and the people close to him. hearst tried through his subordinates to get the movie killed, keep it from ever being shown. >> who was hearst at the time? >> william randolph hearst was a newspaper mogul, a media mogul, he owned a lot of newspapers but also was into radio and television. he had an empire in the 1930s and 1940s. he had begun with a newspaper in san francisco, later in the 1890s, mid 1890s bought the "new york journal" in new york city. that became his flagship newspaper, and for some of the more illustrious days of hearst, and his aggressive activist journalism were in new york, in the "new york journal" in the aftermath of the spanish/american war. >> in this clip, keep your ears on, you furnish the pictures, i'll furnish the war.

>> he paraphrases it a little bit, but close enough. >> i don't know how to run a newspaper, i'll try everything i can think of. >> nou you know perfectly well there's not the slightest proof -- >> hello. >> can you prove it isn't? >> mr. bernstein, i'd like you to meet mr. thatcher. >> how are you doing? >> hello. >> my ex-guardian, we have no secrets from our readers. mr. thatcher is one of our most devoted readers. he knows what's wrong with every copy since i took over. read the cable. >> girls, delightful in cuba, stop. could send you prose, poems about scenery but don't feel right about stealing your money. there is no war in cuba. >> you provide the prose poems, i'll provide the war. >> that's good mr. kane. >> yeah, i rather like it myself. >> frederick remington is a name that wasn't in that movie. how does he fit into this? >> he was the artist whom william randolph hearst sent to cuba to illustrate and draw

sketches of the cuban rebellion that had swept the island by 1897. remington travels there in the company of richard harding davis, who was becoming the best known, most eminent foreign correspondent, work correspondent in the united states. this is a real coup for hearst to send these two individuals to cuba. and supposedly remington found that everything was quiet in cuba, there was not going to be a war with the united states. he sent a cable asking hearst to -- if it would be okay if he returned. in reply, hearst supposedly said, please remain. you furnish the pictures and i'll furnish the war. and orson wells, the "citizen kane" clip you just showed is a paraphrase of that famous line. hearst denied ever having said that. the spanish authorities in cuba it was spanish run at the time,

controlled the incoming and outgoing telegraphic traffic. there is no way they would have allowed a message like that, as inflammatory and meddling as the message supposedly was. there's no way they would have allowed that in. there's no way those messages would have flown freely from new york to cuba. there was a war going on anyway, so hearst to say -- to vow to furnish a war makes no sense on its face. it's illogical. why would he say that when war was the very reason he sent remington and davis to cuba in the first place? the rebellion was going on. when remington was there, most americans knew that there was a very vicious, ugly conflict going on and it was the forerunner. it gave rise to the spanish-american war 15 months later. for those and other reasons, it's almost certainly apocryphal. the sole source for this anecdote is a journalist named

herman. he wrote about it in 1901. he had a reputation for exaggeration, for overstatement, bluster, for putting himself in the stories too. he loved to talk about himself as the journalist. he mentions this not in any great detail. but mentions it almost in passing, but is an example of the forward-looking kind of journalism william randolph hearst was practicing. he meant this anecdote as a compliment to hearst and compliment to the kind of journalism that hearst was practicing at the end of the 19th century. it was anticipatory, forward looking. it was only years later, particularly in the mid 1930s and early 1940s that the interpretation got twisted or changed or altered to the malignant interpretation that we know it as today. you furnish the pictures, i'll furnish the war. this is an example of hearst at his worst. a warmonger.

>> people keep repeating this including a 1997 movie, the movies seem to perpetuate this. james bond. let's just look at this 45-second clip. >> and it seems you can't resist any woman in my position. >> what are you waiting for? shoot him. >> i told you, we're going to finish this together. >> how romantic. you realize how absurd your position is? >> no more absurd than starting a war for ratings. >> great men have always manipulated the media to save the world. william randolph hearst who told his photographers, you provide the pictures i'll provide the war. i'm just taking it one step further. [ gun shots ] >> sorry about that, i tuned out there for a moment, elliott. >> how do you stop something like this from -- and how much do you blame hollywood for keeping this up? >> well, hollywood certainly has

been a mechanism to solidify, to propel media-driven myths, some of them. this story's almost too good to resist. it's almost too good to be disbelieved. it's a nice, tidy, pithy. it's everything that a memorable media myth is and should be and can be. so it's irresistible in many ways. i think the way to combat media driven myths is to attack them directly and point out how flawed they are. there's a school of thinking that says that, you know, when you do that, you repeat the essence of the myth. you actually perpetuate the myth in trying to debunk it. i think that's a risk worth running in order to try to combat these. i can't think any other way to do it. i can't think of any other way to take them on and debunk them. i think the weight of the evidence is the best friend the debunker has. >> why did you leave print journalism to go into teaching?

>> it was a gradual process, and i had begun as an adjunct at the university of hartford, connecticut, and liked the classes i was teaching. i had an opportunity through the freedom forum to get my ph.d.. the freedom forum is a media foundation based in washington. and they had a program for veteran journalists who go through and obtain a ph.d. and then enter journalism education. have you the -- you have the credentials of the academy plus you have substantial professional experience. it's a great combination, i must say. and so after completing the ph.d. program at chapel hill, university of north carolina, i entered the -- joined the faculty at american university and loved it. i've been there ever since. >> any sense that the public is walking away from newspapers because of years and years of what they think is bad reporting? >> i think media consumers have long condemned the news media in general, newspapers as well as

other outlets for erroneous reporting, for not really getting the story quite right. and some of my earlier research on the yellow press period in the 1890s points it out very clearly, there was a lot of criticism, a lot of remarks about how the news media were getting it wrong, exaggerating, sensationalizing and whatnot. this is a chronic problem, this is one that consumers will always be able to muster and criticize the press. not to say the press doesn't deserve to be criticized. i think that they in many respects do need this critique from the public. and perhaps need to listen a little more closely to some of the critiques. >> did the woodward and bernstein reporting on watergate lead to vast new numbers coming into journalism school in the country? >> that is addressed in the book, under what i call a subsidiary myth, a myth that is spun off by another broader media driven myth. the broader myth is the one of

heroic journalists, that woodward and bernstein brought down richard nixon's corrupt presidency. the subsidiary myth is that woodward and bernstein, their book "all the president's men" came out when they were 30 and 31 respectively. young guys. they made journalism look glamorous. they made journalism look sexy. the movie, "all the president's men" which came out in april 1976, made journalism a sexy and entertaining and appealing profession. so thousands of young people decided to major in journalism programs in colleges and universities across the country. the best research shows that's not true, that the surge in enrollments in journalism and mass communication programs at u.s. universities and colleges had begun well before watergate, was underway well before woodward and bernstein became household names. >> would those 20 people have gone to jail, gone to prison if there hadn't been a woodward and bernstein? >> i think so.

almost certainly. they probably -- richard nixon i think would have survived his presidency. he would have served out his term, his second term, had it not been for the existence of the watergate tapes. that's my view. there's no way of knowing this. and the supreme court forced richard nixon to surrender the tapes that really clearly showed his culpability his guilty knowledge, his role in covering up, or attempting to cover up the watergate scandal. had it not been for those tapes, i think nixon would have survived as a wounded president, but would not have resigned. it was only because of the existence of those tapes and the supreme court forcing them out under subpoena by a federal special prosecutor that richard nixon finally gave up the office. >> again the movie "all the president's men" hal holbrook plays the part of mark felt, deep throat, and robert redford plays the part of bob woodward and then dustin hoffman, carl

bernstein. let's look at a little clip. they're in the garage, it's dark, and we'll come back. >> the garage, by the way is in rosslyn, virginia. >> right over the bridge from where we're sitting. let's watch this. >> the coverup had little to do with watergate, it was mainly to protect covert operations. it leads everywhere. get out your notebook, there's more. your lives are in danger. >> hi, i finally got someone on the phone. ♪

♪ >> any evidence that their lives were threatened? >> not really, although the book "all the president's men" alludes to the fact that deep throat made such a representation. i really don't think their lives were in danger. >> what do you say to your students, they're getting history off of hollywood, which you say is often wrong. >> or exaggerated or, you know, made to -- >> and we watch, as you point out, the media loves to give itself prizes and awards, and they perpetuate this whole business.

>> i think that students are very shrewd, sharp and they can -- although many of them have seen "all the president's men," many more have seen "all the president's men" than have read "all the president's men," the book. i think that students are inclined to be skeptical. inclined to challenge conventional wisdom. many of them. i don't think they necessarily take this as gospel. i think they would critically assess this, and i think that, you know, showing -- trying to take this apart, to unpack the watergate story, the heroic journalist myth. it becomes pretty clear that journalists alone couldn't have brought down the presidency. the presidency of richard nixon. it was just too vast, too powerful, too much in control. it had to be a combination of other forces and factors. as i mentioned earlier, the special prosecutor, federal investigators, grand juries,

federal judges, bipartisan congressional panels and ultimately the supreme court. you needed that to get at the criminality of the richard nixon administration. >> i've never been able to find out how many, but there are tons of schools across the country that give an edward r. murrow award. the business gives an edward r.murrow award. i'm going to read the last paragraph and ask you to embellish on this. there is no small irony in journalism's veneration of murrow who died in 1965. he was 57 or 58 that year. he was hardly a journalist above reproach. on his employment application at cbs murrow added five years to his age and claimed to have majored in college in international relations and political science. in fact, he had been a speech major at washington state. murrow also passed himself off as holding a master's degree from stanford university, a degree he never earned. during the 1956 presidential election campaign, he privately

counseled stephenson, the democratic candidate for president, on the finer points of speaking into the camera. these days such lapses would surely disqualify murrow from positions in prominence for network television. mainstream news media. what do those students say when they read a paragraph like this? they want to go out and get the murrow award? >> it's a good reminder about the dangers of resume padding, it can come back to haunt you. i think that's right, murrow probably would not today hold those kinds of positions, the prominent position of american journalism, had it been known he was privately counseling a democratic candidate or republican candidate for president on the finer points of using television. resume padding, a lot of that information is from biographers, this is not unknown detail. yet the man's aura and his

journalism tends to outweigh the -- those deficiencies and those flaws. >> here's a clip of edward r. murrow around this joseph mccarthy controversy, it's not too long. >> okay. >> we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. the actions of the junior senator from wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. and whose fault is that? not really his. he didn't create this situation of fear, he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. cassius was right. the fault, dear brutus is not in our stars, but in ourselves. good night and good luck. >> what does all that mean? >> first of all, it's great television, great advocacy journalism. murrow is wrapping up his 30-minute program about mccarthy and advising americans not to be

terribly afraid of this guy, the menace that mccarthy was. but by then, by march 1954, most americans were not waiting around for a white knight like murrow to say, hey, this mccarthy guy, he really poses a toxic threat to the country. by then they knew. his ratings had been slowly declining since the end of the year before, since the end of 1953. other journalists, including a guy named drew pearson who wrote the washington merry go round for many years. he was a muck raking journalist. he injected himself in sort of all phases of washington life. he was really kind of a unique character, almost. he took on joe mccarthy early in like 1950, right after mccarthy began his communists in government witch hunt claiming that the communists had infiltrated high levels of the state department and the army of the democratic party and so forth. pearson took him on and revealed

mccarthy's claims as being largely hollow. >> and pearson paid a bit of a price for this, because mccarthy, it's hard to imagine this today. but 60 years ago mccarthy attacked drew pearson in the cloak room of a club on dupont circle. they were seated at the same table trading jibes and barbs all night long. at the end of the dinner, mccarthy cornered pearson and versions vary as to what exactly happened. pearson said mccarthy tried to knee him in the groin a couple times. mccarthy admitted to slapping him real hard across the face. another version was that mccarthy slugged drew pearson so hard, that it lifted the columnist three feet into the air. richard nixon was also at the same party, then a senator,

broke up, intervened and broke up this confrontation. but it was emblematic of the difficulties and of the threats that mccarthy posed and would follow through on them with journalists. >> you say in your book that you talked with his stepson, tyler abel. >> right. >> drew pearson's stepson, who is married to bess able, the social secretary to lyndon johnson. what did you learn from tyler able who is still here and lives in the suburbs? >> i talked with him about the diary that he edited, drew pearson's diary, which was a very important resource for me. and also, he gave me clearance to use the photograph of drew pearson with hat on that appears in "getting it wrong." so he was a very helpful source for me. >> i have some more video, but in your piece you talk about the fact that -- and the source of this may have been cbs news

president that worked with edward r. murrow. that murrow became -- he was a friend of bill baileys, who owned cbs and paid him a salary over the fact that bill paily kept wanting to give equal time to the people they were attacking. >> in this case, the mccarthy case, he did -- right at the outset of the show, murrow offered to give mccarthy ample time to respond to murrow's allegations and mccarthy took him up on it in april, 1954. mccarthy goes on the air and does a very bad job, really a terrible job of trying to defend and explain himself. >> let's watch part of this. >> we supplied the senator with that program of march 9 and with such scripts and recordings as he requested.

we place no restrictions upon the manner or method of the presentation of his reply and suggested that we would not take time to comment on this particular program. the senator chose to make his reply on film. here now is senator mccarthy, senator from wisconsin. >> good evening. mr. edward r. murrow devoted his program to attack on the work of the united states senate investigative committee, and on me personally as its chairman. over the past four years, he's made repeated attacks on me and those fighting communists. of course, neither joe mccarthy or edward r. murrow is of any great importance as individuals. we're only important in our relation to the great struggle to preserve our american liberties.

the senate investigating committee has forced out of government and out of important defense plans communists engaged in the soviet conspiracy. it's interesting to note that the viciousness of murrow's attacks is in contrast to our success in digging out communists. ordinarily i would not take time out for the important work at time to answer murrow. however, in this case, i feel justified in doing so, because murrow is a symbol, the leader and the cleverest of the jackal pack, which has always gone for the throat of anyone who dares to expose communists. >> what do you think? >> those attacks on murrow did joe mccarthy no good. by the time he was on the air in april of '54, his favorability

ratings were in decline and also his career, his career was in jeopardy. the senate was about to begin investigative hearings about mccarthy, charges that had been raised by the army that he thought special treatment for a former aide on his committee, his subcommittee. and those charges were the center piece of a succession of hearings in the summer of 1954. and wound up leading to mccarthy's being censured by the u.s. senate and his political decline in eclipse. >> three years later he's dead at age 48. >> that's right. >> you say that joe mccarthy was not run out of this whole business by edward r. murrow in the end. >> that's right. murrow was very late in taking on mccarthy. the toxic threat that mccarthy posed to the united states was well demonstrated long before

murrow's program. interestingly, murrow himself said he did not want credit for taking down mccarthy. fred friendly said as much. he said it was the army mccarthy hearings in 1954 that took down mccarthy. >> where does the myth start? >> it is seated very early on, and a magazine called "telecasting broadcasting" said in the aftermath of murrow's program, said they're going to have to change the definition of journalism now and extolled murrow for taking on mccarthy and being courageous about it. so it took on this mythical overtone almost immediately. and at the time television is making its clear entry into american households, into american living rooms. in 1954, it passes the threshold of 50% penetration. in other words, 50% of american households now have television.

so television needs a defining figure, it needs a white knight and it needs a defining moment and that defining moment became the confrontation that murrow had in march 1954, taking down joe mccarthy. also, it's very well timed. murrow didn't plan it this way, but the army's charges against mccarthy take hold and are announced a couple days after his program. so this great timing helps place murrow at the center of this unraveling of joe mccarthy. but he really was a subordinate player. >> what do you come down on the spectrum of the argument today you hear people wanting to go back to the old days, back to way journalism was, they don't like the idea that there's a fox news or msnbc where they're at each other's throat or a rush limbaugh, better or worst off today?

>> absolutely better off today. the more options, the better for journalism and american democracy, the better for the american public. i think back in the day when there was the fairness doctrine and just three major networks, i don't think american audiences, the american country and american journalism were well served by that. i think the more choices, the more options, the better. even if we have fond regulations of edward r. murrow. media driven myths often invoke what i call the golden age fallacy. sort of look back and say there was a time when american journalism was respected, that journalists did great work, that they told truth to power and their work had an effect. and the murrow/mccarthy confrontation, just as watergate, just as the cronkite moment, all those fall victim to the golden age fallacy, looking back to a time when journalists were widely respected and did

great work. >> i saw on a website in 2006, maybe there's been more activity since then, you were the teacher of the year at american university. >> that's the student government every year at american university gives an award for faculty member of the year, and i was the lucky recipient that year. >> what techniques do you use in the classroom that gets you that kind of following? >> i like to teach in a very interactive way. even if it's a large class of 30, 40 more students, to try tone gauge students in the content and not to strictly lecture to them, although there is some lecture and some presentation. but to engage the material, to have reading assignments that they are expected to have completed and then also to be ready to discuss. and that kind of engagement, that kind of discussion based learning i think is very effective. >> what's next after this book? >> i like to think that the universe of media driven myths

is not confined to ten in this book. and i would like, although i haven't spoken with the publisher about, this i would like to think that there's a sequel to getting it wrong. getting it wrong part ii or maybe another title. >> is there an interactive website for people to get to you on this book? >> there are a couple of websites. one of them is mediadrivenmyths.com. i can be reached also through wjosephcampbell.com. >> what does the w stand for? >> it's my first name. >> what is it? >> my mother is -- she insisted i use the w. and not the joseph. it's a family secret. >> what does it stand for. >> it's a family secret. >> why is it a family secret? >> it's one i never disclose. >> this ought to be an opportunity. >> it could be. i think i'll pass.

>> w. joseph campbell, getting it wrong is the name of the book. thank you for joining us. >> thank you very much. it's a pleasure. >> for a dvd copy of the program, call 1-877-662-7726. for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q&a.org. programs are also available as c-span podcasts. they're often referred to as the conscience of the congress and after working there for almost two years, i can't think of a better name. >> executive director and general council of the congressional black caucus ge