The Media Research Center loves to melt down whenever Ken Burns says something, and Tim Graham spent a Nov. 12 post dutifully doing just that over a Burns documentary he hasn’t seen yet:
Ubiquitous PBS presence, documentary director, and dogmatic liberal Ken Burns is making the media rounds for his latest upcoming 12-hour, six episode epic The American Revolution, debuting on most PBS affiliate stations Sunday night. Burns spoke to Newsweek late last month about the project, codirected by Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt.
If Burns’ interviews reflect the doc’s content, we may in for less a celebration of the Revolution and more of a lecture on America’s past sins.
[…]Newsweek noted that American Indians and enslaved blacks will have their stories told alongside Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
Apparently, that’s a bad thing as far as Graham is concerned:
Burns doesn’t have to point out anti-Trump messages in his docs; liberal journalists will happily do it for him. In a Boston Globe interview Sunday, Burns was lauded by writer Mark Arsenault for highlighting “a spine-tingling quote from Thomas Paine, about how the American Revolution proved that the ‘powers of despotism consist wholly in the fear of resisting it.’ It’s a sentiment that would be at home on a handmade poster at a No Kings political rally.”
Why does Graham want to censor political dissent (when directed at a Republican, anyway)? He doesn’t explain. Still, he continued to rage against Burns in a second post that day:
Ken Burns appeared Sunday to discuss his new documentary series on The American Revolution on the “How to Fix It” podcast from the Trump-hating outlet The Bulwark, hosted by former CNN pundit and losing Democrat congressional candidate John Avlon. As usual, Burns is gently nudged to issue long answers, like he’s a genius that everyone must enjoy. He did the usual mockery of patriotic thoughts about the revolution as “fife-and-drum treacle.”
[…]Ken Burns lives in an old farm house in the small town of Walpole, New Hampshire. We can only hope the local folks mock him at the grocery store about this — if he doesn’t send “the help” to buy his wine and cheese.
How does Graham supposedly know so much about Burns’ personal life, and why shouldn’t he be considered a creep and a stalker over it? Again, he doesn’t explain. Instead, he raged that Burns defended public media for its service to rural area, huffing, “The idea that rural folks get all their news from PBS and NPR was highly amusing.”
Alex Christy joined in the grumbling in a Nov. 14 post:
Bad camera angles were not the only thing wrong with former CBS and NBC anchor Katie Couric’s Friday interview with PBS documentarian Ken Burns on her Substack page. After spending much time on Burns’s upcoming series on the American Revolution, the pair moved on to discuss the state of history education in the country more broadly, which Couric described as “going backwards” and Burns labeled as being in “an autocrat’s interest.”
After complaining that Burns brought up a dubious cartoon from right-wing PragerU, Christy grumbled further;
One of the bigger criticisms of PragerU appears to be a video where a cartoon version of Christopher Columbus says slavery is better than death in a conversation with time-travelling children from the present day. PragerU has defended itself by saying that is simply what the real Columbus would have believed. Indeed, one of the child characters immediately follows up by debating Columbus and telling him that slavery was “evil.”
Nevertheless, Couric rolled on, “And I’m just curious to hear your thoughts on this reversion to a brand of history that is not factually accurate, that presents American history, you know, through rose-colored glasses and gives the impression that Americans never did anything wrong.”
She also stated that, “Howard Zinn kind of tried to turn it on, turn this on its head with, you know, talking about history from the point of view of the oppressed instead of the oppressor, but it seems like we’ve made so many strides in giving a more inclusive and a more accurate view of our history, and now we’re going backwards, and it’s so frustrating to me, and as a historian, I can only imagine how you feel.”
Christy offers no evidence that either the statement from Columbus or the following debate with a child is “factually accurate.” Instead, he concluded by whining:
Couric and Burns can dance around the issue all they want, but it doesn’t change the fact that PragerU and other conservative education reforms came about as a result of the Zinn-1619 Projectification of education. That school of thought is just as wrong as the strawman version of history they accuse conservatives of believing.
Christy failed to prove that the right-wing PragerU take on history is not a “strawman,” or that the only alternative is his own straw man of “the Zinn-1619 Projectification of education.”
Oh, and the MRC refused to serve up a review of Burns’ documentary, telling us even more that Graham was making stuff up about it.