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Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Since when is giving liars equal time regarded as "balance"?
Posted by Jill | 8:37 AM

Via Steve Gilliard comes this ghastly example of "fair and balanced" run completely amok:

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?' "

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.

[snip]

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.

[snip]

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.


This is the Swift Boat Liars, only worse. As Gilliard says, "Fairness is not rebuting truth with lies." Lies are not "the other side" or "an opposing view", they are LIES. And if Holocaust deniers can be designated by supposedly reputable outlets such as C-SPAN as simply "an opposing view", then facts are truly fungible, and whoever spouts the loudest bullshit in the loudest voice gets to claim his view as "factual."

Ron Suskind had no idea how right he was when he quoted the Bush Administration official about "creating our own reality." In the Age of Bush, Tom DeLay is a good, devout, moral Christian man being hounded by evil power-hungry Democrats; veteran and war hero John Kerry is a traitor while cokehead alcoholic deserter George W. Bush is a military hero; Saddam Hussein really DID have weapons of mass destruction; slaves in America were happy; and Hitler's death camps never existed.

There are still a few people alive, however, who bear the tattoos attesting to the existence of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and the other camps whose names we know so well. Once those people are gone, who will testify for the truth?
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