Rather than just complaining (as I've noted, justifiably) about its rhetoric, Timothy Burke is thinking carefully about the substantive point of the historians' letter to the media about Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment."

He attributes Malkin's success in drawing uncritical attention from the major media to two things: (a) her saying something contrarian about a matter of current interest, and (b) her being mediagenic.

He then says this:

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.
. . .
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?

Timothy Burke's point about David Irving and Holocaust revisionism deserves a moment's reflection. Let's consider a hypothetical. Suppose an author were to publish a book revisiting the pogroms across Germany in November of 1938 that we know as "Kristallnacht." Suppose that author's thesis went something like this: "Yes, German and Austrian Jews certainly and regrettably suffered in the attacks of November 9 and 10, 1938, and in the incarceration of some 26,000 in concentration camps for a period of many weeks that followed. We have seen, time and again, the images of the broken storefront windows and the burning synagogues that the Jewish grievance community and politically correct academics want us to see. We have been led to believe that this was an unprovoked outburst of baseless hatred on the part of the German people. But what Jews and academics do not tell you, and do not want you to know, is that the so-called Kristallnacht had a real cause: A Jew did, in fact, murder the German official Ernst vom Rath in Paris on November 7, 1938, at the German Embassy, and documents from the time show that Josef Goebbels knew this and saw the murder as proof of a larger Jewish threat to the Reich."

This, in the context of the Holocaust, is the precise analogue of Malkin's thesis about the Japanese American internment. Please note that I'm not suggesting that Malkin herself believes or has ever said any such thing about Kristallnacht specifically, or the Holocaust generally. I am sure she does not. believe such a thing. I am also not comparing Kristallnacht to the eviction of Japanese Americans. I am instead making a point about the nature--the architecture, if you will--of her argument. It is this: you have been led to believe that what seems to be a groundless, racist government action lacked any foundation and can therefore be explained only as an expression of hatred, but that is not so; in fact, there was a real threat to the government that supplied a foundation for what they did.

So, to return to Timothy Burke's observation: suppose that a mediagenic author were to publish such a work. Would MSNBC, CNBC, Fox, C-SPAN, HBO, and countless radio programs present that work at all? If they did so, would they present it uncritically, and without rebuttal?

Of course they wouldn't. And so the question is: why the difference?

A couple of possible answers suggest themselves to me, and neither is very attractive.

One is that it's easier for us to recognize malevolence in others' ancestors (the Nazis) than in our own. Thus, what seems incontestably unjustifiable in the history of others remains debatable in our own.

The other is that Holocaust survivors and their children and grandchildren (full disclosure: I am one), and the Jewish community more generally, would not countenance an unrebutted presentation of such a work in the major media, whereas the Japanese American community is to some extent still (as it was 60 years ago) a safe target for such an assault.

In the end, Timothy Burke is right:

"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?"

Update: The comments over at my blog have started to pour in, as I knew they would, calling me vile and reprehensible for comparing Michelle Malkin to a Holocaust revisionist. A careful reader of what I wrote will, I am confident, understand what I actually do. I construct a hypothetical about one episode from 1938 Nazi Germany about which there is historical consensus. (I set aside the disagreement that actually seems to exist over whether Grynszpan shot vom Rath in enraged protest or because the two had been lovers.) I imagine a book that depicts the consensus as a "myth" by a similar mode of argument, and with a similar type of evidence, that Malkin's book uses to depict the consensus about the internment as a "myth." I postulate that such a book about 1938 Nazi Germany, published today, would not receive uncritical attention from American major media. And I ask why Malkin's has, and suggest a couple of possible answers.

To those who are rushing over to my blog to call me names for insulting Michelle Malkin, I hope that on their way over they'll think for a moment about the insult that Malkin's book represents to many thousands of loyal, patriotic, and innocent Americans of Japanese ancestry who had to endure the questioning of their loyalty 60 years ago, and now, thanks to Malkin's book and the uncritical attention the media has lavished upon it, are having to endure it again.