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The Unfairness Doctrine

There’s a lot of books about history out there, with another thousand coming down the pike every few months.

How does the mass media decide what’s worth their attention, what authors belong on talk shows and op-ed pages? This is what I take the Historians’ Committee on Fairness to have been asking about Michelle Malkin. I may have been harsh about the clumsy way they rhetorically invoked the norms of historical scholarship, but the basic question is a fair one. Why Michelle Malkin and not many other authors of readable, interesting works of history, or for that matter, authors of dense, scholarly works of history?

Obviously, Malkin’s appeal at the moment has something to do with good timing: her argument about internment reverberates within today’s charged debates over security, war and terrorism. Ten years ago, her book would have sunk like a stone. But there are some more basic principles here.

Authors get play in the media first off when they have a contrarian novelty to them. The best, most readable book in the world that intelligently and accurately recounts internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II would get little play at this point because its arguments are now well-known to much of the American public, and the episode has become an orthodox part of our historical memory. This is of course what makes it an attractive target for contrarian opinion--a contrarian take on state formation in 13th Century West Africa doesn't have much play. In general, there is nothing wrong with the media taking little interest in what amounts to a dog-bites-man work of history, and a lot of interest in man-bites-dog. That makes sense; it's a sound strategy for drawing viewers and listeners.

I’m not ashamed to admit that this one reason I get calls occasionally from reporters about the history of American popular culture. (As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m sort an apprentice quote slut for Robert Thompson, the director the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.) It’s because my general take on popular culture (and Thompson’s, too) is fairly divergent from the norm among academics, even academics in cultural studies. A contrarian perspective is attractive within the ecology of mass media: it’s a hook that draws in the eyeballs.

Beyond that, there’s the question of how mediagenic an author is. That’s looks, partly, and Malkin is making the most out of that. It’s also a question of how “quote-friendly” or talk-show articulate an author is, and here Malkin has comes off fairly poorly, but certainly better than most academics might. On television, Malkin simply appears to be not terribly bright. Most academics have a different problem in the media, and that’s an inability to compress what they know into digestible, amusing bits and to know when and how to take a joke and roll with the punches.

Taking all this into account, the Historians’ Committee for Fairness still has a valid fundamental point. How do you decide what’s worth covering and not covering? Because not everything that is contrarian and potentially mediagenic gets the coverage—the coverage without, for the most part, attention to the dissenting views of others—that Malkin has. To put it bluntly, why does Michelle Malkin get on television and David Irving, the infamous Holocaust revisionist, not get on television? Irving’s argument that the Nazis did not actually set out to exterminate the Jews is factually detailed and it’s certainly contrarian, and he’s actually somewhat creepily mediagenic.

If the people who make decisions about programming and content at the talk shows want to tell me and other historians that they wouldn’t put Irving on the air because what he says in his work is factually specious and untrue (which it is), then they’re telling me that they make these decisions based either on their own personal and professional assessments of the factual truthfulness of works of non-fiction, or they make these decisions based on consultation with experts about what is reasonable, plausible, debatably true work and what is poor, scurrilous, offensive lies. If this is true, the question becomes potent: why is Michelle Malkin on the air now? Because if talk show producers consult experts on internment, they’d certainly find that almost everyone thinks Malkin’s work is shoddy and inaccurate, quite aside from its ethical character. If talk show hosts read and assess work independently to decide whether it is worth covering, then I’m hard-pressed to understand why they think Malkin’s is legitimate.

And if they just put people on the air because they’re mediagenic and interestingly contrarian, I again ask: why not Holocaust revisionists? What sets the boundaries of the fringes, and doesn't the expert assessment of intellectuals and scholars matter in that boundary-setting? That scholars have errors on their own ledgers, as in the Bellesiles case, doesn't obliterate more than a fractional percentage of the legtimate and meticulous collective expertise of historical scholarship, Clayton Craymer's mouth-frothing notwithstanding.

The Historians’ Committee for Fairness may have gone about their task the wrong way, but they’re entitled to an answer to this question from the media that have given Malkin a hearing. What makes her work worthy of coverage when work of equivalent shoddiness and offensiveness is regarded as absolutely off-limits?