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THE PRESS EFFECT
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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.
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
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.
THE PRESS EFFECT
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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denied it. We told them to come qa′idaog̣ ᴀñgᴀn. Gatā′hao dalᴀ′ñ
near shore, and they entered the gi tꜝalᴀ′ñ dā′xo-î′ngᴀn.” Giên hᴀn
mouth of the inlet. sū′gᴀni “Ga′oano dalᴀ′ñ qa-idā′‐
wagᴀn.” Giê′nhao gī ʟꜝ
qā′dagᴀne. Giên dia′nᴀñ ʟꜝ
gā′yiñxᴀlgᴀni giên g̣ ag̣ aga′-i g̣ ei
qā′x̣ iatcꜝigᴀni.
And after he (one of them) had Giên g̣ a lᴀ kîłgu′ldi qa′odi hᴀn l’

talked for a while, he said: “Get sū′gᴀn: “ʟua′-i łᴀ da′og̣ o.
[into] the canoe. I do not Kî′łgulia-i ł kî′lsgudaiyagᴀni.”
understand their pronunciation.” 3 Gañā′xᴀnhao ʟua′-i ʟꜝ da′oga-i ʟ̣ ū
As soon as they got [into] the ga′-itg̣ oqa-idᴀni. Giê′nhao
canoe they went off in fright. g̣ ō′ʟ̣ ag̣ a ʟꜝ djîskī′dᴀni. Dagwu′lgî
Then we pursued. [The other ga g̣ astî′ñ xā′dasi ā′xᴀn
canoes] shot at them, one from tcꜝînłg̣ oa′ñgᴀni. Giên tꜝalᴀ′ñ î′sîñ
each side, and we were behind. g̣ ō′tgi g̣ atꜝē′djᴀni. Giê′nhao ʟꜝ
And after we had shot for a tcꜝî′nłg̣ oañgîn qa′odi nᴀñ gwai′ya
while we upset them near an gu ʟꜝ tcꜝîtgutꜝᴀ′łdagîlgᴀn. Gū′g̣ a
island. One whom we had shot nᴀñ ʟꜝ tcꜝigā′gᴀni ʟua′-i gug̣ e′istᴀ
lay there, having fallen out into g̣ ā′yuwa-i g̣ ei ʟ̣ x̣ ia′ñgāgîñgᴀn.
the water. Then Xᴀ′ñxogutg̣ as 4 Giê′nhao Xᴀ′ñxogutg̣ as-gā′ña l’
and his brothers started to get da′otꜝᴀłx̣ idigᴀn giên g̣ a ł qꜝa-
out to fight, and I stopped them. igidᴀ′lgᴀn.
After that we went away and Giê′nhao wᴀ stᴀ îsdax̣ ī′dᴀni

started across [to the Queen gañā′xᴀn ʟuda′ogᴀni. Qꜝa′ʼgustᴀ
Charlotte islands]. The wind tā′dju yuᴀ′ngᴀn. G̣ āl ya′ku ʟꜝᴀ gi
blew strong from the north. In tadja′o g̣ ā′tg̣ oyuᴀ′ngᴀn. ʟua′-i g̣ a
the middle of the night a great ʟgū′sʟgᴀni. Dī ga kꜝᴀtłg̣ askiä′lu
wind arose. The canoe was split. ī′djîn at łᴀ qā′tgogᴀni. Îsîñ ʟuᴀ′-i
I nailed the parts together with ʟꜝ łg̣ adjigū′sʟgᴀni. ʟꜝ īłī′ łg̣ osg̣ ā′-
some staples I had. We also tied igagᴀñgîn. Djigî′n xā′txatgwañ
ropes round the canoe. Some of tꜝalᴀ′ñ gudᴀ′ñgᴀni. A′hao ʟnōt dī
us cried from fright. We thought inā′sʟ g̣ ᴀ′nstᴀ tadja′o ʟā′djîga ł
the other canoes had capsized. g̣ ā′ndᴀñgᴀn.
This was the first time I
experienced a strong wind since
I was grown.
At daybreak we were in front of G̣ a-iʟ̣ ū′hao sîñgaʟ̣ ana′-i gu Mas-

Paint mountain. 5 And after we ʟdag̣ a′os xē′tgu lᴀ gi
had sailed from there for a while sîñgaʟ̣ a′nga. Giê′nhao wᴀ stᴀ
I shouted: “He he he he he; x̣ uqa′-îłgîñ qa′odi qagᴀ′ndjūñ ła
chiefs’ nephews whom I have for g̣ atgadā′gᴀni: “He he he he he
sons-in-law, do not let your ē′ʟꜝxagît nā′tg̣ alᴀñ ł qō′nᴀldᴀgᴀn
minds be downcast. We go out gᴀm xē′da gudᴀñā′ñ
to have a warm time. Make your g̣ eidᴀg̣ ᴀ′ñg̣ o. Gī′hao tꜝalᴀ′ñ
minds strong.” Then they îsx̣ iā′gᴀni a′hao ga kꜝī′na tꜝalᴀ′ñ
stopped weeping. g̣ ā′ndᴀñgîñga. Gudᴀñā′ña
ʟā′djîgadᴀg̣ o.” Ḷū′hao sg̣ a′-iłia-i
ʟan g̣ î′lgᴀni.
Some time after that our canoe Giên ga′istᴀ qā qa′odi Gwī′gwᴀñ-
came to Gwi′gwᴀñ-bay, 6 and sʟꜝîñ gu ē′ʟꜝg̣ a qaʟꜝxagî′lgᴀni giên
there was one canoe there. ʟua′-i ga sg̣ oa′na ê′sîñ wᴀ gu
There we spent the night. When īdjā′gᴀni. Gu ʟꜝ g̣ ā′ldagᴀne.
we left next day another sail Dag̣ ala′-ig̣ a stᴀ ʟꜝ qasā′g̣ aga-i ʟ̣ ū
came in sight from Skidegate. ga g̣ asg̣ oa′na î′sîñ Łg̣ agî′lda stᴀ
Then we saw each other. And we gīx̣ iawa′-i gī′sdagani. Giên gu ʟꜝ
were glad to see each other. And qî′ñgᴀn. Giên guta′t agᴀ′ñ ʟꜝ
when we came to Gū′dᴀl the xᴀña′lgᴀn. Giên Gudᴀ′l gu ʟꜝ
[other] warriors had taken thirty- î′sʟꜝxaga-i ʟ̣ ū ʟꜝ qa′ido-
eight slaves. We were î′ndjawagᴀn [107]xᴀ′ldañ ʟa′ala-i
[106]ashamed. Then it was łg̣ u′nuł wᴀ gi stā′nsᴀñxa ʟꜝ
reported that a woman said of î′sdagialagᴀn. Iʟꜝ g̣ e′idaxagᴀn.
us: “What open place do they Ḷū′hao nᴀñ djā′da hᴀn iʟꜝ sudā′ñ
keep going out for, I wonder?” 7 ʟꜝ sū′gᴀñ: “Gī′ʟg̣ ᴀn gadjā′wasi
We immediately prepared for gī′hao lᴀ ga′-itax̣ uñgwa′-ani.”
war. Ḷū′hao g̣ eidā′ñ xᴀn tꜝalᴀ′ñ
qa′idox̣ idigᴀn.
The people went then to the Giê′nhao Gudᴀ′l stᴀ ʟgᴀnła′ñ g̣ ei

camps from Gū′dᴀl. And after ʟꜝ qasā′gīgᴀn. Ga′-iʟ̣ u ʟꜝ xao
they had fished for some time qa′odi qꜝā′g̣ asʟgᴀni. Giên ʟū
the fish were dried. Then we g̣ astᴀ′nsîñ gu ʟꜝ qa′-idogᴀn.
went to war in four canoes. We Giê′nhao Qꜝā-its-gwai′ya-i stᴀ
started across from North tꜝalᴀ′ñ ʟuda′⁺ogᴀn. Łᴀwa′k xā′-
island. 8 We went against the idag̣ a-i hao tꜝalᴀ′ñ tā′ng̣ agᴀn.
Klawak 9 people.
We pulled up our canoes at the Ga′iʟ̣ uhao g̣ a′oga-i qꜝe-ū′g̣ a ʟua′-

mouth of the inlet. The next day i ʟꜝ ʟꜝstagî′lgᴀni. Dag̣ ala′-ig̣ a î′sîñ
we again went up the inlet. We ʟꜝ ʟu-î′sdax̣ îtłgᴀn. Isdā′lgᴀni.
went, went, went for a while and Qa′odi nᴀñ djī′wa-i djē′gᴀs gu
landed where there was a strong ʟuwa′-i ʟꜝ ʟstagî′lgᴀni, nᴀñ g̣ a
tidal current. In one [stream] sqā′gî qoa′na gu ᴀ. ʟ̣ ! g̣ ētg̣ ᴀ′ndi
there were plenty of dog salmon. qa′⁺odi sa′stᴀ ga gīx̣ ia′wa-i
After we had been there a while gaostᴀtꜝᴀ′lgᴀn. Giê′nhao ga′gu
[we saw] some broad sails ʟua′-i ʟꜝ ʟstagilā′digᴀni gu ʟꜝ
coming from above. And it (the xē′tgu lᴀ g̣ askī′dᴀn. L’ djā′g̣ a îsî′s
canoe) landed below the place giên xᴀ′ldᴀña-i î′sîñ lā′g̣ a
where we had pulled up our stî′ñgᴀni. L’ qatꜝᴀ′lgᴀn giên
canoes. g̣ eiga′ñ g̣ ᴀlqa′-igiga-i lᴀ daqa′-
iłgᴀni. Giê′nhao ʟꜝ g̣ ētg̣ ᴀ′ndies ʟꜝa
He (the owner) had his wife and gut lᴀ qā′łgᴀn. Giê′nhao nᴀñ
two slaves. Then he got off and xᴀ′ldᴀñas l’ sila′-ig̣ a sqā′gi gī
put on his cartridge box. And he g̣ ᴀ′nʟa-i g̣ ei lᴀ qꜝadjū′gᴀni.
passed up near the place where Kꜝiä′łhao Łî′nagît kî′łg̣ agî gutg̣ ā′
we were watching. After he had lᴀ kîłgulg̣ ō′gᴀn. Giên ʟꜝ qꜝō′łg̣ a
gone a slave killed dog salmon in qa-it giagᴀ′ñgᴀn qꜝo′lgî lᴀ
the creek with stones. During all tcꜝā′nog̣ adag̣ ogᴀn.
that time they talked Tlingit to
one another. And they started a
fire at the foot of a tree which
stood near them.
By and by, when evening came, Qa′odi sîñx̣ aiya′-i ʟ̣ ū la

he came down. From afar he qaʟꜝxā′sgag̣ ᴀni. Wā′djx̣ ui xᴀn g̣ a
spoke Tlingit to them. Three lᴀ djîłgita′ogadalgᴀni. Qa′odihao
persons presently came along l’ dī′tg̣ a ga łg̣ u′nuł gᴀndax̣ ī′dᴀn.
behind him. When two reports Djigwa′-i sqꜝastî′ñ wᴀ gu
were heard the people ran qꜝadō′gaga′-i ʟ̣ ū g̣ a ʟꜝ
down. The slaves already had x̣ a′ostagᴀni. Tagī′djigida-i ʟgī′xᴀn
their hands in it (the canoe). The wa g̣ ei ʟꜝ qᴀngixā′ñgᴀni. Djī′gu
gun box was untouched. There g̣ oda′-i wa g̣ a gᴀm
were five [guns] in it. Since he gīdjigî′łdag̣ agᴀn. Sqꜝaʟe′ił wa g̣ a
had come there he had lain īdjā′gᴀni. L’ qā′ʟꜝxas gu lᴀ ta-
down on his back and spoken in ig̣ ā′gîtwas gu Łî′nagît kî′łg̣ agî lᴀ
the Tlingit language. The roasted kiłgulai′agᴀn. Ha′oxᴀn
salmon was still stuck in the wa′g̣ alᴀña-i kîtsgîlagā′gᴀni.
ground. 10
Then they shot him from in Ḷū′hao l’ qᴀn g̣ ei lᴀ ʟꜝ tcꜝigā′gᴀn.

front. And then he exclaimed: Ḷū⁺ ʟꜝa hᴀn l’ sā′wagᴀn: “Giʟg̣ ᴀ′n
“What people have done this to xa-idᴀg̣ a′-i hao dī î′sdañ. Dī łᴀ
me? Save me.” 11 Then he (the qagᴀ′ndᴀ-kuxa′ogu.” Giê′nhao
assailant) shot him again with a djī′gu kꜝudja′o at î′sîñ lᴀ la
pistol. A male slave, however, tcꜝigā′gᴀn. Nᴀñ xᴀ′ldᴀña
escaped into the woods. And īłinagā′gᴀn ʟꜝa agᴀ′ñ
when they ran down to his tꜝaqagᴀ′ngîlgᴀn. Giên ʟua′-i lā′g̣ a
canoe there were cuts of whale ʟꜝ da′ox̣ îtsg̣ agᴀna-i kun lᴀ
in it. By that time they were qꜝeidā′gᴀn lā′g̣ a gā′yiñgîñgᴀn.
speaking Kaigani 12 together. I ʟʟ̣ a la ê′sîñ gu′tg̣ a Qꜝeits xā′-
then said to them: “Why did you, idᴀg̣ a-i kî′łg̣ agî gu′tg̣ a lᴀ
who are Haida, talk Tlingit? We kîłgu′lg̣ ogᴀn. Ḷū′hao hᴀn lᴀ ł
would not have touched you.” sudag̣ ō′gᴀn: “Gasî′nʟao dalᴀ′ñ
Then she (his wife) said: “We did Xā′-idᴀg̣ as skꜝiä′xᴀn gu′tg̣ a
not think anything like this would Łî′nagît kî′łg̣ agî dalᴀ′ñ kîłgulā′-
happen.” udjañ. Gᴀm dalᴀ′ñ g̣ a tꜝalᴀ′ñ
ʟā′gaskig̣ ā′ñaxᴀñga.” Ḷū′hao hᴀn
l’ sūgᴀn “Hᴀ′nʟgua gī′na g̣ ā′-
itgasañ tꜝalᴀ′ñ gudᴀñō′-udjî.”
And when they got ready to start Ḷū′hao ʟꜝ dag̣ a-ilansʟia′-i ʟ̣ ū hᴀn
she said: “Those who came with l’ sū′gᴀn: “Inax̣ ua′hao iʟꜝ ta′ogᴀn
us have a fire on the other side. ga ē′djîn tcꜝā′nudig̣ a. Łᴀwa′k xa-
They are Klawak people.” In the idᴀg̣ a′-i hao ī′djî.” Giê′nhao
night we went over to them. And g̣ ā′lx̣ ua tꜝalᴀ′ñ tā′ng̣ ax̣ îttꜝē′djîni.
we landed near. We ran toward Giê′nhao qꜝō′łg̣ a tꜝalᴀ′ñ
them. The fire there was large. g̣ agadā′ñgᴀnî. Giên tꜝalᴀ′ñ
And after we had gone toward it da′ox̣ idᴀnî. Tcꜝā′nuwa-i wᴀ gu
for a while we peeped over a yug̣ odī′gᴀnî. Giên g̣ a agᴀ′ñ
log. They lay asleep around the łkꜝî′nxet tꜝalᴀ′ñ gᴀndā′ldi qā′odi
fire. qꜝā′xo łgī′g̣ odia tꜝᴀ′lgî gi tꜝalᴀ′ñ
gwasqā′ñgᴀnî. Tcꜝā′nuwa-i
djî′nxa qꜝaxasʟg̣ awā′gᴀnî.
Just before daybreak we ran Giê′nhao sîñg̣ aʟ̣ andala′-i ʟ̣ ū

upon them. Then we seized a tꜝalᴀ′ñ daoʟꜝxa′gᴀni. Ḷū′hao nᴀñ
man to enslave him. He resisted ī′łiña ʟꜝ xᴀldā′ñg̣ atda′gᴀnî. ʟꜝᴀ lᴀ
more fiercely than was expected. qꜝaixagū′łdagᴀn. Giê′nhao lᴀ ł
Then I shot him. He fell. tcꜝī′gᴀn. L’ g̣ atʟ̣ skī′dᴀn. Ga′-istᴀ lᴀ
Afterward he rose. When he ran gia′xaʟꜝxagᴀnî. L’ g̣ adaga′-i
they shot him again. After that [109]ʟ̣ ū î′sîñ lᴀ ʟꜝ tcꜝī′gᴀn. Ga′-istᴀ
he ran into the woods. We took l’ g̣ atgî′lgᴀn. Iłî′ndjîda-i gī′nag̣ a
all the property of the men. We waʟ̣ uxᴀ′nhao tꜝalᴀ′ñ gī′⁺gᴀn. Ga
took six slaves. Many, too, we ʟg̣ u′nuł hao tꜝalᴀ′ñ
killed. tagī′djîgîda′dᴀgᴀn. Qoan ê′sîñ ʟꜝ
ʟꜝ′dagᴀnî.
Then we got into our canoes. We Giê′nhao ʟꜝ qa′-idawa-qaʟ̣ ′gᴀn.

prepared to go. And we arrived Giê′nhao stᴀ ʟꜝ ʟu-îsdax̣ ī′dᴀnî.
over against Gᴀsqo. 13 In the Giên Gᴀsqo ʟā′stᴀxᴀn
night a south wind came ʟꜝʟuda′ogᴀni. Ga-i g̣ ala′-i g̣ a īʟꜝ gi
suddenly upon [108]us, xe-u′ dala′ñ dᴀ′ñat sqꜝag̣ e′idᴀnî.
accompanied by rain. And after Giên ʟꜝ tadā′ñgî qa′odi ʟꜝ
we had thrown over some of the stī′łsg̣ agᴀn. Ga′-iʟ̣ u ʟꜝ
property we went back. [By and x̣ ūtî′sʟꜝxagîlgᴀn. Gᴀm ʟgu g̣ a ʟꜝ
by] we sailed over [to Gᴀsqo]. gig̣ a′ogial-łiña′-i ga′og̣ ᴀñgᴀn.
There was no place to land. But Giê′nhao ʟꜝ ʟu-îsdā′l qa′odihao
after we had gone on for a while gia′gu ī′sʟîña ʟꜝ qē′xagᴀn. Dala′-i
we found a landing place. Much gug̣ oyū′ᴀngᴀn.
rain fell.
After we had been there for a Giên gut ʟꜝ î′sdi qa′odi ʟūgoag̣ a
while a slave stood up in the nᴀñ xᴀ′ldᴀña gā′yiñgîñgᴀn. Qāñ
canoe. He called for his uncle’s sg̣ ā′nag̣ wa-i gī lᴀ kiägā′ñgᴀn.
supernatural helper. He did so Dala′-i l’ gîñx̣ uaiga′-i hao l’
because the rain chilled him. By gîñsū′gᴀn. Qa′odi l’ x̣ îlgā′g̣ ada-i
and by the rain stopped and a gañā′xᴀn qꜝa′gustᴀ
north wind set in. kwē′ʼg̣ ax̣ idigᴀn.
At once we started across [Dixon Gañā′xᴀnhao ʟꜝ ʟuda′ogᴀn.

entrance]. We reached the G̣ ē′gixᴀn ʟꜝ ʟuda′oʟꜝxagîlgᴀn.
islands the same day. The day Dag̣ ala′-ig̣ a gᴀ stᴀ ʟꜝ ī′djîñ gu ʟꜝ
after we sang war songs there. qa-idjū′ʟꜝxagᴀn. Ga′-igu ʟꜝ naxā′ñ
qa′odi Tcꜝā′ał g̣ a ʟꜝ ī′djîn.
After we had remained there for
a while we came to Tcꜝā′ał. 14
Here is the end of this. [105] A′hao ʟan ā′sga-i g̣ e′ida. [110]
1 A Raven family at Tcꜝā′ał on the

West Coast. ↑
2 A camping place of the West Coast
people. ↑
3 Because the Haida spoke Tlingit with
a foreign accent. ↑
4 One of Richard’s brothers, that is,
one belonging to his family in the
large sense. ↑
5 A mountain on Banks island, which
lies on the east side of Hecate
strait. ↑
6 A bay that is close to Spit point at
the entrance to Skidegate inlet. ↑
7 A sarcastic reference to their
nonsuccess. ↑
8 The Haida name means “strait
island,” referring no doubt to the
narrow strait which separates it from
Graham island. ↑
9 A place still of considerable
importance, having large canneries,
on the west side of Prince of Wales
island. ↑
10 This part of the narrative is
somewhat obscure. ↑
11He characterizes himself as of low
caste in compliment to them: “Save
me, your poor servant.” ↑
12 “Language of the strait people.” It is
almost identical with the Haida
dialect of Masset. ↑
13 Forrester island; see the story of
Łᴀguadjî′na, note 4. ↑
14 See story of Sacred-one-standing-
and-moving, note 31. ↑
ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS
[Contents]
Raven Traveling
[Told by John Sky of Those-born-at-Skedans] 1
Over this island 2 salt water extended, they say. Raven flew about.
He looked for a place upon which to sit. After a while he flew away
to sit upon a flat rock which lay toward the south end of the island.
All the supernatural creatures lay on it like Genō′, 3 with their necks
laid across one another. The feebler supernatural beings were
stretched out from it in this, that, and every direction, asleep. It was
light then, and yet dark, they say.
[Told by Job Moody of the Witch People 4]
The Loon’s place 5 was in the house of Nᴀñkî′lsʟas. One day he went
out and called. Then he came running in and sat down in the place
he always occupied. And an old man was lying down there, but
never looking toward him. By and by he went out a second time,
cried, came in, and sat down. He continued to act in this manner.
One day the person whose back was turned to the fire asked: “Why
do you call so often?” “Ah, chief, I am not calling on my own
account. The supernatural ones tell me that they have no place in
which to settle. That is why I am calling.” And he said: “I will attend
to it (literally, ‘make’).”
[Continued by John Sky]
After having flown about for a while Raven was attracted by the
neighboring clear sky. Then he flew up thither. And running his beak
into it from beneath he drew himself up. A five-row town lay there,
and in the front row the chief’s daughter had just given birth to a
child. In the evening they all slept. He then skinned the child from
the foot and entered [the skin]. He lay down in its place.
On the morrow its grandfather asked for it, and it was given to him.
He washed it, and he put his feet against the baby’s feet and pulled
up. He then put it back. On the next day he did the same thing and
handed it back to its mother. He was now hungry. They had not
begun to chew up food to put into his mouth.
One evening, after they had all gone to bed and were asleep, Raven
raised his head and looked about upon everything inside the house.
All slept in the same position. Then by wriggling continually he
[111]loosened himself from the cradle in which he was fastened and
went out. In the corner of the house lived a Half-rock being, 6 who
watched him. After she had watched for a while he came in, holding
something under his blanket, and, pushing aside the fire which was
always kept burning before his mother, he dug a hole in the cleared
place and emptied what he held into it. As soon as he had kneaded
it with the ashes he ate it. It gave forth a popping sound. He
laughed while he ate. She saw all that from the corner.
Again, when it was evening and they were asleep, he went out. After
he had been gone for a while he again brought in something under
his blanket, put it into the ashes and stirred it up with them. He
poked it out and laughed as he ate it. From the corner of the house
the Half-rock one looked on. He got through, went back, and lay
down in the cradle. On the next morning all the five villages talked
about it. He heard them.
The inhabitants of four of the five towns had each lost one eye.
Then the old woman reported what she had seen. “Behold what that
chief’s daughter’s child does. Watch him. As soon as they sleep he
stands up out of himself.” His grandfather then gave him a marten-
skin blanket, and they put him into the cradle. At his grandfather’s
word some one went out. “Come to sing a song for the chief’s
daughter’s baby outsi-i-ide, outsi-i-ide.” As they sang for him one in
the line, which extended along the entire village front, held him. By
and by he let him fall, and they watched him as he went. Turning
around to the right as he went, he struck the water.
And as he drifted about he cried without ceasing. By and by, wearied

out with crying, he fell asleep. After he had slept a while something
said: “Your mighty grandfather says he wants you to come into his
house.” He turned around quickly and looked out from under his
blanket, but saw nothing. Again, as he floated about, something
repeated the same words. He looked quickly around toward it. He
saw nothing. The next time he looked through the eyehole in his
marten-skin. A pied-billed grebe came out from under the water,
saying “Your mighty grandfather invites you in,” and dived
immediately.
He then got up. He was floating against a kelp with two heads. He
stepped upon it. Lo! he stepped upon a house pole of rock having
two heads. He climbed down it. The sea was just as good as the
world above. 7
He then stood in front of a house. And some one called him in:
“Enter, my son. Word has arrived that you come to borrow
something from me.” He then went in. An old man, white as a sea
gull, sat in the rear part of the house. He sent him for a box that
hung in the corner, and, as soon as he had handed it to him, he
successively pulled out five boxes. And out of the innermost box he
handed him [112]two cylindrical objects, one covered with shining
spots, the other black, saying “I am you. That [also] is you.” He
referred to something blue and slim that was walking around on the
screens whose ends point toward each other in the rear of the
house. And he said to him: “Lay this round [speckled] thing in the
water, and after you have laid this black one in the water, bite off a
part of each and spit it upon the rest.”
But when he took them out he placed the black one in the water
first and, biting off part of the speckled stone, spit it upon the rest,
whereupon it bounded off. Because he did differently from the way
he was told it came off. He now went back to the black one, bit a
part of it off and spit it upon the rest, where it stuck. Then he bit off
a part of the pebble with shiny points and spit it upon the rest. It
stuck to it. These were to be trees, they say. 8
When he put the second one into the water it stretched itself out.
And the supernatural beings at once swam over to it from their
places on the sea. In the same way Mainland 9 was finished and lay
quite round on the water.
He floated first in front of this island (i.e., the Queen Charlotte

islands), they say. And he shouted landward: “Gū′sga wag̣ elai′dx̣ ᴀn
hā-ō-ō” (Tsimshian words meaning “Come along quickly”) [but he
saw nothing]. Then [he shouted]: “Ha′lᴀ gudᴀñā′ñ łg̣ ā′gîñ gwā′-ā-ā”
(Haida equivalent of the preceding). Some one came toward the
water. Then he went toward Mainland. He called to them to hurry,
[saying] “Hurry up in your minds,” but he saw nothing. He spoke in
the Tsimshian tongue. Then one with an old-fashioned cape and a
paddle over his shoulder came seaward. This is how he started it
that the Mainland people would be industrious.
Pushing off again toward this country, he disembarked near the

south end of the island. On a ledge a certain person was walking.
Toward the woods, too, among fallen trees, walked another. Then he
knocked him who was walking along the shore into the water. Yet he
floated, face up. When he again knocked him in the same thing was
repeated. He was unable to drown him. This was because the
Ninstints people were going to practise witchcraft. And he who was
walking among the trees had his face cut by the limbs. He did not
wipe it. This was Greatest-crazy-one (Qōnā′ñ-sg̣ ā′na), they say.
He then turned seaward and started for the Heiltsuk coast (ʟdjîñ). 10
As he walked along he came to a spring salmon that was jumping
about and said to it: “Spring-salmon, strike me over the heart.” Then
it turned toward him. It struck him. Just as he recovered from his
insensibility it went into the sea. Then he built a stone wall close to
the sea and behind it made another. When he told it to do the same
thing again the spring salmon hit him, and, while he was on the
ground, after jumping along for a while, it knocked over the
[113]nearer wall. But while it was yet moving along inside the farther
wall he got up, hit it with a club, killed it, and took it up. 11
He then called in the crows to help him eat it. They made a fire and
roasted it [on hot stones]. He afterward lay down with his back to
the fire. He told them to wake him when it was cooked. He then
overslept. And they took everything off from the fire and ate. They
ate everything. They then poked some of the salmon between his
teeth. And he awoke after he had slept a while and told them to
take the covering off the roast. And they said to him: “You ate it.
After that you went to sleep.” “No, indeed, you have not taken the
coverings off yet.” “Well, poke a stick between your teeth.” He then
poked a stick between his teeth. He poked out some from his teeth.
He thereupon spit into the crows’ faces and said: “Future people
shall not see you flying about looking as you do now.” They were
white, they say, but since that time they have been black.
And walking away from that place he sat down near the end of a
trail. After he had wept there for a while some people with feathers
on their heads and gambling-stick bags on their backs came to him
and asked him what the matter was. “Oh, my mother and my father
are dead. Because they told me I was born [in the same place] as
you I wander about seeking you.” They then started home with him.
Lo, they came to a house. Then they made him sit down. One of the
men went around behind the screens by the wall passage. After
staying away for a while [he came in and] his legs were wet. He
brought a salmon with its back just broken. They rubbed white
stones against each other to make a fire. Near it they cut the salmon
open. They put stones into the fire, roasted the salmon, and, when
it was cooked, made him sit down in the middle. There they ate it.
These were the Beavers, they say. They were going out to gamble,
but turned back on account of him.
One of them again went behind the screens. He brought out a dish
of cranberries, and that, too, they finished. Again he went in. He
brought out the inside parts of a mountain goat, and they divided
them into three portions, and made Raven’s portion big. Then they
said to him: “You had better not go away. Live with us always.” They
then put their gambling-stick bags upon their backs and started off.
When it was near evening they came home. He was sitting in the
place [where they had left him]. Again one went in. He again
brought out a salmon. They steamed it. And they also brought out
cranberries. They also brought out the inside parts of a mountain
goat. After they had eaten they went to bed. On the next day, early
in the morning, after they had eaten three sorts of food, they put
the gambling-stick bags upon their backs and started off again.
He then went behind the screen. Lo, a lake lay there. From it a creek
flowed away in which was a fish trap. The fish trap was so [114]full
that it looked as if some one were shaking it. There were plenty of
salmon in it, and in the lake very many small canoes were passing
one another. Several points were red with cranberries. Lēn 12 and
women’s songs 13 resounded.
Then he pulled out the fish trap, folded it together, and laid it down
at the edge of the lake. He rolled it up with the lake and house, put
them under his arm, and pulled himself up into a tree that stood
close by. They were not heavy for his arm.
He then came down and straightened them out. And he lighted a

fire, ran back quickly, brought out a salmon, and cooked it hurriedly.
He ate it quickly and put the fire out again. Then, sitting beside it,
he cried.
As he sat there, without having wiped away his tears, they came in.
“Well, why are you crying?” “I am crying because the fire went out
some time ago.” They then talked to each other, and one of them
said to him: “That is always the way with it.”
They then lighted the fire. One of them brought out a salmon from
behind [the screens] and they cut it across, steamed, and ate it.
After they had finished eating cranberries and the inside parts of a
mountain goat they went to bed. The next morning, very early, after
they had again eaten the three kinds of food, they took their
gambling-stick bags upon their backs and went off.
He at once ran inside. He brought out a salmon, cooked it, and ate it
with cranberries and the inside parts of a mountain goat. He then
went in and pulled up the fish trap. He flattened it together with the
house.
After he had laid them down he rolled the lake up with them and put
all into his armpit. He pulled himself up into a tree standing beside
the lake. Halfway up he sat down.
And after he had sat there for a while some one came. His house
and lake were gone from their accustomed place. After he had
looked about the place for some time he glanced up. Lo, he (Raven)
sat there with their property. Then he went back, and both came
toward him. They went quickly to the tree. They began working
upon it with their teeth. When it began to fall, he (Raven) went to
another one. When that, too, began to fall he sat down with his
[burden] on one that stood near it. After he had gone ahead of them
upon many trees in the same way they gave it up. They then
traveled about for a long time, they say. After having had no place
for a long time they found a lake and settled down in it.
Then, after he (Raven) had traveled around inland for a while, he

came to a large open place. He unrolled the lake there. There it lay.
He did not let the fish trap or the house go. He kept them to teach
the Seaward (Mainland) people and the Shoreward (Queen Charlotte
islands) people, they say. [115]
While he was walking along near the edge of the water [he saw] a
part of some creature looking like a woman sticking out of the water
at the mouth of Lalgī′mi. 14 He was fascinated by her, made a canoe,
and went to her. When he got near she went under the water in
front of him. After he had made a canoe of something different he
went to her again. When he got near to her she sank into the water.
He made one of something still different. Again she sank into the
water before him.
Now, after he had searched about for a while, he opened a wild pea
(xō′ya ʟū′g̣ a, “Raven’s canoe”) with a stick and went out to her in it.
When he came near to get her that time she did not go under the
water. He came alongside of her and took her in. She wore a
dancing skirt and dancing leggings. He then got the canoe ashore,
untied her dancing leggings and dancing skirt, and wiped her all
over. He ran to the woods, got a tcā′łg̣ a, 15 and drew it over her for a
blanket.
He then launched the canoe and put her in it, and they started
landward. 16 He set her ashore on the west arm of Cumshewa inlet
(G̣ a′oqons) and also took out the house for her, but kept the fish
trap in his armpit. He did so because he was going to teach [some
one] about it.
He then went back again. After he had passed along Seaward land
(the mainland) in his canoe for some time, behold, a person came
along by canoe. The hair on the top of his head was gathered in a
pointed tuft. And he (Raven) held his canoe off at arm’s length for a
while. The canoe was full of hair seal. Then he questioned him: “Tell
me, where did you gather the things you have?” “Why, there are
plenty of them” [he replied], and he picked up his hunting spear.
After he had looked between the canoes he speared something. He
pulled out a hair seal. “Look in” [he said], and he (Raven) looked in.
He could see nothing. “I say, I am this way (i.e., have bad eyesight)
because a clam spit upon me. Since then I have been unable to see
anything.” He then stretched his head over. He stretched it to him.
And, having pulled a blood clot out of his eye with his finger nails,
he put it back again. He used bad words to him, therefore he did not
take it out for good. Now, he (Raven) treated him well. He made
many advances to him, but he could not get [what he wanted] and
started off.
After he had gone along for some time, lo, Eagle 17 was coming; and
he said to him: “Comrade, I have been drinking sea water. You, too,
had better drink sea water.” And he drank some in his sight. At once
he defecated as he went along. Then Eagle, too, drank some. He
also defecated as he went, and he said: “Cousin, come, let us build a
fire.” “Wait, I am looking for the place.” Then Eagle pulled a water-
tight basket out from under his armpit and drank from [116]it. At
once what he had drunk spurted from his mouth as he went along.
After they had gone along for a while they landed upon certain flat
rocks extending into the sea.
Then Raven went up first and lighted a fire. He again watched Eagle
as he kept taking out his basket and drinking water. He intended to
take it, but he did not have an opportunity. Eagle also let the
contents of his stomach run into the ground, and they went out of
sight. Then he (Raven) took a walk. “I am going to drink,” he said,
and passed into the woods. Having taken roots and put root sap into
the hat he wore, he went to him. While coming back he drank of it
on the way. And he asked Eagle to taste it. He handed it to him. He
looked into it. He sniffed at it. “Tell me, cousin, why does your water
smell like pitch?” “Well, cousin, the water hole was in clay.”
He then broke off tips of branches from a hemlock that had clusters
of twigs sticking out all round them and gave them to him. “Cousin,
put these upon the fire.” And he put them upon the fire. Wā-ā-ā, it
burned brightly. And after he had done this a while, lo, Eagle pulled
out his basket. As soon as he saw that, he (Raven) ran to the end of
a clump of limbs and stepped heavily upon it to break it. “Clump of
branches, fall down, fall down” [he said], and it broke and was
coming down. Then he said to Eagle, “Hukukukuk.” 18 Eagle ran from
his water in terror.
Then Raven put on his feather clothing and flew away with it. Eagle,
too, put on his feather clothing and flew after him. He tried to hook
his claws into him, and water was jerked out of [the basket]. As this
happened the salmon streams were formed. Eagle gave up the
pursuit, and he (Raven) continued scattering water out of his mouth.
After a while he emptied the last where he had stretched out the
first [lake]. He treated this island in the same manner. After that he
emptied [the last] at the head of Skeena. 19
Eagle was also called Lā′g̣ ałᴀm. 20

Raven finished this. He then traveled northward. After he had
traveled for a while he came to where a village lay. He then put
himself in the form of a conifer needle into a water hole behind the
chief’s house and floated about there awaiting the chief’s daughter.
The chief’s child then went thither for water, and he floated in the
water that she dipped up. She threw this out and dipped a second
time, but he was still there. And when close to her he said: “Drink
it.”
Not a long time after that she became pregnant. Then she gave
birth [to a child], and its grandfather washed the child all over and
put his feet to its feet. It began to creep about. After it had crept
about for a while it cried so violently that no one could stop it. “Boo
hoo, moon,” it kept saying. After it had tired them out with [117]its
crying they stopped up the smoke hole, and, having pulled one box
out of another four times, they gave it a round thing. There came
light throughout the house. After it had played with this for a while it
let it go and again started to cry. “Boo hoo, smoke hole,” it cried.
They then opened the smoke hole, and it cried again and said: “Boo
hoo, more.” And they made the space larger. Then he flew away with
it. Marten 21 pursued him below. Tā′ʟᴀtg̣ ā′dᴀla, 22 too, chased him
above. They gave it up and returned.
He then put the moon into his armpit. And, after he had traveled
about for a while, he came to where Sea-gull and Cormorant sat. He
made them quarrel with each other. And he said to Cormorant:
“People tell me to brace myself on the ground with my tongue this
way [when fighting].” He then did it, and [Raven] went quickly to
him. He bit off his tongue.
Then he made it into an eulachon. And he put on his cape and

rubbed this all over it, and he rubbed it on the inside of the canoe as
well. Then he also put rocks in and went in front of Qadadjâ′n. 23 And
he entered his house. “Hī, I, too, have become cold.” Qadadjâ′n was
lying with his back to the fire and, looking toward him, saw his
canoe, covered with slime, lying on the water as if full. He then
became angry and pulled the screen down toward the fire. Eulachon
immediately poured forth. He then threw the stones out of the
canoe and put them into it. When it was full, he went off with them.
After he had distributed the eulachon along the mainland in the

places where they now are and had put some in Nass inlet, he left a
few in the canoe.
He then placed ten paddles under these, of which the bottom one
had a knot hole running through it. And he shouted landward to
where a certain person lived. She then brought out a basket 24 on her
back, and he said to her: “Help yourself, chieftainess.” After she had
put them into [the basket] a while, and her basket was nearly full,
he stepped upon a stalk of łqeā′ma 25 which he had provided and
said: “Ā-ā-ā, I feel my canoe cracking.” He then pushed it from the
land, and when she stretched out her arm for more [eulachon] he
pulled out the hairs under her armpit.
Fern-woman (Snᴀndjā′ñ-djat) at once called for her sons. Both her

sons knew how to throw objects by means of a stick, they say. 26 He
immediately fled. And one of them shot at him and broke his paddle.
And after they had broken ten he paddled with the one that had a
knot hole. When they shot after him again he said “Through the
knot hole,” and through the knot hole went the stone. Thus he was
saved. He had dexterously got her armpit hair.
He then left the canoe. He came to a shore opposite some people

who were fishing with fish rakes in Nass. And he said: “Hallo,
[118]throw one over to me. I will give you light.” But they said: “Hᴀ
hā′-ā-ā, he who is speaking is the one who is always playing tricks.”
He then let a small part shine and put it away again. They forthwith
emptied their canoe in front of him several times.
He then called a dog and said to it: “Shall I make (or ordain) four
moons?” The dog said that would not do. The dog wanted six. He
(Raven) then said to him: “What will you do when it is spring?”
“When I am hungry I will move my feet in front of my face.” And he
made it as he (the dog) told him to do, they say.
He then bit off a part of the moon. After he had chewed it for a
while he threw it up [into the sky]. “Future people are going to see
you there in fragments forever.” He then broke the moon into halves
by throwing it down hard and threw [half of] it up hard into the air,
the sun as well.
Thence he traveled northward. The smoke of House-point was near

him. He then pulled off his hair ribbon and threw one end of it over
here. He at once ran across on it. And he walked about the town,
peering in [through the cracks]. The wife of the town chief of House-
point had given birth to a child. And he waited until evening. Then,
at the time when they went to bed, he entered [the child’s] skin and
himself became newly born.
Every morning they washed him, and his father held him on his
knee. After a while his aunt came down to the fire. They handed him
to his aunt. After she had held him for a while he pinched her teats.
“Ha′oia,” she said. “Why do you say that, ʟ̣ a?” 27 “Why, he nearly fell
from me.” The town chief was named “Hole-in-his-fin,” and his
nephew was named “Fin-turned-back.”
After a while he thought: “I wish the village children would go

picnicking.” And on the next day the children of the town went
picnicking. They brought along all sorts of good food. And his aunt
brought him to the same place. When they had played for a while
they went away. After they had all gone his aunt sat there alone. He
looked about, entered his own skin quickly, and seized his aunt. And
his aunt said: “Do not take hold of me. I am single because your
father is going to eat my gifts.” 28
Then, as soon as she started off, he became a baby again. His aunt
was crying and as she went had it on her mind to tell what had
happened. He wished his aunt would forget it when she went in.
And she went in. After her brother had looked at her a while he
asked: “What is the cause of those tear marks?” “Why, I discovered
him eating sand. That is why I am crying.”
He then started along by the sea and, having punched holes in the
shells brought up by the tide, he made two dancing rattles. And he
ran toward the woods. He took grave mats, frayed out the ends, and
fastened shells upon these. He made them into a dancing skirt. And
[119]he said to the ghost: “Are you awake?” It got up for him, and he
tied the dancing skirt upon it. He also put the rattle into its hand.
And he said to it: “Walk in front of the town. When you reach the
middle wave the rattle in front of you toward the houses. A deep
sleep will fall then upon them.”
Now it began to dance, they say. When it waved the rattle toward
the town, just as he had told it to do, they began to mumble in their
sleep. They had nightmares. He then went into the first house and,
roughly pulling out a good-looking woman, lay there with her. And
he entered the next one. There, too, he lay with somebody. As he
went along doing this he entered his father’s house, went to where
his aunt slept, and lay with her.
And a certain old woman living in the house corner did not have a
nightmare. She had been observing the chief’s son in the cradle
come out of himself. Then he went out again. After he had been
away for a while he came in and lay down to sleep in the cradle. He
made the ghost lie down again.
The town people told one another in whispers that he had lain with
his aunt, and his mother, Flood-tide-woman, as well. This went on
for a while; then, all at once, there was an outbreak. Then they
drove Flood-tide-woman away with abusive language. Her boy, too,
they drove off with her with abusive words. She was the sister of
Great-breakers, 29 belonging to the Strait people, they say.
And they came along in this direction (i.e., toward Skidegate). After
they had come along for a while they found a young sea otter
opposite the trail that runs across Rose Spit (G̣ o′łgustᴀ). His mother
then skinned it and sewed it together. Now she stretched it and,
having scraped it, laid it out to dry. When it was dried she made it
into a blanket for her son. He was Nᴀñkî′lsʟ̣ as-łiña′-i, 30 they say.
And after they had traveled for a while she stood with her child in
front of her brother’s house. By and by somebody put his head out.
“Ah, Flood-tide-woman stands without.” “N-n-n, she has done as she
always does (i.e., been unfaithful to her husband), and for that
reason comes back again,” said her brother. And again he spoke:
“With her is a boy. Come, come, come, let her in.”
Then she came in with her son. And her brother’s wife gave them
something to eat. By and by he asked of her: “Flood-tide-woman,
what are you going to name the child?” And she moved her hand
over the back of her head. She scratched it [in embarrassment].
“Why, I am going to name your nephew Nᴀñkî′lsʟas-łiña′-i.” As she
spoke she held back her words hesitatingly. “I tell you, name him
differently, lest the supernatural beings who are afraid to think of
him (the bearer of that name) hear that a common child is so
called.”
While she was staying with her brother her child walked about. He
banged the swinging door roughly. “Flood-tide-woman, stop that
[120]child from continually opening the door in that way.” “Why, chief,
I never can stop him.” “Just hear what she says. What a common
child is continually doing the supernatural beings ever fear to do.”
On another day, while Great-breakers was lying down, he banged
the door again. He said to the mother: “Flood-tide-woman, a
common child is doing the same thing again. Try to stop him.” “Why,
chief, I can never stop your slave nephew.”
And where he was sitting with his mother by the fire, on the side
toward the door, right there he defecated. And his uncle’s wife made
a pooping sound at him. “I shall indeed go with that husband’s
nephew,” he heard his uncle’s wife say. 31
On the next day, very, very early in the morning, he started off. After
he had gone along for some time he came to some persons who
burst into singing sweet songs and danced. They then asked him:
“Tell us, what are you doing hereabout?” “I am gathering woman’s
medicine.” “Well, what do you call woman’s medicine? Is woman’s
medicine each other’s medicine?” “Yes; it is each other’s medicine.”
Those women chewed gum as they sang. Then one of these gave
him a piece. “This is woman’s medicine.” And one of them gave him
directions: “Now, when you enter the house, pass round to the right.
Chew the gum as you go in. And when your uncle’s wife asks it of
you, by no means give it to her. Ask of her the thing her husband
owns. When it is in your hands give the gum to her.” And he went
away from the singers. When he entered the gum stuck out red from
his mouth. Then his uncle’s wife said to him: “I say, Nᴀñkî′lsʟas-łîña′-
i, come, give me the gum.” He paid no attention to her. He then sat
down beside his mother, and to his mother he said: “Tell her to give
me the thing my uncle owns. I will then give her the gum.” Then his
mother went to her. She told it her. And to her she gave something
white and round. He then handed her the gum. While his uncle’s
wife chewed it and swallowed the juice he saw that her mind was
changed.
Some time after that his fathers 32 went by on the sea. And he said
to a dog sitting near the door: “Nᴀñki′lsʟas-łîña′-i says he desires the
place where his fathers now are to dry up and leave them.” And
immediately it went out and said so. The tide left them high and dry,
and they were in great numbers. They made a scraping sound in
their efforts to move. He then said to his mother: “I say, go and
pour water upon my fathers.” She then went down to them, and she
did not look upon her husband. She poured it only upon Fin-turned-
back. And he went to his mother and told her to pour water upon his
father. She acted as if she did not hear his voice. They were going to
the supernatural beings of Da′osgên 33 to buy a whale, they say.
Then he came in and said to the dog again: “Go and say,
‘Nᴀñkî′lsʟas-łîña′-i says he desires the tide to come in to his
parents.’ ” He then went out quickly and said it. X̣ ū-ū-ū-ū-ū (noise of
the waves coming in), and they at once were moving along far off
on the water. [121]
And, after they had been gone a while, they returned to that place.
And again he said to the dog: “Go and say, ‘Nᴀñkî′lsʟas-łîña′-i says
he wishes his parents to leave something for him.’ ” He then went
out quickly and said so. Something black was sent to one end of the
town. He went thither. A whale floated there.
After he had made a house of hemlock boughs he shot all kinds of

birds there. By and by a bufflehead came and ate of the whale. He
then wanted it. And he aimed just above the top of its head. When it
flew it struck its head. He then skinned it and entered [the skin].
And he wished for a heavy swell, and it became rough, and he
walked toward the water. And when a wave came toward him he
quickly dived under it. After he had done the same thing repeatedly
he flopped up from the water, took the skin off, and dried it in his
branch house. He thus came to own it, they say. He kept it in the
fork of a tree.
After he had shot there all kinds of birds something blue and slender
came and ate of it. It flew down from above. It ate sitting upon it.
He then shot it. He shot [only] through its wings. He (Raven) was
sad. And on the next day, early in the morning, he entered his
branch house. After he had sat there for a while it again came down
from above, making a noise as it came. And after it stood upon it
and had begun to eat he shot it. The arrow again passed quickly
through its wings. His mind was sad.
And on the next day, very early in the morning, he again went into
the branch house. It came by and by and ate. And he now shot over
it. As it started to fly it was struck in the head. He then went down
to get it. He brought it into the branch house.
When he had skinned it, he entered it. He then flew up. After he had
flown for a while he turned quickly and came down. He then ran his
beak into a rocky point at the end of the town. At the same time he
cried out: “G̣ ao” (Raven’s croak). Though the rock was strong, he
split it by his voice. After he had dried it in the branch house he put
it where he kept the bufflehead.
He then started off, they say. He went in and sat down by the side of
his mother. By and by his aunt said to her husband: “Why do you
remain seated so long? Go and hunt,” she said to him. And they
brought out a war spear and a box of arrows, and they put pitch on
[the cord wound round the arrow point] for him. And at midnight he
went off in a canoe, and his place was vacant in the morning.
He (Raven) then went out and stood up out of himself (i.e., changed
himself). He put on two sky blankets and painted his face. And, as
soon as he entered, his uncle’s wife turned her head. He went
around behind the screens. And, after some time had passed, it
thundered on the underground side of the island.
And her husband came back and asked his wife: “My child’s mother,
what noise was that, sounding like the one that is heard when I go
to [122]bed with you?” And she laughed and said: “Why, I guess I am
the same with Nᴀñkî′lsʟas-łîña′-i, your nephew.”
On the next day, early in the morning, Great-breakers sat in the

place where the fire was. On the top of the chief’s hat (dadjî′ñ skîl)
that he wore a round fleck of foam swirled rapidly. Nᴀñkî′lsʟas-łîña′-i
began to look around. And he went out, got his two skins, put on his
two sky blankets, and came in. His uncle had his hair tied in two
braids. Something on his head began turning around very rapidly.
Then a strong current of sea water poured from the corner of the
house. And he put his mother in his armpit, quickly entered his
bufflehead skin, and swam about in the current. He dived many
times and again swam about. And when the sea water came up to
the roof of the house he floated out with it through the smoke hole.
He then quickly entered the raven’s skin. He at once flew up. He

then ran his beak into the sky. And his tail was afloat on the water.
Then he kicked against the water. “Enough. You, too, belong to me.”
There it stopped (lit., “came to a point”). It began to melt
downward.
And he looked down. The smoke of his uncle’s house looked

pleasing. He then became angry with him, at the sight, and started
to fly down. After he had flown for a while he ran his beak into it
from above, crying as he did so, “G̣ ao.” “Oh, you shall own the title
of Chief-of-chiefs (Kî′lsʟekun)” [said his uncle].
He then became what he had been before. He entered with his

mother. From that time he often set out to hunt birds. When he
came in one day he said to his mother: “Mother, Qî′ñgi 34 says he is
coming to adopt me.” And his uncle said to her: “Qꜝā′la īdjā′xᴀn, 35
Flood-tide-woman, stop that child from talking. We are, indeed, fit to
be adopted.”
After this had happened many times they saw something wonderful,
they say. People came dancing on ten canoes. He then went out, put
on two sky blankets, and walked around on the retaining planks.
Said his uncle: “What he brought on by his talking has happened. I
wonder how we are going to supply people and food.”
And, after he had walked about for a while, he kicked upon the
ground in the front part of the house on the right side. There the
ground cracked open. Out of it one threw up a drum from his
shoulder. They came pouring out. He went to the other side as well.
There he also kicked. “Earth, even, become people” [he said].
Thence, too, one threw up a drum from his shoulder. And he did the
same thing to the ground in one of the rear corners. Out of that,
too, some one threw up a drum from his shoulder. He did as before
on the other side. And they danced in four lines toward the beach.
Out of his uncle’s house Tsimshian, Haida, Kwakiutl, Tlingit [came]
36
[123]singing different songs. Yet his uncle said [sarcastically]: “We
shall indeed have lots to eat.” They sat down in lines, and around
the door was a crowd to serve the food.
Then Nᴀñkî′lsʟas-łîña′-i said: “Now go to my sister Sî′ndjugwañ to

get food for me.” 37 And a crowd of young men went to get it. They
came back with silver salmon and cranberries. And [he said]: “Go to
Yał-kīñā′ñg̣ o, 38 too, to beg some for me.” Her house was also full of
silver salmon, cranberries, and sockeye salmon. They also brought
some from the woman at the head of Skidegate creek, 39 and they
brought some from the woman at the head of Qꜝā′dᴀsg̣ o creek. It
mounted up level with the roof. The distribution of food was still
going on when daylight came. On the next day, too, and on the next
day [it went on]. At the end of ten days they went off in a crowd.
These [days] were ten winters, they say.
And he went off with his father Qî′ñgi. Soon after they arrived at his
village he invited the people to come. He called them for a feast. He
(Nᴀñkî′lsʟas) did not eat the smallest bit. And on the next day he
called them in to a feast for his son. Again he did not eat. Two big-
bellied fellows had come in. People took up cranberries by the box,
and when one of these opened his mouth they emptied a boxful into
it. They also emptied boxes into the mouth of the other.
On the next day his father invited them again, and they (the big-
bellies) came in and stood there. And again cranberries were
emptied into their mouths. Then Nᴀñkî′lsʟas went quickly toward the
end of the town. As he was going along he came to open ground
where cranberries were being blown out. He stopped up this hole
with moss, and he did the same to another. After he had entered he
questioned the big-bellied ones, who stood near the door: “I say, tell
me the reason why you eat [so much].” “Don’t ask it, chief. We are
always afflicted in this way.” “Yes; tell me. When my father calls in
the people, and you are going to eat, if you do not tell me I will
make you always full.” “Well, chief, sit close to me while I tell you.
Early in the morning take a bath, and when you lie down [after it]
scratch yourself over your heart, and when scabs have formed on
the next day swallow them.”
He did at once as he was told. After he had sat still for a while [he
said]: “Father, I have become hungry.” Upon this his father sent to

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The Britannica Guide to Theories and Ideas That Changed

God Willing Political Fundamentalism in the White House

Alterity and Narrative Stories and the Negotiation of

Predictably irrational the hidden forces that shape our

The Eye of the Sandpiper Stories from the Living World

Beyond red and blue how twelve political philosophies

Big Fat Liars How Politicians Corporations And The

50 Battles That Changed the World The Conflicts That

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON

Copyright © 2003 by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jamieson, Kathleen Hall.

W e wish to thank Annenberg School for Communica-

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

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

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

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

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

reporters pounced on trivial misstatements to launch an indictment

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

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

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

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

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

When reporters transform the raw stuff of experience into presumed

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

The Horton Menace

The Supreme Court and Election 2000

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

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

Who had Political Relations

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

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

Moderator George Stephanopoulos probably did not attempt to settle

Tobacco, Taxes, and Canadian Mounties

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

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

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

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

The Press as Patriot: Four War Stories

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

Deception Excused: Air Force One

Resolution was passed overwhelmingly by Democrats as well as Repub-

Did Saddam’s Soldiers Throw Babies From

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

The story served two purposes: legitimizing the analogy between

Did the Patriots Intercept and

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

The Press as Amateur

T he notion that reporters should hold the powerful account-

To understand what actual Presidents do and what potential Presidents

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

Performance and Authenticity