NPR’s ombudsman weighs in on a flawed story about the passing of one of America’s finest, and most courageous, historians.
It probably won’t surprise anybody to learn that the historian Howard Zinn is a hero to many of us who regularly wander through the Center for Justice. Suffice to say that it is a large part of the Center’s mission (with our humble reach and resources) to stick up for the people that Howard Zinn devoted his life to sticking up for.
As a history teacher at Spellman College in the early ’60s, Zinn was terminated for “insubordination” after he began working alongside his African-American students to push for desegregation in Atlanta. But most of us got to know him through his popular 1980 book, “A People’s History of the United States,” because it answered some questions for us that our traditional history lessons and texts had rushed past or glossed over.
To pick one example, here’s part of Howard Zinn’s answer to the question of what happened to the Native Americans on the mid-Atlantic coast.
On October 1, 1938, the first detachment set out in what was to be known as the Trail of Tears. As they moved westward, they began to die–of sickness, of drought, of the heat, of exposure. There were 645 wagons, and people marching alongside. Survivors, years later, told of halting at the edge of the Mississippi in the middle of winter, the river running full of ice, “hundreds of sick and dying penned up in wagons or stretched upon the ground. Grant Foreman, the leading authority on Indian removal, estimates that during confinement in the stockade or on the march westward four thousand Cherokee died.
In December 1938, President Van Buren spoke to Congress: “It affords sincere pleasure to apprise the Congress of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi. The measures authorized by Congress at its last session have had the happiest effects.”
One way to describe Howard Zinn as a historian is that he wasn’t content to let the victors write history, or let their triumphalism strangle the moral questions about the broken lives and cultures left in their wake. If you believe in the search for truth, then you have to admire Howard Zinn’s life work.
So, you can imagine how we felt when National Public Radio broadcast a story/obituary about Zinn on January 28th, the day after he died at the age of 87. In addition to some sloppy attribution in the piece, NPR allowed the conservative firebrand David Horowitz to have air time to say that there is “absolutely nothing” about Zinn’s life work that was worthy of respect.
“Zinn represents a fringe mentality,” Horowitz said, “which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse.”
Horowitz’s slander cuts pretty close to the broiling divide that many of us see in American culture and politics, where a full-throated, “love it or leave it” view of American militarism and unchecked corporate voraciousness is invoked like a steamroller to flatten dissent and pave over anything that accounts for the interests of working people and minorities.
The hateful comment says a lot about Horowitz and how frustrated he is that Zinn’s work was popular and influential.
But the story itself, many listeners thought, also said something about National Public Radio. NPR is certainly well apart from most commercial media in finding and telling stories like the ones Zinn himself preferred to focus upon. But it more than occasionally exhibits a deference to “balance” that seems to require that no liberal or progressive view of the world go unchallenged by a reliably right wing voice, even a shrill one.
And that’s what appeared to be playing out on Howard Zinn’s life, just in the hours after his sudden death (he was on a speaking tour at the time) occurred.
Allison Keyes’s story provoked an eruption of anger among NPR listeners, resulting in hundreds of emails and phone calls.
Yesterday, NPR’s ombudsman, Alicia Shephard addressed the fracas and, to her credit, criticized the network and Keyes (who, interestingly, refused to be interviewed by Shephard) for airing a “flawed obituary” that was “not respectful” of Zinn.
She also quoted the Washington Post’s obituary editor, Adam Bernstein, who heard Keyes’s obit when it aired.
“I think the Zinn story misses the mark for two reasons,” he told Shephard. “It quotes people with a vested interest [another was Zinn's friend, writer and linguist Noam Chomsky] in celebrating the man and then quotes a man who vividly despises what Zinn represents.” About the Horowitz quote, Bernstein said, it “seems a low blow that doesn’t add much insight to the reader or listener.”
First, good for NPR and Shephard for taking this up. This business of who gets contacted to be a source for a given story is, by itself, a large part of whether journalism works or fails. In the case of Zinn’s rushed obituary, you get to see how this particular story went awry.
Personally, my first and second reaction to Horowitz’s nasty remark was to be angry at NPR and to hurt for Zinn and his loved ones. Absent convictions for homicide or other dark crimes, I would think each of us deserve a level of respect upon our passing that was missing from NPR’s piece on Howard Zinn.
Yet, on third thought, I’m also grateful that this badly bungled story exposed the blue streak of hatred that runs in zealots like David Horowitz, who bring such malice aforethought to the discussion of ideas, history, and the pursuit of truth–especially the harder truths that Howard Zinn was determined to focus our attention upon. One measure of a great man is the nature of his enemies.
–Tim Connor
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