C-SPAN's Definition of 'Fair and Balanced'
Little Green Footballs
C-SPAN wanted Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt to appear on their program BookTV to promote her new book History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving, but they were concerned about fairness and balance.
Their idea of “balance” was to give the cretinous Holocaust denier David Irving equal time.
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Deborah Lipstadt, Holocaust scholar at Emory University (pictured), will deliver a talk at Harvard University this evening (3/16), promoting her new book, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving. C-SPAN wished to broadcast Lipstadt’s talk on the network’s BookTV program, but informed Lipstadt that a recent speech of Irving’s (recorded by C-SPAN) would need to be broadcast as well. C-SPAN producers explained their reasoning to Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen:
’We want to balance [Lipstadt’s lecture] by covering him [Irving],’ said Amy Roach, a producer for C-SPAN’s Book TV. Her boss, Connie Doebele, put it another way. ‘You know how important fairness and balance is at C-SPAN... We work very, very hard at this. We ask ourselves, ‘Is there an opposing view of this?’
C-SPAN, that is, sought out an ‘opposing view’ to Lipstadt’s confirmation of the Nazi Holocaust. Lipstadt refused to be cast side-by-side with Irving, on the grounds that Holocaust denial does not merit public debate. Cohen asks the appropriate question: ‘For a book on the evils of slavery, would C-SPAN counter with someone who thinks it was a benign institution?’
In personal correspondence with HonestReporting, Lipstadt explained:
I would have been delighted to appear on C-SPAN’s BookTV. It is an important venue and is watched by a book-reading audience. However, there was no way I was going to be forced into debating a man who is the equivalent of a flat-earther.
I spent six years in court fighting this man. We defeated him completely. That C-SPAN should now give him an opportunity to resurrect arguments which the court found completely false is appalling.
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Appalling — six million times over.
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