PBS Make ‘Documentary’ Full of Lies

December 31, 2007 | Filed Under Education, Entertainment, Media Bias, News, Publius Contributor, Science, Society/Culture, Uncategorized, Warner Todd Huston |

-By Warner Todd Huston

Not long ago, I wrote a piece on how our PBS stations have been foisting a so-called documentary on the wife of thinker Albert Einstein and how she supposedly had a large hand in his famous scientific theories. It’s all bunk, of course, but PBS is foisting this piece of junk biography on the public, none-the-less. Worse, our tax dollars are going to help pay for these lies.

In that piece from August, I introduced you all to the exhaustive work of one Allen Esterson who has tirelessly been trying to get PBS to pull their support for this flawed “documentary.” Since that time, Mr. Esterson has not ceased his efforts and saw fit to give me an update that I thought I’d share you all of you.

Dear Mr Huston,

I thought you might be interested in the latest developments re PBS and “Einstein’s Wife”. In regard to the film, David Davis, VP National Production OPB, has informed me that the broadcasting rights have expired. However, on the “Einstein’s Wife” website PBS is continuing to promote the grossly misleading and dishonest film, and the DVD is still being sold by PBS.

As I anticipated when I (indirectly) heard that the writer Andrea Gabor had been commissioned to rewrite the website material, the revised web pages (posted in late September) continue to propagate false and misleading contentions. While no longer claiming that Mileva Maric co-authored the celebrated 1905 papers, Gabor contends that during their marriage Maric took part in “longstanding give-and-take” discussions of physics, which “almost certainly yielded some help with mathematical proofs”. The facts are that there is not a single known document in which Maric expresses any ideas, or even views, of her own on physics, nor a single specific report of any such ideas, nor any hint in letters to her closest friend over three decades of any such discussions. As to her giving help with mathematical proofs, even her Zurich Polytechnic entrance exam average grade in mathematics was mediocre, and her final diploma mathematics grade was a dismal 2.5 on a scale 1-6. In contrast, Einstein was precociously gifted in mathematics, and mastered the basics of differential and integral calculus by the time he was 15. In his Ph.D. thesis submitted to Zurich University in 1905 the mathematics was so difficult that the relevant sections were given to a math specialist to assess, and he reported that “the manner of treatment demonstrates *a thorough command of the mathematical methods involved*” (emphasis in original).

The central theme of the revised website is that Maric was a brilliant scientist whose contributions to Einstein’s work have been concealed, and whose career ambitions were thwarted by institutional obstructions and Einstein’s “disregard” for them. This is false through and through, as I demonstrate in my latest article posted on Butterflies and Wheels (and also on History News Network): http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=290

Astonishingly, there are four major falsehoods which I have repeatedly documented to be erroneous in previous communications to PBS over a period of 18 months. In addition, there are numerous other errors and misrepresentations which contribute to the presentation of a predetermined portrait of Maric in accord with Gabor’s tendentiously error-strewn chapter on Maric in her 1995 book on the lives of five great [sic] 20th century women. I have documented the errors in full at: http://www.esterson.org/einsteinwife3.htm

It is only too evident that not only are David Davis and the other PBS officials involved not prepared to publicly acknowledge (as I have urged them to) that they have breached PBS editorial policy on accuracy, they are determined to continue to propagate a tendentiously false story of Einstein’s first wife.

Best wishes,
Allen Esterson
http://www.esterson.org

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