Book Review: Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism

Abstract

Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism. W. Joseph Campbell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 269 pp. $26.95 pbk.Reviewed by: Guido H. Stempel III, Ohio University, Athens, OH, USADOI: 10.1177/1077699012472031Every journalism student and reporting teacher should study Getting It Wrong, in which Joseph Campbell, a professor in the School of Communications at American University, separates the myth and legend from reality in ten legendary news stories. He presents extensive documentation to support his analysis.He begins with the supposed telegraph exchange between Frederic Remington and William Randolph Hearst. Remington, a famous artist, was sent by Hearst to Cuba in 1897 to cover the Spanish-American War. Legend has it that Remington wired Hearst that there was no war, and Hearst wired back, You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war.There is no supporting evidence for this anecdote, which Campbell calls perhaps the hardiest myth in American journalism. Copies of the supposed telegrams are not known to exist. Of course, the anecdote was partly believable because Hearst did, indeed, promote the war with Cuba.Campbell moves on through nine other well-known stories that are somewhere between myths and hoaxes. The one that seems to qualify clearly as a hoax is the story of Private Jessica Lynch, the captured supply clerk with the U.S. Army in Iraq. Her unit made a wrong turn and ended up in hostile territory on March 23, 2003; her Humvee was ambushed and shelled, and crashed. She was seriously injured in the crash and taken to a hospital by the Iraqis. She was rescued from the hospital nine days later by a U.S. Special Operations unit.This much was true, but little of what the media offered after that was. Lynch became the great hero of the Iraq War, compared to Annie Oakley and Sgt. York. It started with a Washington Post story two days after her rescue that said she had shot several Iraqi and fired her weapon until she ran out of ammunition. The Post story cited unidentified U.S. officials who said Lynch had continued firing after she had been wounded. If the Post said all this on the basis of what government officials said, that was good enough for other media, which blew Pvt. Lynch into a full-blown American hero. Lynch became at that point the most widely publicized member of the U.S. armed forces.Yet, the fact was that Lynch had not been wounded, and did not fire her weapon because it jammed. …