budge wrote:
>
> On Tue, 10 Dec 2002 at 7:36am andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> > Your guy ought to be more relaxed. I agree that we
> > ought to be careful to get things right (look what
> > happened to that historian at Emory!), but journalists
> > are not scientists or experts in a lot of the areas
> > that they write about, and if they are held to the
> > standards of 100% accuracy on everything, no one will
> > read them about anything. I mean, they can't even get
> > quotes right.
>
> why not, and why be so forgiving? a stenographer can get it
> right, why not a highly paid journalist?
Any stenographer worth his/her wage will get things wrong at times. Or put otherwise, any stenographer who gave absolute priority to getting it right would be fired by the third day.
All one needs to do is to read book reviews in professonal journals to discover that the very best historians will make a number of errors in anything they write.
I haven't read enough Moore to have any idea as to whether he errs beyond allowable limits, but to demand in general that historians (say of the quality of Braudel) not make errors is to demand that no history be written. ANd certainly even good journalists are going to have a higher proportion of error than good historians.
Carrol