I expressed a lot of excitement about the New York Times’ coverage of Haiti’s history earlier this week, and as a result, didn’t underscore how disappointing it was in another respect. Namely, that it neither credited existing work by historians for having made the same arguments working with the same evidence (historians who actually aided the Times in its investigation) nor did it credit, for the most part, Haitians themselves for having long made the same anguished response to generations of ideological abuse that the New York Times itself often showcased throughout the 20th Century. Amy Wilentz makes this last point incisively in a New Republic essay and the Times itself, somewhat churlishly, concedes that historians might have a (minor) point about their work being undercredited.
The Times’ explanation that they can’t possibly credit hundreds of interviews or note all the materials they consulted is almost as infuriating as the original set of articles. First, because the original articles infuriated historians, scholars and intellectuals due to the constant trumpeting of the idea that the New York Times had uncovered truths that no one really knew until this moment. That’s not about having a full bibliography, that’s about making false claims that you’re not entitled to make, and that’s an especially bad look in a set of essays that otherwise aim to underscore truths that most of the world, especially France and the United States, have tried to suppress. The Times is a welcome addition to the struggle to have those truths known, but not if it’s going to claim to be the first to know them. The Times editor Michael Slackman says “we are under no illusion that we are the first to tackle this topic”. Could have fooled me: the articles repeatedly sounded as if that illusion had taken hold in the offices on Eighth Avenue.
More importantly, in a publication that has otherwise made some interesting moves to adapt itself to digital distribution, the explanation that you have no room to give full credit to your sources in an article that focuses on evidence is unacceptable. Sure, if you must, in the print edition, say “for a full listing of historical scholarship consulted in the making of these articles, look at the digital bibliography at the following URL”. But the digital edition can have that list. This is a paradigm shift that journalism needs to adopt generally, precisely to fight against the rise of fake news where the evidence for reporting cannot just be “I spoke to some people and trust me they all said X”. I know the list of everyone the reporters spoke to and every piece of evidence they read was kept by the people who wrote the articles, so provide it. If it turns out that they didn’t keep notes or a log of conversations with historians like Mary Lewis, that’s a professional misstep in its own right.
I get the vague sense that the NYT position is that this is just professors being hidebound or nit-picking, or that the professional standards of journalists trump the professional standards of scholars if something with scholarly content appears in a journalistic venue. I fully understand why many of my colleagues found that attitude so profoundly infuriating.
The first reason is that the NYT (and many other mainstream publications) frequently gives voice to the complaint that scholars are too consumed by highly specialized research, too fond of their own jargon, too reluctant to translate their work for wider publics, too locked up in their ivory tower. But when scholars turn out to have been doing work that all along was of great importance to public debate, and that was perfectly readable—as readable as any journalist’s rewriting or rewording—they get ignored or sidelined. Professionals who style themselves as bringing scholarship to wider publics, whether it’s journalists or general non-fiction writers like Malcolm Gladwell, have a strong vested interest in maintaining that professors need that kind of translational work and therefore in maintaining the idea that scholarship in its “natural state” is unfit for wider publics. In a case like this one, this attitude really feels like a Catch-22, we get hit coming and going. Very few of us write to make money from our scholarship. For most of us—especially historians—the payoff is reputational. You can’t earn reputation if you don’t get credit. When your work is important to a major series of essays published in the dominant newspaper of our moment, that credit is due, as surely as a bill.
It’s more than just the individual payoff, however. There’s a long-standing argument that what distinguished historians in particular is that whatever their theoretical, political or interpretative disagreeements, they share a common commitment to producing knowledge from evidence. Moreover, we have a very strong sense that we are building knowledge collaboratively, collectively, and accumulatively. Citation is not just how we pay off reputational debts or stay inside a professional code about academic honesty. Citation is how we make truth through decentralized assemblies. We connect our work to other work because that’s what makes it valuable and it is what lets us know more. Not all disciplines approach work that way. New work in many scientific fields essentially absorbs and replaces older work. People get credit, but you don’t need to trace the entire history of how what is known now came to be known. (Older materials in science libraries often gather dust unless historians or other non-scientists want to look at them.) Some disciplines revisit older work that established an important method or represented an important theoretical point-of-view, but do not necessarily hold that recent work is the accumulation of everything that has come before it. Historians are strongly attached to historiography, the history of our historical knowledge, because it’s how we create historical truth.
If journalists want to play in our yard, it’s not just that they should show some respect for the people already playing. They need to understand why the rules are what they are. We’re not being selfish or snobbish. We’re saying that if you want to hit a basketball with a tennis racket and claim that’s a three-point shot, you don’t know what game you’re playing and why it works the way it does.
Image credit: "UNESCO Special Envoy Visits Haiti's Historic Sites" by United Nations Photo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
You are right, Tim. Yet it is a compilation of important arguments and histories in one place. As is becoming clear, there is knowledge and then there is knowledge that finds its way onto the front page of the NYT. The differences can be glaring, embarrassing, and infuriating.
It seems clear that the claims about originality by the NYT are too strong there, but the claims about academic norms seem too strong here. It's definitely not a norm that every work you read while working on a project has to be cited, nor that everyone you speak to about the project has to be acknowledged. Some work provides a general bibliography on a topic as well a specific citations, but the academic norm is to cite both to defend specific claims made and to explicitly situate ones work in the broader history of the literature, and there are many different discipline-specific standards for how much citation that actually involves. I don't think there's any shared norms about acknowledgements.
On Twitter, many academics seem to want, for fairly understandable reasons related to how people are rewarded in academia, a different norm where everyone who speaks to a reporter in a useful way gets their name in something that they can show to their dean. And maybe journalists should switch to that norm. But it's not the current norm and it's also not the norm that academics have in their own work.