I think part of what’s going on here is a tendency (which I’ve often been guilty of), when something is not new information, to say “everybody knows [or ought to know] that already” -- there’s obviously a balance to be found in terms of spending resources on presenting things that are commonly known but we should be encouraging and celebrating when people are excited to learn and engage in new (to them) information !
Lots of NYT readers surely knew next-to-nothing about Haitian history, and now many of them know much more -- that’s a fantastic outcome, and one that was never going to come about without this or a similarly prominent and accessible publication.
I agree that providing historical context is a good idea, but given the complexity of historical controversies, I wonder if newspapers like the NYT could simply point their readers to books written by historians. (I really like the New York Review of Books for exactly this reason.)
I think part of what’s going on here is a tendency (which I’ve often been guilty of), when something is not new information, to say “everybody knows [or ought to know] that already” -- there’s obviously a balance to be found in terms of spending resources on presenting things that are commonly known but we should be encouraging and celebrating when people are excited to learn and engage in new (to them) information !
Lots of NYT readers surely knew next-to-nothing about Haitian history, and now many of them know much more -- that’s a fantastic outcome, and one that was never going to come about without this or a similarly prominent and accessible publication.
I agree that providing historical context is a good idea, but given the complexity of historical controversies, I wonder if newspapers like the NYT could simply point their readers to books written by historians. (I really like the New York Review of Books for exactly this reason.)
An example: the debate over the origins of WWI. Was Germany responsible? https://issforum.org/forums/newlight1914