The first draft, not the last word
Journalists should give us the facts, not a worldview or “origin story.”
Do you remember…
Liberals loved this project because it effectively said: Our focus on race is rooted not in grubby calculations about political power, but in historic facts that are obvious and determinative. We are what we have done. Our past defines our present. Slavery and racism are America’s original sins, and we can repent only by adopting “a new origin story.”
Conservatives hated The 1619 Project because the “very center of our national narrative” shouldn’t be slavery, they said. Instead, Americans should acknowledge our mistakes, celebrate our core values and aspirations, and work together to build a brighter tomorrow and a “more perfect union.”
The argument over The 1619 Project has primarily focused on its content — on what story we should be telling ourselves about the American experiment. But I’d like to focus on a different question:
Who is best qualified to narrate our national origin story?
“Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it,” writes Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist for The New York Times and a critic of The 1619 Project. “We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded.”
I agree.
Journalists are in the business of reporting the facts, day after day. They (should) tell us what’s happening, not what those events ought to mean. Yes, reporters may need to zoom out to 10,000 feet to provide adequate context for a particular story or set of facts, but it’s not their job to zoom out to a low-Earth orbit to give readers an entire worldview. That responsibility should be shouldered by other people with a different set of skills and expertise.
Consider a different example:
The Boston Globe won a much-deserved Pulitzer Prize for its investigation of widespread and systemic child sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests in the Boston area. But is it the job of Globe journalists to report on how that sex abuse scandal was a result of the Roman Catholic Church’s fundamentally flawed origin story?
Imagine the Globe writing: Child sex abuse in the Church is directly linked to a profound misunderstanding of Jesus, his ministry and the Gospels, the incarnation, and the mystery of the Trinity… and then delivering that critique not only in a book review or an op-ed but as an institutional statement that’s disseminated in the newspaper’s flagship magazine — and then in K-12 curriculum materials. That would be weird, right?
Bret Stephens objects to his newspaper saying: We’re not only going to give you the day-to-day facts about racial tensions in America. We will also provide you with an entire historical narrative and a worldview that will enable you to give those facts the appropriate meaning.
Is that what we now expect journalists to deliver? The Big Picture and a Master Narrative for America… or for the Church? I hope not. Such an ambitious mission seems far beyond most journalist’s skill set and expertise. Perhaps the making of meaning is a more appropriate job for historians, philosophers, religious leaders… and individuals.
Unless the church that gives your life meaning is The New York Times.
Yet William Shirer, a journalist, wrote one of the best histories of the third Reich. Of course, that was modern history, and he had reported on it from Europe as it unfolded. It’s possible to be a journalist and a historian. The thing is, in an anxious culture of dogmatic certitudes, everyone is an expert as long as they toe the line and recite the same beliefs. The repetitions of sanctimonious nonsense that we have to listen to on national media of all stripes is mind-numbing. That’s the point of it. To keep people’s minds on the same story, so they don’t wander off and start asking uncomfortable questions— didn’t that used to be the prerogative of journalists? But people don’t want to wonder about themselves. They want to stand in a place of certainty and cloak themselves in a shiny cloak of moral rectitude, ascending a pulpit from which heretics can be publicly condemned. This is the purpose of stories like the 1619 project. Variations on guilt and expiation of guilt are as old as humanity, and they won’t be going away anytime soon. Yesterday it was bonfire of the vanities. Today it is the flagellation of white colonialists. Tomorrow it will be… stay tuned.