Bases teóricas de las variables

While, as we have seen in Chapter 3, history is an area that has survived changes in fashion, not least through the presentation of charismatic academics, it is also a fertile field for challenging, revisionist views. One historian who has helped Channel 4 keep its contro-versialist flag flying has been the Oxford historian and The Sunday Telegraph columnist Niall Ferguson, now a Professor at Harvard. He first burst upon our television screens in 2003 with a revisionist view of Empire.¹⁵At a time when Western leaders were apologising for the imperial and racist transgressions of previous generations, Ferguson argued forcefully for recognition of the great strengths and contributions of the British Empire:

The British enslaved millions, expropriated millions and looked on as millions starved.

But, there were also really quite remarkable achievements, which people today tend to forget. In 19th and 20th centuries the British presided over an empire which encouraged free trade, invested billions in the developing world and spread the legal norms, which are indispensable for economic development. And of course in 1940 the British Empire was the only thing standing between Nazi Germany and her allies and world domination.

So I ultimately argue that the benefits outweighed the costs, although those costs were undeniably very high. What we need to do is to compare the empire, not with some utopian ideal, but with the real historical alternatives that contemporaries faced.¹⁶

The series excited the divisions of opinion for which it was designed, with another prominent right-wing television historian, Andrew Roberts, hailing Ferguson as ‘the Errol Flynn of British historians’,¹⁷while the liberal press decried this ‘neoconservative ideologue’.¹⁸The general view is that Ferguson’s genius for self-promotion through contrarianism matched Channel 4’s profile perfectly. ‘It’s not about being a contrarian for its own sake; it’s about being willing to test all hypotheses in the way that Karl Popper said scientific inquiry should be conducted,’ Ferguson protests.¹⁹ The venerated science philosopher might have been piqued to find his critique of historicism being invoked to justify Ferguson’s morally relativist approval of empire, but it helped neutralise the liberal press’s response to the series.

As a result of this successful debut, Ferguson went on to make a television series on the American empire, Colossus,²⁰and the bloody conflicts that dominated the twentieth century, The War of the World.²¹Colossus, written in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, is full of the conflicted views that British intellectuals who have been seduced by the status and money on offer in the United States hold. He admits to America’s weakness and overreach, but ‘unlike most European critics of the United States, I believe the world needs an effective liberal empire and that the United States is the best candidate for the job’:²²

The American Empire sure ain’t perfect. Power has corrupted it, as power corrupts all Empires, even those established by democracies. And yet the alternative to Empire is never Utopia. More often than not, it’s either bitter ethnic conflict – or another, much nastier Empire.²³

Such blithe pragmatism did not play well in America, where Ferguson was about to take up his post at Harvard. In May 2006 he addressed the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, anxious in the immediate aftermath of the publication of the Abu Ghraib

torture pictures to hear how this neo-con historian, who had been one of the siren voices cheer-leading the Iraq war, might help extricate them. They were not well pleased to hear that instead the US should be there for 40 years and live up to its destiny as the global imperial power. Even one of Ferguson’s admirers, the editor of The Washington Monthly, Benjamin Wallace-Wells, had to comment: ‘In less than 10 minutes, Ferguson had pulled off that rarest of Washington double plays, alienating liberals and conservatives alike.’²⁴ More seriously, Wallace-Wells points out that, though a brilliant archival historian, Ferguson had only got into the study of empire five years earlier, as a result of the invitation from Channel 4. His prominence had come as much through the accident of history that rapidly propelled him to consult with governments desperate to bring intellectual credibility to their imperial adventure.

Ferguson knows just enough about empire and America to make an argument which is on its face convincing, but not nearly enough to be right. The attempt at empire-building he pushed America towards in Iraq is clearly failing. But rather than question his own thinking, he now argues that a bigger, better version of American empire would have worked and still could. In this, he resembles the American Communist Party of mid-century: The problem with Stalin’s Soviets, they said, was that they weren’t Communist enough.²⁵

It is interesting to contrast this over-promoted historian, with his undue influence in Washington due at least in part to his television career, with Ken Burns, the American television documentary filmmaker who has found himself labelled ‘the most recognizable and influential historian of his generation’.²⁶ The eleven hours of Burns’s undisputed masterpiece The American Civil War were watched by 40 million viewers on its first transmission, in September 1990, making it then the most watched PBS show to date. Its epic sweep across the historic landscape that redefined America also refined the style that characterises Burns’s work – a measured, poetic commentary underscored by music, relatively few interviews, with readings of contemporary sources by leading actors, and above all 17,000 contemporary photographs lovingly explored by the rostrum camera. Whole scenes are constructed from one still, and the way the camera zooms and pans across the print is so powerful and recognizable that it has been named ‘the Ken Burns effect’.

While Burns’s success is an application of this style to a consensual view of American history, he is regularly castigated as being a polemicist, not least due to his liberal take on race and the Afro-American as being central to the American identity, hence his key central trilogy of work being on the Civil War, Baseball and Jazz. In The American Civil War, the leading role of blacks in the struggle is foregrounded from the beginning of the first episode.

A single, sustained, beautiful aerial shot over a riverscape – drenched blood red by the setting sun – is the perfect visual corollary for a seminal quote from the leading black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, voiced in the rich baritone of Morgan Freeman:

In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky, her grand old woods, her fertile fields, her beautiful rivers, her mighty lakes and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked when I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slave-holding and wrong; when I remember that, with the water of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brothers are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten;

that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters: I am filled with unutterable loathing.²⁷

While the tone could hardly be further removed from hectoring, the epic scale of Ken Burns’s series has the effect of rewriting popular perception of history, revealing some of the less heroic aspects of the national psyche through its obsession with baseball, or confronting the alternative cultures it slaughtered in The West (1996). In this way, it fulfils the role of polemic, not in the literal translation from the Greek polemikos, warlike, but in the cultural sense of being likely to stimulate discussion or controversy.

While there are those on the left who find Burns’s reverence for American history and heroes too soft and sentimental, it is not just those who wear the white cowls of the Ku Klux Klan that find his placing native American and African-American experience so centrally a challenge to their own sense of American identity. Thus there was a strong hint of schadenfreude when his 2007 opus The War, a fairly exhaustive, if not exhausting, series on the Second World War, caused a vocal outcry because of its failure to include mention of the half million Hispanics who fought in it. The offence was compounded by the initial scheduling of the transmission of the first episode on Mexican Independence Day, the start of Hispanic Heritage Month. Transmission was delayed by a week and a Latino filmmaker, Hector Golan, was hired to add a couple of Hispanic interviews and other additional footage.

The New Yorker was typical of comments:

You have to work very hard, and take yourself very seriously as the keeper of the keys to America, to make a tedious documentary about the Second World War. But that is what Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have done . . . At fifteen hours, ‘The War’ is too much of a not good enough thing. A spark is missing – a spark that you almost always find in even the most unassuming documentary on the History Channel.²⁸

A waspish delight in a fall from the heights of success more commonly associated with British comment, but Ken Burns has little to fear. He had just signed a new 15-year contract with PBS, keeping him making his multimillion dollar projects until 2022, when he will be nearly 70, a level of job security afforded no British documentarian, polemicist or otherwise.

Iconoclasm

While Burns’s polemic builds heroic figures up, another tradition would tear them down.

During its heyday in the early 1990s, when its UK audience share topped 10 per cent, Channel 4 ran an occasional series called J’Accuse, referencing the Zola letter in the Dreyfus case, itself one of the great polemical pieces of all time.²⁹Screened as part of the Without Walls arts strand, J’Accuse had its own title sequence – a chisel desecrating a stone slab engraved with cultural icons’ names, scratching over them the title J’Accuse! Each film offered a protagonist, normally a journalist, half an hour to mount an attack on a cultural icon, either a famous writer or artist, or a more general popular cultural phenomenon, such as Manchester United or the television news. Some successfully hit their targets with forensic deconstruction of their subject’s multiple failings, others were little more than rants. Janet Street-Porter’s J’Accuse: Technonerds was among the latter, broadcast in March 1996.

Street-Porter had only recently parted company with L!VE TV, the short-lived cable channel she had been joint Managing Director of and where she had spectacularly fallen out with former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, leaving after four months. His populist gambits – topless darts and the News Bunny giving thumbs up or down on news stories – failed to save the unwatched channel. She had had her own revenge in her McTaggart lecture at the 1995 Edinburgh Television Festival. There she laid in to all the men who she felt had impeded her career at the BBC and elsewhere. ‘A terminal blight has hit the British TV industry . . . this blight is management – the dreaded four Ms: male, middle-class, middle-aged and mediocre’.³⁰She also accused Channel 4 of being stuck in a 1960s time-warp, so it was kind of them to offer her the canvas to vent her Luddite vitriol on another pet hate, the internet and all who patronised it: ‘Every culture needs some kind of blotting paper to soak up the socially challenged.’³¹This ill-conceived and not very far-sighted polemic served its purpose, exciting an army of enraged nerds in what was to become known as the blogosphere. The internet has prospered rather better than Street-Porter.

The more predictable targets of J’Accuse were such formerly unchallenged icons as Vincent Van Gogh, Philip Larkin, Sigmund Freud and Virginia Woolf. The latter ‘feminist icon’ was one of the first to get the treatment, with the poet Tom Paulin calling her ‘one of the most overrated literary figures of the 20th century’.³²This set the more reasoned stand-ard for the polemical strand, where cultural figures have been expropriated to represent meaning beyond their artistic value and deserve being critically cut down to size. Writers people regularly invoke without ever having read are an obvious candidate for this service, which has the estimable objective of getting people to think. Some of the more successful programmes were ones that extended the critique to pop culture shibboleths and created an ensuing argument among the public and in the press. Hunter Davies’s J’Accuse: Manchester United (1995) raised the issue of the corporatisation of football and exploitation of fan-bases with their regularly changing strips, which kids pester parents to buy. Davies accused Manchester United and other clubs of corrupting and perverting the course of English football by ‘cutting itself off from its cultural and geographical roots’.³³

Alison Pearson took on the might of BBC News and ITN in J’Accuse: The News (1994), criticising the form and function that TV news had come to adopt. From pompous theme tunes ‘suggesting the imposition of martial law’ to male presenters with female sidekicks,

‘literally a bit on the side – the perfect trophy wife’,³⁴ Pearson picks away at both the presentation and formulation of the news. She effectively itemises the lack of senior women and the preference for reports from ‘identikit pretty boys’ with lantern jaws, the ascendancy of pictures over content, and the pressure for human interest (or, as she says, ‘inhumane interest’) over common sense. She decries the ‘yoking of the mawkish and macabre’, instancing the invasive coverage of the then recent funeral of the murdered toddler Jamie Bulger. ‘Parents crying because their child is dead isn’t news.’³⁵Veteran reporters, from Francis Wheen to Mark Tully, are rolled out to confirm that the growing demand is for drama and disaster, at cost to context and comprehension. This is not a ranting piece, far from it, but a reasoned critique supported by evidence and testimony that makes a compelling argument.

The presentation may look a little dated today, but the argument largely holds true, despite the competitive evolution in the meantime of rolling news and online news. What has fallen out of fashion is not the false worldview promoted by TV news that Pearson rails against, but the opportunity to mount such an argument. J’Accuse disappeared in the mid-1990s,

though it was briefly resurrected with a pair of films covering the Iraq war. In J’Accuse:

Jacques, war-supporter William Shawcross mounted a hatchet job on Jacques Chirac, the President of France, for his failure to join the ‘coalition of the willing’ and his alleged long record of cosying up to Saddam Hussein.³⁶ In J’Accuse: Uncle Sam, the Guardian’s New York correspondent Gary Younge explored the American media’s uncritical support for the war and the accompanying sense of a resurgent McCarthyism in the United States.³⁷ Both are valid positions, but reflective of great swathes of current opinion, and the very symmetry of these equal and opposite views more closely correlates to the conventional

‘balance’ of current affairs – everything reduced to two sides.