” ‘I don’t know that Trump has historical awareness at all,’ Fitzhugh Brundage, the chair of the history department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me…. ‘I’ve had any number of colleagues say they feel recommitted and energized to do what they do, because of its very importance now.’
“Brundage told me that he has fought against ‘fake history’ for decades; in the 1980s, he often heard bizarre claims related to Pearl Harbor — that Franklin Roosevelt intentionally allowed the Japanese to attack or tried suppressing information about a potential attack and whether it would bring the U.S. into the war. ‘Every now and then Reagan made weird statements, like having been there when they liberated concentration camps,’ Brundage said. ‘But that may have been the onset of Alzheimer’s. All of which is to say: I’ve dealt with fake history before, but not sustained by a President adding to it.’ ”
— From “Teaching Southern and Black History Under Trump” by Charles Bethea in the New Yorker (Feb. 2)
This just in: yet another contribution to the archives of fake history….
Let me preface this reply be stating that I am a 66-year-old lifelong Democrat. Professor Brundage has apparently missed out on the emerging opportunity to be informed by a diverse collage of media sources. During my lifetime neither side of the ideological divide has been innocent in the promulgation of “fake history” and “fake news.” One unmistakable trend I have observed in more recent times, however, is that the traditional media’s previously hidden biases have been exposed for all to see. The ability of establishment news organs to frame the narrative on past and current events based on distorted or revisionist reporting has been compromised by the unfiltered new media. This is a positive development in that it will force the traditional media (New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, etc.) to reengage in honest journalism in order to survive and thrive in the Internet age. My political party, which has long embraced the propagandists as allies, will bear the brunt of the pain from the changing media landscape, and deservedly so.