History and Journalism ...

by Cliopatria

Ed Conn at Gnostical Turpitude calls attention to Andie Tucher's"Whose Turf is the Past?" in the Columbia Journalism Review. Tucher argues that"the boundaries between historians and journalists are crashing," as journalists like Anne Applebaum, Robert Caro, Melissa Faye Greene, David Halberstam, Adam Hochschild, Richard Kluger, Nicholas Lemann and Diane McWhorter are publishing major books in history and historians barely wait until the dust from falling towers has settled before rushing in to cover a major news story.

Tucher has some intuitions of where new lines of distinction between the historians and the journalists may lie."A generation's worth of changes in the way historians and journalists do their jobs has brought them so close together that the differences between their books sometimes seem notional, even anecdotal, to be summed up in a few generalizations — some of them, clearly, gross," says Tucher.

Historians tend to have more endnotes, journalists more acknowledgements. Historians are the hedgehogs who know one big thing, journalists the foxes who know many things. Historians locate themselves within and draw upon (or argue with) a community of scholarship; journalists parachute in and take everyone out to lunch. Historians are freer from the pressures of the marketplace; journalists are freer to make the bestseller list. The darkest temptation of the historian is plagiarism; of the journalist, fabrication. The historians are the ones most skittish about using the first-person singular. The journalists are the ones most sunburned on the nose.

You can argue with a number of those generalizations. There've been major examples of both fabrication and plagiarism by both journalists and historians. Major scandals at CBS and the New York Times involved both failures to acknowledge and failure of critical distance on sources.

Or, when I think of comparable titles on the civil rights movement, the literature I know best, I tend to contrast David Garrow's Bearing the Cross with Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters or Mills Thornton's Dividing Lines with Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home. When I do that, the business about"historians are the hedgehogs who know one big thing, journalists the foxes who know many things" falls apart completely. If you want massive detail, accurately rendered, read the historians, Garrow and Thornton. If you want to learn how to tell a cracking good yarn, often rendered as the journalist thinks things ought to have been, read Branch and McWhorter.

That difference, says Tucher, is real; and he cites Columbia journalism dean Nicholas Lemann and Princeton historian Robert Darnton in defense of their respective fields."Historians try to pose a really interesting problem or contribute to the debate in a field," says Lemann."But it's striking how little professional historians know about how to tell a popular story. They think ‘popular' means ‘picking a good topic.' They don't see that storytelling is a learned skill; they don't see that's what the nonprofessionals are doing." Historians may recognize the appeal of a good yarn, but they use it differently, says Darnton. He notes"a surge of academic interest in what he calls ‘incident analysis,' in which the historian starts with the sort of dramatic event any journalist would grab in a minute — a crime, a disaster, a dramatic imposture, or, as Darnton himself once did, the ‘great cat massacre' by roistering apprentices in eighteenth-century Paris — and ‘uses the narrative material to argue a case, one where an interpretive problem is at stake'...

The emphasis is on developing the thesis and sustaining the argument with adequate documentation. Indeed"narrative skill takes second place, if it figures at all.
But the journalist's professional conditioning to look for the good story, says Darnton, raises its own questions. Journalistic storytelling has a ‘stylized quality, which can be a disadvantage as well as an advantage. By that I mean a tendency to look for a lead instead of an argument, to hype things, overuse colorful quotes, and exaggerate the importance of personal quirks.'

Darnton is right about a certain kind of history -- I'd call it thesis-driven history, but my colleague, Tim Burke, would step in here and thump me on the head again for talking about red herrings -- and, yet, Darnton misses a point to be made in defense of a less fashionable, bread-and-butter way of doing history. That is, an insistence on accuracy of detail. Put your finger on any page of Branch's stunning narratives and I'll find you an error; on some pages, they are so important as to stand reality on its head. Despite the Michael Bellesiles of the profession, there is something about a historian's greater sense of distance from the subject that lends itself to an insistence on accuracy. And there is something about a journalist's proximity to the sources that lends itself to corruption. If you don't believe that, track Judith Miller's reportage in the lead-up to the war in Iraq or read Jack Shafer's piece for Slate on the relationship between Henry Kissinger and the major journalists of the 1970s. It's just bloody depressing how sycophantic they could be. There's a major story to be told there that reverses Tucher's title:"Whose Past is the Turf?"

But, finally, says Tucher, there's another problem with the journalists' instinct: an inadequate sense of what distinguishes a headline story of the day -- a Gary Condit saga or a"Mission Accomplished" banner -- from a story of longer term significance."The distinction most worth exploring between history and daily journalism," says Tucher,

is neither professional nor temporal but teleological. History can have endings, and most journalism does not. Even though we know in our hearts that history is never really finished, that each new generation reinterprets the past in ways that make sense for its own particular present, narratives of the past can offer what daily journalism almost always cannot: the illusion, at least, of completion. Even though there's no odometer that clicks over from"now" to"then," the lengthening distance between event and interpreter can bring a certain clarity of vision, as can new evidence, a shifted perspective, or someday, perhaps, even a cooler look at that dusty old archive of oral histories about 9/11. Even though the arc of any historical narrative is arbitrary — stopping with V-J Day makes a vastly different story than stopping with the Berlin airlift — writers of history have a luxury denied the daily journalist: the hindsight to choose an endpoint rather than just waiting for it to come along.

There is, he argues, a"widespread and irresistible ... idea that there exists some final reckoning, some great arbiter that will coolly render the verdict of the ages, Olympian and infallible, and, no doubt, enshrined within a nice strong binding with gilt lettering on the spine." Let the people say: Amen.

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Derek Charles Catsam - 10/10/2004

Ralph-
I read a lot of really bad journalistic writing. And I read an awful lot of really good historical writing. I'm not certain I could make judgments that one profession knows more than the other about excellent writing. Sometimes particular forms of academic writing simply are not going to be all that accessible. But oftentimes it can be as good as anything out there. C. Vann Woodward cowed before no man as a stylist. We can surly think of dozens of others.
Good point on Branch v. Goodwin. In a sense I am willing to take anyone seriously who thinks historically, and i take less seriously those who do not. I do not care at the end of the day what credential they have after their name, though at the same time I do know what it means to have the PhD in terms of knowing historiography, critical assessment of sources and all that.
dc

Ralph E. Luker - 10/10/2004

I don't think you're crazy, but I do think there were issues to be discussed here. For example, I _do_ think that Lemann's point about journalists knowing more than we do, ordinarily, about excellent popular writing and how to tell a good story is well taken. And, I _do_ think that Tucher's point -- that historians and journalists have in recent decades tended to ignore turf claims more commonly than they have in the past is well taken. A generation ago, there really were relatively few books by journalists which historians took seriously as history (Frederick Lewis Allen's _Only Yesterday_ being a notable exception) -- but I don't think that that is any longer the case. There were historians who had crossed the line _from_ journalism, like Allen Nevins, but the few who did had clearly crossed a line. These days, it's a good question why we tend to think of Taylor Branch as a journalist as compared with why we tend to think of Doris Kearns Goodwin as a historian.

Derek Charles Catsam - 10/9/2004

. . . but on the whole it is not a debate much worth having among serious people that historians are better at history than journalists are. That does not mean that some journalists do not do wonderful history. There are some. Just as there are some historians who do first class reportage. But on the whole, I think I'll make the proprietary claim that the many years of grad training and then my few years of professional experience trump the historical vantage point of a journalist, however experienced, old, or revered. One need look no further than David Halberstam's wretched car crash of a book "The Children" to see how having a big name and selling lots of copies does not substitute for writing good history.

dc

Manan Ahmed - 10/8/2004

Ralph, great piece. I saw Motorcycle Diaries last night. This morning, even as I was working through the movie in my head, I read this interview of E. Howard Hunt in Slate which discusses among other things Che's assassination.
Journalism and Film has me confused. So, I did what I do. Search the library catalogue for a good historian's take. Any recommendation from Cliopatria readers?

Richard Henry Morgan - 10/8/2004

History might, on average (as a result of the perspective of time), have a better grasp on the significant versus the ephemeral. But it seems just about every distinction offered turns out to be, on reflection, one of degree (there are historians who write good narrative, and journalists with a capacity for accuracy, etc.). As for significance as the hallmark of good history (or even history), that is a very traditional view, going back at least to Polybius, and perhaps even further. But I thoroughly enjoy, and would defend as good history, books with little claim to capturing great significance, but which are readable and more or less accurate -- take Tony Grafton's history of the footnote, or Henry Petroski's history of the bookshelf, for instance.

Jonathan Dresner - 10/8/2004

I can't add much to what you've said so well here, except to note that Tucher is terribly presentist to believe that the boundary between historians and other writers has ever been sharply drawn. The past belongs to all of us, and many people from all sorts of fields and backgrounds have written history. H.G. Wells and Isaac Asimov wrote history; Marx and Weber wrote history; Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy wrote history; novelists and playrights have been writing and rewriting history as the raw material for fiction since humans realized that past and present were different.

Anthropologists and sociologists write history; economists and literary critics write history; politicians (or their ghost-writers) and lawyers write history. History has never been the special province of historians, it's just that we know, a bit more precisely, what we're doing and how it needs to be done.

I do disagree with Tucher's teleological conclusion, though: I think historians' narratives are much clearer than journalists that the stories are open-ended. When a journalist approaches a historical subject, they seem to always have a victory, a climax, a conclusion through death or dishonor, at the end of the story, and a moral theory firmly in mind (even if it's postmodernist amoralism). I think historians actually handle ambiguity and fuzzy borderlines better than journalists.