All Historians are Journalists

Throughout this semester, I have been overwhelmed by what I learn in Media Studies class. However, most of the books I have read in this class concentrated on television. McKibben, Gitlin, McChesney and Bourdieu all put emphasis on television and how they alter our perceptions. Though this is the case, I started wondering about what other medium has a large or possibly larger impact on our perception of the world. The Print Media presentation on November 13th 2008 made me realized that although little emphasis has been put in print media, it still is a predominant source of today’s education. Take this Media Studies class for instance; all students are assigned 5 books to read throughout the semester. It is quite clear that although many statistics and researches proved to show how print media receives less and less attention year after year, print media is still the fundamental source of the school educational system.

Print media, similar to other types of media, get updated as time passes by. The books we are reading today will definitely be different from those that our parent read or our grandparents read. This is mainly due to new discoveries, innovations or even evidences that rejected traditional views. However, one of the books that also get updated is history books. This really bothers me because no matter how much I try to make sense of it, I cannot understand what makes one part of history more important than another. What gets written on history books, what get excluded and more importantly, can the past really be known?

Google dictionary define history as “the aggregate of past event,” but I disagree. I would rather define history as “the biased perception of the past through the point of view of journalists in the present.” Some people might call these journalists historians, but I cannot really see the different. I believe that historian is just journalist that writes about history. And as McChesney would argue, “decision making is an inescapable part of the journalism process, and some values have to be promoted when deciding why one story rates front-page treatment while another is ignored” (68). Comparable to journalist, decision making is also an inescapable part of historian. Perhaps one could even argue that historian makes a larger decision of deciding why one event gets to go in the book while another is ignored. Basically what I am asking is what makes Hitler’s life and history more important than mine?

One of the relatively recent events that cause controversy is when China decided to rewrite its history books. “Socialism has been reduced to a single chapter” while “Mao Zedong is only in the etiquette chapter” (Bnet). One of the government spokesmen even claims that “the new history is less ideological, and that suits the political goals of today." The changes “are part of a broader effort by the Chinese government to promote a more stable, less violent view of Chinese history that serves today's economic and political goals” (Bnet). Despite the Chinese government’s intentions, these reasons resemble many characteristic of propaganda presented by Ellul in his book “The Characteristic of Propaganda.”

This event has really made me wonder whether my perception of the past is the right one. Because if it is true that the main reason we study history is so that we learn from it and stop ourselves from repeating the mistakes, wouldn’t it be wise to learn from the right history? Though this is the case, McChesney would argue that it is impossible to know what the right history is since “it is impossible for [anyone] to detect the actual values at play that determine what makes up history books. Therefore, I believe that the best thing anyone could do to learn about history is to learn it from as much sources as possible. Moreover, I also think that every argument made about good journalist and how it requires a “vigorous public debate” can and should be made about historian also (McChesney 252). Lastly, to answer the question I posted earlier; I believed that the past cannot really be known.