C-SPAN ON TRIAL

Fox News, which registered "Fair & Balanced" as its trademark, must have done a double-take when C-SPAN tried to poach the phrase earlier this week. In a ludicrous attempt to "balance" its coverage of a lecture by Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt, C-SPAN said it would pair it with a speech by Holocaust denier David Irving, a so-called historian who says of Auschwitz, "It's baloney. It's a legend."

"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."

March 18, 2005 11:19 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
HERMAN WOUK'S LATEST 
It's hard to say which comes off worse in Herman Wouk's latest novel, his first in a decade: the U.S. Congress or the American press. "A Hole in Texas" offers the choice between two emblematic stereotypes: a red-faced opportunist who heads the House Armed Services Committee and a mustachioed investigative reporter for the Washington Post.
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