“It’s tricky to point at a lack. But in journalism, what’s left unsaid — whether it was overlooked or ignored — can be as corrosive as a falsehood.”

A searing truth written by Brendan Kiley as part of the The Seattle Times’ A1 Revisited Project which seeks to reexamine the paper’s past coverage of historical events to address harm caused by how some events were covered.

In this case, Kiley is writing about the paper’s coverage of Native American protests at Fort Lawton in March 1970. Kiley informs today’s readers that there was a profound disconnect between the newspaper and the community it was trying to cover, “In missing the context, we missed the story.”

I think about the New York Times’ 1619 Project which sought to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” This project was criticized by some historians who argued it put ideology before historical understanding and accuracy.

The Times declined to make a correction, but did ultimately agree to offer clarification on one of the points in contention regarding slavery as an underlying cause of the Revolutionary War. I would argue that by focusing on the ways in which this project diverged from traditional historical narratives, these critics missed the larger, and more important, purpose of the work. I would further argue that media historians often suffer from the same myopic perspective as those critics.

If the media that make up media history are starting to reevaluate their history and the narrative surrounding our national history, shouldn’t we as a discipline be willing to do the same? Historian James Banner Jr., in making the case for connecting the past with the present, states: “It’s therefore a mistake to think that historians can fully isolate themselves in majestic, objective, intellectual solitude from the world around them. As hard as they may try to keep their own hopes and views out of what they write, historians, like others, try to find meaning in the past.”

Banner is arguing the need to revise what our discipline for so long has labeled “revisionist” history to allow room for previously silenced or marginalized voices to be heard, and to allow those voices to offer new and different interpretations and distinctive understandings of the past.

I am encouraged because I believe we are starting to have those conversations. We are asking important questions: How do we convince academic programs that media history matters? How can we make room for more cultural history and theoretical thinking in our discipline? How do we attract new scholars to the field and get students to engage with media history?

I would argue that all of these questions can be addressed by finding an answer to an even bigger question, one that asks us to authentically evaluate the work we do and to examine why we do the work. In short, we should be asking what we as media historians owe to the cause of historical reckoning and contemporary cries for social justice.

I understand this will push many out of their comfort zones, but if legacy media outlets are recognizing the need to grapple with historical oversights and missed opportunities to tell a fuller, more accurate and authentic story… shouldn’t we be willing to do the same?

We can no longer afford to continue to put forth a “great man” approach to historical figures or “great publications” in our scholarship without also offering some context and counterbalanced perspective that seeks to address their legacy in the current moment. What if, at our conferences and in our journals, we made time and space for revisiting past scholarship in the same way The Seattle Times is making space to review and critique its published past? What if we as a division issued a statement acknowledging past oversights and stating our intent to do better moving forward?

We have an opportunity to examine who we are and who we want to be as scholars and as a discipline; it is an opportunity to examine the work that journalism has done and continues to do in shaping our collective memory and constructing our national narrative. We, as media historians are uniquely positioned to sound a clarion call to ensure that past oversights and misrepresentations do not continue to manifest in the journalism of the present, and we should ask ourselves what we owe to improving the modern journalistic discourse around underrepresented peoples and communities who have for too long been overlooked in our history and our journalism.

It’s tricky to point at a lack… but it has never been more imperative that we be willing to do just that.

For further reading:

Brendan Kiley, “A1 Revisited: Our coverage of 1970 protest showed neglect of vital Native issues,” The Seattle Times, Oct. 16, 2022. Accessed via: https://www.seattletimes.com

Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The 1619 Project,” in New York Times Magazine, Aug. 14, 2019. Accessed via: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html   

James M. Banner, Jr., “All History is Revisionist History,” in Humanities The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, (Summer 2022), 34-41. Can be accessed via: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/issues

Melissa Greene-Blye is an assistant professor in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Communications at the University of Kansas and is an enrolled citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. She is chair of the PF&R committee.