HISTORY AND NEWS
The media: Paul Johnson
on the fruitless search for `total history'
HISTORY begins with yesterday's news- paper, and the historical and journalistic professions are closer and more inter- twined than members of either realise. Great historians like Macaulay and Carlyle influenced by their styles the way in which British and American journalists wrote and presented the news (as did Hippolyte Taine in France), and sometimes a move- ment which begins in obscurest academia ends by having a profound effect on the way in which hundreds of millions get the news. A case in point is the French Annales school of historians, whose best-known and most successful practitioner, Fernand Braudel, died last week.
Braudel did not found the school. That was the work of Marc Bloch (and to a lesser extent Lucien Febvre), an inspir- ational historian who moved away from the traditional preoccupation with narrative and sought to explore all the forces which play upon humanity, using the new techni- ques of the social sciences. Braudel, however, was the most prolific of his followers. He began his huge work on 16th-century Mediterranean history as a conventional study of Philip II's diplomatic and war policy. It expanded into a gigantic anatomy of the region in early modern times, in which mere events sank into insignificance, overwhelmed by a mass of geographical and economic data. Braudel explained that he was moving away from l'histoire evenementielle, the narrative of political and military events, and towards rhistoire Wtale, the study of their causes. Battles, decisions, the impact of human character, the deliberate actions of good or evil men, were of little or no importance: what mattered was la longue duree, the irresistible, impersonal ocean swells of history which swept events before them like flotsam.
Large-scale historical gimmickry of this kind has often been popular: witness the success, in their day, of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, and Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History. Braudel's big book, first published in 1949, gradually became a world-wide success, and he and his colleagues began to influence the prac- tice and writing of history in almost all the free world's universities. I have always regarded the school with great suspicion. I noticed, in reading Braudel's Mediterra- nean book, that his statements about 16th- century England are nearly always wrong or suspect, and his chronology is often confused. His later multi-volume study of the rise of capitalism has the cardinal fault, to my mind, of lumping together collec- tions of evidence from many different places and periods, in order to prove a point. The fact is, it is impossible to write a good history without a strong chronologic- al framework and in the long run — la longue duree if you like — you cannot write clear and comprehensible history without a narrative presentation. Marc Bloch, a much better historian than Braudel, came to realise this at the end of his life when he was caught up in l'histoire evenementielle himself — the French disaster of 1940, when he served as a staff officer — and described it in a brilliant book, L'Etrange Defaite, which marked a return to conven- tional history. Today, in the forward eche- lons of the academic world, the influence of the Annales school is now declining fast and scholars are once more submitting to the necessary discipline of chronology and narrative.
In the media, however, where academic fashions tend to work themselves out 20 or 30 years later, the notion of `total history' is echoed in theories of how the news ought to be presented. Braudel was not a Marx- ist. But his approach was similar in that he sought to penetrate beneath the superficial surface of mere events to the subterranean forces lurking beneath, and he hailed Marx as the first writer to examine society on the basis of la longue duree. The Annales attitude to history, like Marx's, is fun- damentally gnostic: the superficial truth conceals the real truth which can be pene- trated only by the right techniques and methodology. In recent years this form of gnosticism has exercised a powerful appeal to those on the Left who work in the news media, especially television.
The argument runs as follows. To give the day's news, as it happens, is grievously misleading. For these happenings have origins, often distant, which determined them. These origins must also be presented and explained, to put the day's events in their context. Hence, in a television bulle- tin, it is wrong to show picketing miners throwing stones at the police. You must go not merely into the origins of the strike, but the history of the coal industry, and indeed into the nature of the relationship between the coalminer, who has no capital but his labour, and the authority (be it private or state) which owns the mineral rights and supplies the machinery to work the mine; and, for that matter, the author- ity which recruits, trains, pays and controls the police. When all these factors have been examined and given due weight, it will be seen that the mere image of miners attacking police is misleading; in a deeper sense, it is really the police (capitalist society, etc) attacking the miners. Equally, it is quite wrong to personalise the strike in the image of Arthur Scargill: he is merely expressing deep, impersonal forces: and it is the forces that the news bulletin should present, all else being distortion and de- ception.
Those who advocate this kind of news presentation have made some headway in British television in recent years, and it is now common to see large parts of news bulletins taken up by interpretative fea- tures, often tendentious. Of course this is not a new way of presenting the news, let alone a more truthful one: it is merely concealed, back-door editorialising. In its most blatant form, it is propaganda mas- querading as news. The hypothesis of la longue duree is false, in both its historio- graphical and its journalistic forms. Of course all good historians take account of long-term forces as a matter of course, as do all good journalists of the causes of today's events. But events are the essential stuff of history, as is news of newspapers: the primary job of historians is to narrate them, as it is the job of journalists to give the news, untainted and unadorned. Events are the product not just of long- term forces but of accident, misjudgment, human calculation and error, above all decisions taken by morally responsible personalities. Without Philip II and his father Charles V, the whole history of the 16th century would have been quite diffe- rent. Without Arthur Scargill, the coal strike would not have taken place at all. Those in charge of the news media should concentrate on giving the news, as quickly, accurately and fully as possible, and leave it to the public to make the judgments.
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