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All the History That's Fit to Print by Notra Trulo
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Promoting All the History That Is Fit . to Support Media Biases
Reed Irvine
Aug. 4, 2002
One way to detect liberal bias in the media is to monitor coverage of new scholarship on early American history or the founding fathers. When new historical findings are supportive of the media's liberal agenda, the New York Times or New York Review of Books will promote these prominently in an effort to influence the public debate. If the subject relates to an issue hotly debated in the political arena, the author is assured of publicity in the nation's most influential publications.
On the subject of gun control, for example, both the Times and the New York Review of Books promoted Emory University associate professor Michael Bellesiles' "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture." The Times was covering Bellesiles' book months before it was published, citing gun control advocates as saying that the book "may change the terms of the debate."
Bellesiles' research challenged the widely held belief that gun ownership had been commonplace in early America; in fact, he claimed that records of the era show that no more than 10 percent of the total population owned guns at any time before 1850. Bellesiles said that gun ownership did not become popular with Americans until the Civil War.
His findings were used to undercut interpretations of the Second Amendment that rely on early America's gun ownership as proof that the founding fathers meant the amendment to apply to an individual's, and not just a state militia's, right to bear arms. The Times assigned Garry Wills to review the book; he lavished praise on it and the Times put his review on the front page of its Sunday book review section.
Wills wrote that Bellesiles had "dispersed the darkness" and dispelled our deepest "superstition" about the role of guns in American history. Bellesiles won the Bancroft prize-the most prestigious in American history scholarship. His book was on its way to influencing court cases on the meaning of the Second Amendment, particularly a bitterly contested federal appeals case in Texas.
The book could not withstand the scrutiny of other academics when they checked his scholarship and research. His footnotes could not be verified. He misused historical records, and some records he cited had been destroyed. The Times finally got around to reporting that Bellesiles was under fire about a year late and then in an article buried in its Saturday edition.
The Times focused mostly on the hate mail and harassment Bellesiles received and implied that the campaign had been started by the National Rifle Association. It did air criticisms of the book by other scholars, but Bellesiles told the Times that his research materials had been destroyed in a flood and that, anyway, the portions of his book under fire weren't really central to his overall thesis.
Despite lots of academic posturing, Bellesiles still has his Bancroft prize and he is still a member in good standing of Emory's history faculty. Obviously, Bellesiles picked the right topic on which to fudge the facts.
Now comes another new book that examines America's historical experience about another hot-button issue in contemporary politics. Professor Philip Hamburger, a legal scholar at the University of Chicago, published his book, "Separation of Church and State," just days after the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down schools' use of the Pledge of Allegiance because of the phrase "under God," and the Supreme Court found that school vouchers do not violate the separation doctrine.
Hamburger's research overturns the long-held belief that Thomas Jefferson enshrined the doctrine in the Constitution; instead the doctrine grew out of nativist objections in the years before the Civil War to government support for Catholic schools in New York City.
In fact, the doctrine of separation of church and state owes more to the Ku Klux Klan than to Jefferson or the American Civil Liberties Union, according to Hamburger. Late in the 19th century, the Klan made anti-Catholicism part of its central nativist creed, which continued into the 1920s when the Klan was known in the Midwest more for its anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic positions than its hatred for African-Americans..
However unpalatable such findings might be to the Times and other liberal opinion makers, to its credit the Times has discussed Prof. Hamburger's startling findings. Not on its front pages or prominently displayed in its Sunday book review section, however. The Times' only mention of the book, thus far, came in a Saturday piece in its Metropolitan section two days after the Fourth of July. Hamburger clearly picked the wrong topic.
Notra Trulock is the Associate Editor of the AIM Report at Accuracy in Media, http://aim.org.
http://www.newsmax.com/commentarchive.shtml?a=2002/8/4/031335
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Reed Irvine
Aug. 4, 2002
One way to detect liberal bias in the media is to monitor coverage of new scholarship on early American history or the founding fathers. When new historical findings are supportive of the media's liberal agenda, the New York Times or New York Review of Books will promote these prominently in an effort to influence the public debate. If the subject relates to an issue hotly debated in the political arena, the author is assured of publicity in the nation's most influential publications.
On the subject of gun control, for example, both the Times and the New York Review of Books promoted Emory University associate professor Michael Bellesiles' "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture." The Times was covering Bellesiles' book months before it was published, citing gun control advocates as saying that the book "may change the terms of the debate."
Bellesiles' research challenged the widely held belief that gun ownership had been commonplace in early America; in fact, he claimed that records of the era show that no more than 10 percent of the total population owned guns at any time before 1850. Bellesiles said that gun ownership did not become popular with Americans until the Civil War.
His findings were used to undercut interpretations of the Second Amendment that rely on early America's gun ownership as proof that the founding fathers meant the amendment to apply to an individual's, and not just a state militia's, right to bear arms. The Times assigned Garry Wills to review the book; he lavished praise on it and the Times put his review on the front page of its Sunday book review section.
Wills wrote that Bellesiles had "dispersed the darkness" and dispelled our deepest "superstition" about the role of guns in American history. Bellesiles won the Bancroft prize-the most prestigious in American history scholarship. His book was on its way to influencing court cases on the meaning of the Second Amendment, particularly a bitterly contested federal appeals case in Texas.
The book could not withstand the scrutiny of other academics when they checked his scholarship and research. His footnotes could not be verified. He misused historical records, and some records he cited had been destroyed. The Times finally got around to reporting that Bellesiles was under fire about a year late and then in an article buried in its Saturday edition.
The Times focused mostly on the hate mail and harassment Bellesiles received and implied that the campaign had been started by the National Rifle Association. It did air criticisms of the book by other scholars, but Bellesiles told the Times that his research materials had been destroyed in a flood and that, anyway, the portions of his book under fire weren't really central to his overall thesis.
Despite lots of academic posturing, Bellesiles still has his Bancroft prize and he is still a member in good standing of Emory's history faculty. Obviously, Bellesiles picked the right topic on which to fudge the facts.
Now comes another new book that examines America's historical experience about another hot-button issue in contemporary politics. Professor Philip Hamburger, a legal scholar at the University of Chicago, published his book, "Separation of Church and State," just days after the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down schools' use of the Pledge of Allegiance because of the phrase "under God," and the Supreme Court found that school vouchers do not violate the separation doctrine.
Hamburger's research overturns the long-held belief that Thomas Jefferson enshrined the doctrine in the Constitution; instead the doctrine grew out of nativist objections in the years before the Civil War to government support for Catholic schools in New York City.
In fact, the doctrine of separation of church and state owes more to the Ku Klux Klan than to Jefferson or the American Civil Liberties Union, according to Hamburger. Late in the 19th century, the Klan made anti-Catholicism part of its central nativist creed, which continued into the 1920s when the Klan was known in the Midwest more for its anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic positions than its hatred for African-Americans..
However unpalatable such findings might be to the Times and other liberal opinion makers, to its credit the Times has discussed Prof. Hamburger's startling findings. Not on its front pages or prominently displayed in its Sunday book review section, however. The Times' only mention of the book, thus far, came in a Saturday piece in its Metropolitan section two days after the Fourth of July. Hamburger clearly picked the wrong topic.
Notra Trulock is the Associate Editor of the AIM Report at Accuracy in Media, http://aim.org.
http://www.newsmax.com/commentarchive.shtml?a=2002/8/4/031335
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Comments
Richard Poe
Aug. 4, 2002
No sooner had I arrived home from my five-week sojourn in Greece this Thursday, than I learned that some people had been talking about me. In an article called "The Virtue of Xenophobia," posted on TheTexasMercury.com, Jimmy Cantrell suggests that, far from being a neoconservative - as my detractors often call me -I am actually closer to being a paleoconservative.
"A paleo-what?" some readers may respond.
Yes, I know. All those "neos" and "paleos" used to confuse me too. But I am finally beginning to understand what they mean. And I think Cantrell is right.
Many issues divide neocons from paleocons, but race seems to be the crucial one. Neocons believe that America will always be America, with or without white people. Some neocons even preach that the sooner American whites intermarry with non-whites to produce a new race of amorphous cosmopolites with caf? au lait complexions, the better off everyone will be.
Not so, say the paleocons. Anglo-Saxon civility will not survive the disappearance of Anglo-Saxon people. If white folks lose their demographic and political dominance here, America will likely degenerate into a hellhole of Zimbabwe-style violence, they warn.
I have long been mistaken for a neocon, partly because I wrote "Black Spark, White Fire," a book which suggests that the blending of many races and cultures in the ancient Mediterranean helped stimulate high civilizations in Egypt, Greece and the Levant.
Some perceived my book as a promotion of the neocons' caf? au lait utopia, since it celebrated a time when swarthy Mediterraneans built mighty kingdoms, while purebred Aryans languished in savagery.
Even worse (in the eyes of some critics), "Black Spark" seemed to emanate from ethnic self-interest. Being half Russian-Jewish and half Mexican by descent, I melt easily into Mediterranean crowds - as I was recently reminded in Greece, where waiters, cab drivers and store clerks invariably addressed me in the Hellenic tongue.
One could argue that "Black Spark" was merely a chauvinistic celebration of my own kind, a song of praise for Mediterranean "diversity" over Aryan "purity," somewhat in the spirit of Giuseppe Sergi's 1901 treatise, "The Mediterranean Race."
All of that is possible, at least on some half-conscious level. But "Black Spark" made a larger point.
Contrary to popular belief, my book was no exercise in dead-white-male bashing. In praising the Egyptian and Phoenician seafarers who "discovered" Europe (and who possibly gave the continent its name), I defended exploration as a noble enterprise - no small heresy in an age when schoolchildren are taught to despise Columbus as a slaver, mass murderer and infectious disease vector.
The honest reader, moved by my book to applaud Egyptian and Phoenician explorers, could hardly condemn later adventurers for similar feats in the New World.
Some conservatives got the point. Steve Sailer -nwhose Human Biodiversity Institute outrages liberals with its Darwinian analysis of racial differences - gave unexpected praise to "Black Spark" in a recent UPI article, calling it a "sophisticated Afrocentric book" by "a white conservative political pundit."
Sailer quoted me on the subject of whether or not the Carthaginian general Hannibal looked more like Denzel Washington or Vin Diesel. It was great fun. But whatever color Hannibal may have been, I don't think I would have wanted to live in his Carthage. They used to sacrifice babies there, for one thing.
I approach the question of race much as I approach ecology. We don't really know whether clear-cutting every major forest on the planet will fatally deplete the earth's oxygen supply. Maybe it won't. But why run such a dangerous experiment?
Likewise, it is possible that the neocons are right. Maybe America will survive the extinction of its Anglo-Saxon creators. But who, in his right mind, wants to put this theory to the test?
When I was editor of FrontPageMagazine.com, I ignited a minor scandal in November 2000 by publishing "The End of Paleoconservatism" by James Lubinskas. He predicted that paleoconservatism would fade as a movement, but that its ideas would spread.
And they are spreading. In the unimpeachably neocon NationalReviewOnline.com, columnist John Derbyshire recently opined that "Only Anglo- Saxon countries can do democracy. . Other cultures can fake it for a few decades, as France, Germany, and Japan are currently doing, but their hearts aren't really in it and they will swoon gratefully into the arms of a fascist dictator when one comes along."
Perhaps Derbyshire is exaggerating for comic effect. Even so, his point cannot be refuted from history. Only a fool would ignore Derbyshire's warning. Only a scoundrel would try to silence him by screaming "racist."
http://www.newsmax.com/commentarchive.shtml?a=2002/8/3/201138
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Copyright c 2002
Scripps McClatchy Western Service
Search the archive for: homeland security
By DAVID WESTPHAL, McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON (August 3, 2002 8:51 p.m. EDT) - If all goes as expected, President Bush will achieve the centerpiece of his anti-terror blueprint, a massive new domestic security department, sometime after the one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Congressional approval would be another milestone in the president's strategy of marshaling new federal powers to protect Americans from terrorist strikes. Yet increasingly, members of Congress from both sides of the political spectrum are challenging some of the administration's initiatives as too costly to individual freedoms.
Even as they endorsed Bush's Homeland Security Department legislation last month, House members fired a shot across the White House bow, denouncing proposals to launch national tipsters and ID programs.
Reining in numerous other proposals, the House also insisted on a special office to monitor civil rights and privacy issues in the new department.
"I think members of Congress, after the initial crisis atmosphere, are starting to step back and ask whether some of these proposals are really going to work, are really worth the cost," said Tim Edgar, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.
The ACLU and other civil rights groups hardly won every battle.
In a major vote, the House exempted large chunks of data gathered by the proposed new agency from traditional freedom-of-information laws - a decision that led some to suggest the agency be called the "Department of Secrecy."
It also declared that some of the 170,000 employees of the department could be stripped of certain civil service and collective bargaining rights, if the president so decided, in order to respond more quickly to domestic threats.
"A time of war is the wrong time to weaken the president's ability to protect the American people," Bush said in defending the provision. "We can't be micro-managed."
Even so, groups opposed to the expansion of government size and power at the expense of individual rights appear to be gaining strength.
An unusual coalition - liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans who share a passion for civil liberties - forced the White House to give on major provisions of its homeland security legislation in the House, and still more concessions loom in the Senate.
In two highly visible rebukes, Democratic and Republicans leaders teamed up to denounce an administration plan to develop a national ID card, and to ridicule Attorney General John Ashcroft's proposal to encourage Americans to report suspicious activities.
"Citizens should not be spying on one another," Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey said.
Ashcroft is getting an earful on his tipster idea from political friends as well as foes. Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative leader of the Eagle Forum, said the proposal would "institutionalize a federal system of informers."
But this issue, like scores more, is a long way from being settled.
Justice Department officials said last week they still plan to continue the so-called TIPS program in some form. And all of the issues raised in the House debate are likely to get an even more contentious hearing in the Senate next month.
Congressional observers say the clashes are a natural outgrowth of a political process that's trying to adjust to the new threat of domestic terror.
"It was almost inevitable, once we got past the initial wave of horror after September 11th, and the desire to act swiftly, that our larger societal and constitutional concern for civil liberties would kick in," said Norman Ornstein, the veteran political scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Ornstein said the process of re-balancing national security priorities against individual rights is complicated because no one knows what the future will look like. "I think we're going to have a lot of ups and downs on this until we get a clear picture," he said.
In the months following the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress acted quickly to deliver substantial new terror-fighting powers to the president. The USA Patriot Act gave the FBI new authority to conduct wiretaps, seize voice-mail messages, probe bank records, explore electronic databases and obtain nationwide warrants.
The newest initiatives, however, are meeting more resistance.
Senate Democrats are promising to slow down consideration of the Homeland Security legislation in order to fully vet some of the civil rights issues.
Chief among them, and one with intriguing political overtones, is the president's insistence that he be given authority to suspend certain union and civil service rights for Homeland Security workers. Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Government Affairs Committee, has challenged Bush over the issue and vows not to back down.
Lieberman contends it's a "slap in the face" of the police and fire units that responded to the Sept. 11 attacks to suggest that union representation is at odds with national security. But administration officials, in an argument that carried the day in the House, say the new terror threat is so new, so rapidly changing, that the president must have the ability to short-circuit time-consuming rules governing hiring, firing, promotions and transfers.
"When we face unprecedented threats like we're facing, we cannot have business as usual," the president said.
Bush and Lieberman, potential rivals in the 2004 presidential race, are also likely to tangle over a provision that would allow the new department to operate with uncommon secrecy. For example, infrastructure data submitted voluntarily to the government by businesses could be exempted from normal Freedom of Information Act requirements.
Administration officials say businesses, which have valuable information about potential targets, won't disclose vulnerabilities without the guarantee of secrecy. Opponents say it offers a huge loophole allowing firms to keep embarrassing information away from the public.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., who led to an unsuccessful effort to remove the provision in the House, criticized business lobbyists, saying they were pursuing self-serving protections when they instead should "do their patriotic duty and disclose vulnerabilities that could endanger the American people."
News organizations also are fighting the measure. First Amendment advocate Paul McMasters said it represents a "standing invitation for companies with something to hide to label incriminating material as 'critical infrastructure information' ... and thus put it beyond the reach of the public, the press, the Congress and the courts."
Timothy Lynch, a scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, said erosions of individual rights are a self-defeating form of defense against terrorism.
"This cycle of terrorist attack followed by government curtailment of civil liberties must be broken," he said, "or our society will eventually lose the key attribute that has made it great: freedom."
But Ornstein said the context for a national discussion about civil liberties and government powers is likely to be a changing one.
"If we'd had a succession of attacks, if we had undergone the horrors that Israel has undergone," he said, "you'd see a driving demand to solve the problem whatever the short-term damage to civil liberties.
"And we could see that yet."
http://www.nando.net/politics/story/487912p-3893768c.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878