C-SPAN's
Balance of the Absurd
By
Richard Cohen
March 15, 2005;
Page A23, Washington Post
Email: cohenr@washpost.com
You
will not be seeing Deborah Lipstadt on C-SPAN. The
Holocaust scholar at Emory University has a new book out
("History on Trial"), and an upcoming lecture of hers at
Harvard was scheduled to be televised on the public
affairs cable outlet. The book is about a libel case
brought against her in Britain by David Irving, a
Holocaust denier, trivializer and prevaricator who is, by
solemn ruling of the very court that heard his lawsuit,
"anti-Semitic and racist." No matter. C-SPAN wanted
Irving to "balance" Lipstadt.
The word balance is
not in quotes for emphasis. It was invoked repeatedly by
C-SPAN producers who seemed convinced that they had
chosen the most noble of all journalistic causes:
fairness. "We want to balance it [Lipstadt's
lecture] by covering him," said Amy Roach, a producer
for C-SPAN's Book TV. Her boss, Connie Doebele, put it
another way. "You know how important fairness and balance
is at C-SPAN," she told me. "We work very, very hard at
this. We ask ourselves, 'Is there an opposing view of
this?' "
As luck would have
it, there was. To Lipstadt's statements about the
Holocaust, there was Irving's rebuttal that it never
happened -- no systematic killing of Jews, no Final
Solution and, while many people died at Auschwitz of
disease and the occasional act of brutality, there were
no gas chambers there. "More women died on the back seat
of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died
in a gas chamber at Auschwitz," Irving once
said.
For obvious
reasons, Lipstadt cited Irving in her 1993 book, "Denying
the Holocaust," which was also published in Britain.
Irving sued her for libel. Under Britain's libel laws,
Lipstadt had to prove the truth of what she wrote, which,
after a lengthy trial, she did in spades. Her lawyer's
opening statement -- "My Lord, Mr. Irving calls himself a
historian. The truth is, however, that he is not a
historian at all, but a falsifier of history. To put it
bluntly, he is a liar." -- ultimately became the judgment
of the court itself. In matters of intellectual
integrity, Irving is an underachiever.
Once, this was not
all that apparent. By dint of maniacal industry, Irving
had turned himself into an admired writer on Nazi
Germany. He mined the archives for material that others
appeared to have overlooked. Some of it was genuine; some
of it was false. Increasingly, though, his books gave off
the whiff of anti-Semitism and a certain admiration of
Hitler. When Richard J. Evans, a Cambridge University
historian (and one of Lipstadt's expert witnesses),
carefully examined Irving's work, he found it a stew of
misrepresentations, falsifications and outright quackery.
Irving was authoritatively exposed: a propagandist hiding
behind seemingly scholarly footnotes.
This is the man
C-SPAN turned to for "balance." It told Lipstadt that
since it was going to air her lecture, it would do one of
Irving's, too. As luck would have it, he was appearing
March 12 at the Landmark Diner in Atlanta. C-SPAN was
there for this momentous event -- although Irving's
advance warning that cameras would be present apparently
held down attendance. (His people seem to prefer
anonymity -- or, in the old days, sheets.) Lipstadt was
in effect being told that if she wanted to promote her
book on C-SPAN (an important venue) she would also have
to promote Irving. If she was to get a TV audience, then
so would he.
C-SPAN's cockeyed
version of fairness -- it told Lipstadt that it had bent
over backward to ensure its coverage of the presidential
election was fair and balanced -- is so mindless that I
thought for a moment its producers and I could not be
talking about the same thing. This is the "Crossfire"
mentality reduced to absurdity, if that's possible. For a
book on the evils of slavery, would it counter with
someone who thinks it was a benign institution? Why does
it feel there is another side to the Holocaust or to
Irving's assertion that he was libeled? He was not. He
was described to a T.
In the end,
Lipstadt had to choose between promoting her own book --
a terrific read, by the way -- and giving Irving the
audience of his dreams and a status equal to her own.
C-SPAN said it was only seeking fairness, but it was
asking Lipstadt to balance truth with a lie or history
with fiction. On this occasion, at least, Irving did what
he could not do with his libel suit: silence Lipstadt. He
may still appear on C-SPAN, but Lipstadt will not -- a
victory for "balance" that only the truly unbalanced
could applaud.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35346-2005Mar14.html