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.”
Couric declared that, “Personally, I have been really concerned and, and at times offended, by these new efforts to really whitewash American history to, whether it's national parks or whether it's something at Arlington National Cemetery, you know, an effort to make, you know, to talk about some of the black soldiers who died in various conflicts, to this whole PragerU, which is this animated series that's being shown in a lot of public schools all across the country, that basically gloss over things like slavery and, you know, to present this pristine view of history that's simply isn't accurate.”
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.”
[See NewsBusters for more]
