As a trained historian, I loathe modern academic “history”. The 100 year philosophy is what I learned - “if it’s not 100 years old it’s not history”. But everybody had to get on the publishing train and write something, anything, even yesterday’s news as history. And when that train got full everybody had to get on the “Where’s Waldo” train and started writing history about “minority groups” in places where what the minority group did was not exciting in reality so the historians made stuff up.
I love the history of our Great Nation, and it is exceedingly frustrating to live at a time of so much deliberate ignorance.
Do you have a specific period of history that you focus on?
Journalism calls itself “the first draft of history.” The trouble is that journalism is negative (“If it bleeds, it leads”), superficial ("always make your deadline”), and arrogant (“journalists are objective”).Journalists know that they are negative, and yet they claim objectivity. But the inevitable implication is that “negativity is objectivity” - a conceit which is IMHO the very definition of cynicism.
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others. - Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)This implies that skepticism toward society is the only justification for government - and therefore, that cynicism toward society does not correspond to cynicism toward government but to naiveté toward (or faith in) government. “Liberals” and journalists are both cynical toward society and naive toward government.IMHO no one can be a serious historian without taking that into account. Journalism must be evaluated on what it does not say as well as what it does.