'how do you sleep at night?' history and the media

This blog is for students of Macquarie Uni's Modern Honours unit Media and Methods. In the course, we bring history and media students together to introduce history students to the media, and media students to history. The course has run for two years and 2008 will be its first blogging year.

Frankly, this is an experiment - will it extend the work we do in class or become a substitute for it? Will we post lots of links to fantastic websites or will it just become another way to procrastinate? One reason for blogging is that the web now offers lots of great possibilities to those who want to create history for broad audiences, and in non-print, non-linear formats. If you find something great, share it here. If you see an interesting (or just plain woeful) film or radio doco, share your thoughts on it here too. During your honours year you need to start honing your skills of critical analysis, so short reviews of history in whatever form you find it are welcome.

Finally, to my title. At a recent forum about history and media, I was asked, 'how do you sleep at night? The guy who asked was horrified at the amount of crappy television history there is out there and wondered how I, as a historian, could sit comfortably with the inevitable compromises and challenges involved in translating historical knowledge for large audiences. I wonder what you all think - over to you on that one...