CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
Writing as if the malevolent read.
The “Churchill incident” raises some “interesting” (as in, “may you live in interesting times”) questions for bloggers and academics alike. If you believe in the centrality of free speech to academic life, hell, to American life, the backlash against Ward Churchill has become far more offensive and frightening then anything he did or said.
I know that was not the intent of some of his critics. (See K.C.’s post below.) Yet we are living in the world in which major media institutions are trolling the web, not looking for the truth but looking for riots to incite. The critics of Ward Churchill, perhaps by highlighting misleading passages (see Jon Dresner’s comment on K.C.’s post), made him visible in both conventional media and in blogs). Some in the mass media saw this, pounced and the rest, for the moment, is McCarthyism.
I may be wrong, but I do not think that I have used “McCarthy” or “McCarthyism” to describe recent events until this moment. I shy away from such terms because they have been used too much and too facilely. But the combined actions of death threats, other illegal harassments, shrill and superficial media, and a Colorado legislature which does not think that subsidizing a university means subsidizing free speech fit the McCarthy era pattern far too well.
We often forget that much of the damage done in the McCarthy era was not due to government mandates or House and Senate hearings. It resulted from a frightened culture that rewarded fearmongering, pandering and grandstanding by politicians, by media, and by businesses. The people of that culture rewarded it in part by accepting suppression as an unavoidable part of their times.
Some also did harm by blaming the victims for being foolish enough to use their rights. A good example is what K.C. did in his comment below, when he followed his condemnation of the Colorado governor’s calling for Churchill’s firing by this statement:
“Nonetheless, to borrow one of Professor Churchill’s phrases, this is in some ways a case of the chickens coming home to roost.”
I know you will object to my characterization, K.C. And I do not know if it is what you intended. But one cannot defend free speech in a halfway manner, particularly in times like these. If he has the right to free speech, he has the right, and legislators, of all people, should be held to the fire on that. Instead, you partially justify their actions.
This incident also raises the question of blogging. With the media trolling for the sensational, a comment can have striking consequences. Unfortunately, blogs have far less power to correct a news story than they have to create one. That is particularly true if the correction is subtle, as seems to be the case with the selective quoting done here.
Does that mean we should shut up? No. But maybe we all need to be a little slower to repeat what we hear and a little more willing to double-check first. We are read, but some of the people who read us will lie for a buck.
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