Eric Muller (IsThatLegal?) posts an open letter to the media from various historians:
We represent the Historians’ Committee for Fairness, an organization of scholars and professional researchers. Michelle Malkin’s appearance on numerous television and radio shows and her comments during these appearances regarding her book IN DEFENSE OF INTERNMENT represent a blatant violation of professional standards of objectivity and fairness. Malkin is not a historian, and she states that she relied almost exclusively on research conducted or collected by others. Her book, which purports to defend the wartime treatment of Japanese Americans, did not go through peer review before publication. This work presents a version of history that is contradicted by several decades of scholarly research, including works by the official historian of the United States Army and an official U.S. government commission. In fact, the author’s presentation of events is so distorted and historically inaccurate that, when challenged by reputable historians, she has herself conceded that her main thesis in incorrect, namely that the MAGIC intercepts of prewar Japanese diplomatic cable traffic, explain and justify the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans. As Malkin states, her critics have noted that “once the decision was made to evacuate ethnic Japanese from the West Coast, many ancillary decisions were made–and MAGIC doesn’t explain all or even most of them. True….” (see her website, www.michellemalkin.com, August 6, 2004)
It is irresponsible of your producers to permit Michelle Malkin’s biased presentation of events to go unchallenged as a factual historical presentation. We therefore respectfully demand that you formally apologize to the Japanese Americans who have been slandered by Ms. Malkin’s reckless presentation and invite a reputable historian to present a more even-handed view of the evidence.
The historians may well be right in their criticisms of Malkin; I haven’t been following the controversy closely enough to have an expert opinion. But it seems to me that they’ve framed their criticisms in a way that greatly weakens their argument.
What do they start with? They’re professional researchers — good enough as it goes. Then they allege that Malkin isn’t “objectiv[e]” and “fair[]” the way that professionsl are. Well, I certainly support objectivity and fairness, but my guess is that (1) many historians themselves are pretty biased; (2) a longstanding, and plausible, criticism of the very people who are likely to be sympathetic with Malkin is that many historians are indeed biased towards the Left; and (3) the media thrives on contentious presentations, where two partisans duke it out, either on the same show or over time. They think it makes for more interesting programming, and they think that it’s quite fair. I doubt that supposedly objective historians will persuade them, or their viewers, otherwise.
But then, it seems to me, it gets worse: Malkin isn’t a historian, and relied on research done by others. Well, the media publishes commentary by people who aren’t professional academics, and who rely on research done by others, all the time. That’s what columnists usually are. You might not get tenure in a history department if you rely on research done by others, but such reliance doesn’t disqualify you from appearing in the media.
Nor, more importantly, does it make you wrong. And while not being a professional historian may make it more likely that you’ll get some things wrong, it’s hardly a guarantee of that — plus sometimes an outsider to a profession can indeed help puncture professional orthodoxy (though I suspect it happens less than outsiders might like). The same goes for peer review; even if peer review dramatically improves accuracy (maybe), the absence of peer review hardly proves inaccuracy. And in any event I’m pretty sure that the media and the public don’t treat peer review with the reverence that professional scholars in peer-reviewed disciplines might. The not-a-historian/relied-on-others’-research/no-peer-review sentence will likely sound to many like a guild guarding its professional turf against upstart competition, not a substantive critique that should make the media or viewers take notice.
So the first four sentences, it seems to me, frame the issue entirely the wrong way (especially since the first sentence’s reference to professionalism, which is unobjectionable on its own, ends up looking like more turf-guarding in light of the following sentences). And then the letter gets to the heart of the argument — the point that should be persuasive to media and to viewers, and that appeals to acknowledged media ethics: Malkin is wrong. Now that might persuade people that she ought not be trusted, and that at least some contrary voices should be called on to rebut her arguments. (The call for an apology to soothe hurt feelings seems to me to return to the unpersuasive, because it distracts from what’s accurate to what’s offensive, but at least it doesn’t smack of trying to defend guild authority.)
That, it seems to me, is what the historians should have started with: They should have put their strongest argument — the claim of grave inaccuracy, and the reasonable call for an opportunity to respond — front and center. And then they should have stayed on that message, perhaps even beefing it up with more telling details.
Instead, they buried the lead. (Should they have taken their own advice and left this sort of writing to professional, credentialed journalists or press relations specialists? I don’t think so, but at least I don’t think they would have then made that mistake.) But worse, they buried it under a different lead that, it seems to me, frames the argument exactly the way that professional academics ought not frame it — at least if they want to persuade their lay readers. Perhaps I’m mistaken; I too am not a professional press relations or public relations expert, and I’m sure I have many blind spots myself when dealing with people who don’t share my own profession’s preconceptions. But my sense is that the historians really did err in their rhetoric here.
UPDATE: Clayton Cramer has more on this. I should also mention that, while Eric Muller posted the letter, and signed on to it, I doubt that he was the one who drafted it — among other things, I think he’s too savvy about rhetoric to have framed it the way they did.
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