Watergate at 50: Why the ‘heroic-journalist’ myth still defines the scandal. “Sometimes, people accuse us of ‘bringing down a president,’ which of course we didn’t do, and shouldn’t have done,” Graham said. “The processes that caused [Nixon’s] resignation were constitutional.”
1 year ago by Chipit to /s/media_criticism from (mediamythalert.com)
50 years on: Revisiting the myths of the ‘Napalm Girl.’ Prominent among the myths of the “Napalm Girl” is that U.S.-piloted or guided warplanes dropped napalm at Trang Bang. Not so. AP, in an article posted yesterday, erroneously described it as “an American napalm strike on a Vietnamese hamlet.”
WaPo review indulges in myth, claims Bernstein’s ‘work brought down a president’. You’d think editors at the Washington Post might have turned to statements by its Watergate-era principals before allowing a mythical claim about the scandal to appear in a book review that was published today.
2 years ago by Chipit to /s/media_criticism from (mediamythalert.com)
Taking stock: Top media mythbusting posts of 2021. It is 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.”
Recalling memorable myth-busting posts. 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.
‘Such was Cronkite’s influence’. The Boston Herald published an odd commentary the other day, one that scoffed at core elements of the media myth of the “Cronkite Moment” of 1968 while repeating the dubious elements anyway.
Once-prominent E&P tells media myths about Murrow, Watergate. The answer indeed is “no,” because broadcast legend Murrow of CBS did not take down McCarthy. And Nixon did not resign because of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting for the Washington Post.
Afghanistan is ‘Biden’s Katrina’? Afghanistan is dramatically worse. Katrina was a powerful, destructive natural disaster, the coverage of which the news media botched. The U.S. exit from Afghanistan is a bloody, self-inflicted disaster, borne of Biden’s blundering, impatience, and ineptitude.
Insidious: Off-hand references signal deep embedding of prominent media myths. The insidious nature of prominent media myths is evident in how casually they are invoked, as if their veracity is beyond question. Two recent cases serve to illustrate this tendency.
Punctured tale of Trump’s photo op may live on as media myth. The media narrative that demonstrators were violently expelled from Lafayette Square outside the White House a year ago was convincingly and impressively deflated last week in a report by the Interior Department’s inspector general.
Watergate myth, extravagant version: Nixon was ‘dethroned entirely’ by press. Seldom has the myth been presented as colorfully or extravagantly as it was in a recent Esquire UK essay pegged to the 45th anniversary of the release of All the President’s Men.
Hal Holbrook, ‘follow the money,’ and Watergate’s distorted history. Beyond injecting “follow the money” into the popular vernacular, All the President’s Men toyed with the historical record in several respects. In fact it’s Watergate’s most famous made-up line.
3 years ago by Chipit to /s/media_criticism from (mediamythalert.com)
The timeless paean to childhood and the Christmas spirit, published in 1897, long ago became the single best-known, most-reprinted editorial in American journalism. It also is a myth-distorted artifact, as suggested by errant media descriptions and characterizations over the years.
"The press has had little to say about most of the strange details of the election — except, that is, to ridicule all efforts to discuss them." That passage was not addressing the oddities and suspicions of fraud in this month’s election. No, the passage is about the 2004 election.
Media lied about 1938 "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast. The overheated press accounts were almost entirely anecdotal — and driven by an eagerness to question the reliability and legitimacy of radio, then an upstart rival medium. Reports of widespread panic and hysteria were wildly exaggerated.
Woodward’s latest Trump book prompts myth-telling about Watergate. It was all but certain that news accounts and reviews of Rage, Bob Woodward‘s latest book about Donald Trump, would credulously recite the hardy media myth that Woodward’s Watergate reporting brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency.
Cronkite did all that? The anchorman, the president, and the Vietnam War. It has taken on legendary status as a moment of telling unvarnished truth to power, as an occasion when an anchorman’s words brought clarity to a President who, as if in an epiphany, realized his war policy was a shambles.
New York Times commentary offers up that hoary 1960 debate myth between Nixon and John F. Kennedy. The myth of viewer-listener disagreement was thoroughly and impressively demolished 33 years ago and yet it lives on at the New York Times, which offered up the myth in an essay published yesterday.
No, WaPo, Nixon never ‘touted a secret plan to end war in Vietnam’. The hoary media myth about Richard Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam is circulating anew, and being presented as if genuine.
3 years ago by Chipit to /s/MediaAnalysis from (mediamythalert.com)
The ‘Cronkite Moment’ of 1968: Remembering why it’s a media myth
4 years ago by Chipit to /s/MediaAnalysis from (mediamythalert.com)
Media Myth Alert: Top mythbusting posts of 2019
4 years ago by Chipit to /s/news from (mediamythalert.com)
Media myth as cliché: ‘The War of the Worlds’ radio ‘panic’. But like most media myths, it’s a tale with scant evidentiary support.
4 years ago by Chipit to /s/whatever from (mediamythalert.com)
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