Liberals love to insist that they are on the “right side of history,” and their self-confidence is based on liberal dominance among historians. Just as the liberal media dominates our assessment of daily developments, liberals count on their historians to dominate our assessment of the decades that lie behind us.
It’s not just about historians, it’s about our taxpayer-funded storytellers like insufferable PBS documentarian Ken Burns. On the eve of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, NPR’s “Morning Edition” portrayed him as an American treasure without bias. So let’s ignore the propaganda film about Ted Kennedy he made for the 2008 Democratic National Convention, in which, according to Politico, Kennedy was portrayed as “a modern-day Ulysses who brings his party home to the harbor.”
It’s quite bold to operate a metaphor like that with Teddy.
Please note that in 2020, Burns donated $2,800 to Republicans Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sarah Gideon, who were trying to unseat Sen. Susan Collins. Or his routine $5,000 donations to the New Hampshire Democratic Party, the state where he lives.
On “Morning Edition,” Burns praised the optimism of Franklin D. Roosevelt, then took up Roosevelt’s inspirational mantle and spread it around Joe Biden, saying: “Joe Biden’s biography… has been defined by loss and suffering, but (with) the positive power to say: What are you going to do? You can’t curl up into a ball… So let’s put one foot in front of the other and see what we can do is part of Roosevelt’s vital greatness and that optimism is at its core. You can hear echoes of this in Joe Biden.”
That same morning, the Washington Post ran a front-page roundup of historians with the headline, “It’s not just Trump who will face the judgment call of history: Scholars say America’s commitment to democracy should also be examined.” Reporter David Nakamura called out the usual liberal and left suspects:
1. Douglas Brinkley, CNN historian and unofficial staff historian for John Kerry’s 2004 campaign, with his hagiography “Tour of Duty.” Brinkley ranks outgoing President Donald Trump last among presidents who are “harming the country.”
2. Matthew Dallek, a “political historian” at George Washington University who is political enough to suggest that all 74 million Trump voters question the health of our democracy. Voting for Republicans proves our democracy is “extremely fragile.” Democracy equals Democratic victory.
3. Joseph Crespino, a history professor at Emory University, who donated $500 to liberal Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio in 2018. He worries that documenting Trump’s decision-making could be hard because “he’s not a reader or note-taker or note-taker. Trump doesn’t read? That’s a bit exaggerated, isn’t it? But that’s standard Washington Post analysis.
4. Nicole Hemmer, “a historian specializing in conservative media and working on the oral history of the Obama presidency at Columbia University.” Hemmer is Brian Stelter’s favorite on CNN. He says Trump and his movement show that “we can understand that there has been racism, fascism and anti-democratic forces throughout American history, and he claims to draw on these powerful influences.”
5. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “a historian at New York University who studies fascism,” reiterates that Trump “can be best understood in comparison to figures with authoritarian views abroad.”
6. Leah Wright Rigueur, “a professor of American history at Brandeis University,” says Trump is a case study in “the naked, unadulterated pursuit of power and self-interest at the cost of 400,000 lives and at the expense of the American Union.”
In compact, The Post collects stories much like the Democratic National Committee would. There is no objection. There is only one view of history that is “factual” and fits together, like a Ken Burns propaganda film for PBS.
Tim Graham is the director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and editor-in-chief of the NewsBusters.org blog.
