After all the controversy, C-SPAN is now advertising that they’re airing a segment on Prof. Deborah Lipstadt’s new book after all. The show is today at 4:30 PM Eastern, and according to the C-SPAN site, clips of Irving will be aired as well.
Here’s the email Lipstadt received from C-SPAN today, notifying her of the show.
UPDATE 4/4 : You can now view the show here (in RealPlayer), and here is Prof. Lipstadt’s reaction to the show.
Lipstadt notes that the Washington Post’s T.R. Reid, who reported from the London trial and is the central speaker in the C-SPAN show, does not seem to have actually read her book. Though Reid accurately depicts Irving as utterly lacking credibility, Reid repeately gets the focus of the trial wrong — it was not, as Reid says, about ‘whether or not Hitler knew’ about the Holocaust, but rather about Irving’s negligent, ideologically-motivated denials of the most basic facts of the Holocaust — gas chambers, mass executions, etc.
Moreover, the show’s discussion around the C-SPAN controversy was inaccurately framed by Reid and C-SPAN editors as ‘freedom to speak’ vs. silencing. The real issue in this entire matter seems not to be this, but rather how the deniers are presented by media outlets — are they placed side-by-side alongside the legitimate historians in a debate-like format (as Lipstadt describes CNN attempted to do with her and David Duke), or are they (duly) marginalized within the very context of the story? C-SPAN now says they always intended to do the latter, but Lipstadt was given the understanding that the former was to occur — hence her refusal to allow C-SPAN to film her recent Harvard talk.
