Everything You Know About the Last 100 Years is Still Wrong

Terrific round-up of links at the World Around the Net blog. Here’s but a sample:

• William Randolph Hearst didn’t start the Spanish-American war, despite Citizen Kane. There zero evidence, and Hearst always denied it.
• Kennedy didn’t win the race based on his performance at the televised debate with Nixon, he only got a 2% bump in the polls, which is within the margin of error.
• Johnson probably never said “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America;” he wasn’t even watching the news when Walter Cronkite treacherously declared the Vietnam war (despite all evidence to the contrary) to have been lost. Johnson continued to be upbeat about the war and condemned people who called for withdrawal.
• For that matter, the Tet Offensive was a disastrous, ghastly defeat for the Viet Cong, which in effect ceased to exist after it because the US military totally obliterated them, reversing their temporary gains in a matter of days.
• The press didn’t bring Nixon down. Even Bob Woodward calls that horse(bleep). It was the special prosecutor and the supreme court, not the press, but the “heroic journalist” narrative is too sweet for the media to pass up.
• Following the Watergate scandal, there was supposedly a doubling of journalism students, making reporters hot for the first time in history… except that never happened. There was a very slight gain, but the doubling had already taken place.

As World Around the Net notes, “Just remember, having heard something all your life and had it repeated to you by people you trust doesn’t necessarily make them true.” Although reading their above list certainly brings me a distinct sense of deja vu, which I’ll chalk up to “Great Minds Think — and Link — Alike.”

(Via Fausta.)