Let's All Agree We Should Aim for Objectivity

Journalists love to talk about themselves and their profession, and the existence of 24-hour a day news channels give them plenty of opportunity. On a recent Fox News Channel program a panel of journalists argued heatedly about evidence (which is overwhelming) of leftist bias in the major media. At one point, a leading liberal contended that unbiased reporting is just stenography. Surprisingly, a major conservative columnist and television commentator agreed. The liberal then proceeded to note that a major reason for the slant in news reporting, if there is one, involves awards and prizes: they can't be won by stenographers. Panel members expressed approval. Unstated was the fact that the honors go, almost exclusively, to those on the left.

Quite naturally, I thought about my own profession, wondering if the same observations might apply to historians. It would never dawn on the media to explore that issue, but it is surely worth a bit of our time to reflect upon it.

First of all, it seems to me silly to assert that either journalists or historians could ever be mere stenographers. The reporter and the scholar face enormous quantities of often complex data along with conflicting accounts of events and people. Their job is to analyze what lies before them, make sense of it, and draw conclusions. In the process, by picking and choosing and emphasizing and labeling, they inevitably leave their stamp on what they have written. They are not recording devices. They come to their subject matter with a lifetime of experiences and beliefs that have an impact on their accounts. Sometimes too, of course, they are writing for a specific audience, and that colors their story. Articles in, say, National Review and The Progressive are going to present the war in Iraq in a very different light. The authors are never stenographers.

In the field of history, especially since the 1960s, the impact of the left has been pronounced in every area of activity. The contents of the major journals quickly reveal this familiar story, as do convention programs that would have made the modern founders of the profession gasp and blush. Roger Kimball's classic study Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, and the recent book by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage document the point brilliantly.

Even before the Vietnam War, the historical profession, especially its American branch, was devoted to liberal causes. The Progressives and New and Fair Dealers dominated the attention of leading scholars, who saw heroes and heroines everywhere in these movements. Few ambitious historians wanted to write favorably about conservative politicians, businessmen, or religious figures. The Gilded Age was largely dismissed and left to the likes of ultra-leftist Matthew Josephson to condemn.

The major differences between the historical profession in, say the 1930s and the 1970s, were threefold. In the earlier period, the extreme left, including the Communists, were in general not viewed favorably. Secondly, the certainty that the United States was always wrong, in both foreign and domestic matters, was largely absent. Thirdly, there was an emphasis upon the attempt to be objective. Graduate students in the earlier period in this country were often drilled in the quest for unbiased accuracy. Many historians were taught that evidence should not be the servant of ideology. They were trained not to be stenographers but to be as careful and as true to the facts as they could possibly be. Such a methodology often draws snickers today, especially from the younger historians, who dismiss it as undesirable, and in any case impossible.

It is now wholly fashionable and agreeable to be a radical leftist historian. The politics of the professors, as several studies show and as personal experience verifies, is more predictable than weather forecasts. And the professional rewards, as in journalism, go almost exclusively to those on the left. Follow the grants and the prizes; they tell the story.

So the journalists and the historians have much in common: the hard left, enamored of an assortment of Marxist utopias, and convinced that America is an evil empire, dominates. All talk of stenography as the alternative, it seems to me, is nonsense.

The National Association of Scholars knows this perhaps better than anyone. It was created to reaffirm the dignity and the highest ideals of objective scholarship in colleges and universities where freedom of thought and expression reign supreme. Is it any wonder that it has a great many enemies in academia and in the press.

And watch the almost daily struggles of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), as it battles against leftist fascism on American campuses. The courageous efforts of ex-radical David Horowitz should also receive widespread attention.

The production of objective and balanced journalism and history seems more important than ever in our sharply divided political and intellectual atmosphere. Let us hope that fearless journalists and historians will never submit to the false argument that such efforts are outdated, unprofessional, or impossible.

This article was first published by the National Association of Scholars and is reprinted with permission of the author.