‘When Losers Write History’
Back in 2007, Robert McHenry, the former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica (five years before that august institution would become fully digitized) asked, “Who Really Writes History?”
Rod Dreher, an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, has posed an interesting question in this blog post on Beliefnet. He begins by offering a passage from a book about local communities in Chicago in the 1950s in which the author, Alan Ehrenhalt, writes about how history is written. It is a commonplace, and therefore a suspect notion, that “history is written by the winners.” Ehrenhalt suggests that, more often than not, it is written by the dissenters.
This is a much more useful insight and one that fits with other things we know or intuit. By “history,” I take Ehrenhalt to be referring not just to academic tomes or schoolbooks but to the public memories and attitudes that evolve with respect to past times and events. For example, we have all learned to think of the 1950s as a time of materialism and conformity and cultural blandness. This has become our shared historical viewpoint. But who told us that? Wasn’t it precisely those who weren’t, or worked very hard not to seem to be, like that?
It’s only been in the last few years that a counter-argument has emerged that far from being a squaresville L-7 drag, daddy-o, the 1950s intellectually, were a pretty vibrant time, both laying the groundwork for the decade that followed, and generating a middlebrow culture that succeeding decades would have a tough time equaling, as Fred Siegel argues in this month’s Commentary.
But then, (a) all of the conventional wisdom you know about the 20th century could well be wrong, and (b) as Matt Welch writes at Reason in a must-read new article, what you know about history really does depend upon who wrote it in the first place, what institution he occupies, and which axe he’s grinding:
Most journalists are familiar with the arch observation, made famous by Winston Churchill, that history tends to be written “by the victors.” Less known and more cheeky was Churchill’s prediction (mostly accurate, it turned out) that “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”
To make even preliminary sense of the hotly disputed and remarkably fluid landscape of modern media, it helps to recall Churchill’s axioms about historiography, and recognize that something closer to the inverse is warping our basic view of journalism. It’s the losers, not the winners, who are writing the early historical drafts of this transformational media moment, while those actually making that history—the people formerly known as the audience, in critic Jay Rosen’s apt phrase [And Rosen would have his own issues with some of those who transformed journalism -- Ed]—are treating their legacy interpreters not with kindness but contempt. So much misunderstanding and breathtakingly wrong-headed analysis tumbles forth from this one paradox.
Imagine for a moment that the hurly-burly history of American retail was chronicled not by reporters and academics but by life-long employees of A&P, a largely forgotten supermarket chain that enjoyed a 75 percent market share as recently as the 1950s. How do you suppose an A&P Organization Man might portray the rise of discount super-retailer Wal-Mart, or organic foods-popularizer Whole Foods, let alone such newfangled Internet ventures as Peapod.com? Life looks a hell of a lot different from the perspective of a dinosaur slowly leaking power than it does to a fickle consumer happily gobbling up innovation wherever it shoots up.
That is largely where we find ourselves in the journalism conversation of 2012, with a dreary roll call of depressive statistics invariably from the behemoth’s point of view: newspaper job losses, ad-spending cutbacks, shuttered bureaus, plummeting stock prices, major-media bankruptcies. Never has there been more journalism produced or consumed, never has it been easier to find or create or curate news items, and yet this moment is being portrayed by self-interested insiders as a tale of decline and despair.
Glenn Reynolds links today to a 1996 Atlantic piece by James Fallows titled “Why Americans Hate the Media,” with the following subhead: “Why has the media establishment become so unpopular? Perhaps the public has good reason to think that the media’s self-aggrandizement gets in the way of solving the country’s real problems.” Fallows’ article is an excellent summary of the state of the elite MSM at their peak, the moment before first Matt Drudge and then Drudge, Breitbart and the Blogosphere began occupying wide swatches of the MSM’s cerebellums, very much rent-free. (Fallows’ article also makes for quite a contrast with the current incarnation of the Atlantic, but that’s a whole-’nother blogpost).
Fallows begins by very carefully recounting one of the roundtable discussions that Fred Friendly produced* for PBS in the 1980s, the episode which featured the now-infamous exchange between Peter Jennings, and the now recently deceased Mike Wallace. They were joined by William Westmoreland, a pre-Contract with America Newt Gingrich, and Frederick Downs, whom Fallow describes as “a writer who as a young Army lieutenant in Vietnam had lost his left arm in a mine explosion,” and “the man getting the roughest treatment” on the panel. The show was moderated by Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School. Fallows does an excellent job of recapping that moment when Wallace revealed just how far removed from reality the MSM thought of themselves back then and convincing Jennings that he should be as equally craven. Perhaps Jennings’ “temper-tantrum” moment first began incubating in his brain during that panel.
But it also tells you how far we’ve traveled, since that moment is now preserved (thanks to the invaluable Media Research Center) on YouTube as a video clip for anyone to call up and watch:
Still though, my favorite scene describing the MSM before the lights went out is an anecdote from around that same time by the Wall Street Journal’s David Gelernter:
Today’s elite loathes the public. Nothing personal, just a fundamental difference in world view, but the hatred is unmistakable. Occasionally it escapes in scorching geysers. Michael Lewis reports in the New Republic on the ’96 Dole presidential campaign: ‘The crowd flips the finger at the busloads of journalists and chant rude things at them as they enter each arena. The journalists, for their part, wear buttons that say ‘yeah, I’m the Media. Screw You.’ The crowd hates the reporters, the reporters hate the crowd– an even matchup, except that the reporters wield power and the crowed (in effect) wields none.
That’s no longer true, as we’ve seen with CBS’s RatherGate being first noticed by the readers of Free Republic in 2004 and now NBC’s “Edit-Gate” by Dan Riehl of Breitbart.com. Not to mention this very 60 Minutes-style moment brought to you today by James O’Keefe. As with the ACORN sting, which for the MSM to condemn with as much force as they praised Wallace’s similar tactics on 60s Minutes.
* These shows often brought together an amazing assemblage of characters from both sides of the aisle. My favorite was a segment titled “Anatomy of a Hostile Takeover” on the ethics of Wall Street and the investment word, which had Fred Joseph, CEO of Drexel, Burnham, Lambert on the same panel with Rudy Giuliani, shortly before Rudy was escorting investment bankers out of their offices in handcuffs for his photo-ops and threatening to attack Drexel with a RICO charge.
Although I’m just a little too young to really remember the fifties, you know, that storied era when every house was identical, every man wore a tie to his prison… uh, office, and every wife wore pearls as she swept the floor, I really suspect our memory of that era was created by those who hated emLeave It To Beaver/em and Donna Reed.
I can’t quite prove it, but I start to doubt that the ’50 were actually dominated by Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. I doubt that every housewife was subservient and I really doubt that everybody over 30 was a robot.
But you’d never know it from the popular conception.
You are correct. The ‘rebellions’ of the 60′s didn’t happen spontaneously.
“…the reporters wield power and the crowd (in effect) wields none.
That’s no longer true,…”
Ah, but it still is mostly true. The MSM elected Obama, didn’t they? And I fear they will re-elect him. They still decide what most people will know, what will or will not be a scandal, what lies will be accepted as “truth” and what truths will be ignored or discarded as heresy. They control the narrative as much as they ever did.
*sigh*
They will try, but their credibility is at an all time low. They have also lost control of the narrative. not because they haven’t the means to retain it, but because they have lost the discipline to restrain themselves from going to far. Martin and Zimmerman are a perfect example, where they fanned the flames so hot that they were unable to prevent the majority of the nation from being polarized by the NBPP’s bounty and calls for blood.
The specter of all out class warfare, unrestrained by a corrupt justice department, may energize the base, but it is going to make it close to impossible for Obama to run near the center.
I am reminded of Bill Stewart, the ABC TV reporter who was executed on camera by the Nicaragua National Guard in 1979. The collapse thereafter of U.S. support for the Debayle regime underscores the potency of a well-placed casualty.
In a perfect world, the value of the life of a journalist would be (at most) equal to that of any other person. However, as long as the MSM controls the data feed to the majority of viewers the scale will remain unbalanced.
The trick is to get people to *want* to be better informed.
Marilena – great point, it conjures the famous Samuel Clemens quote about the reports of his death being exaggerated. Personally, I loath the Marxist media and have friends who continually herald its death but I still await the final autopsy, especially when I hear so many adults regurgitate the mis-information spouted by the propaganda arm of the DNC (which nowadays should be re-dubed the SNC given that it has been taken over by the softheaded, tenured socialists that roost in untouchable districts akin to the tenured crowd that milks the tuitions out of millions seeking an education but finding well honed indoctrination instead at the “re-education camps” that pass for universities.)
There can be no doubt that Obama was media made and his incompetence and mismanagement of almost every aspect of his duties and those he has assumed beyond his constitutionally defined functions, should be laid at the MSM’s feet and hopefully discussed at industry’s overdue eulogy – hopefully, a eulogy akin to that other infamous socialists movements such as that led by Il Duce.
Certain media bankruptcies cannot come quick enough for the sake of the country.
I’d like to have seen what Wallace and Jennings would have said if they were “given the hypothetical” that one of those Marines was their son. Hell, make it their neighbor’s son, I don’t care, but I agree they’re both contemptible.
Have to say, one thing impressive about the entire exchange was the degree of on-the-fly introspection going on. Wallace’s and Jennings’ positions were of course contemptible, a by-product of their insular post-modern notions relativism and moral equivalency. But they seemed to be thinking through the matter rather carefully. Compare this to today’s absolutely-sure-of-themselves, predictably-party-line, I-got-the-last-word snark-fests.
Admirably for Ogletree, he presses Wallace in a way which indicates he at least understands and even respects the concept of patriotism, something I reckon would be harder to find at today’s ’1,000-Mogadishus-Little Eichmans’ elite academy.
We must mock the MSM out of existence. I have a proposal:
Since they wield power that makes kings tremble, they must be the target of our protests. No more picketing the capitol or the budget or whatever. Just show up at any media event, news coverage event, or other seat of MSM manufacturing and start yelling, “Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!”
Because that’s what they’ve become. They’ve moved beyond their existentialism and high-brow elitism to become ringmasters.
I wonder how Mike Wallace would cover the story of a serial killer murdering his family? He was a fashionably anti-American hypocrite.
I wish that the moderator had asked Mike Wallace another hypothetical. Assume that you were doing a story about an increase in rapes and assaults in your city. If you stumble upon an attack while researching background for your story, would you stand back and report it objectively or would you try to stop the assault and aid the victim? If he said aid the victim, I would infer that he was making a moralistic judgement between the attacker and the victim. From his answer on the ambush, I infer that he sees no distinction between the American troops and those of the enemy.
I had forgotten Rudy’s arresting various Wall Street types. But he’s a Republican, in bed with the Fat Cats! Or so says our Dem President and AG. Or maybe I missed those current arrests too.
The real question that didn’t get asked of Mike Wallace was whether he would have volunteered US troop movements to the Northern forces in order to create some dramatic video of American troops being ambushed. At least it would have given him the opportunity to be outraged at the presumption, if he didn’t sit there mulling it over for too long that is.
Man had his moments as a reporter but I often felt he would do ‘anything’ for a good story.
What makes anyone think that the MSM credibility is at an all time low. You could argue that 60 Minutes credibility was at all time low when Gen. William Westmoreland sued them, but they bounced back. You could argue that CBS’ credibility was at an all time low when Dan Rather spoke about the George Bush forgeries. Is NBC’s credibility at an all time low now?
At best you can say perhaps. As soon as the Olympics, or some huge event (manufactured or not) rolls around their credibility will come back. They have the means to shape the opinion and they will continue to do it as long as they can. There are elements of dissent but they are just that — small elements.
Yes Fox News is a small element of dissent. Yes Rush Limbaugh is a small element of dissent. Yes Andrew B. is a small element of dissent. They hurt the conglomerate but not enough to do damage. Yes the Internet is a small element of dissent. The elements of dissent may have millions of readers but not millions of viewers.
I wonder what Wallace would do if he were covering a KKK rally and learned that some of the sheets had planted explosives under a black church and planned to blow up the place during services the next morning. Actually, I don’t wonder. He would do the right thing and warn the authorities. But in the hypothetical posed on PBS, the victims were mere soldiers. Why would Mike Wallace give a damn what happened to them?
Hard, or make that easy, to believe that Mike Wallace and Peter Jennings were willing to trade the lives of an American patrol for a ten second film clip on the evening news. “Utter Contempt” is an apt phrase.
I would urge everyone to take another look at the last couple seconds of the video when the Marine colonel turns to look at Mike Wallace. I would say that Wallace owes every day of his life after that show to the professionalism of that Marine colonel.
I remember watching that when it first aired. I’m a USMC Viet Nam vet, and was furious. I appreciated the Colonel’s response but…
Wallace was no doubt familiar with the first Amendment which prevents the U.S. government from interfering with him saying, writing, or producing pretty much whatever he wanted to. He apparently forgot that the U.S was pretty much unique in having such a provision enshrined in fundamental law when it was first written, and that it has been the success of the U.S. military and the rest of the nation that supports and provides the personnel for that military that has not only kept that Amendment in force, but influenced the spread of the notion of free speech throughout the rest of the world. Wallace owed his professional existence to that military and the nation it serves.
In that discussion we see that Wallace was so blinded by his own self perceived importance that he felt that the lives of men who were risking them so that he could ply his trade and build his reputation were less important than that reputation. There is no hint of gratitude for their potential sacrifice, only a willingness that they should sacrifice so that he could publish the story of their deaths, and maybe nick a Pulitzer.
I’ll second OCBill above. Colonel Connell was a professional, but Wallace deserved to have his nose embedded in his 3rd cervical vertebra.
If I were in the Colonel’s situation, I would think it my patriotic duty to arrange for Wallace to have an ‘accident’ in the jungle.
I will say, though, Wallace’s relentless pursuit of the story makes him willing to do things today’s liberal journalists would cringe at. When he wanted an interview with Chuck Colson, one of the conditions was that he pray with him and the Senator (I forget his name) who made peace with Colson during Watergate. No journalist today would be willing to taint himself with the ‘Jesus freaks’.