Talkin bout Doris Kearns Goodwin blues

I heard a rumour that Doris Kearns Goodwin is still being interviewed on TV, and . . . yes, it’s true!

My first thought was: What, they couldn’t find an equally appealing talking head who wasn’t also a plagiarist? I’m sure there are lots of well-spoken historians who’d love the chance to go on Johnny Carson or whatever it’s called nowadays.

But then I looked around on her website, and now I’m not sure. Her books have received all sorts of praise as exemplary popular history, and that sounds like as good a qualification as any for explaining history on TV. Who cares if she’s a plagiarist? She’s not on the tube for her creative writing talent or, for that matter, for her ability to learn from the primary sources.

The other dimension is that plagiarism is a moral offense. At the very least, I think it might help if Goodwin’s TV interviewers every once in a while brought up the piagiarism issue in some relevant way. For example, “Since we’re on the topic of authenticity in political candidates, what do you think of the accusation that candidate X is ripping off the ideas of politician Y? As a plagiarist yourself, you must have some thoughts on this?” Or, “The relations between senators and their staff are complicated, no? You must have some insights into this, having delegated the writing of your book to research assistants who copied whole chunks from others’ work. How many of 100 members of the U.S. Senate do you think actually read more of the health care bill than you’ve read of your own publications?”

4 thoughts on “Talkin bout Doris Kearns Goodwin blues

  1. I lost any interest in her talking headedness when I saw her in an interview talking about terrrorism and comparing it to WW II. She said that after Pearl Harbor Americans had to wait until the invasion of North Africa before seeing any victories against the Axis. I thought to myself "what about the Doolittle raid? what about the battle of the Coral Sea? What about Midway?" If you can't trust your talking head's facts why bother watching your talking head?

  2. You know all (a group the Faux news invents every time some right-wing idiot—how many ways redundant is that?) wish this would just “fade away.'' I mean, really, she is just a talking head.

    It is that “just'' that needs to be challenged, as you are doing: she is a PLAGARIST talking head: she can't even marshal her own “facts'' (Faux News allows for two kinds of facts: real facts, and those claimed to be real, and doesn't countenance a difference). And that needs to be front and centre.

  3. I'm disgusted too. It tells you something about the standards journalists have for reliability of sources.

    Of course, I'm also waiting to hear someone ask Treasury Secretary Geithner how he has the nerve to appear in public after being exposed as tax cheat.

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