Progressives have been annoyed, for some time now, that pro-war pundits keep their jobs no matter how often they’re wrong: about Iraq, foreign policy more broadly, or, come to think of it, just about anything else that pops into their heads. Not only that, but said pundits maintain their prestige, as though their reputations exist independent of their work product. Which, I’ll grant you, is quite odd, because a pundit’s words and ideas should be the very foundation of their reputation. If their opinions are rotten, in other words, the foundation should crumble.
Alas, the relationship between cause and effect, in Punditland at least, has apparently been been severed. So it’s not surprising to hear that Bill Kristol is leaving Time for a post at the New York Times, bastion of American liberalism.
Matthew Yglesias writes about this today:
After all, everyone knows that conservative pundits don’t get held accountable for saying tons and tons of wrong stuff — that’s not how it works. Instead, you march through the institutions of conservatism by being loyal to the Cause, and then eventually mainstream organizations decide they need to contain representatives of the Cause and there you are on your perch. So it is in the newsweeklies, so it is on the op-ed pages, and so it is on the Sunday shows.
Now let me be clear: I completely agree with Yglesias (and not just because he linked to us yesterday — thanks!). And I, too, find the phenomenon absolutely maddening. Particularly when it comes to someone like Bill Kristol, who’s nothing but an appendage of the Republican Party: more than a factotum, but far less than a vibrant intellectual. But I wonder: is it only conservatives who are immune from consequences? Or is there just a permanent pundit class?
That’s a serious question, by the way. Are there any recent examples of opinion makers, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum, who’ve been fired and relegated to obsurity for writing or saying silly things? Rather than, say, being cashiered for calling female basketball players “nappy-headed hos.”
Moving closer to home, are there historians who, after having established for themselves excellent (not just good, mind you) reputations, have completely fallen from grace? Tenure, of course, means that scholars have job security. So I’m thinking more of a case in which someone has truly lost intellectual standing after having once occupied a lofty perch. Such a fall, to make the comparison work, would have to be linked to a huge scholarly blunder — not illegal, immoral, or unethical conduct (which, as everyone knows, is the key to tenure).
Update (12:28 EST): I’ve just edited the first sentence of this post for style. It’s still not great, I know, but I can at least make my way through it now.
64 comments
December 29, 2007 at 7:51 am
ollie
Here is the deal with newspapers and the mainstream media: these days, they are more about entertainment than anything else. That is why WK gets to the NYT: people will read him. Whether he is ever right about anything is totally irrelevant.
December 29, 2007 at 7:56 am
Larry Cebula
These people are in the entertainment business, and so long as they keep an audience they keep their jobs. Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman are no better than Kristol.
December 29, 2007 at 8:10 am
Matt W
Are there any recent examples of opinion makers, regardless of whre they sit on the political spectrum, who’ve been fired and relegated to obsurity for writing or saying silly things?
The question isn’t whether there are opinion makers who’ve been fired and relegated to obscurity for saying silly things, but whether there are opinion makers who’ve been fired and relegated to obscurity for saying the wrong thing, for some value of “wrong.”
So… Eric Alterman was fired from MSNBC and is now at Media Matters.
Robert Scheer was fired from the LA Times and is now at the SF Chronicle and runs his own site, Truthdig. In an editorial page revamp, the LA Times hired JONAH FUCKING GOLDBERG, idiot extraordinaire.
Maybe what gets you fired is not saying something silly, but saying something that was right before the Pundit Consensus realized it was?
December 29, 2007 at 8:12 am
Matt W
Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman are no better than Kristol.
That’s just not true.
December 29, 2007 at 8:12 am
ac
It’s not strictly a case of a pundit, but there’s the James Watson case, which is also to do with race. That’s probably a function of that particular discourse, rather than something that works more broadly for wrong statements.
Martin Amis is also taking a lot of heat for some remarks about Muslims, but who knows whether it will hurt him in any way, in terms of his career.
December 29, 2007 at 8:19 am
matt w
But Amis hardly took any heat for a long time, and currently the people who pointed out that his remarks were horrible (and they were, really over the top) seem to be taking as much heat as Amis himself is. As d-squared says, Amis seems to be an example of the mysterious persistence of reputation more than the reverse.
December 29, 2007 at 8:41 am
Levi Stahl
Michael Bellesiles, maybe? Regardless of the right-wing animus driving the prosecution, it did seem that he made a lot of significant errors and possibly even intentionally fraudulent statements, and he fell hard and fast. (Though I could be misremembering all this?)
December 29, 2007 at 8:47 am
ChrisK
Michael Shermer (author of “Why People Believe Weird Things”) explains that smart people can believe weird, dumb things, but they often have sophisticated (though in the end, misguided) reasoning on why they believe the stupid idea.
I think of the NYT as a paper that sometimes hires smart people who might believe stupid things. But we readers are seemingly fascinated by the logic by which those writers come to their conclusions, and sometimes we too fall for the faulty logic. We like cleverly written bullshit.
December 29, 2007 at 8:48 am
ari
“Michael Bellesiles”
Now we’re talking. And what an incredibly weird case. Although, wait: his fall, within the scholarly community at least, seems to have been related to unethcial acts — not being wrong. Which isn’t to say he was right. Again, he didn’t get drummed out of the profession because his ideas were wrong. His demise was predicated on making up evidence. At least I think that’s so.
December 29, 2007 at 8:52 am
ari
“We like cleverly written bullshit.”
God, I hope so. (Note to self: become more clever.)
December 29, 2007 at 9:00 am
Levi Stahl
Yeah, you’re right–it does seem to be ethics rather than content that did him in.a
Although I guess you could argue that the fact that his ideas were wrong (in the eyes, that is, of the extremely active and forceful gun-advocacy movement) was the initial reason that people (specifically, if I remember right, the aforementioned gun advocates) starting tugging at the frayed edges of his research. By the time they’d tugged a bit, the holes were starting to be so obvious that even those who didn’t have a political beef with him had to start looking closely at his work as well.
December 29, 2007 at 9:06 am
ari
I suppose this is turning into a question of professional standards. For historians, lying about evidence is a killer — if you get caught. But just being wrong, or not very smart, or even both in tandem, so long as you’ve already banked an outstanding reputation, won’t cause you too much trouble (a good thing, as far as I’m concerned). I’m not sure that I can believe that’s the case. But, for the moment at least, I can’t think of counter-examples.
December 29, 2007 at 9:08 am
eric
I think you need to clarify what you want — do you really want people sacked for being wrong? Just at the moment I’m not sure I think this is a great idea. I think knowledge proceeds by people being interestingly wrong. I gather, for example, that Stephen Jay Gould’s big idea, punctuated equilibrium, may have been wrong. Say it was: I don’t think he should be per se punished for that, because it turned out to be fruitful in terms of getting people to refine their ideas about natural selection.
Or, closer to home (because I really don’t know anything about evolutionary biology) large chunks of Time on the Cross appear to have been wrong. Does that mean Fogel and Engerman should suffer some kind of professional sanction? I don’t think so.
December 29, 2007 at 9:20 am
ChrisK
I don’t want people sacked for being wrong. I dislike writers who have a theory, and collect evidence to prove it, without seriously considering alternatives.
Stephen Jay Gould’s idea, for example, of non-overlapping magisterium—the separation of biology and religion in evolution—was interesting because he really seemed to attempt sincerely to grapple with believers’ sincerity. He didn’t set up straw men cartoon creationists and knock them over with clever science.
Will Bill Kristol ever write and consider that he’s been a buffoon on some important matters of the world?
December 29, 2007 at 9:23 am
eric
Ah, what you want is intellectual honesty. That’s different from being right.
December 29, 2007 at 9:28 am
Matt w
But what Kristol and Tom Friedman do goes beyond being wrong in an interesting way, doesn’t it? Their arguments don’t even have the appearance of sense, and this is particularly apparent in retrospect. Or maybe what I’m saying is, when Friedman refuses to acknowledge error, or when he keeps saying that the next six months of the war should be decisive, he’s being grossly irresponsible and should be canned.
Plus people have been fired for being right, which is not conducive to good op-eddery.
Anyway, I thought the question was whether people who’ve been wrong have suffered serious informal sanctions, like loss of reputation? I’ve seen it claimed that Gould’s reputation really did suffer among scientists.
December 29, 2007 at 9:29 am
Matt w
pwned by ChrisK and eric.
December 29, 2007 at 9:31 am
ChrisK
Yes, and I know intellectual honesty isn’t easy. I mean, we REALLY REALLY do think we’re right on issues we hold dear.
But if NYT is paying and promoting me, it’s time to listen to my detractors very seriously.
December 29, 2007 at 9:38 am
eric
Yes, and I don’t want to say that the pundit class is properly run. But I don’t necessarily want this to bleed over into a discussion of what’s wrong with academia. Which is where Ari seemed to be taking it.
December 29, 2007 at 9:39 am
eric
Previous comment to Matt W.
But if NYT is paying and promoting me, it’s time to listen to my detractors very seriously.
Au contraire! If NYT is paying and promoting you, your detractors are ipso facto wrong.
December 29, 2007 at 9:53 am
ari
No, I wasn’t saying that historians should be fired for being wrong. I was, as Matt w* says, talking about reputation, which seems to be immune, amongst the top-shelf scholars, immutable. Or not. It was really just idle speculation. Remember: Ari is glib.
* Now with an upper-case “M.” Something really is weird with the comments feature on the site. But that is a nice “Home” button on the bottom. Well done. And thank you.
December 29, 2007 at 9:56 am
eric
I was … talking about reputation, which seems to be immune, amongst the top-shelf scholars, immutable
To test this you’d want to show a top-shelf scholar who’d committed a serious, known blunder then failed to suffer appropriate reputational consequences. Although ideally you’d want n to exceed one.
December 29, 2007 at 9:59 am
ari
Right. That’s why I asked the question. I’m genuinenly curious but can’t think of the data points myself.
December 29, 2007 at 10:04 am
Matt w
Now with an upper-case “M.” Something really is weird with the comments feature on the site.
No, that’s because my computer is moderately goofed and I keep quitting out of my browser to try and make that stupid beachball go away. So sometimes I’m logged in, sometimes I’m not, and the different browsers remember different versions of my name.
It’s been suggested that if I quit MS Word things will get better, but MS Word is what I’m supposed to be working in. Such as it is.
December 29, 2007 at 10:34 am
ari
And also, getting back to Eric’s point, I think what I’m saying, at least in part, is that the Iraq punditry is worse, both in quality and quantity, than anything I can think of that happens in the academy. Reputedly great historians often write a bad book, even two in a row. But they don’t often spend season after season telling the same horribly wrong story, ignoring all of their peers who bring forth evidence undermining their contested thesis, and still maintain their great reputations. At least not that I can think of. Then again, scholarly squabbles are often far more obscure than that, contested over interstitial bits, rather than something so obvious, or so public, as the Iraq debate.
A related, but somewhat different, point: the nature of reputation, generally speaking, fascinate me. Eric and I have often talked about the workings of institutional reputation, why it is that ceratin places maintain their good name long after the goodness is gone. The same, it seems, holds true for individuals — absent some sort of public scandal, like Bellesiles manufacturing evidence and then failing, again publicly, effectively to cover up having done so.
(I’m not ignoring your beachball, Matt. There, I’ve just batted it back to you.)
December 29, 2007 at 10:36 am
ChrisK
eric or ari, give a hypothetical “serious, known blunder,” and what a hypothetical “failure to suffer an appropriate reputational consequence”
I think I know what you mean, but…
December 29, 2007 at 10:43 am
Ben Alpers
How about Charles Beard, whose posthumous fall from grace had much to do with his last book, President Roosevelt and the Coming of War (1948). Or was Beard’s problem not his factual incorrectness, but his political incorrectness? Or perhaps a professionally deadly combination of the two?
December 29, 2007 at 10:56 am
Matt w
Reputedly great historians often write a bad book, even two in a row. But they don’t often spend season after season telling the same horribly wrong story, ignoring all of their peers who bring forth evidence undermining their contested thesis, and still maintain their great reputations. At least not that I can think of.
Bernard Lewis? Obviously he is a member of another set. And I don’t really know whether his story is horribly wrong and whether he’s maintained his reputation among his peers.
Niall Ferguson? Same caveats apply, except that I can say that he must still have his reputation, since people keep hiring him.
December 29, 2007 at 11:00 am
Ben Alpers
Another interesting case is that of David Abraham, covered extensively in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream. It’s been a while since I’ve read about the case and I don’t have the book handy, but here’s my memory of its details (others more familiar with it, please correct anything I get wrong).
A junior faculty member at Princeton at the time, Abraham was essentially drummed out of the profession for being wrong and sloppy…and for reaching different conclusions from those reached by the author of a competing book.
Abraham’s Collapse of the Weimar Republic argued that big business played a crucial role in supporting the rise of Hitler. The other scholar discovered serious problems with Abraham’s evidence. As far as I remember, no ethical issues were raised. Abraham was able to correct the mistakes, and the book was reissued in a corrected, revised edition, which is still in print (thus making the case fundamentally different from the Bellisles matter). But by that time the damage had been done, in part because the senior scholar had made it his personal mission to make sure that Abraham would neither get tenure nor be hired by another institution. Abraham retooled himself and became a law professor.
Now this is a story involving a junior faculty member, not an established scholar. But it quickly became famous within the profession, which is why Novick took it up in his book.
In the interest of full disclosure, years after all this happened I came to know and like David. Although teaching at the University of Miami’s Law School, he lived in Princeton and played softball with me on the Revolting Masses, one of the History Department’s softball teams. It speaks well of both David and the History Department that, despite everything that had happened a decade earlier, they remained on excellent terms. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his earlier career as an historian never came up in conversation and I can claim no special insight into it whatsoever.
December 29, 2007 at 11:06 am
Amos Anan
I’m sure there are hundreds of “liberals” that have lost whatever position they had for expressing a view contrary to the “party” line. Part of making people “nonpersons” is that they fall from view and memory. I’m surprised Dan Rather hasn’t been mentioned. His fall from great heights was based on unproven doubts about the authenticity of evidence he presented, no matter how much the evidence content seemed accurate. And Rather was far from a “liberal,” other than having a bias towards facts.
December 29, 2007 at 11:18 am
eric
Ah, yes, the Abraham case. Okay. Now, as I understand it (1) that was extraordinary, and it happened only because the other scholar made it a personal concern of his; (2) is that how you think it should always be — should there be a professional body dedicated to performing such inquiries?
Also, of course, that’s the opposite of what Ari is talking about — are there examples in academia of failing upward — of being consistently wrong, refusing to admit it, and moving up anyway?
December 29, 2007 at 11:21 am
Ben Alpers
There are plenty of journalistic falls from grace–Ashleigh Banfield is another interesting case–but the original question was about pundits falling from grace for being repeatedly factually incorrect or for saying “silly things.”
And so far I haven’t been able to come up with a good example of that happening.
December 29, 2007 at 11:29 am
Ben Alpers
The Abraham case seems to me precisely how issues of sloppiness should not be handled, though I’m not sure that I could say how they should optimally be handled.
And you’re right, Eric. It is the opposite of what Ari is talking about.
Perhaps to find historical careers that resemble those of pundits one should look at historian-pundits. What’s Victor Davis Hanson’s reputation among military historians and historians of the ancient world?
December 29, 2007 at 11:39 am
eric
What’s Victor Davis Hanson’s reputation among military historians and historians of the ancient world?
Setting up the silbey signal now….
December 29, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Greg Miller
Jon Wiener covered this subject in Historians in Trouble. I haven’t had tome to read it carefully (although I did peruse it during one of the Harry Potter extravaganza’s, so I had time for quite a bit of it), but as I recall, Wiener argues that Bellesaile’s mistakes were relatively minor (Bellesaile has subsequently self-published an updated edition of Unarmed America, in which he allegedly provides better documentation of his arguement). I recall that Wiener compared the treatment of Bellesaile with Joseph Ellis and his claims in the classroom to have served in Vietnam, as well as with Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin.
December 29, 2007 at 1:20 pm
urbino
Ambrose, Goodwin, and Ellis came to my mind, too, but they’re more popularizers than scholars, nicht wahr?
I think it’s going to be able to come up with any contemporary names. Everything’s so contested, anymore, there’s literally almost nothing one can say that won’t be accepted as orthodox in some community — whether of pundits and their readers, or of scholars (who, of course, have no readers except each other). It provides a safety net; there’s not far to fall.
The best contemporary example I can think of is Michael Behe, the biochemist at Lehigh who became the darling of creationists everywhere. As I understand it, he’s become a joke within his department and, obviously, in the scientific community more generally. Still, with the support of the creationist community, has he really fallen all that far? In some ways, he’s even failed up.
December 29, 2007 at 1:21 pm
urbino
I think it’s going to be able to come up with any contemporary names.
That should read, “I think it’s going to be difficult to come up with…”
December 29, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Hank
Kristol should not be thought of as anything remotely analogous to a scholar. He is rather a malignant modern example of that old American type, the booster. He works hand in hand with those other American types, the hustlers.
The hustlers sell the weapons and provide the services in the wars the boosters convince the people to buy. The hustlers then throw some cash at the boosters by advertising in their journals and supporting their “think” tanks.
Most of these people aren’t out-and-out swindlers–they really believe their own guff. Like promoters of dry farming, they promise paradise just over the next rise (with their help), and they genuinely believe it.
They only pay attention to the success stories that emerge, and if they have to attend to a failure, they blame someone else: you didn’t apply yourself, the people didn’t believe hard enough, the president didn’t follow my advice assiduously enough, snakes in the grass sabotaged the effort, etc., etc.
December 29, 2007 at 2:24 pm
urbino
Kristol should not be thought of as anything remotely analogous to a scholar.
That’s certainly true. I don’t think that’s what Ari was suggesting.
December 29, 2007 at 2:33 pm
silbey
Among military historians, Hanson has a mixed reputation. His early work is considered solid and thought-provoking. I don’t know that I agree with his arguments in them (and there’s a bit of Western triumphalism even there), but they’re good analyses. These include:
Hanson, Victor Davis. Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece. Vol. Biblioteca di studi antichi ; 40, Pisa: Giardini, 1983.
Hanson, Victor Davis. The Western Way of War : Infantry Battle in Classical Greece. 1st ed ed. New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1989.
Hanson, Victor Davis. Hoplites : The Classical Greek Battle Experience. London ; New York: Routledge, 1991.
The books he has written since the mid-1990s have not been taken terribly seriously by military historians (with one exception, on which more later), for the very good reason that they’re not worth taking terribly seriously. Well, okay, perhaps you want more of an analysis than that? What he’s written since the 1990s have really been by Victor Davis Hanson, professional pundit. As such, they haven’t really contributed anything to pushing forward military history.
The one exception to this has been _Carnage and Culture_ (Hanson, Victor Davis. Carnage and Culture : Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. 1st ed ed. New York: Doubleday, 2001.) which did make a serious historical argument. A lot of historians find that argument seriously flawed (John Lynn enough so that he was compelled to write a book-length response: Lynn, John A. Battle : A History of Combat and Culture. Rev. and updated ed ed. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2004. Note the snarky subtitle), but something with which it was worth engaging.
Reverberating through all of this, of course, are Hanson’s remarkably poltroonish rantings in a variety of “public intellectual” spaces. They make it hard to take anything Hanson has done or is doing seriously, but luckily for military historians, he seems less interested in doing anything serious and more interested in the poltroonish rantings.
He is, in some ways, like John Keegan, who did excellent work to start off with, and then detoured very thoroughly into a kind of simplified public history (though he was always light years better than Hanson). Keegan never became a parody; Hanson seems to have sought after it.
December 29, 2007 at 3:03 pm
ari
Silbey = Funny. Poltroonish = Underused.
Also, where does one apply to become a parody? Is there graduate training involved? Or just a willingness to cast one’s dignity to wind?
December 29, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Ben Alpers
Also, where does one apply to become a parody? Is there graduate training involved? Or just a willingness to cast one’s dignity to wind?
And does achieving parody status automatically include the Hoover Institution Chair, or is getting that a separate process?
December 29, 2007 at 3:35 pm
silbey
“Silbey = Funny”
Thank yew, thank yew, I’ll be here all week. Matinee on Sunday.
“Poltroonish = Underused”
I’d always thought so. After my using it twice, I suspect it’s slightly overused, but…
To become a parody, one has to have gone to Unseen University. In a pinch, either the Hoover Institute or the Cato Institute will serve.
December 29, 2007 at 3:41 pm
russell
Are there any recent examples of opinion makers, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum, who’ve been fired and relegated to obsurity for writing or saying silly things?
As mentioned upthread, Dan Rather. Not for saying something silly, but for saying something based on less than credible evidence.
Also, where does one apply to become a parody?
Apparently, the NYT editorial board.
The NYT lost me after the Judith Miller episode, and I was once a dedicated daily reader of theirs. To say that they are liberal implies that they actually have a principled editorial stance. They don’t. Their overriding goal over the last seven years seems to have been making sure that noone can accuse them of not being “even handed”.
They’re weak beer at a time when something stronger is called for. Not necessarily a strong partisan stance, just a basic, decent level of editorial rigor.
Kristol is, no doubt, an intelligent man, but he is a shill. I’m sorry to see him at the NYT.
Thanks –
December 29, 2007 at 3:51 pm
ari
Upon clicking on your name, russell, I’m transported to a lovely spot. Where, if you don’t mind my asking, is that?
As for Dan Rather, that was a telling episdoe, I suppose. And I think that historians may read his firing as evidence of the hyper-patriotism of the moment, rather than any serious journalistic lapse. That said, hasn’t he always been something of a parody, what with the cornpone expressions and the lashing himself to poles during gales?
December 29, 2007 at 4:13 pm
urbino
hasn’t he always been something of a parody
I always thought so. Others seemed to take him pretty seriously, though.
December 29, 2007 at 5:38 pm
Amos Anan
My recollection of Dan Rather was that his claim to fame was a press conference comeback to a Richard Nixon jibe. It wasn’t terribly eloquent, on the level of “Oh yeah! Says you!” Still, it was a time when few dared any public comebacks to Nixon.
As for going at Rather as a parody, consider the theme of this thread and ask yourself how you would describe the core of Republican public dialog and the purveyors of that dialog. Parody would be a gross simplification of the level of cartoon character fundamentals involved. And that, without considering the deadly malevolence involved.
Dan Rather is a Mount Everest of forthright integrity compared to the “big shit pile” (sorry Atrios) that is the American conservative community.
December 29, 2007 at 5:51 pm
ari
Shorter Amos: It’s all relative. Which is exactly right.
December 29, 2007 at 5:54 pm
Hank
Not sure what support from this source means, but Peggy Noonan used to be his assistant and counts him a friend.
December 29, 2007 at 6:10 pm
andrew
Fogel, mentioned by Eric above, is an interesting case. Did his reputation among historians fall a bit after Time on the Cross? Probably, but in economics he went on to win the Nobel. And to the extent that his reputation fell among non-economic historians,* it matched a decline in the standing of cliometric history within the discipline as a whole.
*As I understand it, from talking to a couple of Latin Americanists in my graduate program a few years ago, Time on the Cross has a better reputation in their field than it does in U.S. history. (Note: most of the Latin Americanists in my program were doing quantitative topics, and all of them had to be familiar with quantitative work. This was not the case in the U.S. field.)
December 29, 2007 at 6:26 pm
ari
Cool picture on your not-yet-a-blog, Andrew. What is that? As for Time on the Cross, yes, my sense is that it enjoys a better reputation among Latin Americanists than among US historians. That said, for all of its (well-documented) flaws, I think Fogel’s reputation is still pretty good.
December 29, 2007 at 7:07 pm
andrew
I wish I knew where and when that picture was taken. I found it on the Library of Congress American Memory site, but the reference info just says it’s a railroad crossing.
Thinking more about this, I wonder if part of the difficulty in finding a historian who’s undergone a reputational decline of the kind one might want to see a pundit experience is the fact that timeliness isn’t necessarily all that important to academic history. So someone who made their reputation on an early book might still have a fairly high reputation because that book could remain widely read long after that historian stopped producing such highly regarded work. People – outside of specialists, perhaps – might not be all that aware of the more recent work.
A pundit, on the other hand, who burst on the scene with some brilliant commentary – or however it is that pundits burst on the scene – shouldn’t be able to coast on the strength of that commentary for years or decades if they can’t maintain its quality. Pundits have to keep up with current events and people who read pundits have to keep up with the most recent things they say. Which makes it all the more irritating when their commentary stinks and their reputation doesn’t change much.
You can’t very well say that So-and-so’s columns from 1987 are still some of the better work on political incident X, and that makes So-and-so’s current work worth reading today. But you can say that Academic So-and-so’s book from some years back is still one of the books on subject X, and should be recommended/assigned to anyone interested in X. So academic So-and-so’s work will be considered “still worth reading today” but what will be read today may not be today’s work.
December 29, 2007 at 7:26 pm
ari
Excellent point. Eric has been coasting for years on the huge sales of The Refuge of Affections. We sometimes wonder if he’ll ever write anything again.
December 29, 2007 at 7:35 pm
russell
Upon clicking on your name, russell, I’m transported to a lovely spot.
Essex Bay, in Massachusetts. It’s on Cape Ann, maybe 25 or 30 miles north of Boston, just west of Gloucester.
It basically looks just like that from most vantage points, and the clams are great. Don’t come during greenhead season unless you bring your Cutter’s.
Thanks –
December 29, 2007 at 8:03 pm
EyeInHand
Judith Miller
Ok, not a pundit.
Dan Rather
Neither.
Both were reporters, who get measured by a different set of standards. Unfairly? Perhaps not. They were not “claiming” to present their own opinions, which is what pundits do.
Bottom line: a pundit is like a preacher – doesn’t matter whether god exists or not; what matters is whether the flock will pay to follow.
December 29, 2007 at 8:23 pm
eric
Eric has been coasting for years on the huge sales of The Refuge of Affections.
You’re a cruel man, Kelman.
December 29, 2007 at 8:31 pm
ari
I’m just tired of carrying you. Something had to be said.
December 29, 2007 at 8:48 pm
ari
Did I just make the blog eat your post when I put up and then took down the Wounded Knee post? Crap, I can’t figure out what I’ve done.
December 29, 2007 at 10:26 pm
matt w
A pundit, on the other hand, who burst on the scene with some brilliant commentary – or however it is that pundits burst on the scene – shouldn’t be able to coast on the strength of that commentary for years or decades if they can’t maintain its quality.
This seems like a good description of what happened — at least in certain circles — to the reputation of Mickey Kaus. Many people say that The End of Inequality was a good book, but almost everyone I read treats him as a complete joke and disgrace if they think of him at all.
OTOH, that’s after years and years of egregious subliterate idiocy, and he still has a job.
December 30, 2007 at 12:42 am
Jeremy Young
Regarding the second question, I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned Harry Elmer Barnes yet.
December 30, 2007 at 1:38 am
Ralph Luker
Good conversation here. Greg Miller cited Jon Weiner’s Historians in Trouble as covering instances of historians’ reputations or status taking a tumble as a result of their missteps. Although they don’t cover precisely the same cases, it seems to me that Peter Charles Hoffer’s Past Imperfect is the better book on the subject. A major problem with Jon’s book is his thesis that conservative historians survived their crises without major penalty, while left wing historians paid an unduly heavy price. He can’t carry the thesis through his chapters because the particular politics of some historians who paid a greater or lesser penalty isn’t really known (Dino Cinel? Joe Ellis?). Presumably, the thesis hinged on the cases of Michael Bellesiles and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, but the thesis wasn’t helped any by the fact that, throughout his ordeal, Bellesiles repeatedly referred to himself as a “Tory”. Beyond that, Jon had little critical distance on at least two of the book’s subjects and his book has to be read as a defense of his department’s integrity. Mike Davis is Jon’s colleague at UC, Irvine, and Michael Bellesiles earned his doctorate there. Despite considerable evidence, Jon still doesn’t admit that Bellesiles committed research fraud.
December 30, 2007 at 3:19 am
ari
Ladies and gentemen: Ralph Luker! Without whose efforts we wouldn’t be here today. Welcome, Ralph, and thanks for stopping by. And I also present Jeremy Young, aka The Future. He’s got his own signature sneaker, I’m told. With Nike. Ask him for details about the deal he signed (filled with incentives). Again, welcome. We’re very glad you both could join us.
December 30, 2007 at 4:16 am
ari
Also: the fall of Barnes is fascinating. And the case of Mike Davis, too, is interesting. Though the controversy over Ecology of Fear seems to have been local, for the most part, and certainly didn’t hurt his reputation too much. (The whole Davis v. Westwater kerfuffle used to be online somewhere, but I can’t find it now. This is the best I can do for the moment.)
December 30, 2007 at 10:30 am
Jeremy Young
Heh — they gave me Michael Jordan’s contract when he stopped playing. Seriously, though, you guys have a fabulous site here, and it’s great to see how exponentially it’s grown. Seems folks can recognize great writing when they see it.