo's 'myths about Watergate' article ignores the scandal's best-known mythical narrative
1897, Cuba, Fact-checking, Frederic Remington, Furnish the war, Getting It Wrong, Hearst, History, Journalism, Media-driven myths, Research
Hearst, Remington, and the half-embrace of a hoary media myth
In 1897, Debunking, Error, Furnish the war, Media myths, Quotes, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on June 17, 2019 at 10:31 am
It's unusual for media myths to be embraced partially — a half-embrace, as it were, of those prominent tall tales about journalists and their supposed exploits.
But half-embrace is how a new book treats the hoary media myth of William Randolph Hearst's purported vow to "furnish the war" with Spain at the end of 19th Century.
Hearst supposedly made the declaration in a telegraphic reply to the artist Frederic Remington, who was on assignment in Cuba for Hearst's New York Journal.
The exchange of telegrams purportedly went this way:
Remington: "Everything this quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return."
Hearst: "Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war."
Clay Risen's new book, The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders and the Dawn of the American Century, does a half embrace of that well-known but thoroughly dubious tale. Specifically, Risen treats Hearst's supposed reply as improbable but embraces the Remington portion.
And he does so flatly, writing: "Remington telegraphed Hearst to tell him that there was no war, and that there wasn't going to be one."
Risen repeats the purported Remington message: "Everything this quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return."
He then says Hearst "allegedly, infamously, replied, 'Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.'
"In fact," Risen adds, "it's unlikely Hearst wrote anything of the kind. … Whatever his reply, Remington ignored him and left Cuba."
As sources, Risen cites two books, Frederic Remington and the Spanish-American War and The Chief, David Nasaw's fine biography of Hearst. Both are secondary sources published before my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, which devotes a chapter to dismantling the presumptive Remington-Hearst exchange. (I first addressed the Remington-Hearst tale in 2000, in an article for the peer-reviewed Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.)
The Remington-Hearst anecdote, I wrote in Getting It Wrong, "lives on despite a nearly complete absence of supporting documentation" — the purported telegrams have never turned up; Hearst denied such an exchange, and Remington, apparently, never discussed it. The anecdote's sole original source was an exaggeration-prone journalist named James Creelman, who mentioned the purported exchange in a book of reminiscences in 1901. But Creelman did not explain how or when he learned about it.
For those and other reasons, the tale is almost certainly untrue. And that goes for the Remington portion, which Risen, deputy op-ed editor at the New York TImes, embraced in his book. It's highly unlikely Remington wrote anything close to "Everything this quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war." His work and words give lie to that supposed message.
Cuba at the time was scarcely trouble-free: It was in the midst of an island-wide rebellion against Spanish colonial rule and that armed conflict — that war — was the very reason Hearst sent Remington and Davis to the island. Remington hardly found everything "quiet" in Cuba when he arrived in early January 1897, in the company of the correspondent Richard Harding Davis.
As I discussed in Getting It Wrong, Remington sketches, as published in Hearst's Journal, "depict unmistakable (if unremarkable) scenes of a rebellion — 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 kneeling to fire at a small Spanish fort; a knot of Spanish soldiers dressing a comrade's leg wound."
The subject matter impugns the notion that Remington had found "everything … quiet" in Cuba.
Remington sketch, Cuba 1897
What's more, the headlines accompanying the sketches emphasized the conflict in Cuba. Remington's work appeared in the Journal beneath headlines such as "Cuban War Sketches Gathered in the Field by Frederic Remington" and "Frederic Remington Sketches a Familiar Incident of the Cuban War" (see nearby).
Following his return to New York, Remington wrote a letter to the Journal's keenest rival, the New York World, in which he described the Spanish regime in Havana as a "woman-killing outfit down there in Cuba."
In 1899, Remington described the assignment to Cuba in a magazine article that further challenges the notion "everything" was "quiet" in Cuba when he was there in early 1897.
"I saw ill-clad, ill-fed Spanish soldiers bring their dead and wounded into" Havana, Remington wrote, "dragging slowly along in ragged columns. I saw scarred Cubans with their arms bound stiffly behind them being marched to the Cabanas," a fortress near Havana harbor. The country-side, Remington said, "was a pall of smoke" from homes of Cubans that had been set afire.
He wrote that he shook his fist in anger at Havana as he left for New York aboard a passenger steamer in mid-January 1897, saying he looked forward to returning only in the company of 100,000 American soldiers.
Remington's sketches and words, I wrote in Getting It Wrong, "leave no doubt that he had seen a good deal of war-related disruption in Cuba. The island during his brief visit was anything but 'quiet.'"
Still, I noted, "it remains some-thing of a mystery why Remington never publicly addressed Creelman's anecdote."
In any event, the evidence is overwhelming that the Remington-Hearst anecdote is false. And it is not divisible; if one half is apocryphal, the other must be, too.
A half-embrace is wholly untenable.
'War Lovers': A myth-indulging disappointment
BBC calls Hearst's vow apocrytphal, quotes it anyway
No, 'Politico': Hearst did not cause the Spanish-American War
Halberstam the 'unimpeachable'? Try myth-promoter