C-SPAN ON TRIAL

"You know how important fairness and balance is at C-SPAN," executive producer Connie Doebele told Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. "We work very, very hard at this. We ask ourselves, 'Is there an opposing view of this?'"

"As luck would have it, there was," Cohen wrote in his column on Tuesday, "Balance of the Absurd":

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.

When Lipstadt learned that C-SPAN's notion of fair and balanced meant airing her March 16 talk at Harvard along with Irving's March 12 speech at a diner in Atlanta, she refused to have her talk videotaped for C-SPAN's "Book TV" program. The program would have helped her promote her recently published "History on Trial," which chronicles the libel case Irving brought against her for citing him, in her 1993 book "Denying the Holocaust," as an anti-Semitic racist who distorts history with lies.

Lipstadt proved the truth of her claim to the British court, where the case was tried. The court not only ruled in Lipstadt's favor but, as Cohen notes, also ruled that Irving was "anti-Semitic and racist." In fact, anyone who has followed Irving's career even slightly knows he often appears as an invited speaker at events organized by white supremacists.

Since the publication of Cohen's column, Tamar Lewin reports in this morning's New York Times, more than 200 historians have signed a petition protesting the network's plan to broadcast Irving's speech. "Falsifiers of history cannot 'balance' histories," the petition is quoted as saying. "Falsehoods cannot 'balance' the truth."

Cohen wrote:

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?

The protest petition has been delivered to Doebele, who may be having second thoughts. C-SPAN taped Irving's speech, but a network spokesman now tells Lewin that plans to air it are uncertain. Unfortunately, damage has already been done. As Cohen wrote, "On this occasion, at least, Irving did what he could not do with his libel suit: silence Lipstadt."