Once upon a time, Encyclopedia Britannica was an authority to be reckoned with. From its famous first edition over two centuries ago to its fabled eleventh edition to the one from the post-WWII era now gathering dust in the house where I grew up, readers and researchers and the idle curious turned to Britannica for a trustworthy education on myriad subjects.
But today, in the age of Wikipedia, the era of Googling your way to finding things out? Who needs it? The anxious feeling that “no one is reading our work any more” must regularly seize the scribblers who work for Britannica now, as it lives on in relative obscurity, in its little corner where Web surely means cobwebs.
Only this, I think, can explain the strange editorial decision at Britannica to give their “editors” (i.e., writers) a chance to unburden themselves of commentaries in the form of lists called “editor picks.” Just giving people information without ever having the chance to tell them what it all means is a common itch among journalists, many of whom hanker to move from the news division to the editorial page, and can’t resist opining before they even move there. But Britannica really ought to resist this temptation among its scribes. It’s bound to spoil the brand, or whatever is left of it.
A case in point is a little two-part production by “senior editor in philosophy” Brian Duignan, titled “Editor Picks: The Worst U.S. Supreme Court Decisions.” In Part One, Duignan gives us a list of ten from the Constitution’s first two centuries:
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
The Civil Rights Cases (1883)
United States v. E.C. Knight Co. (1895)
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
Lochner v. New York (1905)
Adair v. United States (1908)
Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918)
Korematsu v. United States (1944)
Dennis v. United States (1951)
Bowers v. Hardwick (1986)
And Part Two gives us these from the new century:
Bush v. Gore (2000)
District of Columbia v. Heller (2008)
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010)
Shelby County v. Holder (2013)
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014)
I don’t have to point out the pattern, do I? This is a uniformly liberal list, informed not by constitutional reasoning but by ideological tantrum-throwing. Whether I might put some of these cases on a “bad rulings” list of my own—and there are some I would—is beside the point. The brief entries on each case are for the most part devoid of anything like legal analysis, and routinely give short shrift to the arguments of which Duignan disapproves, if he notices their existence at all. What stitches the list together is that these are Big Bad Victories for the Right Wing.
And if you want to know what I mean by spoiling the brand, have a look at the “straight” encyclopedia entry Duignan wrote for Britannica on Citizens United, and then compare it to the more fevered entry on the case in his Worst Decisions list. At first the encyclopedia entry really does look straightforward and free of any bias, and it is very informative in a brief space. But after you read the screed about the case and then return to it, the “straight” entry begins to look slightly bent. And then you begin to wonder if Duignan can keep his left-wing politics out of his work anywhere. Not smart.
At this rate, the editors of Britannica seem determined to make Wikipedia look good. It’s a sad declension.