{"id":513,"date":"2004-09-03T23:04:27","date_gmt":"2004-09-03T23:04:27","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:46","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:46","slug":"more_malkin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=513","title":{"rendered":"More Malkin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Volokh<\/a>, Eric Muller is discussing the standards that the mass media use when they select what works of history to cover and who to have as commentators. I’ve always assumed that they used the same standards they use in selecting what show to put on, which is – what will draw ratings without getting me in trouble?<\/i><\/p>\n

That’s not enough for Muller (and possibly not for Timothy Burke<\/a>, the historian whose post on HNN analyzing the same issue Muller riffs from). In both cases – more in Muller’s case than Burke’s, I think – the argument I read is that there is an ‘ought’ involved; i.e. that it is more than a question of<\/p>\n

How does the mass media decide what\u2019s worth their attention, what authors belong on talk shows and op-ed pages? This is what I take the Historians\u2019 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?<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

but that somehow, professionally legitimated works should have priority. Burke says:<\/p>\n

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.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One thing that I will take away from my experience as a blogger (and no, I’m not quitting today or anything) is a profound change in how I read the newspapers and (when I do) watch the news. I am more aware of the ‘sociology’ of the media than I was before.<\/p>\n

But as critical as I often am about the media, I’m not quite ready to write prescriptions just yet. And I’m certainly not ready to write a prescription, as Muller suggests in his letter, for ‘expert’ filtering of what we should see.<\/p>\n

Somehow my response – that we need to be careful about filtering experience through our beliefs, no matter how legitimately held – brings up an old Latin phrase I read once in a biography of Galileo…<\/p>\n

Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam.<\/i> – which means “For neither do I seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order that I may understand.” –Anselm of Canterbury<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Volokh, Eric Muller is discussing the standards that the mass media use when they select what works of history to cover and who to have as commentators. I’ve always assumed that they used the same standards they use in selecting what show to put on, which is – what will draw ratings without […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}