this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
196 points (98.0% liked)
A Comm for Historymemes
2411 readers
381 users here now
A place to share history memes!
Rules:
-
No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, assorted bigotry, etc.
-
No fascism, atrocity denial, etc.
-
Tag NSFW pics as NSFW.
-
Follow all Lemmy.world rules.
Banner courtesy of @setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'd like to think our standard of proof has increased, but that really doesn't seem to be the case if you pay attention to the news
Academic historical analysis is so wildly different from 24/7 news headlines.
What concerns me really is that a lot of our relatively recent history comes from journalists. As in these journalists, actual journalist mind you, go out do reporting do interviews and write there articles and then later they compile it all into first had accounts that are the bases of our history for a lot of things. Think John Reed.
Yet I wonder if they exist anymore. I know some of them still do. But much much reduced. So how's history going to be recorded really? If you have no first hand accounts what gets written down? Is it just the government propaganda?
Journalism is not history, and vice versa. They are different disciplines, with different goals and methodologies. Don't confuse the work journalists do with the work of historians, and vice versa. John Reed's account of the Russian Revolution is an invaluable source for historians, of course, but it is only one such source, and any history which overly relies upon it risks giving a biased account. Not to say that that doesn't happen, but it's explicitly antithetical to the notional goal of practicing history. No such compunction affects journalism, where the creation of a biased account is not only tolerated, sometimes it's encouraged, or the entire purpose of a work (as it was when Reed was giving his account of Ten Days That Shook the World).
Reed even calls out his own bias in the preface of his book. He was a devoted Socialist, and his sympathies were with the reds. That affected his account. Furthermore, while he could comment on the Revolution from his vantage point (embedded with Bolsheviks as he was), he's not necessarily the most reliable (or informed) narrator of what was happening on the Tsarist side of the conflict, simply by virtue of not having access to that perspective in the moment. That doesn't change the value of his journalism, but it does impinge it's value as a comprehensive history.
None of what you said is even remotely new. That's been the case since the beginning of written history.
Never said it was new. I specifically mentioned John Reed. Though I would question your assertion that investigative journalism has been around since the beginning of written history.
That's just a semantics argument.
All arguments are semantic arguments if you're pedantic enough.
Over time, you tend to develop more sources and a diversity of views. That's why we don't remember the USS Maine as a villainous attack by the nefarious Spaniard to this day, but recognize it as a result of poor military maintenance and crew training combined with intense yellow journalist agitprop.
this is why you have to go out yourself and see what's going on in the streets. you have to both talk to people in order to disseminate the truth, and you have to go out and talk to people to find the truth. look for the marginalized people in your community. they have witnessed and experienced things that the powers that be deny ever happening.
I feel like this mindset just abrogates responsibility.
how so? because the idea is that everyone is responsible and has to act on that responsible. to be uninformed, or to allow others to be uninformed is irresponsible and makes you and your community vulnerable to manipulation
Just like how only the better made pottery or stone writings of history have survived to be studied, only the better written histories of that time have survived. So our perspective is skewed that they had no bad historians, but they probably had just as many egotistical opinion driven writings as we do now. They are all just the dust we found in the various hearths.