This Day in Media History (Marguerite Higgins, First Woman to Win Pulitzer for International Reporting, Born)

Sept. 3, 1920—Marguerite Higgins, who overcame the rampant sexism of her time and profession to become the first female winner of the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting, was born in Hong Kong, in the Asia-Pacific Rim where she would establish much of her reputation.

In the Library of America anthology Reporting World War II, Higgins was the last by birth among the approximately 80 writers represented. A day shy of 25 when Japan formally surrendered, she reported on some of the major stories coming out of the latest six months of the European conflict: the refugee crisis and the liberation of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps.

These would have been great scoops for any reporter. They were extraordinary for a recent graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and a woman in an unrelieved, unapologetic masculine environment.

But it was in Asia—specifically, in Korea and Vietnam—where Higgins advanced closer to achieving her stated post-collegiate goal of becoming more famous than Dorothy Thompson, perhaps the most influential female journalist of the day. How she moved towards her goal has made her the subject of speculation and even controversy ever since.

Stationed in Tokyo as the New York Herald Tribune’s Bureau Chief, Higgins was ideally situated to cover the outbreak of hostilities in Korea in 1950. Despite her credentials as a war correspondent in WWII, she was initially ordered out of the country by Gen. Walton Walker.

Only a direct appeal to Douglas MacArthur, who had become Commander in Chief of the United Nations Command in Korea, enabled her to report on the conflict. She joined MacArthur's troops on the daring invasion at Inchon that, for a time, changed the direction of the war. In fact, she was the only female reporter to land on Red Beach (“a rough, vertical pile of stones”) with the men.

The Pulitzer Prize committee cited Higgins’ "enterprise and courage" in her coverage of the campaign, noting that she deserved "special consideration by reason of being a woman." But even as she was winning a new level of renown, she was stirring animosity among the largely male cadre of war correspondents that would dog her even beyond her early death.

Thousands of readers were amazed at how Higgins smashed through conventions that restricted women’s chances for achievement; a smaller cadre of colleagues were disgruntled at how they believed she ignored traditional ethical codes in pursuit of her laurels. It is still not easy sorting through these issues more than a half-century after her death.

While displaying outward bravado, Higgins was inwardly driven by an insecurity so unrelenting that it manifested itself as bravery so extreme that some males believe it shaded into foolhardiness. (Among them was Herald Tribune colleague Homer Bigart, who, like Gen. Walker, wanted her out of the country--leading not just to heightened competition between the two journalists but also to a closely watched feud between the two.) 

Such aggressiveness might be taken for granted among male reporters but were eyed critically when exhibited by females—and led to speculation that Higgins was not above stealing colleagues’ scoops.

Another serious charge against her arose from her good looks. Anyone glimpsing the stunning blonde in the attached photo might be forgiven for thinking that Betty Grable or even Marilyn Monroe had suddenly morphed into a top-flight journalist.

Those same people were often convinced that someone that glamorous could not have succeeded through her own efforts, but by sleeping with important men to further her career. 

In the process, these critics ignored factors that facilitated her work—knowledge of French and Chinese; extraordinary sympathy and compassion for young soldiers that sealed their bond with her; and willingness to endure extreme discomfort and danger.

(Ironically, when particularly obsessed with a story, Higgins was so oblivious to how she looked that she neglected to clean her face.)

Opinion remains divided to what extent those charges were true. But, if ruthlessness in pursuing scoops and straying outside traditional sexual norms are to be assessed, many if not most of Higgins’ male rivals would be as guilty as she.

A third charge against Higgins is more troubling: that, through personal associations and ideological preconceptions, she abandoned objectivity in her reporting on the early days of the Vietnam War. 

In 1963, younger reporters such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan were making plain in their dispatches that South Vietnamese forces were collapsing in the Mekong Delta. Based on her high-ranking military sources, Higgins disagreed strongly, airing their view that the Viet Cong were being progressively crushed. Any problem in Southeast Asia had resulted from journalists accepting at face value the notion that Buddhists in Vietnam were being oppressed by President Ngo Dinh Diem's "Catholic-dominated government":

"In the fall of 1963 Washington went into the business of hiring and firing governments,” Higgins charged in Our Vietnam Nightmare. “We not only forgot the one overriding priority, the war effort, but also, for the first time in history, conspired in the ouster of an ally in the middle of a common war against the Communist enemy, thus plunging the country and the war effort into a steep spiral of decline."

Higgins was ill-prepared to examine the reality of Vietnam dispassionately. In 1947, she had witnessed how Communists employed deception in taking over Poland. Friendly with both Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, she had adopted their view of the need to counter Soviet aggression. And, in 1952, she had married William Evens Hall, an Air Force Lt. General.

Vietnam undermined the credibility of a fellow journalist who accepted the government line, columnist Joe Alsop. Long before that happened, a tropical disease contracted in that country led to Higgins’ death in 1966 at age 45. She is one of a handful of war correspondents buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

During her lifetime, Americans became very familiar with the sight of Higgins—in well-attended lectures, her book covers (War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent and News is a Singular Thing), and TV appearances (in 1956, the quiz show What’s My Line?). 

Though her celebrity has faded, her face and story have still attracted enough posthumous attention to land her on a postage stamp (in 2002) and have made her the best-known character in a little-noticed film about the early days of the Korean War last year, The Battle of Jangsari.

I have not yet seen that movie, but in a sense its most famous cast member, Megan Fox, should be able to identify intensely with Higgins. In both women’s cases, men were so besotted by their looks that they sometimes had a difficult time taking their drive and work seriously. Time will tell how well Fox counteracts that perception.

This Day in Media History (Beck, Palin Lead Pseudo-Event, ‘Restoring Honor’ Rally)

Aug. 28, 2010—In one of the more curious manifestations of the growing Tea Party movement, Glenn Beck (pictured) and Sarah Palin led a “Restoring Honor” rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial that attracted hundreds of thousands of attendees.

The event, audaciously held on the 47^th anniversary of the “March on Washington,” had little discernible content but demonstrated plenty of discontent—principally, with an African-American President whose election two years previously would have been inconceivable without the civil-rights movement that had reached its rhetorical zenith on this spot.

At the time, "Restoring Honor" garnered quite a bit of attention, typified by the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, which devoted three articles in one issue to the rally: William Kristol’s lead editorial, along with features by Harvard government Professor Harvey Mansfield and Lee Harris, author of The Next American Civil War: The Populist Revolt Against the Liberal Elite.

Searching the Internet for more recent retrospectives on the rally, though, I came up with nothing significant. You might wonder, then, why I am even writing about something that left so little discernible impact on the popular memory.

But I would argue that it is worth discussing—not only as a demonstration of the amorphous anger that coalesced into the Democratic Party’s midterm drubbing the following November, but also as an example of what the historian Daniel J. Boorstin had, in his 1961 book The Image, termed a “pseudo-event.”

That resentment and the movement’s penchant for such synthetic happenings were integral elements in both the Republican Party’s domination of Capitol Hill through much of this past decade as well as in the rise of Donald Trump and his continued popularity among Republicans.

But back to Beck.

Three years ago while on a tour bus in Savannah, I saw another passenger, a middle-aged man, blinking nonstop. I couldn’t think right away who he reminded me of. Then it hit me: this was a Glenn Beck look-alike. I groaned at even this low-grade, undoubtedly unconscious imitator.

Starting out as a radio personality, Beck made the leap to television at CNN’s Headline News. Eventually the libertarian commentator came to the attention of Roger Ailes, who was casting about for an additional ratings magnet besides Bill O’Reilly. After meeting with him, the Fox News head hired Beck.

Debuting the day before Barack Obama’s inauguration as President, Beck was attracting more than 2 million viewers daily within a few weeks. Despite appearing in the 5 pm slot—not even the coveted prime time spot—Beck soon became the third highest-rated personality on the network.

 

He endeared himself to his audience with such pronouncements as that Obama had “a deep-seated hatred for white people” and that Nazi tactics were progressive tactics.

Besides Beck, Fox had also had a hand in promoting Palin. From the moment of her selection as GOP Presidential nominee John McCain’s running mate, Ailes saw her as a natural for his medium with her biting criticism of both GOP regulars and liberal press outlets, or, in a term that has been endlessly and mindlessly retailed on social media ever since, “the lamestream media.”

With mounting legal bills from the election and her new-found celebrity status, Palin stepped down as governor in July 2009. Early the following year, she was on board as a Fox political commentator—as well as a star in the insurgent right wing whose endorsement could catalyze previously moribund candidates.

Although recognizing their ability to boost ratings, Ailes before long found Beck and Palin distinctly high maintenance. That feeling began to solidify with the “Restore Honor” rally, which—particularly in Beck’s case—the news head saw as an attempt at brand building outside the umbrella of the network, according to Gabriel Sherman’s biography of Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room.

In no small part, that explains why Fox made no special attempt to cover a happening by one of its own stars.

Ailes’ suspicions about Beck may have sprung from a conjunction of the rally itself, the anniversary of the civil-rights milestone, and his star’s own venture. Only a couple of days after “Restoring Honor” was held, Beck launched TheBlaze, a conservative cable media company. Indeed, it might be said that the venture arrived amid a “blaze” of publicity for its founder.

Whatever the rally’s shortcomings as actual news, it was certainly the kind of “pseudo-event” that Boorstin had in mind.  Using his criteria, it was planned rather than spontaneous; planned primarily to be reported or reproduced; ambiguous as it relates to the underlying situation; and intended as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even more obnoxiously, it sparked pseudo-events meant to counter it: on that very day by the Rev. Al Sharpton, and that fall in Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear.”

But in another sense, "Restoring Honor" was not just a pseudo-event but also a daring act of political appropriation. More specifically, Beck and Palin capitalized on the inevitable association with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech without acknowledging the true nature of his challenge to the American political and social order of the time.

In a single sentence, Palin lumped King together with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as having “the same steel spine and moral courage” as the crowd.  Leave aside for a second the blatant flattery of those gathered together, not to mention the fatuity and fallaciousness of grouping them with a trio who risked death for establishing or extending freedom to Americans.

In essence, Palin was conveying that she knew that King was somehow important, but not why. The causes that drew her and Beck to the Tea Party—less government and lower taxes—were antithetical to the aims of Dr. King, who saw the federal government as the necessary guarantor of the rights of African-Americans and who in the weeks before his death was advocating for labor unions and the “Poor People’s Campaign” for jobs, unemployment insurance, a fair minimum wage, and education for poor adults and children.

Does anyone really think that Beck and Palin would regard such measures collectively as anything other than socialism?

Certain aspects of the rally—all mentioned in the trio of Weekly Standard articles—gave it a veneer of non-partisanship: its stress on the non-objectionable “God and Country”; the ban on signs; the lack of specific references to political parties; even proceeds from the event to be designated for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation.

But all of this contrasts with the lack of progressive speakers who could have balanced the more conservative Beck and Palin, not to mention the use of the “Restoring Honor” label itself, which Professor Mansfield bluntly admitted was “a jab at President Obama.”

In retrospect, the irony of that “jab” is glaring. 

Whatever his real shortcomings as a leader, President Obama has conducted his private life without the sexual scandals that plagued a predecessor (Bill Clinton) and the current occupant of the Oval Office, and his administration was largely free of the ethics violations that characterized administrations of both parties going back nearly 40 years. Beck and Palin would have been better advised to employ that "Restoring Honor" tag now for the individual seeking reelection rather than a decade ago.

The best way to illustrate the fundamental shortcoming of Restoring Honor, though, is to contrast it with the March on Washington. 

Religious conviction animated most of those on the official program (King, John Lewis, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle, and Rabbi Joachim Prinz) as surely as those at “Restoring Honor,” but they were there to promote concrete objectives—passage of civil-rights measures, ending school segregation, enforcing the 14^th Amendment, and minimum-wage and fair-labor legislation.

On the other hand, “Restoring Honor” was centered around themes—God and Country. They were not only unassailable (were liberals really against either?), but also, for that reason, unmeasurable.

Beck, for instance, had proclaimed, "Something beyond imagination is happening. America today begins to turn back to God." How to begin to assess the truth of that? What constitutes turning “back to God”? Who decides what that even is?

In producing a return to God, Beck and Palin might have done better to dispense with smarmy self-congratulation like this in favor of painful self-examination. 

They might have asked how many people might have been turned off by the religious right's near-incestuous embrace of political power, or how so many leaders of religious-affiliated institutions had alienated their faithful through their own financial and/or sexual corruption (seen most recently with Jerry Falwell Jr. and, in the past few decades, with the American hierarchy of my faith, the Roman Catholic Church).

This Day in Media History (Editor Asks, ‘What’s the Matter With Kansas?’)

Aug. 16, 1896—Annoyed at a crowd hectoring him about an anti-Populist article, William Allen White published one of the most famous editorials in his long career—and, indeed, one of the most famous in the history of journalism—with the provocative title, “What's the Matter With Kansas?”

If the title sounds familiar, it should: Left-liberal journalist Thomas Frank used it for his 2004 book speculating on why Red States (such as Kansas) continued to vote conservative Republican, even though it was clearly not in their best economic interest.

White (shown here in late middle age), who had just taken over the Emporia Gazette only one year before his piece ran, had a beef of his own 120 years ago with how Kansas voters could act in ways so contrary to their interest. How was it, he noted, that the state lagged the country and even other Midwestern states in different indices of prosperity and well-being?

Yet White came by his diagnosis from a vastly different ideological place than Frank. As a conservative Republican, the 28-year-old journalist blamed Democrats for his state’s doldrums, especially those advocating for the surging Populist movement (including, from adjacent Nebraska, the Democrats’ recently anointed nominee for President, William Jennings Bryan).

A half-century later, in the posthumous Autobiography of William Allen White, the editor admitted that his opinion piece was, shall we say, not entirely a product of cool reason. He had been on his way to his office when he was accosted by readers who took exception to his work.

“They ganged me—hooting, leering, nagging me about some utterances I had made. . . . Finally I broke through the cordon and stalked, as well as a fat man who toddles can stalk, down the street to the office. I . . . sat down to write for Monday`s paper an editorial, and I headed it ‘What`s the Matter with Kansas?’ . . . and it came out pure vitriol.”

That editorial took note of every conceivable metric White could think of—migration out of state, capital fleeing, stagnant industries outside of agriculture--and found Kansas wanting.

The editorial rose to a crescendo of sarcasm: “That's the stuff! Give the prosperous man the dickens! Legislate the thriftless man into ease, whack the stuffings out of the creditors and tell debtors who borrowed the money five years ago when money ‘per capita’ was greater than it is now, that the contraction of currency gives him a right to repudiate.”

In time, White regretted his scornful attitude. He continued to back Republicans for President: William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. But he thought he had dismissed too easily the legitimate grievances of Populism, an agrarian movement rightly fearful that large railroad companies were undermining their livelihood. Decades later, he realized that they had been engaged in “the beginning of a long fight for distributive justice, the opening of a campaign to bring to the common man a larger and more equitable share in the common wealth of our country.”

White grew less conservative, not more, with age, standing with those most marginalized in Kansas and the nation. In 1924, he ran an unsuccessful write-in campaign for governor on a single plank—opposition to the Ku Klux Klan—when neither the Republican nor Democratic candidates refused to say where they stood on the issue.

It may be that 21^st century Kansans may now, like White, be at least partially reconsidering their prior political beliefs. In the first term of Gov. Sam Brownback, they backed his plan to sharply reduce taxes. But hard experience with the consequences—deepening budget gaps, draconian cuts in school spending, deteriorating highways, and credit-rating agency downgrades of state bonds three times in the last two years—has sparked something of a counterrevolution.  

Two weeks ago in primary elections, moderate Republicans, calling for a return to the state’s “fiscal viability,” defeated 14 legislators allied with the governor, while anti-Brownback candidates won nominations for open seats in another seven races. Moreover, Representative Tim Huelskamp, a Tea Party favorite, lost his seat in the state’s 1st congressional district. Pushed to the limit, Kansans--as their counterparts in White's time did--have pushed back.

This Day in Media History (“Bouncing Czech” Robert Maxwell Buys Mirror)

July 13, 1984—The improbable—no, preposterous—career of press baron Robert Maxwell took another unexpected turn, as he took control of the Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN)—and positioned himself for another down-and-dirty rumble with fellow yellow journalist Rupert Murdoch.

I’m not surprised by the allegations of phone hacking of private citizens by Murdoch’s minions in the U.K. After all, the publisher of the New York Post has never adequately explained how his paper was able to get a photo of serial killer David Berkowitz asleep in prison (an image that got plastered on the front pager with the headline, “SAM SLEEPS”).

I am surprised, however, by all that I hear about Maxwell. The amount and variety of his shenanigans continue to astound, 18 years after his mysterious death aboard his yacht.

Some years ago, on a field trip for librarians, someone on the tour recounted how Maxwell had offered her a job as an executive assistant. Initially, she was torn about taking it, because the money was so good. Eventually, she decided not to make the job switch because she did not want to lose precious time with her family by constantly being at Maxwell’s beck and call.

After Maxwell’s death, time wouldn’t have been the only commodity lost by the librarian. The scandal of Maxwell’s death was how much he had endangered the pensions of his employees.

Over the years—and especially with the premiere of the BBC adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now—Maxwell was often compared with Augustus Melmotte, the con artist extraordinaire at the heart of the Victorian masterpiece of high finance and meager ethics, especially on these counts:

* Both vaulted to the top of their professions using nefarious financial schemes.

* Both were émigrés from the Continent (Maxwell, from Czechoslovokia, inevitably became known as the “Bouncing Czech”) who sought and gained political office in their adopted country (in the ‘60s, Maxwell served in the House of Commons as a Labour Party member).

* Both men died as their financial house of cards was about to collapse.

But Maxwell’s resemblance to Melmotte on a particular point brought out especially invidious comparisons, as well as the worst aspects of their accusers. Both men, it was noticed, were Jewish.

In Trollope’s time, anti-Semitism was a product of the right; in Maxwell’s, it had switched over to the left, many of whom over the last two decades have dismissed guesses that Maxwell accidentally drowned or (more likely) committed suicide. No, these new anti-Semites believe, Maxwell was killed on order of the Israeli secret service, Mossad. Or by the Russian Mafia. Or who knows who? Pick your favorite conspiracy theory. One’s as good as another.

The purchase of MGN was particularly heartening for Maxwell—it meant he not only had fulfilled his dream of owning a national paper but that he could finally take on Murdoch, who had defeated his 1969 attempt to purchase The News of the World.

Maxwell’s ambitions far outstripped his ability to keep his empire going, however. By the end of the ‘80s, he was in a merry-go-round of acquiring and disposing of one item after another: media groups, paper producers, printers, banks, insurance and leasing companies. Within a year of his death, his company filed for bankruptcy.

This Day in Media History (First Long-Running American Newspaper Founded in Boston)

April 24, 1704—As Americans watch an industry that (depending on one’s point of view) is experiencing unusual turbulence or its death throes, let’s take a moment to remember the first continuously operating newspaper on these shores: The Boston News-Letter, founded on this date in Britain’s most theocratic—and fractious—North American colony.

Did you catch the history of American newspapers a few months in The New Yorker that was written by Jill Lepore? If you didn’t, here’s the link—it’s a good way to get acquainted with this Harvard historian, who has a knack for rendering early America in engaging, lightly ironic tones.

True, Lepore sums up, in only one sentence (blink and you’ll miss it!) the story of this landmark American media event. But you’ll find enough context to gauge the peculiar soil in which an entire institution grew—and what is new and what is not so new about its current difficult situation.

Notice one phrase in my first paragraph: “continuously operating.” I inserted it because, technically speaking, the first American newspaper, Publick Occurrences, also came out of Boston, in 1690.

Only one little problem: It was shut down after one issue, for repeating the rumor that the King of France had cuckolded his own son. (Why this should be a problem in Anti-French, Anti-Catholic British North America is beyond me—but there you go.)

The News-Letter didn’t make the same mistake—it was “published by authorities,” or, as Lepore helpfully translates it, endorsed by clerics (you know which ones—those Puritan divines who, only 14 years before, had gotten themselves all in a knot over witchcraft that didn’t exist in Salem).

I’m afraid that you and I might have found the appearance and content of the News-Letter a bit boring. It started out on a single page, printed on both sides, filled mostly with news of English politics along with a lot of boring lists of ship arrivals, deaths, sermons, political appointments, fires, etc.

Among the only major item it broke that broke this torpor in its first two decades was the news of the death of the pirate Blackbeard. (Ah, pirates—newspapers are going out of style, but pirates are experiencing a comeback, have you noticed?)

But all of this was new in those days, and people sat up and took notice. When the first sheet of the first issue came out, the damp specimen was shown to the chief justice of Massachusetts and the president of Harvard, attracting attention as a real curiosity.

Interest in newspapers became really lively, however, with the arrival on the scene of James Franklin’s New-England Courant in 1721. The printer’s decision to go without a license attracted some unwanted attention from authorities, who threw him in print—twice. On one of those occasions his kid brother, hired as an apprentice, ran the paper in his absence. You might have heard of this cheeky younger sibling who, after his brother came back and started lording it over him, ran away to Philadelphia and into the history books—Ben Franklin.

By the time of the American Revolution, there were 40 newspapers in the colonies. Newspapers were instrumental in aiding the cause of John Adams during the American Revolution and Thomas Jefferson in the 1790s. Yet once they became President, the two men bitterly complained about the scurrilous attacks by the institution they once welcomed.

From what I’ve seen on other blogs and Facebook, the more heated a denunciation, the more likely these Internet phenomena are to attract attention and comment. In this way, they hearken back to the days of the thirteen colonies and the new United States, where invective carried the day.

More than 10 years ago, a friend who’d written about the early 1860s told me that the mood of that decade seemed closer in spirit to his time than the early 1960s had. I think we’re seeing something similar to that with what Thomas Jefferson called the “contest of opinion,” which now is taking place more in cyberspace than in hard copy.

None of the champions of the old order quite know how to deal with this brand new world—not even the bearer of one of the most storied surnames in American journalism, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. His predicament has been brilliantly captured by Mark Bowden in the new issue of Vanity Fair.

The Boston News-Letter folded when its Tory owners left America for the Mother Country during the American Revolution. They never recognized, until too late, the epic change taking place around them.

“Pinch” Sulzberger, I’m afraid, is kin to them in his vapid managerial clichés, starting with his decision to spend on a very expensive headquarters. Since its much-ballyhooed opening two years ago, The Good Gray Lady has been forced to sell the building off, then rent it back.

If newspapers hope to carve out a place in our new environment, they need to recognize the sense of novelty that made the first real American newspaper so striking when it first appeared.