There is No Such Thing as “Fair and Balanced”

“No one will want to watch this crap. Find something that will boost our ratings.”

Part of my coursework this semester involves taking H501 Historical Methods. Seeing that I never had the opportunity to take a methods class while in undergrad (that has changed for the students currently enrolled there, thankfully), I am looking forward to being challenged like I never have before to think critically about the methods historians use to analyze sources and build arguments. I realize that this process is going to hurt and that I will most likely make many, many mistakes, but I believe that this will be the most important class I take throughout my graduate studies. Even though I am training to teach history in a non-academic setting, my hope is that I will someday share the sentiments of Bob Beatty, who commented at History@Work that “a grounding in history made the [public] programs I created and contributed to stronger and more effective and provided me fodder to fight against the tides of myth and sentimentality that can sometimes permeate the study of local history.”

The first book I am reading in Historical Methods is by Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier. While reading today a brief passage stuck out to me on page 32 about the art of journalism that I think does an excellent job of not only describing journalistic media, but the process of creating an argument in history. To wit:

So it’s not a matter of being “fair and balanced.” It’s about embracing biases and using them to ask certain questions about contemporary problems and holding leaders and institutions accountable. In journalism, how those biases shape the flow of a newscast or report says a lot about the sort of things that constitute “news” for a given media organization. Also, before you get whacked out about the title of this blog or think that I’m picking on a certain news organization that embraces that moniker, keep in mind that it’s not about the “liberal news media” or the perceived biases of the sometimes called “Faux News,” it’s that the process of interpreting the “news” is something all stations do and is inherent in the process of creating news, because even a 24/7 news station can’t tell the full story.

Interestingly enough, HBO and Aaron Sorkin’s show “The Newsroom” does an excellent job of demonstrating this point. I’ve only seen the first episode of the show, but in that episode we see a journalism staff enter into a new television organization and actively fight to change the content of Jeff Daniels’s (I forgot his character name) program, shooting for a more “investigative report” style of questioning and inquiry. There is disagreement among the staff as to whether or not the program should pick up a story about the BP oil spill in the Gulf, whether it constitutes “news.” The staff decides to include it in Jeff’s program, and it turns out that they are the first channel to report on what turns out to be a very “newsworthy” story (as it was in real life). Everyone celebrates the increased ratings and the fact that it got the station increased attention, but what they were really celebrating was their ability to create “news” that pleased the various interests associated with the news station, including the station owner, the constituency that regularly watches the show, and channel surfers who may have stopped to watch and see what was happening.

While history isn’t exactly the same as journalism, some of these ideas permeate and are embraced by the bulk of the history profession. Historians create their own depictions of the past and construct meanings from it using the most reliable sources of a given time period. They are storytellers who ask questions of the past based on their personal biases and what sort of contemporary problems they yearn to solve. They determine what is “historical.” By attempting to hold leaders and institutions accountable, historians help us keep contemporary leaders and institutions accountable. Although I’m arguing that the biases of historians should be embraced, I am also adamant that such biases should be transparent and that historians must be honest with their sources. One of the best ways of doing this, I’ve learned, is by distinguishing between information that comes from primary sources and what is a personal interpretation of the historian creating a story around such material. Being clear with such biases allows us to engage in a more honest dialogue that allows for new perspectives and interpretations of the past that have the possibility of enhancing our understanding of the past.

Until next time.