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THE PRESS EFFECT
This page intentionally left blank
û
The
Press Effect
Politicians, Journalists, and the Stories
That Shape the Political World

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON

&
PAUL WALDMAN

2003
 Oxford New York
Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai
Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi
São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto

Copyright © 2003 by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

www.oup.com

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication

may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jamieson, Kathleen Hall.

The press effect : politicians, journalists,
and the stories that shape the political world /
Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman.
p. cm. Includes index.
ISBN 0-19-515277-8
1. Journalism—Objectivity—United States.
2. United States—Politics and government—1993–2001.
I. Waldman, Paul. II. Title.
PN4888.O25 J36 2002 071'.3—dc21 2002009845

135798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
 To Robert,
who keeps ships afloat.

To Al Bennett,
who opened the mind
of every student he taught.
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction xi

CHAPTER 1
The Press as Storyteller 1

CHAPTER 2
The Press as Amateur Psychologist, Part I 24

CHAPTER 3
The Press as Amateur Psychologist, Part II 41

CHAPTER 4
The Press as Soothsayer 74 vii
viii CONTENTS

CHAPTER 5
The Press as Shaper of Events 95

CHAPTER 6
The Press as Patriot 130

CHAPTER 7
The Press as Custodian of Fact 165

Conclusion 194

Notes 199

Index 209
 Acknowledgments

W e wish to thank Annenberg School for Communica-

tion staff members Sharon Black, Nikki Dooner,
Joshua Gesell, Deborah Porter, Deborah Stinnett, and
Debra Williams for their help. The Annenberg 2000
Survey, on which much of our analysis of public opinion is based, was
designed, executed, and analyzed with Richard Johnston, Michael Hagen,
Kate Kenski, Princeton Survey Research staff members Christopher
Adasiewicz and Mary McIntosh, and the folks at Schulman, Ronca &
Bucuvalas. We are grateful to our editor Tim Bartlett for fine-tuning
ideas, suggesting new directions, tempering our more extravagant aca-
demic impulses, and keeping the manuscript on course; and to Oxford
stalwart Laura Brown, who has kept Kathleen sane through seven Ox-
ford books.

ix
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

I n early December 2001, journalists were told by Bush adminis-

tration officials that an about-to-be-released videotape of Osama
Bin Laden not only provided evidence that Bin Laden planned
the September 11 attacks, but included a detail worthy of a James
Bond villain: Even some of those about to die in service to his cause
were unaware that the plan called for their deaths. As CNN’s John King
reported, administration officials said the video showed Bin Laden “talk-
ing about how, and one official says laughing when he does so, that many
of those hijackers did not know, when they were planning those attacks,
that they indeed would die in what ultimately became suicide hijackings.”
From the tape itself, however, reporters learned that what they had
been told was incorrect. On the tape, Bin Laden actually said that the
hijackers hadn’t known the details of the operation until just before it
occurred but did know that they were participating in a “martyrdom
operation,” a subtle but important nuance. Yet the news reports did not
charge that administration officials had misled them about the details
of the tape.
Why did reporters not call the officials to account? Because the “main
story” of the tape—that Bin Laden admitted planning the attacks—was
so significant, the press may have decided that the incidental falsehood
was not noteworthy. We suspect that it was dismissed as well because the
larger story of the time, a story embraced by Republicans, Democrats,
citizens of small towns and large cities, and reporters alike, focused on
the terrible crime that Bin Laden had engineered and his identity, in the xi
xii Introduction

words of President Bush, as “the Evil One.” Thus even if he hadn’t actually
uttered the words, it was plausible that he might have, and there was com-
fort in believing that all but the ringleaders had been deceived by the Devil
incarnate. If some of the hijacking terrorists who boarded the planes on
September 11 didn’t realize that they were about to end the lives of hun-
dreds along with their own, then the fact that they boarded at all was some-
how more comprehensible. Even after the tape was broadcast and
transcribed, some later news reports repeated the original erroneous claim.
For instance, on March 13, 2002, NBC reporter John Hockenberry said on
Dateline, “There is this famous video of Osama Bin Laden talking about
how some people on the airplanes in New York and Washington did not
even know that they were going to die, had no idea that this was a suicide
mission.” Because it was not corrected, the inaccuracy had become part of
the historical memory of some journalists, and could thus be repeated.
This is one small case in which an inaccuracy was passed from po-
litical actors to reporters and on to the public. Because it was not cor-
rected, the inaccuracy persisted in public memory. Officials were able to
control the frame because they held a temporary monopoly on relevant
information; when that monopoly disappeared, other facts were deemed
to be of greater consequence and a continuing, compelling narrative over-
whelmed any impulse reporters might have had to address the question
of whether they and the public had been misled.
In a complex world, what the public knows and understands is a
collection of facts both small and large, and stories both fleeting and
persistent. In describing the process by which real-world events are trans-
lated into public knowledge through journalism, we use two primary
metaphors, one novel and one common in the study of communication
and public opinion. In order for an event to reach the public, it must
first be viewed by reporters, then related in stories. To describe report-
ers’ views of the world they are asked to explain (we use the metaphor of
lenses) the shifting perspectives that color what reporters see of the world
at a given moment. To describe the news coverage that results from those
views, we use the metaphor of frames, the structures underlying the de-
pictions that the public reads, hears, and watches.
Because they determine the content of news, those lenses and frames
continuously shape what citizens know, understand, and believe about
the world. In The Press Effect, we make sense of moments such as the Bin
Laden tape and their effects on public knowledge by examining the vari-
ous lenses through which reporters saw events and the frames they de-
ployed as they told us stories about the meaning of politics in a year of
 Introduction xiii

presidential recounts and terrorist attacks. In order to do so, we will

concentrate on the way truth and falsehood pass through news frames
and the identifiable patterns of coverage that make certain interpreta-
tions more likely. Just as there are countless events reporters could write
about each day, there are many more pieces of information than could
possibly fit into a single story. The metaphor of a frame—a fixed border
that includes some things and excludes others—describes the way in-
formation is arranged and packaged in news stories. The story’s frame
determines what information is included and what is ignored.
As scholar Robert Entman defined them, frames “define problems—
determine what a causal agent is doing with what costs and benefits,
usually measured in terms of common cultural values; diagnose causes—
identify the forces creating the problem; make moral judgments—evalu-
ate causal agents and their effects; and suggest remedies—offer and justify
treatments for the problems and predict their likely effects.”1 Frames tell
us what is important, what the range of acceptable debate on a topic is,
and when an issue has been resolved. By choosing a common frame to
describe an event, condition, or political personage, journalists shape
public opinion. As communication scholar Oscar Gandy wrote, frames
“are used purposively to direct attention and then to guide the process-
ing of information so that a preferred reading of the facts comes to domi-
nate public understanding.”2 As scholars studying framing have argued,
the fact that news frames help determine what the public knows and
believes opens opportunities for interested parties to exert influence by
advancing some frames and downplaying others.3 Because reporters are
dependent on those same actors to provide them with information and
quotes, they can at times be susceptible to manipulation.4 Political ac-
tors understand which frames are more amenable to their position; the
greater the power an actor holds and the more central her comments are
to a story, the more success she may have in getting her preferred frame
adopted. In the case of the Bin Laden tape, the operative frame con-
cerned the certainty and details of his guilt; questions of the administra-
tion’s truthfulness were set aside for another day.
Journalists help mold public understanding and opinion by decid-
ing what is important and what may be ignored, what is subject to de-
bate and what is beyond question, and what is true and false. In order to
make those judgments, they have to navigate an often confusing thicket
of information and assertions. “Facts” can be difficult to discern and
relate to the public, particularly in a context in which the news is driven
by politicians and other interested parties who selectively offer some
pieces of information while suppressing others.
xiv Introduction

Just as politicians sometimes succeed in deceiving the public, jour-

nalists sometimes fail in their task of discovering and describing the
knowable, relevant information at play in public discourse. Our goal in
this book is to examine those negotiations and battles over what will be
accepted as fact, investigate where journalists succeed and fail, and offer
some recommendations for improvements in reporting that we believe
would result in a better-informed citizenry and a closer tie between cam-
paigning and governing.
We would not go as far as some postmodernists who assert that all
we know is socially constructed and thus “truth” does not exist in any
meaningful way. Nor would we argue that the truth is out there, if only
journalists would find it. In public discourse, when different stories com-
pete for primacy each may embody some version of the truth. But this
does not mean that some stories are not more true than others, and that
there are not some facts on which most can agree. The critical variable is
usually not the facts themselves but the manner in which they are ar-
ranged and interpreted in order to construct narratives describing the
political world. Between these two extreme positions—that there is no
such thing as truth, and that there is but a single truth that simply waits
to be found—lies the terrain journalists attempt to chart every day.
As critic Kenneth Burke noted, language does our thinking for us.
Language choices not only reflect individual disposition but influence
the course of policy as well. Tax cuts or tax relief? Religious or faith-
based? Death penalty or execution? Estate tax or death tax? Civilian deaths
or collateral damage? In the early stages of almost any policy debate, one
can find a battle over which terms will be chosen. Because the terms we
use to describe the world determine the ways we see it, those who con-
trol the language control the argument, and those who control the argu-
ment are more likely to successfully translate belief into policy.
When competing politicians or groups adopt the same language,
the press usually transmits the agreed-upon words to us. But when com-
peting sides feud over language, the vocabulary chosen and legitimized
by reporters and editors is likely to both frame debates and ultimately to
embody unchallenged assumptions that facilitate some arguments and
undercut others. For example, in the mid-1990s anti-abortion activists
made an issue out of a procedure known to medical professionals as
“intact dilation and extraction.” By naming it “partial birth abortion,”
they attempted to move it both out of the medical realm and into the
policy realm and out of impersonal technical technology into emotion-
ally evocative language. Early in the feud over the description, the press
used the words “so-called” before one or the other of the labels to charac-
 Introduction xv

terize each as a contested phrase. Ultimately, the descriptive power of

“partial birth abortion” took hold and became the phrase used more
often than alternatives by reporters, an important linguistic victory for
the “pro-life” forces. The U.S. Congress and legislatures in twenty-nine
states passed laws banning or restricting “partial birth abortion.”5
The language, stories, and images in which politics is cast by those
in power, those seeking power, and by the press become filters through
which we make sense of the political world. Citizens expect that the press
will approach the competing frames offered by interested parties with
skepticism. As we shall see, this is not always the case.
The frames that journalists adopt are in part a function of the lenses
through which reporters view the world and their conception of their roles
in the political process at a given moment. For example, during election
campaigns reporters see themselves in part as unmaskers of the hypocrisy
of those who seek office. That perspective carries with it a frame that is
ironic and often cynical, focusing on strategic intent, motives, and ap-
pearance. A candidate’s missteps are featured as signs of a defective char-
acter or questionable competence. By contrast, on September 11 and in
the days that followed, reporters viewed events through a patriotic lens.
Where in the campaign of 2000 the motive and strategic intent behind the
message were a matter of focus, in the wake of the attacks reporters took
U.S. leaders at their word, assumed that their motives were honorable,
and overlooked, indeed compensated for, their missteps.
This book will explain the way these lenses, frames, and stories shape
how we translate political data into presumed fact. It will also illustrate
how assumptions about those who lead come into being and change,
and how evidence is interpreted by journalists to support or challenge
an ascendant view. To build our case, we will range across the political
landscape, and press responses to it, over one of the more interesting
years of modern presidential history, from the summer of 2000 through
the beginning of 2002, a period encompassing the closest election in
modern memory, a controversial decision by the Supreme Court, and
the transitions in governance occasioned by the terrorist attacks of Sep-
tember 11, 2001.
In the process we will try to make sense of moments in which differ-
ent versions of reality and different sets of facts competed for purchase in
public consciousness. Among the questions we will ask are the following:

• In the 2000 presidential primaries, when Al Gore distorted his op-

ponent’s record, the press took little public notice. Sixth months later,
xvi Introduction

reporters pounced on trivial misstatements to launch an indictment

of the Democrat’s character. Since the reports failed to draw on ear-
lier, more credible evidence, Democratic partisans concluded that
the press was out to get their party’s nominee. But was it?

• Would Republican nominee George W. Bush’s tax plan dispropor-

tionately help those in the upper 1% of income earners? Which
Americans wouldn’t receive a penny of benefits from Democratic
nominee Al Gore’s proposed education tax deduction? Many report-
ers didn’t appear to think these were questions worth asking. When
they did raise them, their answers were often confusing and occa-
sionally inaccurate. Why were those who see themselves as custodi-
ans of fact so hesitant to help the public sort all of this out?

• In the 2000 presidential debates, reporters interpreted Gore’s mis-

taken claim that he had visited fires in Texas with the head of FEMA
as a sign of a defective character. Reporters also noted that contrary
to his claim, Bush had not championed a patient’s bill of rights in
Texas, but in contrast to their evaluation of Gore, did not then go on
to draw inferences about the Texan’s character or competence. Were
they applying different standards to the candidates, or was some-
thing else going on?

• Although they pride themselves on their investigative instincts, re-

porters were oblivious to the maneuvering of the Bush campaign that
led to different standards of vote counting in Florida—a lenient stan-
dard in counting likely Bush overseas absentee ballots and a strict one
in counting Gore’s. Did reporters’ susceptibility to the Bush spin in-
crease the likelihood that the Supreme Court would take the case of
Bush v. Gore and decide the election for Bush?

• When in late 2001 analyses by news organizations showed that Gore

was as likely as Bush to have won the needed ballots in Florida, head-
lines proclaimed that Bush had indeed won and the system worked.
Was this simply Bush boosting or something else?

• When Bush mangled sentences during the campaign, it was said to

“raise questions” about his intellect. After September 11 the same
sorts of stumbles were overlooked. Was the press wrong when it
singled those cues out for comment in the campaign? Or was the
president given a pass because the country was under threat?
 Introduction xvii

When reporters transform the raw stuff of experience into presumed

fact and arrange facts into coherent stories, they create a way of seeing
individuals and events as well as a way of making sense of politics writ
large. Because the success of our democracy depends so heavily on jour-
nalists’ exercise of their constitutionally protected mission, it is impor-
tant to understand the ways shifting journalistic perspectives alter the
facts that are deemed important, the ways in which fact is framed and
frames come to be assumed, and the ways that journalism’s facts and
frames become the stories we tell each other and our children about the
meaning of our times.
This page intentionally left blank
THE PRESS EFFECT
This page intentionally left blank
 CHAPTER 1
The Press as Storyteller

T he reports that journalists offer their readers, listeners, and

viewers are not called “stories” by accident. By arranging
information into structures with antagonists, central con-
flicts, and narrative progression, journalists deliver the world
to citizens in a comprehensible form. But the stories that journalists tell
and the lenses that color their interpretation of events can sometimes
dull their fact-finding and investigative instincts.
In the illustrations that follow, we describe instances in which re-
porters failed to investigate and locate the facts that would have under-
cut the coherence of a story being told because the lens they adopted
made fact-finding seem unnecessary or irrelevant. In the first set of cases,
while replaying coherent, compelling stories, reporters missed facts that
would have disrupted the story line even though the story line itself was
being disputed. In the second set, involving events in times of crisis or
war, government-blessed versions of fact were uncritically embraced and
deceptions tacitly forgiven.
Of course politicians cast the world in stories, too. Political actors argue
through the use of narrative for a number of reasons. First, they understand
that narrative has persuasive power; when arguments are arranged into sto-
ries, they are more readily recalled and more easily believed. Second, they
understand the reporter’s preference for good stories around which news
can be built. If a story is compelling enough, it can increase the chances that
coherent but inaccurate information will pass through to the public, as is
the case in our first example from the 1988 presidential campaign. 1
2 THE PRESS EFFECT

The Horton Menace

The 1988 presidential election produced a telling case in which the press
failed to challenge facts that sounded plausible because they completed
a dramatic narrative. Seeing the story through the lens of strategy and
tactics, reporters neglected their role as custodian of fact. What were the
facts? William Horton, who had been convicted as an accessory to a felony
murder for his part in a robbery in which a young man was murdered,
was released from a Massachusetts prison on a furlough. He jumped
furlough and traveled to Maryland, where he held a couple hostage,
stabbed the man and raped his fiancée. The Bush campaign used the
story to paint the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts governor Michael
Dukakis, as soft on crime.
Whether or not the Horton story accurately symbolized Dukakis’s
record on crime, George H. W. Bush’s embellishment of it and the press’s
failure to challenge the untruths the vice president told as he repeated
the story provide an excellent example of the power of narrative to over-
whelm concern about fact. On the stump, for example, Bush alleged that
“Willie Horton was in jail, found guilty by a jury of his peers for mur-
dering a seventeen-year-old kid after torturing him.”1 There is no direct
evidence that Horton killed Joseph Fournier, and nothing on which to
base a charge of torture. The untrue claim that Horton had cut off
Fournier’s genitals and stuffed them in the victim’s mouth was whis-
pered to reporters by Bush campaign operatives. There is some evidence
that Horton may have been in the getaway car shooting heroin while his
associates robbed and killed Fournier. A court official indicated that one
of Horton’s accomplices confessed to killing Fournier but the confes-
sion was disallowed because it had been secured without the reading of
Miranda rights. Horton was convicted as an accomplice to a felony mur-
der. In other words, there is no evidence that he killed Fournier and
reason to believe that he did not.
Bush next alleged that Horton had murdered again when he jumped
furlough. As he described it in an Ohio speech in September, “You re-
member the case of Willie Horton in the Reader’s Digest, the guy was
furloughed, murderer, hadn’t even served enough time for parole, goes
down to Maryland, and murders again, and Maryland wouldn’t even let
him out to go back to Massachusetts, because they didn’t want him to
kill again. I don’t believe in that kind of approach to criminals.”2 Bush’s
claim that Horton had committed murder while on parole was untrue.
The Republican candidate’s story, then, had three flaws: It increased
 The Press as Storyteller 3

Horton’s role in the crime for which he was originally in jail, it embel-
lished the details of the crime, and it magnified the horror of Horton’s
post-furlough activities. There is symmetry in the notion that a killer
has killed again; thus Bush’s exaggerated version of the story cohered
thematically with the undisputed facts, and that coherence increased its
plausibility. When Dukakis failed to challenge the Bush claims on the
assumption that they were unbelievable, the press, taking its cue in part
from the Democrat, gave Bush a pass. While reporters discussing the
story usually correctly stated its facts, they did not charge Bush with
deception for making the story more awful than it actually was.
The Bush campaign also falsely asserted that the furlough program
was Dukakis’s invention (he had inherited it from his Republican pre-
decessor), that Horton was a first-degree murderer not eligible for pa-
role at the time of his furlough (he was in a category that made him
eligible for parole), that there were hundreds of others who escaped from
Massachusetts furloughs and committed violent crimes (none commit-
ted murder, and Horton was the only one who committed rape), and
that Horton’s name was not William but “Willie.” In fact, until June of
1988 Horton was referred to as William in all court documents and news-
paper stories, including those of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, the Massa-
chusetts newspaper that won a Pulitzer Prize for its exposé of the furlough
program. The advertisement featuring Horton, which was paid for by
the National Security PAC,3 referred to him as “Willie,” and Bush, who
mentioned him in speeches in the summer of 1988 as well as in his de-
bate with Dukakis on September 25, referred to him as “Willie.” An ex-
amination of newspaper stories reveals that once the Bush campaign
began referring to him as Willie, most newspapers began calling him
that as well. Only the Washington Post and New York Times continued to
call him William—although they shifted back and forth between the
two names. Given the controversy, one would assume that reporters
would have gone back to look at the documents surrounding the Horton
case, including the Eagle-Tribune series. Had they done so, they would
have noticed that Horton hadn’t been called Willie until Bush began
talking about the case. One explanation for the lack of correction is that
the name Willie sounded more lower class, more criminal, and indeed
more “black” to reporters, and thus cohered with the narrative concern-
ing Horton’s crimes.
The question of Horton’s name demonstrates that the stories on which
political arguments are built have embedded within them a variety of facts
both large and small, any of which may be subject to distortion. The fact
4 THE PRESS EFFECT

that reporters failed to call Bush on his claim that Horton had killed
again while on furlough suggests the extent to which reporters, like the
rest of us, often fail to check facts that seem compatible with compelling
narratives. This is particularly true when the lens through which report-
ers are seeing is a strategic one, evaluating candidates’ words and actions
for their tactical intentions and electoral effects.

The Supreme Court and Election 2000

In the case of William Horton, the press permitted a compelling story—

and the absence of clear rebuttal from Dukakis—to overwhelm the facts,
allowing inaccuracy to pass uncorrected to the public. The denouement
to the 2000 election showed how an existing narrative can drive interpre-
tation in cases where the press is called to make sense of a finite set of facts.
When the tightly fought 2000 race came down to a disputed state decided
by a margin of less than one one-hundredth of one percent, the dominant
narrative portrayed partisan division and a country equally divided be-
tween the “red states” supporting one candidate and the “blue states” sup-
porting the other, as they were portrayed on the networks’ electoral maps.
Reporters had forecast two possible story lines about the basis for the Su-
preme Court decision. In the first, the conservative majority’s disposition
to minimize federal authority and reserve power to the states forecast a
decision that would return the case to the Florida Supreme Court. A sec-
ond story line suggested that the “conservatives” would find a way to hand
the election to the individual most likely to strengthen their hold on the
Court. Either of these was compatible with a 5–4 vote on the Court; nei-
ther was compatible with a 7–2 ruling. The ruling contained both a 7–2
decision and a 5–4 decision. Which would reporters feature?
Democrats and Republicans were divided over whether the court
had decided 7–2 or 5–4. In fact, it had done both. “Seven justices of the
court [Justices Stevens and Ginsburg disagreed] agree that there are con-
stitutional problems with the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme
court that demand a remedy,” said the Court. “The only disagreement
[among the seven] is as to the remedy.” On the issue of whether there
was a remedy available before a hard-and-fast deadline, two of the seven
(Justices Souter and Breyer) held open the option to give it a try. In
short, four of nine believed that there might be a remedy that would
permit continuation of the count; five concluded that the election was
over and for practical purposes a president elected.
 The Press as Storyteller 5

Republicans would argue that the recount requested by Gore had been
unconstitutional. But that is not actually what the Court said. “Because it
is evident that any recount seeking to meet the December 12 date will be
unconstitutional for the reasons we have discussed,” the justices wrote,
“we reverse the judgment of the Supreme Court of Florida ordering a
recount to proceed” (emphasis added). One can parse the opinion into
three questions: Was the recount to that point acceptable? Seven said no.
Were the recount problems remediable? Seven said yes. (“It is obvious
that the recount cannot be conducted in compliance with the require-
ments of equal protection and due process without substantial additional
work.”) Were they remediable in the time remaining? Five said no.
If Bush v. Gore was a 7–2 ruling then the court acted decisively; if the
ruling was 5–4, the court was instead closely divided. Republicans favored
the first construction; Democrats the second. Just before midnight De-
cember 12, the Gore campaign issued a statement saying that Gore and
Lieberman were “reviewing the 5–4 decision issued tonight by the Su-
preme Court of the United States . . .” The next evening he seemed to lay
fights over the size of the majority behind the ruling to rest with the words
“The U.S. Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt. While I
strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it. I accept the finality
of this outcome.” The Bush camp, on the other hand, characterized the
ruling differently. James Baker, appearing before Gore’s concession, said
that the Texas governor was “very pleased and gratified that seven justices
of the United States Supreme Court agreed that there were constitutional
problems with the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court.”4
More than six months after the Supreme Court ruling, the person
who led the Bush team in the thirty-six days was still working to cast the
decision as a 7–2 vote. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times,
James Baker protested the fact that “you have once again described Bush
v. Gore as a 5-to-4 decision . . . a point that is accurate but also incom-
plete . . . The court’s holding that the lack of uniform standards for the
recount violated the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection
was decided on a 7-to-2 vote, with one of two Democrats joining six of
seven Republicans.”5 The statement by Baker says more than he may
have intended. Presumably in their role as justices of the Supreme Court,
individuals do not consider themselves members of a party, although
one could appropriately characterize them as nominated by presidents
who were either Republicans or Democrats. In his eagerness to establish
that the important decision was rendered 7–2, Baker reopened a far more
damaging charge—that the justices acted politically.
6 THE PRESS EFFECT

Overwhelmingly, press accounts focused on the 5–4 ruling. The New

York Times headline read: “Bush Prevails; By Single Vote, Justices End
Recount.” “The Supreme Court effectively handed the presidential elec-
tion to George W. Bush tonight,” wrote Linda Greenhouse, “overturning
the Florida Supreme Court and ruling by a vote of 5 to 4 that there could
be no further counting of Florida’s disputed presidential votes.” “Su-
preme Court Rules for Bush,” read the headline in the Milwaukee Jour-
nal Sentinel, “5–4 Decision Clears Path to the Presidency.” “A deeply
divided U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday night effectively handed the
presidential election to Texas Governor George W. Bush,” said the first
sentence.“A sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court last night handed Texas
governor George W. Bush what may be a presidential victory,” wrote the
Cleveland Plain Dealer. In the San Diego Union-Tribune the headline
announced “5–4 Ruling Puts Bush on Threshold of Victory.” The Court
was “sharply split,” said the accompanying article.
Although reporters might have spent more time discussing the ele-
ments of the Supreme Court’s ruling with which seven members agreed,
the 5–4 split—conservatives on one side, liberals on the other—fit so
well with the larger story line of a divided country and a neck-and-neck
election that it almost inevitably became the central point in describing
the Court’s decision. This is not to say there was anything inaccurate
about that characterization; on many of the key issues of substance, the
Court was indeed divided 5–4. But this provides another example of the
way frames highlight some facts and interpretations instead of others.
The decision by the Gore team to concede the day after the Supreme
Court ruling was, in part, a reflection of its reaction to the way the me-
dia had played the story. The staff writers for the Washington Post note:

Could they fight on? Sure, Boies said. Should they? “It is not just mak-
ing a decision of whether this is viable or sensible,” he said later. “It is
whether the viability of it or the sensibility of it [is] great enough to
consider it. It is not just a legal question.” It was a question about a
divided country, and about the future of Al Gore.
All this was hashed and rehashed in early morning conference
calls. At about 8:30, Daley and Gore spoke again. “The spin on the
morning news was ‘It’s over,’” Daley noted. Even if they wanted to
keep fighting, there was scant running room and vanishing support.6

A process that had begun when the vice president believed the me-
dia reports and called to concede ended when the vice president heard
from an aide that the news interpretation precluded any further legal
 The Press as Storyteller 7

challenge. The frame through which the Supreme Court decision was
discussed provided a coda to the contested 2000 election. The reliance
on the 5–4 frame opened a story line suggesting that a single Supreme
Court justice had in fact selected the president of the United States. As
we will argue later, when the so-called media recounts were complete,
the press itself dismissed that story line.

Who had Political Relations

with that Company?

When an assumption is widely shared within the press, an allegation con-

sistent with the assumption is more likely than it otherwise would be to
travel uncorrected into news. The campaign finance scandals of the Clinton
administration were telegraphed in one often repeated claim: those who
gave money were invited to spend the night in the Lincoln Bedroom.
The Lincoln Bedroom first emerged as a symbol of selling access
when it was revealed that the Clinton administration had rewarded large
contributors by allowing them to spend a night in the White House,
some in the Lincoln Bedroom. The story became a powerful symbol
because it told of wealthy contributors in effect being able to purchase
the right to temporarily occupy what is in the American civil religion a
kind of sacred space by virtue of its association with a revered president.
The proximity of the Lincoln Bedroom to both the Oval Office and the
President’s bedroom translates readily into a symbol of intimate access
and proximity to power.
As the Enron scandal developed at the beginning of 2002, one of the
key points of contention was, first, whether it was a business scandal or
a political one, and, second, if it was a political scandal, who was impli-
cated in it. Democrats argued that Enron in general and its chairman,
Kenneth Lay, in particular were much closer to the GOP than to them.
Observing that three quarters of Enron’s contributions went to Repub-
licans, Democratic consultant James Carville said to Tim Russert on Meet
the Press on February 17, 2002, “This ludicrous idea, ‘Oh, they both got
it,’ no, it was 73 to 27. If you lose the game 73 to 27, that is not a tie.”
Republicans attempted to tell the story as one in which Enron spread its
wealth to both parties. Supporting that view was a claim repeated in
numerous media outlets: Ken Lay had spent a night in the Lincoln Bed-
room during the Clinton administration. The Lincoln Bedroom story
turned out to be false; although Lay had played golf with President
8 THE PRESS EFFECT

Clinton, he had spent the night in the White House only at the invita-
tion of George H. W. Bush.
Because it was known that Clinton had rewarded contributors with
nights in the Lincoln Bedroom, and it was also known that Ken Lay had
given large amounts of money to many politicians, it was plausible that
Ken Lay had rested in Lincoln’s bed at Clinton’s invitation. The claim
originated on the Drudge Report, and was then picked up by the Chicago
Tribune and USA Today. Subsequently, it appeared in, among other places,
a news story in the Washington Times; editorials in the Cleveland Plain
Dealer, Portland Oregonian, and Augusta Chronicle; and in a Newhouse
News Service column by James Lileks distributed to multiple newspa-
pers. It reached overseas, appearing in the Times of London, the Sunday
Age of Melbourne, and the Korea Herald. Fred Barnes wrote it in the
Weekly Standard and made the claim on Fox News’s Special Report with
Brit Hume. On the same network, Republican activist David Bossie said
the same thing on Greta Van Susteren’s On the Record. Republican me-
dia consultant Alex Castellanos made the claim on CNN’s Crossfire on
February 14, then again on ABC’s This Week on February 17. That ap-
pearance was the only time anyone directly challenged the assertion.
The exchange on This Week offers a good example of the way in which
such claims survive untethered to fact.

Castellanos: Paul forgot—Paul forgot to mention that Ken Lay slept

in the Lincoln Bedroom in the Clinton administration, not Bush.
Begala: No, that’s not true, actually.
Castellanos: But anyway—yes, it is.
Begala: That’s false. It’s false.
Castellanos: But anyway . . .
Begala: Maybe Bush One, but no, not Clinton.
Castellanos: Anyway, what the Democrats are doing here . . .

Moderator George Stephanopoulos probably did not attempt to settle

the factual dispute because he did not know whether the story was true or
not. Instead, after Castellanos and Begala went back and forth, Steph-
anapoulos said, “Alex, let me talk a little bit more about the Republican
strategy . . .” Had Stephanopoulos stepped in to side with Begala, he would
have been accurate, but might have risked the perception that his past
work as a Clinton aide was compromising his role as a moderator. Would
audiences have believed a former Clinton aide turned journalist in this
kind of factual dispute? Ultimately the Lay-in-the-Lincoln-Bedroom story
was debunked by Gene Lyons of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and
 The Press as Storyteller 9

Brendan Nyhan in the on-line magazine Salon, but the correction did
not diffuse into the national media. Mistaken information given plausi-
bility by the past actions of Clinton and Lay and by its coherence with
an existing narrative was thus able to help Republicans widen the sphere
of responsibility for Enron to include Democrats. With each subsequent
retelling, the story became less and less likely to be checked for accuracy.
When a contested piece of information such as this arises, reporters have
a responsibility to discover the truth, then sanction anyone who repeats
a falsehood.

Tobacco, Taxes, and Canadian Mounties

When two sides are projecting competing outcomes from a piece of leg-
islation, reports are likely to simply set their claims against each other
and probe for tactical advantage. If the facts are checked, reporters are
more likely to scrutinize the claims of those who have demonstrated a
capacity to deceive the public in the past. If the contest is between the
tobacco companies on one hand and groups such as the American Can-
cer Society and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids on the other, the
fact that internal documents had confirmed that the tobacco industry
had lied about marketing to kids meant that the media were more likely
to explore the accuracy of its arguments than those of the other side.
There was not a week in a three-and-a-half-month period in 1998
in which tobacco industry ads addressing an antitobacco bill sponsored
by John McCain were not being aired. The McCain bill would have settled
the states’ suits against the tobacco industry by providing protection for
the industry from class-action lawsuits in return for an increased to-
bacco tax and assurances that the industry would no longer advertise to
the young through billboards near schools and the like. The industry’s
ad campaign was significant in part because it was the first time a large-
scale, long-running nationwide broadcast ad campaign on a piece of
pending legislation had run with negligible response from those on the
other side. The only television ad by proponents of a “tough bill” against
“Big Tobacco” was aired by the American Cancer Society for a single
week in May in five states and nationally on CNN. By contrast, the to-
bacco industry’s ads aired widely (in from thirty to fifty markets) on
both cable and local spot broadcast. Much of the industry budget was
spent on CNN, which did not air a single news piece evaluating the ac-
curacy of the ads’ claims.
10 THE PRESS EFFECT

One of the industry ads featured Ron Martelle, identified as a former

Canadian Mountie, who said, “The criminals that showed up in Cornwall
threatened my life and the lives of my family. All because a tax that was
supposed to protect our teenagers from smoking ended up hurting all
of us, and as a result, teens purchased black market cigarettes.”
Illustrating the role the press should play in providing context for
facts offered by those engaged in political debate, New York Times re-
porter Anthony DePalma noted that “many of the 47,000 people who
live in Cornwall say Mr. Martelle is exaggerating, just as, in their view, he
had tended to blow things out of proportion during the more than five
years he was mayor.” The same article reported the attack of his oppo-
nents: “They point out that although he calls himself a former Mountie,
he was in the force for only eight months . . . They also delight in point-
ing out that the company Mr. Martelle now works for, Forensic Investi-
gative Associates of Toronto, represents the National Coalition Against
Crime and Tobacco Contraband, a lobbying group for tobacco whole-
salers, retailers and the major cigarette producers in the United States.”7
What else should reporters have told viewers? The tobacco industry
ads implied a legitimacy that their claims lacked by providing on-screen
citations to supposed forms of documentation. A number of the ads ar-
gued that the McCain bill would “create 17 new government bureaucra-
cies . . . Washington wants to raise the price of cigarettes so high, there
would be a black market in cigarettes with unregulated access to kids.”
By any reasonable definition of “bureaucracy,” this claim was false.
The ads for the five tobacco companies source the “seventeen new govern-
ment bureaucracies” assertion to an April 9, 1998 research note by David
Adelman of Morgan Stanley. However, Adelman’s “Industry Overview”
was not an independent finding that there would be seventeen new gov-
ernment bureaucracies. Instead Adelman was quoting tobacco company
CEO Steve Goldstone’s April 8 speech at the National Press Club. And
Goldstone did not use the word bureaucracies but “17 separate tobacco
committees and boards.” Adelman’s document also contained the follow-
ing information: “Within the last three years, Morgan Stanley and Co.
Inc., Dean Witter Reynolds Inc. and/or their affiliates managed or co-
managed a public offering of the securities of RJR Nabisco.”
The statement “Lots of money for new government bureaucracy” is
sourced to an article in the Washington Post. However, there is no backup
for the assertion in the cited article. Instead it said, “President Clinton’s
new budget calls for spending nearly $10 billion from the proposed na-
tional tobacco settlement on a wide variety of new initiatives . . .”8 The
 The Press as Storyteller 11

cited article referred not to the McCain bill but to a request in President
Clinton’s budget. On-screen citations for information, which have become
commonplace in both candidate and advocacy ads in recent years, are a
welcome development. As this case illustrates, the fact that someone of-
fers citations does not mean that they are necessarily telling the truth.
And what of Martelle’s claim that teens simply got their cigarettes
on the black market created by the tax increase? In a May 19 adwatch on
ABC, Aaron Brown evaluated both the industry ad claim that the McCain
bill would produce a black market and the implication that kids would
buy cigarettes there:

Narrator in ad: There will be a black market in cigarettes with

unregulated access to kids.
Brown: The industry cites Canada as proof. In the early ’80s when
Canada increased cigarette prices, a black market did emerge. But
something else happened in Canada the tobacco industry doesn’t
mention.
David Sweanor: Non-Smokers Rights Canada: The price went up in
Canada, consumption among teenagers plummeted.
Brown: The number of kids who smoked every day dropped by 60%
in little more than a decade. The tobacco companies know this.
The evidence of their knowledge is contained in their own files.
This Philip Morris strategic planning document from the early
’90s states it simply.
Voice-over reading from Philip Morris document: “There is no
question that increasing taxes will cause a decrease in smoking.
This point is best illustrated by the present situation in Canada.”
Five years earlier, a Philip Morris analysis of price increases
concluded, “Price increases prevented 600,000 teenagers from
starting to smoke. We don’t need to have that happen again.”

As in the case of Brown’s report, the press is more likely to deconstruct

and critique the narrative provided by those it perceives to be powerful
and manipulative. But one other element was missing from the context
reporters should have offered: when Canada increased its taxes on ciga-
rettes, the source for a black market—that is, a place where black marketeers
could purchase cigarettes Canadians wanted to buy—was just over the
border in the United States. With cigarettes in Canada subject to high taxes,
would similar taxes in the United States give rise to a huge black market
for Mexican cigarettes? From where would the black market come?
Why should we be concerned about the small amount of fact-check-
ing of these ads? Survey data show that the deceptive claims of the ads
were believed in markets with high airing, little adwatching, and little
12 THE PRESS EFFECT

rebuttal.9 So the deception succeeded. Anthony DePalma’s New York

Times piece and Aaron Brown’s adwatch are examples of journalists
upholding their responsibility as custodians of fact, evaluating claims,
and investigating to determine accuracy. Unfortunately, many more
people saw the tobacco industry’s inaccurate advertising than saw these
isolated corrections.
When one side in a policy debate makes a prediction about the ef-
fects of legislation, reporters have a responsibility to make judgments
about the likelihood that those consequences will actually occur. This is
particularly true of those opposed to a legislative change, who usually
predict a dire outcome should a proposed bill become law. These cam-
paigns conduct survey and focus group research to determine the argu-
ments against the legislation that resonate most strongly with the
citizenry; sometimes these arguments are reasonable and sometimes they
are not. For instance, when automobile manufacturers and business
groups argue against proposals to increase fuel efficiency standards for
cars, they contend that higher fuel efficiency would result in lower safety,
because when a small car collides with a large sport utility vehicle, the
people in the small car are more likely to be killed; more small cars would
equal more people being crushed by SUVs. Indeed some ads have shown
an SUV at the point of impact with a small car. But if higher fuel effi-
ciency meant smaller cars, the same logic would dictate higher safety,
since fewer SUVs would be on the road to crush those in small cars. The
questionable logic of the argument presented in the advertisements is
seldom pointed out by journalists.
Although predicting the effects of legislation can require a measure
of speculation, reporters can evaluate the factual and logical basis of
forecasts without making categorical predictions about the future. Of-
ten, reporters avoid such evaluations because of the risk of seeming bi-
ased should they determine that one side is being less than accurate. But
when the press fails to critically examine these predictions, it makes it
difficult for the public to assess the case for and against proposed change.

The Press as Patriot: Four War Stories

On August 3, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the Navy to take

retaliatory action in the Gulf of Tonkin after, he stated, the U.S. destroyer
Maddox had been attacked by communist PT boats. The next day, in a
nationally televised speech, Johnson defined the enemy action in the
 The Press as Storyteller 13

Tonkin Gulf as “open aggression on the high seas against the United
States of America.” He asked Congress to pass “a resolution making it
clear that our government is united in its determination to take all nec-
essary measures in support of freedom and in defense of peace in south-
east Asia.”10 On August 10, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
The narrative that initiated the United States’s formal entry into the
war in Vietnam was simple in its construction. The United States had
been attacked. The attack constituted aggression on the high seas. The
United States responded at once on the order Johnson gave “after the
initial act of aggression.” The response of the military was heroic “in the
highest tradition of the U.S. Navy.” The U.S. response was “limited and
fitting.” The cause was just; the goal, peace. “Firmness in the right is
indispensable today for peace,” said Johnson.
There was only one problem with the narrative. The U.S. destroyer
Maddox had, in all likelihood, not been attacked. In 1995, Johnson’s de-
fense secretary, Robert McNamara, said that he was convinced the at-
tack that prompted the U.S. retaliation had never actually occurred. As
was later revealed in his secretly recorded audiotapes, President Johnson
himself doubted whether the attack took place.11 McNamara also said
that had it not been for the Tonkin Gulf incident, the war resolution
(which had been drafted months before) would have been sent to Con-
gress later and would have been subject to a more extensive debate.12
The Tonkin Gulf case illustrates a number of important features of
political discourse. First, what we believe is in part a function of what we
are told by those entrusted with information we lack. Congress believed
Johnson at a time when skepticism would have better served the country’s
interests. In turn, the country believed Johnson, for it had little reason
to expect that a president would lie about such a consequential matter.
Second, this example shows that facts matter. Policies are built on argu-
ments describing the past, present, and future; if those arguments con-
tain untruth, the consequences can be enormous. Third, it demonstrates
that the impulse to bend the truth in order to maintain support for one’s
goals is a powerful one.
This is not to say that politicians persuade mostly by lying. Instead,
they tell the public stories, selecting facts and arguments that support
their interpretation of reality. In the context of events occurring in war
zones overseas, the press is constrained by its often limited ability to
confirm the factual assertions made by the government. As the next ex-
ample shows, in times of crisis the press often refrains from punishing
the government for deception, even when it learns the truth.
14 THE PRESS EFFECT

Deception Excused: Air Force One

After word of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
reached President George W. Bush’s staff at a school in Florida where
Bush was making an appearance, Air Force One flew the president from
Miami to a military base in Louisiana and from there to the Strategic Air
Command headquarters in Nebraska before returning to Washington.
Members of the press wondered why he had done this. Hoping to blunt
a narrative in which Bush appeared to be the object of forces beyond his
control rather than a decisive leader guiding the country through the
crisis, Bush aides told reporters that there had been a “credible threat”
against Air Force One. If that was true, then the moves across the coun-
try were the reasonable response of a vigilant Secret Service and a na-
tional security process to protect the commander in chief. If it was not
true, then the Bush aides were deceiving reporters to create a false image
of a President’s behavior. “Credible evidence” that Air Force One was at
risk was quickly disseminated. Bush adviser Karl Rove told journalists
that the Secret Service had received a telephoned threat that “contained
language that was evidence that the terrorists had knowledge of his pro-
cedures and whereabouts. In light of the specific and credible threat, it
was decided to get airborne with a fighter escort.”13
Reporters later learned that Rove and administration spokesperson
Ari Fleischer had misled them. Administration officials had no record
of any such call, and were unable to explain why Air Force One was less
vulnerable in one location than another even if there had been such a
message.14 Had such an act occurred in a political campaign, headlines
would have reported the deception. Instead, the facts were largely bur-
ied. The country needed to believe in a decisive, commanding president
in the anxious days after September 11, and the press was not disposed
to feature evidence incompatible with that narrative.
People generally assume that the press plays an adversarial role to
those in power and is quick to unmask, debunk, and challenge. In fact,
reporters play this role selectively. If they assume that the country sup-
ports the person telling the story (in this case the president) and oppos-
ing narratives are not being offered by competing players, the tendency
to challenge is dramatically curtailed. At the time of the Tonkin Gulf
speech, Johnson was on his way to a landslide victory against Barry
Goldwater. After assuming the presidency at the death of John Kennedy,
LBJ had driven much of the Kennedy legislative agenda through Con-
gress. His was a formidable presence. At the same time, the Tonkin Gulf
 The Press as Storyteller 15

Resolution was passed overwhelmingly by Democrats as well as Repub-

licans. Only two dissenters opposed the Resolution. Faced with the alle-
gation of an attack on the country and two parties united behind the
president, reporters are disinclined to buck the tide.
Reporters sometimes say that their job is to tell the public “what it
needs to know.” The perceived need can shift depending on how the
public feels. In a time of crisis, do citizens “need” to know if the president’s
representatives have misled them? As these cases indicate, in times of
national crisis, when reporters learn that they have been deceived they
downplay the implications. Implying that Bush was not up to the job
that first day seemed unpatriotic.
While campaigns and policy debates are characterized by compet-
ing narratives, in wartime the country is often presented with a single,
uncontested story line. In both cases, the successful construction and
use of narrative often determines the outcome of events. We illustrate
this claim with a particularly gruesome tale from the Gulf War.

Did Saddam’s Soldiers Throw Babies From

Their Incubators in Kuwait?

With hundreds of thousands of soldiers massing in the Persian Gulf in

the fall of 1990, America was on the brink of an undeclared war against
Iraq over its invasion of Kuwait. The Bush administration needed not
only to provide a principled justification for action, but to demonize
Saddam Hussein and those who served him. To that end, Bush focused
attention on a compelling narrative—albeit one built on a fabrication.
On October 10, 1990, a fifteen-year-old using the assumed name
“Nayirah” appeared before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. “I
just came out of Kuwait,” she said. “While I was there, I saw the Iraqi
soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of
the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the
cold floor. It was horrifying. I could not help but think of my nephew,
who was born premature and might have died that day as well.” At the
end of her testimony, Congressman John Porter said,“We’ve passed eight
years in the existence of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. We’ve
had scores of hearings about human rights abuses throughout the world
. . . we have never heard, in all this time, in all circumstances, a record of
inhumanity and brutality and sadism as the ones that the witnesses have
given us today. I don’t know how the people of the civilized countries of
16 THE PRESS EFFECT

this world can fail to do everything within their power to remove this
scourge from the face of our earth . . . [A]ll the countries of the world
. . . must join together and take whatever action may be necessary to free
the people of Kuwait.” The audience for the account included the presi-
dent, who told Porter that “he had seen it on CNN and that he was
shocked at some of the things that he had heard.”15
It is unclear why President Bush should have been shocked, since
the day before Nayirah’s testimony, identifying the Emir of Kuwait as
the source, he had alluded to babies taken from incubators. In that first
telling, however, he added that the stories may not have been authenti-
cated. Specifically, at a press conference October 9, he said “babies in
incubators [were] heaved out of the incubators and the incubators them-
selves sent to Baghdad. Now I don’t know how many of these tales can
be authenticated but I do know that when the Emir was here he was
speaking from the heart.” “Speaking from the heart” uses perceived sin-
cerity as a test of reliability. This is one unusual instance in which the
elder Bush used a technique similar to one employed often by his son,
using good intentions—the contents of the Emir’s heart—as a counter-
weight to potential criticism or factual refutation.
There was at the time another source that confirmed the incubator
story. After the young woman testified, her observations were corrobo-
rated by Amnesty International, which concluded that 312 infants had
died after Iraqi soldiers removed them from their incubators.
After the first reference, in which Bush qualified the story by ex-
pressing uncertainty about its authenticity, the incident moved from an
undocumented tale to a statement of presumed fact. Rallying troops en
route to Iraq on October 28, Bush said that twenty-two babies had died
and “the hospital employees were shot and the plundered machines were
shipped off to Baghdad.”
The story then became a staple of the Bush drive to mobilize public
support for the impending war. In a speech in Mashpee, Massachusetts
on November 1, Bush said of Saddam Hussein and his forces, “They’ve
tried to silence Kuwaiti dissent and courage with firing squads, much as
Hitler did when he invaded Poland. They have committed outrageous
acts of barbarism. In one hospital, they pulled twenty-two premature
babies from their incubators, sent the machines back to Baghdad, and
all those little ones died.” Speaking to the allied forces near Dhahran,
Saudi Arabia, Bush said on November 22, “It turns your stomach when
you listen to the tales of those that have escaped the brutality of Saddam,
the invader. Mass hangings. Babies pulled from their incubators and scat-
tered like firewood across the floor.”
 The Press as Storyteller 17

The story served two purposes: legitimizing the analogy between

Hitler and Hussein, and rebutting the charge that the conflict was actu-
ally about retaining U.S. access to Middle East oil. The analogy to Hitler
set justification for the war not on the pragmatic claim that the United
States needed access to the region’s oil but on the moral claim that
Saddam’s acts were an affront to humanity. So, for example, on October
28 at a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, Bush said, “I read the other
night about how Hitler, unchallenged—the U.S. locked in its isolation
in those days, the late thirties—marched into Poland. Behind him . . .
came the Death’s Head regiments of the SS. Their role was to go in and
disassemble the country. Just as it happened in the past, the other day in
Kuwait, two young kids were passing out leaflets in opposition. They
were taken, their families made to watch, and they were shot to death—
a fifteen- and sixteen-year-old. Other people on dialysis machines taken
off the machines and the machines shipped to Baghdad. Kids in incuba-
tors thrown out so that the machinery, the incubators themselves, could
be shipped to Baghdad.” On October 15, Bush closed his litany of atroci-
ties by saying “Hitler revisited.” It was only when Bush attempted to ar-
gue that Hussein was not simply the German dictator’s equal but worse
than Hitler that the analogy was criticized.16
The use of the story of the babies to dismiss the pragmatic claim
and justify the moral one—making the war about human rights, not
oil—was clear on October 23 when Bush told a fund-raiser in Burlington,
Vermont, “They had kids in incubators, and they were thrown out of the
incubators so that Kuwait could be systematically dismantled. So, it isn’t
oil that we’re concerned about. It is aggression. And this aggression is
not going to stand.” Speaking to the troops at Pearl Harbor on October
28, Bush said, “What we are looking at is good and evil, right and wrong.
And day after day, shocking new horrors reveal the true nature of terror
in Kuwait.” In his list of horrors was the story of the incubators.
On Larry King Live on October 16, Kuwait’s ambassador to the United
States, Sheik Saud Nasir al-Sabah, cited the young woman’s testimony
and the Amnesty International report as proof of atrocities in Kuwait.
Eyewitnesses, he said, “came out and described all the brutalities of the
Iraqis against my people . . . and they are also being corroborated by
Amnesty International.” Unnoted during any of this was the fact uncov-
ered by Harper’s publisher John R. MacArthur long after the war was
over: “Nayirah” was the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter and a member
of the royal family of Kuwait.17 After its own investigations concluded
that no babies had been removed from incubators, Amnesty Interna-
tional retracted its report.
18 THE PRESS EFFECT

On March 15, 1991, not long after the fighting had ended, ABC re-
porter John Martin revealed that the incubator story was a fiction when
he interviewed employees at the hospital where the incident allegedly
took place. In a 60 Minutes exposé in January 1992, Morley Safer talked
with Andrew Whitley, executive director of Middle East Watch, who re-
ported that a colleague went to the Adon Hospital after the liberation of
Kuwait “and interviewed the doctors, and he was able to speak to people
who said they had been on duty at that time, and that this incident didn’t
happen.” Asked by Safer to explain, a representative of Hill & Knowlton,
the powerhouse Washington lobbying and public relations firm that
choreographed the campaign, said, “I’m sure there will always be two
sides to a story. I believe Nayirah. I have no reason not to believe her.
The veracity of her story was indelibly marked on my mind when I saw
her and when I talked to her.”18 In this telling, truth is relative and the
perceived authenticity of the speaker is the test of veracity. But there
either were or were not Iraqi soldiers in the hospital in Kuwait. If there
were, they either did or did not remove babies from incubators and put
them on the floor; they either did or did not kill hospital personnel; they
either did or did not then ship the empty incubators to Baghdad; the
babies either did or did not die. President Bush either did or did not
have a warranted reason for outrage.
While the Gulf War may have been justified on any number of
grounds, the incubator story was offered repeatedly by the war’s propo-
nents as primary evidence of the moral righteousness of the cause. In
the Senate, where a resolution supporting the use of force was passed by
five votes, the incubator story was cited six times during debate on the
resolution. The incident was mentioned in floor debates about the war a
total of twenty-two times.
In the President’s rhetoric the synoptic statement justifying the war—
“This aggression is not going to stand”—was built in part on a deception
about babies and incubators. More important for our purposes here, the
narrative was used to rebut the charge that the purpose of going to war
was securing access to oil, as opponents of the war alleged (“No blood for
oil” was the chant heard at protests of the war). Bush used the dramatic,
heartrending story to reframe the conflict as a moral one in which no
compromise was possible and the United States’s actions, in the past or
present, would not be subject to debate given the evil of the enemy.
The Nayirah tale is instructive for other reasons that speak to our
need for public wariness and press vigilance when public discourse veers
into emotional anecdote. MacArthur’s book and Safer’s exposé both
 The Press as Storyteller 19

appeared in 1992, nearly a year after the war was over; the ABC News story
was the first attempt to disprove the incubator story, but it appeared after
the war ended as well. The incubator story raises a number of important
questions: First, was the president deceived? What efforts were made to
verify the facts used to justify consequential action? Did the president be-
lieve the account because he heard it from the Emir, saw Nayirah’s testi-
mony on CNN, and read Amnesty International’s seeming corroboration?
Was the analogy comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler—which was
made from the day Iraq invaded Kuwait—given more legitimacy by the
incubator story? These questions are important because 200,000 troops
were already on the ground when the incubator story emerged.
Why did it take so long for reporters to check the facts? Of course,
journalists would have had trouble getting into Kuwait to talk with the
medical personnel in the hospital. Nonetheless, why was there no skepti-
cism about a story from a young woman speaking under an assumed
name? Why no tests of her credibility? Didn’t any reporter in Washing-
ton know enough about the family of the ambassador to recognize his
daughter? Why didn’t any reporter ask for a copy of her passport to verify
that she was in Kuwait at the reported time? John MacArthur reported
that Congressman Tom Lantos, the cochair of the Human Rights Cau-
cus, knew before the hearing that “Nayirah” was in fact the ambassador’s
daughter. Although Congressman Porter denies knowing, the Kuwaiti
ambassador himself claimed that both congressmen were aware of her
identity. Why did no reporters ask Lantos or Porter if they had any in-
formation that would substantiate her claims?
Why didn’t someone test the claim of Amnesty International by ask-
ing U.S. doctors who had visited Kuwait how many incubators a single
hospital would be expected to have in use at a given time? Does Kuwait
have an unusually large number of premature births? Why didn’t re-
porters spot the contradictions in Bush’s accounts? For example, in a
speech in Des Moines on October 16, Bush said, “In a hospital Iraqi
soldiers unplugged the oxygen to incubators supporting twenty-two
premature babies. They all died. And then they shot the hospital em-
ployees.” Did the soldiers unplug the oxygen or throw the babies to the
ground? The story changed in various tellings. As C. Wright Mills ob-
served in The Sociological Imagination, “The problem of empirical veri-
fication is ‘how to get down to the facts’ . . . The problem is first what to
verify and second how to verify it.”19
The reporter who uncovered Nayirah’s identity did so while writing
a book about propaganda and the Gulf War. John R. MacArthur told
20 THE PRESS EFFECT

60 Minutes, “I set out to find out, like any reporter does. And I started
asking questions. And I finally heard a rumor that Nayirah was the daugh-
ter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, so I used an old reporter’s trick. I called
up the embassy, and I said, ‘Nayirah did a terrific job at the Human
Rights Caucus, and I think her father must be very proud of her. And
doesn’t she deserve her place in history?’ And the ambassador’s secre-
tary said to me, ‘You’re not supposed to know that. No one’s supposed to
know she’s the ambassador’s daughter.’ ”
The conditions of war made the press both more willing to accept
the incubator story and less able to determine whether it was true. But
in other cases, assertions that would have been quite simple to investi-
gate have been accepted at face value because they cohered to form a
powerful, coherent narrative.

Did the Patriots Intercept and

Destroy the Scuds?

As Congress and the president once again debate the feasibility of de-
ploying a missile defense shield, the ability of what Dwight Eisenhower
called the “military industrial complex” to produce technology that
shoots down incoming weapons should be open to question. We all re-
member watching the Patriot missiles blasting Scuds out of the sky, ren-
dering Saddam Hussein’s malevolence impotent in the face of our
technological prowess. During the Gulf War, we were told that the Patri-
ots worked nearly perfectly.
The rhetoric at the time reduced the Scuds vs. the Patriots to a tale
of U.S. superiority, a rebuke to those who had doubted the Patriot. On
February 15, 1991, President Bush visited the Raytheon plant that con-
structed the Patriot missiles. “The critics said that this system was plagued
with problems, that results from the test range wouldn’t stand up under
battlefield conditions,” he told the workers. “You knew they were wrong,
those critics, all along. And now the world knows it too. Beginning with
the first Scud launched in Saudi Arabia, right into Saudi Arabia and the
Patriot that struck it down and with the arrival of Patriot battalions in
Israel, all told, Patriot is 41 for 42: 42 Scuds engaged, 41 intercepted . . .
Not every intercept results in total destruction. But Patriot is proof posi-
tive that missile defense works. I’ve said many times that missile defense
threatens no one, that there is no purer defensive weapon than one that
targets and destroys missiles launched against us. Thank God for the
 The Press as Storyteller 21

Patriot missile.” Note that the President is actually claiming intercep-

tion, not destruction. Hence the qualification “not every intercept re-
sults in total destruction.” But what the audience is supposed to hear is
clear in the sentences that follow: The Patriot worked. Did it?
Later evidence indicated that the answer was no. Testifying before a
congressional hearing in 1992, Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said
that “I believe that the Patriot cannot deal with countermeasures,”20
meaning that it could be easily fooled into missing its targets. The Gen-
eral Accounting Office indicated in 1994 that “the Patriot’s success rate
may have been no better than 9 percent: four Scuds downed or disabled
out of 44 targeted.”21 When a 1992 congressional hearing produced a
report critical of the Patriot’s performance in the Gulf War, Raytheon
lobbied successfully to prevent the report from being approved. The
unapproved draft included the statement that “the public and the Con-
gress were misled by definitive statements of success issued by adminis-
tration and Raytheon representatives during and after the war.”22
The Pentagon’s impulse to overstate the success of missile defense
systems emerged again in 2001. On July 14, the system successfully in-
tercepted a missile in a test conducted over the Pacific. “Bush’s Hopes
for Missile System Get Boost With Successful Test,” said the Wall Street
Journal. “Interceptor Scores a Direct Hit on Missile; Successful Test a
Boost to Bush’s Shield Plan,” said the Washington Post. But ten days later,
an article in the magazine Defense Week revealed that the test had been
rigged—the missile was outfitted with a homing beacon that guided the
interceptor toward it (and away from the “decoy” the system was sup-
posed to avoid).23 The revelation that the test had been rigged was the
subject of few stories in major newspapers, all of which were buried on
inside pages. Once again, the story of technological success was trum-
peted prominently, while the subsequent correction, revealing that the
performance was not quite as advertised, would have been noticed by
far fewer people.
In sum, the stories we tell and that are told matter as do the stories
that are never spun. Skillfully deployed stories are important because
they persuade. A young woman tells a harrowing tale of murdered ba-
bies, and the story becomes an exhibit in rallying a nation to war. Past
fact can bear directly on present-day decisions, as well. If, as generals
and the President told us, the Patriot missiles reliably destroyed Scuds,
then that fact might bolster our confidence that their manufacturer might
produce a workable missile defense shield. But if the missiles were easily
confused by countermeasures, just as the missiles in the missile defense
22 THE PRESS EFFECT

shield appear now to be, we might be more skeptical about claims that a
workable technology is in the offing.
What these examples and the others we have cited have in common
is that those who utilized them were able to present a dramatic narrative
that played an outsized role in the debate of the moment, driving out
relevant facts. As psychologists have known for many years, people don’t
evaluate situations and make decisions by conducting an inventory of
all the information to which they have been exposed about a subject.
Instead, both the press and the public use heuristics, often referred to as
“information shortcuts,” to make evaluation easier. One of the most com-
monly employed is the availability heuristic; we rely on what is most
easily available in our memories. Because evocative images are more
available in memory, they carry a greater importance in evaluations.24
Dramatic, repeated, visually evocative materials can be tools of terror or
vehicles that reassure. By repeatedly showing the hijacked planes hitting
the World Trade Center towers, news increased our sense that such at-
tacks were likely to occur. By repeatedly showing the towers collapsing,
news magnified our fear that we would be trapped in a tall building as it
collapsed. By repeatedly airing stories about anthrax, news increased the
likelihood that we would be fearful as we opened our mail.
The dramatic narrative can thus drive out relevant facts. Ordinary
Americans, the vast majority of whom would not be targets of an attack,
feared opening their mail because of the stories of the few letters that con-
tained anthrax, despite the billions of letters delivered spore-free. In 1991,
Americans remembered the incubator and the success of the Patriot mis-
sile, understanding the war as a battle against evil in which victory was
obtained in large part through the triumph of American technology. When
voters in 1988 evaluated Michael Dukakis’s crime record, the fact that the
furlough program was begun by his Republican predecessor and that se-
rious crime was down in Massachusetts were forgotten by most (although
he mentioned them often), while the dramatic story of “Willie” Horton
was remembered. In a contest between data and dramatic narrative, the
narrative is likely to be stored and recalled.
The political narratives on which we have focused underscore the
insight underlying Aristotle’s observation that pity and fear are power-
ful drivers of stories, and Kenneth Burke’s realization that identification
is at the core of the powerful rhetoric. We respond by identifying with
Nayirah and with the babies who have died because Saddam’s soldiers
have thrown them from their incubators; we fear criminals who, if re-
leased by well-intentioned but naive liberals, might prey on us. We fear
 The Press as Storyteller 23

those who might harm the young while thinking that they are helping
them. The story that unmasks the well-intentioned but harmful act is
powerful because it serves to warn—Dukakis’s furloughs, the black mar-
kets produced by taxation of tobacco in Canada.
As custodians of fact, journalists need to help viewers and readers
make sense of statements about fact while not losing sight of those facts
political actors are reluctant to acknowledge. We make no claim that
this is a simple task, but it is at the core of the journalist’s responsibility
to the public. The task becomes particularly difficult when the relevant
facts are embedded in a compelling narrative.
 2
24 THE PRESS EFFECT

CHAPTER

The Press as Amateur

Psychologist, Part I

T he notion that reporters should hold the powerful account-

able is at the core of contemporary journalism. “Anyone
tempted to abuse power looks over his or her shoulder to
see if someone else is watching. Ideally, there should be a
reporter in the rearview mirror,” write the Washington Post’s Leonard
Downie and Robert Kaiser.1 When it acts as a watchdog, the press keeps
an eye trained on government in order to expose—and thus prevent—
abuse. In campaigns, reporters extend this perspective to vetting candi-
dates, examining individuals instead of institutions to reveal corrupting
influences and impulses. But in so doing, they sometimes distort the
watchdog role to the point where it becomes disconnected from the end
it is intended to serve. While the watchdog exposes corruption to ensure
the honest and effective functioning of government, in campaigns re-
porters too often become amateur psychologists, probing the psyches of
the candidates but largely failing to describe how what they find there
relates to the job one of their outpatients will assume.
The human disposition to probe the difference between the public
and private person is long-lived. “The chasm between the public maj-
esty of the leader and the old coot’s tawdry reality has been memorial-
ized through the ages,” noted the Washington Post’s Meg Greenfield.
“What is different about our time is that most of the protective veils
have been ripped off while the performers are still on stage.”2
The veil-ripping process focuses not only on private words and be-
24 haviors but also on psychological profiling that seeks patterns in these
 The Press as Amateur Psychologist, Part I 25

private and public moments and from them draws inferences with a
broad brush. Of President Bill Clinton, for example, Lewis Lapham of
Harper’s wrote, “He defines himself as a man desperately eager to please,
and the voraciousness of his appetite—for more friends, more speeches,
more food and drink, more time onstage, more hands to shake, more
hugs—suggests the emptiness of a soul that knows itself only by the
names of what it seizes or consumes.”3 About an April 2002 speech by
2000 Democratic nominee Al Gore, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Dick
Polman noted, “He gave the strongest signal thus far that his lifelong
thirst for the highest office remains unquenched.”4
When the Voter News Service exit poll asked, “Will Gore say any-
thing to become president?” 74% of all voters surveyed answered yes,
compared to 58% who held that opinion of Bush. When the same sur-
vey asked, “Does Gore know enough to be president?” 67% agreed that
he did; 54% thought that was true of Bush. How did voters come to see
Gore as untrustworthy and Bush as somewhat less prepared than Gore
for the presidency? One answer is that these were the two candidate quali-
fications stressed by the press and the campaigns in 2000.
The extent to which those characteristics are featured is colored by
each candidate’s fortunes in the polls. When a candidate is leading, the
press seeks to answer the question why, naturally focusing on what is
appealing about the man and effective about his campaign. When he
falls behind, the same question leads to a focus on his personal failings
and his campaign’s missteps. New York Times reporter Frank Bruni rec-
ognized the extent to which the story reporters are telling about a candi-
date dictates the facts which they feature and the ones they dispatch.
George W. Bush, he wrote, “often seemed content to get by on as little as
possible, and we perhaps focused less on this than we might have in the
fall of 1999 because his failings on the stump didn’t fit the narrative in
place at the time.”5
Reporters covering the campaign create simple frames, based on one
or two characteristics of personality, and channel their coverage through
those frames. In so doing they simplify the task set for them in James
David Barber’s influential book The Presidential Character, which argued:

To understand what actual Presidents do and what potential Presidents

might do, the first need is to know the whole person—not as some ab-
stract embodiment of civic virtue, some scorecard of issue stands, or
some reflection of a faction, but as a human being like the rest of us, a
person trying to cope with a difficult environment. To that task a candi-
date brings an individual character, worldview, and political style.6
26 THE PRESS EFFECT

“Over the last thirty years . . . [j]ournalists began to examine the per-
sonal histories of candidates for president, looking for clues that might
bear on what kind of presidents they could turn out to be,” write Downie
and Kaiser. “One stimulus to this kind of reporting was a 1972 book by
professor James David Barber of Duke . . . which urged journalists and
academics to do more to explore the personalities of presidential candi-
dates before they got elected.” While Downie and Kaiser make the con-
nection between the exploration of character and presidential conduct,
this connection is precisely what is missing in much campaign reporting.
The struggle reporters face in linking campaigning to governance
and the personal to the political was at play in the Dole–Clinton elec-
tion. In 1996 the Post applied the relevance standard when its editors
decided not to write that Republican nominee Bob Dole had had an
extramarital affair two and a half decades before. Downie argued that
“the revelation of a love affair from a quarter century earlier had to be
justified by its relevance to the candidate’s suitability for the presidency
or his past conduct in public life. In this case he didn’t see the relevance.”7
In deciding whether to publish, the reporters and editors at the Post
weighed such questions as the following: Was it fair to explore Clinton’s
sex life but not Dole’s? Was Dole’s campaign arguing that he was mor-
ally superior to Clinton and hence engaged in hypocrisy? Was an almost
three-decade-old event worthy of revelation without evidence that the
behavior persisted?
We suspect that the relevance test used by the Post in 1996 was in
part a function of the subject matter—sexual behavior—and in part a
function of how dated the information was. In 2000, the press seemed
less concerned about making the tie between the personality traits on
which it focused and their relevance to conduct in office.
Following Barber’s advice, campaign reporters have become amateur
psychologists, probing the candidates for fatal flaws and trying to discover
the “real” person behind the speeches, position papers, and staffers. This
process creates a pair of portraits, neither complimentary, that determines
the shape of coverage. But the press has largely failed to make the link that
Barber urged: that between a candidate’s character and presidential per-
formance. Reporters have attempted to discover who the candidate really
is, but have spent far less time explaining how this character—or, more
specifically, these character flaws—relate to governance. If citizens are told
that a candidate is dishonest or inexperienced, they should also be told in
detail how this flaw would affect the job the candidate would do as presi-
dent. How would it affect the policies he would propose? His success in
 The Press as Amateur Psychologist, Part I 27

getting legislation passed? His management of the executive branch? His

ability to deal with crises? These are the types of questions that would
give meaning to the exploration of character.

Performance and Authenticity

In 2000, one of the primary questions asked by reporters—and the one

the Bush campaign stressed—was whether each candidate was an honest
man. The question of the candidates’ honesty and the press’s treatment of
it raises a difficult issue: how do we evaluate honesty within an enter-
prise—politics—that is in large part about performance, presentations
intended to shape perceptions of reality? Sociologist Erving Goffman ar-
gued that all of our human interactions involve some degree of perfor-
mance, presenting a persona to those whom we meet. The persona we
offer “backstage,” in more relaxed settings, differs from the one we present
when we are “frontstage,” where a more formal performance is required.8
To illustrate, Goffman offers the example of schoolteachers acting one
way in front of their students and another way in the teachers’ lounge.
While much of the time we pay only marginal attention to the authentic-
ity of the personae presented by the ordinary people we know, contempo-
rary politicians, particularly presidential candidates, have their personae
and performances scrutinized to an extraordinary degree.
Even if a politician’s performance accurately represents reality, it
remains a performance and thus in some sense artificial. When Al Gore
gave his wife Tipper a passionate kiss before ascending to the podium to
deliver his acceptance speech at the 2000 Democratic convention, some
commentators complained that the moment must have been planned in
order to humanize Gore’s image—after all, he knew that the cameras
were on him. While no one questioned that the Gores have a strong and
loving marriage, the genuineness of “The Kiss” was hotly debated. The
question of whether the kiss was “real” or whether it was a performance
could be raised because Gore’s authenticity was itself in question. Bush
could freely wear different types of clothing at different times without
notice, but sartorial alterations on Gore’s part became part of an ongo-
ing discussion on his degree of authenticity. Just as Bush’s intellect was
subject to continual examination and reevaluation, the question asked
of Gore’s performance was usually some form of “Was it real?”
Goffman’s description of “backstage” behavior describes fairly well
the interactions between George W. Bush and the reporters who accom-
panied him. It also provides a vivid contrast to reporters’ complaints
28 THE PRESS EFFECT

about Gore—that he was inaccessible, and that when he did make him-
self available he came across as scripted and careful:

The backstage language consists of reciprocal first-naming, co-

operative decision-making, profanity, open sexual remarks, elaborate
griping, smoking, rough informal dress, “sloppy” sitting and standing
posture, use of dialect or sub-standard speech, mumbling and shout-
ing, playful aggressivity and “kidding,” inconsiderateness for the
other in minor but potentially symbolic acts, minor physical self-
involvements such as humming, whistling, chewing, nibbling, belch-
ing, and flatulence.9

With this description in mind, consider what Seth Mnookin, in an

article for Brill’s Content about Bush’s relationship with the press, said
about the future president:

Within five minutes of meeting me for the first time, Bush developed
some shorthand to signify our intimate connection. Since the press
was writing about Bush, and I was writing about the press, he and I
were joined together in a kind of enemies-of-my-enemies equation.
Now—I’ve spent a total of about five days traveling with the Bush
press corps—whenever Bush sees me, he sticks out his right hand,
wrapping his middle finger around his index finger. And then, as he’s
waving his hand back and forth, he shouts out, “Me and you, right?”10

New York Times reporter Frank Bruni relates that on the campaign
trail, Bush “touched those of us around him a lot . . . He pinched our
cheeks or gently slapped them, in an almost grandmotherly, aren’t-you-
adorable way.”11 Where Bush succeeded was not simply in making the
press like him better than Gore (although that was certainly the case as
well). By participating with reporters in typically backstage interactions,
he convinced them first that they had access to the “real” person, and
second that his frontstage persona was not substantially different from
the backstage persona. Because Gore did not offer reporters a convinc-
ing backstage persona, his frontstage performance was assumed to mask
an unknown and necessarily different reality.
Thus the fact that Gore wore too much makeup in the first debate
was noticed and discussed by journalists and ridiculed on late-night tele-
vision. Jay Leno said Gore “had so much makeup on that if he went to
the White House looking like that, Clinton would have hit on him.” Frank
Bruni later wrote that Gore “was a pumpkin-headed sigh master, ill served
by both his cosmetologist and his petulance.”12 The symbolism is hard
to miss: Makeup serves to conceal and alter the appearance, presenting a
varnished version of the true self.
 The Press as Amateur Psychologist, Part I 29

The idea of performance assumes an audience. In politics there are

two relevant audiences. The larger is, of course, the voting public. The
other—the press—is both an audience and a participant in the perfor-
mance. They simultaneously enact their own role, edit the politicians’
roles, and instruct the public on how the performance should be inter-
preted and judged. In this context, authenticity—defined in part as a
minimal difference between the frontstage persona presented to the
public and the backstage persona presented to intimates—becomes one
of the primary measures of value journalists assign to candidates. The
search for the “real” candidate is an effort to drag the backstage persona
to the front.
It was not always thus; before the latter half of the twentieth cen-
tury, the question of whether a candidate was “authentic” was rarely
raised. The increased value placed on authenticity occurred not only in
politics but in other realms as well. A simultaneous transformation took
place in the entertainment world, with a new definition of what consti-
tuted skilled acting. Until the 1950s, actors tended to perform in a broad,
melodramatic, almost bombastic style rooted in the necessities of the-
ater, that is, the requirement to have one’s performance reach the last
row in the house. In the early years of the medium, film performances
were similarly theatrical. The transformation to a more “realistic” style
of acting, with delivery mirroring everyday speech patterns, occurred
over time but with some notable markers, including Marlon Brando’s
performance in A Streetcar Named Desire in 1951. The result was an al-
teration of the standard by which acting was judged, with a premium
put on realism.
Political speech was transformed in a parallel way by a series of tech-
nological changes. The invention of the microphone allowed those with-
out loud voices, particularly women, to become political speakers. Radio
altered the relationship between speaker and listener, taking the political
speech out of the town square and into the living room. Finally, television
brought political speakers to an intimate distance from citizens. As a con-
sequence, political speech became more personal, more self-disclosive, and
more conversational in style.13
Along with the change in speaking style came a change in the way
political speakers were judged by the press. While the ability to rouse a
crowd to cheers is still admired, the ability to connect to individuals
through the televised medium, much in evidence in figures such as Ron-
ald Reagan and Bill Clinton, is put at a premium. Unlike the grand nine-
teenth-century rhetoric, this form of political communication demands
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
his career at one blow. His faithful body guard, however, which was
composed of his own immediate followers, those who held lands of
him in Shropshire by feudal service, seeing the danger of their
beloved chief, flew like roused lions to the rescue. A terrific conflict
ensued around, and even over the old warrior who was still lying on
the field. The struggle was maintained with undiminished fury for a
considerable period. The shout of “St. George for Merry Englande,”
was fiercely answered back by the cry of “St. Denis for France.”
Each party fought hand to hand; the casques of the combatants
rang with the heavy blows of the battle-axe. Not only the fate of the
present battle, but of the whole campaign, the war itself depended
on the result of the isolated combat. Many a stalwart Shropshire
yeoman shouted from his hoarse throat his leader’s war cry, “A
Talbot, to the rescue!” threw aside his weapon, which in the
thronged melee he had not space to use, and springing furiously at
his adversary, seized him with an iron grip, from which death alone
could liberate him. The conflict ended at last in the entire defeat of
the French; and the earl, to show his gratitude to his brave
followers, many of whom had lost their lives in defending his, told
the survivors that in memory of their courage and devotedness that
day, his body should be buried in the porch of their church; that, as
they had fought and strode over it while living, so should they and
their children for ever pass over and guard it when dead. Sir John
Talbot was created Earl of Shrewsbury by King Henry VI. He was
twenty years in the king’s service abroad, and for his valour had
many signal honours bestowed on him. At the siege of Chastillion
his horse was shot under him, and he being dangerously wounded,
died July 20th, 1453, and was buried at Roan in Normandy, but
afterwards removed to Whitchurch.
There is an altar tomb, with a full length alabaster figure in clerical
robes, in memory of Sir John Talbot, rector of Whitchurch, which
was also taken out of the old church. There are various memorials
and tablets, elegantly designed, which our limits will not allow us to
notice, in memory of the Boycotts, Fowlers, Balls, Chetwoods,
Sandfords, Longs, and others. A mural monument remembers Philip
Henry, M.A., father of Matthew Henry, the commentator. The font is
of curious workmanship, and dated 1661. The Book of Martyrs,
chained to the wall, was the gift of Mr. Thomas Yates, in the year
1701, for the instruction and use of the public. An oil painting of the
royal arms of England is very ancient; and there is a fine specimen
of embroidery of the arms of England, with a portrait of Queen
Anne, beautifully executed in needlework. The church is heated by
a most perfect hot water apparatus, admirably contrived. The living
is a rectory, with that of Marbury annexed; valued in the king’s book
at £44. 11s. 8d.; now returned at £2,004; in the patronage of the
trustees of the late Earl of Bridgewater, and incumbency of the Rev.
William Egerton, M.A.; curates, Rev. Edward Pickering, Rev. John
Thomas Nash, and Rev. Robert R. Turnbull; clerk, Richard Crosse.
The rectory is a commodious and pleasantly situated residence, a
short distance from the church, with pleasure grounds and
shrubberies tastefully laid out. There are 35a. 0r. 17p. of glebe land.
The Baptist Chapel stands a little back from the road, near to
Greenend street, and will hold about three hundred hearers. The
interior is neatly pewed, and provided with a gallery. This place of
worship is respectably attended. The Methodist Chapel, situate in St.
Mary’s street, is a commodious structure which will hold six hundred
worshippers. It is neatly pewed and fitted up with galleries. There
is a Sunday school in connection with this place of worship, which is
numerously attended. The Baptists have also a Sunday school in
connection with their chapel.
The Free Grammar School and residence for the master is a noble pile
of buildings, situated in Bargates street, and was erected in the year
1548. The school is a chaste and elegant structure, ornamental to
the town, and highly creditable to the feoffees under whose auspices
it was erected. The school was founded in 1550, and we find in the
preamble to the schedule of a deed of feoffment, bearing date 16th
September, 1550, that Sir John Talbot, late parson of Whitchurch,
was resolved to have founded in his lifetime a free school in the
town of Whitchurch, at his own expense, for the bringing up of
youth in virtue and learning; and that he had delivered into the
hands of Thomas Cotton the sum of £200 towards the erection and
establishment of the said school, but that the said Sir John Talbot
died before the accomplishment of the same; and that with the said
sum and other moneys given by charitably disposed persons, there
had been purchased a messuage called Cow Hall, to the intent that
they should observe the several articles contained in the deed of
feoffment. The substance of the statutes contained in this deed is,
—That the feoffees, with the parson of the parish, if he should be
inhabiting there, should within six weeks after the death, departure,
or removal of any schoolmaster appoint another unmarried man, if
he could be conveniently provided, and if not a married man—
honest, virtuous, and well learned in Latin and literature—to be
schoolmaster there, such schoolmaster to be presented, within eight
days after his election, to the diocesan or his chancellor to be
examined, and if he should be thought competent on such
examination, then to be admitted. That if the feoffees and parson
should not appoint within six weeks, the Earl of Shrewsbury should
appoint a master. That if any of the feoffees should depart out of
the parish and reside elsewhere, he should release his interest to the
other feoffees. The master was to receive £10 per annum, and to
have the appointment of the usher, who was to receive five marks
yearly. That the feoffees should not demise any of the premises for
more than ten years, and that they should yearly account in the
parish church of Whitchurch for the rents and profits of the same. If
the rents and profits should at any time exceed the sum before
appointed to be paid to the schoolmaster and usher, the feoffees
should deliver the overplus to the churchwardens, to be kept in a
chest in the said church, for the repairs of the schoolhouse, and for
the relief of such schoolmaster as should have laudably taught in the
said school, until by sickness or age he should have given over, or
have been removed from his place, and for the relief of poor
fatherless and friendless scholars. That after the death or removal
of a schoolmaster, the usher should be elected in his place if he
should be thought by the parson and feoffees learned and meet for
the same. That there should be taught in the school children of “all
countries that will come.” William Thomas, in 1662, conveyed 16
acres of land in the parish of Ubley, in the County of Somerset; two
thirds of the rent to be paid to the master of this school and one
third to the usher. Edward Beddon and Ann, his wife, left certain
lands, the rents to be employed to the sole use of the school at
Whitchurch. All the real estates above-mentioned, with the school
and other premises held therewith, have from time to time been
conveyed to new trustees. In 1725 proceedings in Chancery took
place between the master and usher and the then trustees. The
matters in dispute were the amount of the salaries to which the
schoolmaster and usher were entitled, the right of the master to
take any payments from the scholars, and the right of the trustees
to remove the master from his office. By a decree, made 16th
December, 1725, it was ordered that the schoolmaster should have
only £10 per annum, and the usher five marks from the Cowhall
estate; that the rest of the profits should go to the uses mentioned
in the statutes; that the rents of the Ubley estate should be divided
as directed by the donor; and the rent of the Beddow estate in like
manner; and it was declared that it was the intention of the donor
that all people’s children should be taught in the said school gratis,
and that the rector and feoffees had power to remove the master.
In a subsequent cause, between the Attorney-General, at the
relation of the Bishop of Hereford, it was decreed, on March 21st,
1747, that there should be paid to the head master £13. 6s. 8d., and
to the usher £6. 13s. 4d. in addition to their former salaries, and so
much as should remain after the payment of repairs and other
incidental expenses relating to the school should be deposited in the
chest; that whenever £100 should have arisen from such surplus,
the same might be placed out on government securities for the
augmentation of the salaries of the master and usher, in the
proportions of two thirds to the former and one third to the latter,
until such time as there should be a decayed master or poor scholar
entitled to a subsistance according to the donor’s intention. The
Cowhall estate is situate at Backford, in Cheshire, and consists of
153a. 3r. 37p. of land, with a farm house and suitable outbuildings,
let at a yearly rent of £200, but the trustees, in 1822, agreed to
allow the tenant £20 per annum, to be laid out in manure. In the
year 1822, timber was cut from this farm and sold for £200, which
was partly applied in repairing the farm premises: the residue, £80
13s. 10d., was paid to the trustees. The Ubley estate, near Bristol,
consists of 26a. 1r. 4p. of land, and is let for £30 a year. There is
also a yearly sum of £52 arising from lands the gift of Edward
Beddow. The trustees, when the charity commissioners published
their report, were possessed of £6,400 in three per cent. consols,
which has arisen from the investment of surplus rents, in accordance
with the decree of Chancery. The gross annual income amounts to
£454, from which the master had a salary of £210. 8s. 6d., and the
usher £97 per annum. Upon application being made to the trustees,
on behalf of orphan or friendless children, such as are considered fit
objects, are appointed at a meeting of the trustees, they also receive
clothing and are supplied with books. The Rev. James R. Peake,
M.A., is the master.
The National School is situated in New street, Dodington. The British
School is also in Dodington, where they will be found noticed. The
Church Sunday School is a modern erection of brick, situated near the
church. The Infant School, in Claypit street, is a neat building,
erected in 1848.
The Savings’ Bank is situated in St. Mary’s street. The capital stock of
the bank on November 20th, 1850, amounted to £52,954. 0s. 4d., at
which period there were 1,489 separate accounts, of which nine
were charitable societies, having deposits amounting to £518. 3s.
4d., and nineteen friendly societies, with deposits amounting to the
sum of £6,898. 2s. 10d. Of the total number of accounts there were
790 depositors, whose respective balances did not exceed £20; 385
were above £20, and not exceeding £50; 187 were between £50 and
£100; 62 above £100 and not exceeding £150; 33 above that sum,
and not exceeding £200; and four above £200. President: The Right
Hon. George Lord Kenyon. Secretary and Actuary: Mr. S. H. Parker.
The bank was established in the year 1818.
The House of Industry, situate on Deer Moss, was established in 1794,
and is under the management of twelve directors or guardians, who
nominate a chairman. They constitute a board for the regulation of
the house and the paupers belonging to the fourteen townships of
the parish of Whitchurch, which are embraced in the jurisdiction of
the board. The house will accommodate 150 inmates; the present
number on the books is 63. Chairman: Archibald Worthington. Vice-
Chairman: Mr. Thomas Andrews. Treasurer: George Corser, Esq.
Surgeon: Mr. Thomas Groom. Clerk: Mr. Robert B. Jones. Governor:
Thomas Huxley. Matron: Mrs. Huxley. Relieving Officer and
Assistant Overseer: Thomas Huxley. Schoolmistress: Mary Price.
The County Court Office for the recovery of debts, not exceeding £50,
is situated in St. Mary’s street. The court embraces within its
jurisdiction the following townships and places, viz.:—Whitchurch,
Alkington 2, Ash Magna 3, Ash Parva 3, Dodington 1, Black Park 2,
Broughall 3, Edgeley 2, Hinton 2, Hollyhurst and Chinnell 2, Tilstock
3, New Woodhouses 4, Old Woodhouses 4, Ightfield 4, Hanmer 7,
Betisfield 8, Bronington 6, Halghton 9, Tybroughton 6, Wellington 9,
Iscoyd 6, Agden 4, Chidlow 4, Chorlton 8, Cuddington 8, Malpas 5,
Newton by Malpas 7, Old Castle 7, Overton 7, Church Shocklach 11,
Shocklach Oviatt 11, Stockton 6, Whichaugh 7, Wigland 5,
Threapwood 10, Audlem 10, Bickley 6, Buerton 11, Dodcot and
Wilkesley 8, Hampton 7, Macefen 4, Marbury with Quoisly 3, Norbury
5, Tushingham with Grindley 3, and Wirswall 3. Judge: Uvedale
Corbet, Esq., Aston Hall, near Shiffnal. Clerk: Mr. Benjamin Lakin.
Assistant Clerk: Charles Foulkes. High Bailiff: Mr. Thomas
Whittingham, jun. Bailiff: William Baxter, Auctioneer and Broker: Mr.
William Lakin. The figures refer to the mileage from Whitchurch.
The News and Reading Room is held in a commodious and neatly fitted
up room in the Market Hall; it is under the management of a
committee of gentlemen, and supported by annual subscriptions.
The Market Hall, situate in High street or Market street, is a spacious
building of brick, with stone finishings and supported by stone
pillars. Underneath the hall is a spacious area, where the corn-
market is held. Here the farmers assemble in considerable numbers
on the market day, which has a business-like and animated
appearance while the market continues.
The Assembly Rooms is at the Victoria Inn, High street.
The Theatre is a small structure, situated in Mill street.
The Stamp Office is in High street, Mr. Thomas Joyce distributor.
The Excise Office is at the Lord Hill Hotel, in Watergate street. The
Pensioners’ and Corn Returns Offices are at the same place.
The Gas Works were established in 1826, by Messrs. Edwards and
Smith, and are now the property of Mr. William Smith, engineer.
There are two small gasometers, which will hold conjointly 3,600
cubic feet of gas. A charge of about 10s. per 1,000 cubic feet is
made to the consumer.
The Circulating Library is at Mr. Robert Barrow Jones’s, in High street
Petty Sessions are held for the Whitchurch division on the last Friday
in every month. Magisterial business is also transacted at the office
in St. Mary’s street, on Mondays at nine o’clock, A.M., and on Fridays
at eleven, A.M. The magistrates who usually attend are Sir Robert
Chambre Hill, Bart., John W. Dod, Esq., M.P., William H. Poole, Esq.,
and George Bowen, Esq. Clerk: Benjamin Lakin. Deputy Clerk:
Charles Foulkes.
The religious and charitable institutions, which have for their object
the promotion of Christian knowledge and to ameliorate suffering
humanity, are liberally supported in Whitchurch. The members of
the Established Church and the various sectarian communities have
their respective Bible, Missionary, and Tract Societies. The
Depository of the British and Foreign Bible Society is at Mrs.
Clutton’s, in Bargate street. The Dispensary is at the Market Hall.
The Depôt for Coals for the poor is in Watergate street. There is a
Library of Miscellaneous Works at the National School, which has
been established for the benefit of the humbler classes of society.
For Benefit and Sick Societies the town stands pre-eminent; they are
efficiently conducted, the members are very numerous, and several
of the societies have a very considerable accumulated capital. The
Whitchurch Old Friendly Society, established in 1754, in 1850 had
264 members and a capital stock of £1,667. 17s. 11½d. Mr. John
Fowles is secretary, and Mr. Henry Corser treasurer.
The Lock-up and Police-office, situated in Clay-pit street, was built in
1850. It consists of two cells for the reception of prisoners before
committal by the magistrates; and also a residence for the
superintendent constable.
The Bowling Green, in St. John’s lane, affords healthful and amusing
recreation to the residents of the town, is supported by subscription,
and under the management of a committee of gentlemen and
tradesmen.
There is an Almshouse for six poor decayed housekeepers, liberally
endowed, as will be seen on reference to the charities of the parish.
A School-house adjoins the almshouse, and here about fifty children
are instructed.
The commodious premises, formerly occupied as a silk-mill here,
have been purchased by Mr. Thomas Burgess, an extensive cheese-
factor and corn-merchant, and are now converted into a warehouse.
There is a wharf at the bottom of Mill street, on the banks of the
Chester and Ellesmere canal, which is now the property of the
Shropshire Union Canal and Railway Company. Goods are forwarded
to London, Manchester, Liverpool, and Chester by the company; who
are also general carriers to all parts of England. Of the Castle at
Whitchurch, which stood upon Castle-hill, not a vestige remains.
Some portion of the walls are said to have been standing in the year
1760.
During the years 1830 and 1831, the inhabitants of Whitchurch and
the neighbourhood were held in constant alarm by a succession of
incendiary fires. On the 14th of December the first fire commenced
on the premises of a poor man of the name of Heath. On the
following day the out-buildings of the Swan Inn burst into flames;
and on the 21st the out-premises belonging to Mr. Nunnerley, of
Prees Heath, were destroyed. On the 7th of January, 1831, Mr.
Moss, of Heath lane, had a stack burnt; and on the day following the
barn of Mr. G. T. Whitfield and two cottages were destroyed. On the
12th, a barn belonging to the same gentleman was discovered to be
on fire. A stack was fired belonging to Mr. Huxley on the 2nd of
February. On the 10th of March, a second fire broke out on the
premises of Mr. Nunnerley, of Prees Heath, and so rapid were the
flames that the whole of the out-buildings were entirely destroyed
before the arrival of the fire-engines from Whitchurch. Five cows,
two horses, and ten pigs, were also destroyed. The next fires which
took place were the stacks of Mr. Bradbury. On the 4th of April, the
farm buildings of Mr. Huxley, of Tilstock, and a great quantity of
grain, were entirely consumed. The same evening, a range of
buildings, on the road from Prees Heath to Tilstock, burst into
flames, and the fire proceeded with so much rapidity that no efforts
could check them. On the 13th of September, a stack belonging to
Mr. Nunnerley, of Prees Heath, was consumed. The stack-yard and
out buildings of Mr. Booth, and the stacks of Mr. Darlington, were in
flames at the same time, and very great damage sustained. Shortly
after this the incendiaries were brought to justice, and Richard
Whitfield, a farmer and maltster, was transported for life, at the
Shropshire Spring Assizes of 1832, and James Lea and Joseph
Grindley were executed.
Whitchurch was the birth place of Dr. Tylston, an eminent physician
in 1663. He was admitted into Trinity College, Oxford, and his
brilliant talents adorned by a deportment in all respects exemplary
soon attracted the notice of Dr. Bathurst, then president of the
college, whose able directions much assisted him. When about
Bachelor’s standing, his inclinations suggested the study of physic,
as the employment for life, and having by an acquaintance with
natural philosophy laid a good foundation for medical enquiries, he
speedily turned the course of his reading into that channel. After he
had left college he removed to London, where he studied
industriously under Sir Richard Blackmore. On his return he
commenced his professional career at Whitchurch, and though
young, quickly obtained celebrity. At the request of many friends in
Chester he quitted his native town for that city in the year 1690, and
by successful practice continued to increase in fame. His mental
powers rose above the ordinary standard, and in the prosecution of
an enquiry he regarded the opinions of others rather as guides to
direct than authoratitives to govern the efforts of his own mind.
After his attainments had become considerable, such was his thirst
for knowledge that he redeemed for study all the time his
professional engagements would allow. The writings of antiquity,
especially those of Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, afforded him great
delight. In the works of Pliny he took much pleasure, and shortly
before his death read with great satisfaction the writings of
Lactantius. Passages which illustrated any portion of Scripture he
transcribed into an interleaved Bible, or other repository. In his
professional pursuits he was as remarkable for charity to the poor as
for diligence, fidelity, and concern for his patients. The Scriptures he
perused with unfeigned delight, and was influenced by their
authority as a supreme rule. By frequent meditation he became
conversant in an unusual degree with the instructive doctrines and
sublime mysteries of the Gospel. When a subject particularly
interesting filled his attention, he clothed his conceptions in writing;
these have survived him, and not only show the evidences of
erudition, but of an experimental acquaintance with revealed
religion. He died on the 8th of April, 1699, in the 36th year of his
age. The celebrated Matthew Henry bears honourable testimony to
his worth, in a letter to a friend shortly after his death, from which
the following is an extract:—“I find it easy to say a great deal to
aggravate the affliction we are under in the death of Dr. Tylston,
whom we miss daily. What improvement I have made in learning of
late years has been owing as much to my converse with him as to
any one thing. He was the ornament of our congregation, and a
great reputation to us.”
This town was the residence of Nicholas Barnard, a man of great
learning, chaplain to Archbishop Usher, and Dean of Armagh. In the
time of the rebellion in Ireland he was a great sufferer, and often in
danger of his life; he consequently fled to England, and was
presented with the rectory of Whitchurch, where he lived till his
death in 1661. Abraham Wheloch, a person of great learning, and
noted as a linguist of distinguished abilities, was born in this town.
He was author of a Persian translation of the New Testament, which
task he undertook in the hope that it might open the way for the
conversion of the natives of Persia to Christianity. He greatly
assisted Dr. Brian Walton in his Polyglot Bible, and published an
edition of the works of the venerable Bede. He was fellow of Clare
Hall, Cambridge, library keeper, Arabic professor, and minister of St.
Sepulchre’s. His death took place in 1654.
There are 333a. 3r. 0p. of waste land called Whitchurch Heath, which
has a barren and sterile appearance. It has a flat surface, covered
with gravel, and incapable of cultivation.
Charities.—Samuel Higginson, by will, bearing date 28th September,
1697, devised certain lands in Whixall, and gave the sum of £200 in
trust, for the erection of an almshouse, and the benefit of poor
persons appointed as inmates; and if any poor relations of the family
or kin should apply, he directed that they should be first admitted to
receive the benefit thereof. Jane Higginson, widow of the above
Samuel Higginson, by her will, in 1707, gave £5 per annum to five
decayed tradesmen’s widows in Ludlow, in consideration that the five
poor widows should take care to keep the chancel in Ludlow church
clean. She also gave to the rector of Ludlow and his successors £5
per annum. And she gave all her lands and tenements in the
counties of Salop, Flint, and Chester, in trust, and after payment of
certain legacies, she gave for the use of her own and her husband’s
almhouse in Whitchurch £12 per annum, charged upon her estate at
Ash, in the county of Chester, the necessary repairs of the
almshouse to be first deducted thereout; and she directed that the
sum of £7. 10s. per annum, given by her daughter for the support of
the said almshouse, should also be paid out of her estate at Ash.
She also gave to the poorest and most necessitous children of the
parish of Hanmer the sum of £6, payable once in five years, whereof
20s. was designed for their clothing, and the rest to be bestowed for
the benefit of the children, and £6 in like manner to the parish of
Ellesmere. And she gave the debts due to her to build a
schoolhouse upon the piece of ground lying between her almshouses
and those of the town, and bequeathed £10 per annum to the
teacher, and 20s. yearly to buy English books. She directed her
trustees to meet on the 24th June, yearly, to settle the accounts,
and left 30s. yearly for their expenses, and 10s. to the minister to
preach a sermon on the same day.
Under the will of Samuel Higginson, an almshouse was built
consisting of six tenements, and also a schoolhouse. These
premises, with small gardens attached to the almshouses, comprise
the whole of the property devised by him in Whitchurch, except a
small parcel which was sold to the parish for £10, for the purpose of
building other almhouses thereon. The Whixall estate consists of
about 22 acres of land, producing a yearly rental of £42. The
property devised by Mrs. Higginson consists of a messuage and land
containing 110a. 2r. 20p. let at a rent of £140. Certain lands and a
house at Milton Green, comprising in the whole 40a. 3r. 30p.,
producing a yearly rental of £40. The trustees took no estate at Ash
in the county of Chester, and the yearly sum of £12 left as payable
out of the Ash estate to the almspeople is considered as payable out
of her other estates. The rents above mentioned amounts to £252
per annum, out of which each of the almspeople receive £4. 4s.
yearly at Midsummer, and £2. 2s. on each of the other quarter days.
The sum of £6 is transmitted every fifth year to Hanmer; and a
yearly stipend of £10 and an allowance of £2 for coal is paid to the
master of the national school, who teaches the boys in a school
erected by subscriptions for that purpose; the girls are taught in the
school adjoining the almshouse, built according to the directions of
Mrs. Higginson. Out of the residue £15. 15s. is distributed among
the poor of Great Ash, Little Ash, and Tilstock, and a considerable
amount is given in small sums to the poor of Whitchurch and the
vicinity.
Thomas Benyon, in 1707, charged certain premises in the township
of Alkington with the payment of 40s. per annum, for the benefit of
the preaching minister of the then new erected Presbyterian meeting
house in Dodington, to continue so long as such minister should
officiate there and no longer, and that the residue of the yearly rents
should be applied in educating so many poor children of the parish
of Whitchurch as could be conveniently taught therein; and he
directed that if preaching at the said meeting house should cease, or
none be there by a Presbyterian minister, the said payment of 40s.
should cease, and be applied for educating the said poor children.
The property devised by Mr. Benyon contains 22a. 1r. 14p., and is let
for £50 per annum. The nomination of the free scholars is left to
the members of the Presbyterian congregation, instead of being
appointed by the trustees, as directed by the testator.
Mary Whetton, by her will, bearing date March, 1811, gave to the
rector of Whitchurch £100, navy five per cents., in trust, to pay the
interest half yearly among the widows of Higginson’s almshouses. A
portion of this stock having been sold for the payment of the legacy
duty, and the navy five per cents. having been converted into new
four per cents., there is now in respect of this charity £94. 10s. new
four per cents., standing in the name of certain trustees. The
dividends, amounting to £3. 15s. 6d., are distributed as directed by
the donor.
Phillip’s Charity.—The particulars of James Phillip’s charity for the
providing a lecture every Thursday in the parish church of
Whitchurch, and for the supplying the poor with flannel, will be
found in the account of the charities for the town of Shrewsbury.
John Gossage, by will, 1671, gave to the poor of the parish of
Whitchurch the sum of £2. 12s. per annum, to provide twelve
pennyworth of bread every Lord’s day. He also gave a similar
bequest to the poor of the parish of Plumstead, in Kent, and for the
payment of the same he charged his lands in Plumstead and Erith,
and gave the residue of the proceeds to St. Thomas’s Hospital. This
rent charge is received from the treasurer of St. Thomas’s Hospital,
and distributed to the poor in bread.
Ralph Brereton, haberdasher, of London, by his will, date May 1st,
1630, among other charities bequeathed £250 to purchase a yearly
dole for ever for the poor of Whitchurch. In 1635 this bequest was
laid out in the purchase of 21 acres of land in Edgeley, and this land
was sold in the year 1804 for the sum of £1,230. This sale was
supposed to have been authorized by an act of parliament, passed
32nd George III., for building a house of industry at Whitchurch,
whereby it was enacted that all lands, rents, hereditaments, and
sums of money, and all charitable gifts, legacies, and benefactions
belonging to the parish of Whitchurch, and applicable to the relief of
the poor, not being directed by the donors to be applied to any
private person, or for the relief of any particular poor, should be
invested in the directors who were thereby incorporated. And it was
thereby declared that it should be lawful for them to dispose of the
same, and apply the money for carrying on the purposes of the act,
or otherwise in aid of the poor’s rate. At the time the property was
sold it was let for £17 a year, and this sum has been paid annually
by the directors of the house of industry to the churchwardens, to be
disposed of as the charity of Ralph Brereton. The amount is added
to the yearly sums of £2 12s. paid from Gossages charity, £1 from
Griffith’s charity, and £8 from the church rate, probably in respect of
some benefactions which were applied many years ago in rebuilding
the church. From this fund eleven dozen penny loaves are
distributed every Sunday, ten penny loaves in Tilstock chapel, and
the remainder in the parish church.
A yearly sum of £1, left by Morris Griffith, is charged on land called
the Green Field, an estate belonging to Mrs. Ann Brown, whose
tenants pay the amount, which is added to the produce of Brereton’s
charity. Several sums of money left at different periods and by
various donors, amounting in the whole to £340, were held by the
church-wardens and overseers for the use of the poor; of this sum
£300 was laid out in the purchase of a rent charge issuing out of
certain land in Alkington. The yearly sum of £15 is paid to the
treasurer of the house of industry, and it is applied for the general
purposes of that establishment in pursuance of the provisions
contained in the act of 32nd George III., already noticed in the
account of Brereton’s charity. Of the above sum £55 was the gift of
John Taylor, in consideration of which one dozen of penny loaves are
distributed every Sunday, according to the intentions of the donor.
The residue of the sum of £340 was probably laid out with other
money, as hereafter mentioned.
The churchwardens and overseers of the poor, in the year 1699,
purchased an estate in Broughall, with the sum of £100, the gift of
Edward Williams, and a further sum of £110, part of the poors’
money. It does not appear what specific benefactions were
comprised in the sum of £110 above mentioned. There are,
however, a great number of gifts and legacies recorded in the
church, to the amount of £492; and in the purchase of the Broughall
and Alkington estates, before mentioned, £410 is accounted for. It is
probable that the residue, with some other money, was laid out in
re-building the church, and was the origin of the payment of the
sum of £8 from the church rates, which is distributed in bread, as
already mentioned under the head of Brereton’s charity. The estate
at Broughall consists of 14 acres, and is let at a rent of £21 per
annum, one-fourth of which has always been paid to the master of
the grammar school, and three-fourths to the account of the
directors of the house of industry, under the provisions of an act to
which we have before alluded.
At a court held for the manor of Whitchurch, 26th January, 1630,
John Rawlinson D.D., and Catherine his wife, surrendered certain
lands to the use of Richard Alport, and Joyce his wife, in tail, and for
want of issue, to the use of Richard Alport and his heirs, they paying
£12 yearly out of the said lands to the churchwardens of
Whitchurch, to the use of the poor of the said parish. The estate
thus charged with the yearly payment of £12 lies near the town of
Whitchurch, and is now called Alport’s land. It was in the possession
of the assignees of Samuel Fowles, when the charity commissioners
published their report. The amount is distributed among the poor of
the parish on St. Thomas’s day. It is stated in the parliamentary
returns of 1786, that a Mr. Cotton left a rent charge of £4 yearly to
the poor of Whitchurch. The sum of £4 is now paid in respect of this
charity from the Alkington hall estate. The churchwardens receive
£9 annually, about November, from the Company of Drapers in
London, as the amount of the gifts of Roger Cotton, William Cotton,
and Sir Allen Cotton. Thirty-two sixpenny loaves are given away to
poor persons as the charity of Mr. Evans, on Good Friday.
Clement Sankey, D.D., rector of Whitchurch, by his will bearing date
27th September, 1706, gave to the poor of this parish the sum of
£100, to continue under the care of the overseers of the poor and
their successors; half the interest to be disposed of in bread every
Lord’s day, at their discretion, and the remainder to be distributed on
St. Thomas’s day. The amount of this legacy was paid to the
churchwardens in 1714, and applied towards the building of the
church; half the interest is paid from the church rate, and the other
half from the poors’ rate.
Elizabeth Turton, in 1794, bequeathed £500 in trust, to be laid out in
government or other securities, as her trustees should think fit, the
profits thereof to be distributed among poor persons belonging to
the parish of Whitchurch. By a codicil to her will, dated 1796, the
testatrix directed that the residue of her estate and effects, subject
to the payment of her debts and legacies, should be converted into
money, and the produce paid to the same trustees, for the benefit of
the poor. John Hand, one of the trustees named in her will, gave
£200 upon the same trusts, and in augmentation of the charity.
From the legacy of £500 bequeathed, £30 was deducted as legacy
duty, and the residue was invested in 1801, in the purchase of £839.
8s. 4d. three per cent. consols. The following stock has been
subsequently purchased, with the produce of the residuary estate,
viz., November, 1801, £200; January, 1805, £800; July, 1816, £100;
November, 1816, £200; and in 1818, in order to make £2,200, £60.
11s. 8d. was purchased. For the distribution of these charities, the
trustees meet annually, three weeks or a month before the 19th of
January, and select such poor widows, poor housekeepers, and other
poor persons belonging to the parish of Whitchurch, and not
receiving parochial relief, as they think the most fit objects of
charity. Each poor person receives from 5s. to 20s., according to the
necessities of the case.
Richard Woollam, by his will, bearing date June 23rd, 1801,
bequeathed £500 in trust, to place the same out on real or personal
security, and to dispose of the produce weekly in threepenny loaves,
to be distributed by the churchwardens every Sunday morning, after
divine service, in the parish church. When the trustees, by death or
removal from the parish, should be reduced to two, the testator
directed the survivors to assign the trust money to three other
persons resident in the parish of Whitchurch. This legacy has been
invested in the funds, and the dividends are disposed of as directed
by the donor.
Brereton Grafton, in 1811, bequeathed £300 stock in the three per
cent. consols, upon trust, to apply the produce weekly in the
purchase of threepenny loaves, to be disposed of in like manner with
Woollam’s charity. In respect of this and Woollam’s gift, there is
£1,120. 2s, 7d. three per cent. consols standing in the name of
trustees, and the dividends, amounting to £33. 12s. per annum, are
disposed of in the purchase of bread, which is given away every
Sunday.
Francis Henry Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater, by his will, bearing date
29th August, 1828, bequeathed to the overseers and churchwardens
of Whitchurch-cum-Marbury, £2,000, to be by them laid out in the
public funds, and the dividends thereof to be expended by the rector
for the time being, according to his sole will and pleasure, without
being subject to any control whatsoever, for the use, benefit and
relief of the poor of the said parish.
Post Office, St. Mary’s street. Mr. Richard Crosse, postmaster.
Letters arrive from London and various parts of England at 5.30 A.M.,
and are despatched at 7 P.M.; letters from Chester and the west of
England arrive at 7 A.M., and are despatched at 7.30 P.M.
Ackers Ann, shopkeeper, Watergate street
Allen Benjamin, builder, Newtown
Allen Charles, butcher, Watergate street
Allenson William, shoemaker, Claypit street
Allwood and Andrews, drapers and silk mercers, High street
Amson John, blacksmith, Grindley brook
Arden Edwin, coach proprietor, High street
Arrowsmith Thomas, cabinet maker, Green-end street
Baker Thomas, straw-bonnet dealer, High st
Barber William, hosier, Watergate street
Bass Charles, draper, High street
Bate John, flour dealer, High street
Bather John, beerhouse, Watergate street
Batho George, shopkeeper, Bargates street
Baxter William, shopkeeper, Green-end st
Beacall Mrs., Watergate street
Bebbington John, shopkeeper, Newtown st
Beck Edward, chemist, Watergate street
Bolas Susannah, milliner, Back street
Bottwood William, hairdresser, Watergate st
Boughey Elizabeth, dressmaker, Castle hill
Boughey William, cabinet maker, Newtown
Bradbury Thomas, cattle dealer, Claypit st
Bradbury Francis, victualler, Coach and Horses, High street
Bradshaw George, victualler, Swan Hotel and Commercial House,
Watergate street
Bradshaw John, watchmaker, High street
Bradshaw John, shopkeeper, High street
Breeze William, shopkeeper, Newtown
Brereton George, currier, Watergate street
Bright William, confectioner, High street
Brookes and Lee, solicitors, Dodington
Brookes Miss, Green-end street
Bromfield John, surgeon, Green-end street
Broster John, shopkeeper, Green-end
Brown John, surgeon, Claypit street
Brown Sml., victualler, Eight Bells, High st
Brown William, grocer, High street
Burgess Ralph W., factor, Newtown
Burgess and Son, corn and cheese factors
Burgess Thomas, Esq., Small-brook Lodge
Caldecott Thomas, seedsman, High street
Cartwright Mary, stay-maker, Sherrunans, High street
Cartwright William Andrew, registrar and veterinary surgeon,
Watergate street
Carver William, fish & game dealer, High st
Churton George, timber merchant, High st
Churton John, cabinet maker, High street
Churton William Parker, auctioneer, High st
Clay Charles, Esq., Newtown
Clay Charles, jun., solicitor, Newtown
Clay Mrs. Broughton, Claypit street
Clutton Mrs., Missionary Bible Repository
Clutton Thomas, whitesmith, Green-end st
Colclough Sarah, pot dealer, High street
Cooke George, Josh., and Henry, coopers, High street
Cooke Miss, boarding-school, St. Mary’s st
Cooper Edward, shopkeeper, High street
Corser George, Esq., St. Mary’s street
Corser Henry, gentleman, High street
Corser Miss Letitia, St. Mary’s street
Corser, the Misses, St. Mary’s street
Corser The Misses, Green end
Cotgreave Richard, saddler, High street
Cotton Captain, R.N., Allport Cottage
Cox John, wheelwright, Mill street
Crosse George, tailor & draper, St. Mary’s st
Crosse Richard, postmaster, St. Mary’s street
Crosse Thos., tailor and draper, Claypit st
Crosse Thomas, painter, Bargates street
Davy The Misses Mary & Betsey, St. Mary’s street
Davies William, shopkeeper, Newtown
Dawson Thomas, victualler, Fox and Goose, Green-end street
Dimmock The Misses, Bargates
Dodd George, plumber, High street
Done James, draper, High street
Dunning John, shopkeeper, Watergate street
Eastham Rev. Theophilus, M.A., St. Mary’s street
Edge John, woodturner, Green end
Edge John, clog and patten maker, Pepper st
Edge William, beerhouse, Newtown
Edwards John, Brick-kiln lane farm
Edwards Thomas, plumber, High street
Egerton Rev. William Henry, M.A., The Rectory
Elliott James, Allport farm
Elliott Thomas, cheese factor, Tarporley road
Etches James Goulburn, solicitor, St. Mary’s street
Evans William, currier, Green-end street
Evans Thomas, blacksmith, Carlow’s yard
Evanson late, (Simms John, manager,) chemist and druggist, High
street
Farrell Edward, fishmonger, Pepper street
Fenna Thomas, Wickstead farm
Foulkes Charles, clerk, County Court
France William, The Moss farm
Gaskin Miss Ann, Chester road
Godsal P. L., Esq., Iscoid Park
Goodall Mr. John, Belvedere house
Gorse James, grocer, High street
Grafton John, shoemaker, Castle hill
Green Charles, victualler, Victoria Hotel, High street
Green Thomas Fallows, shoemaker, High st
Griffiths Samuel, confectioner, Newtown
Griffiths Thomas, baker, Green-end street
Griffiths William, beerhouse, Yardington
Groom Samuel, surveyor, Claypit street
Groom Thomas, surgeon, St. Mary’s street
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