The Netziv, Reading Newspapers on Shabbos & Censorship (Part Two)

The sources I have used in this book… and memoirs are worthy of note. The last category is the most important, and like every other source it has both advantages and disadvantages. Memoirs sometimes provide a more detailed picture than official documents, but most were written many years after the events described and more than likely in consequence to suffer from only partial recall; they also reflect their authors attitudes at the time of writing rather than at the time of the events they describe. In most cases I have assumed that, although what was written may only be part of the truth, the authors would not have deliberately lied. Moreover, almost all my conclusions are based on several sources, so that if one source proves unreliable it does not usually affect my general conclusions.

"I don't know why you assume that the MB's fabrications - to the extent that they were such - were "common knowledge". How would the Netziv's activities, in the privacy of his house on Shabbos, be "common knowledge"? As an insider, RBE had free reign to claim whatever he wanted. The same applies also to R' Kook. He may not have known what his rebbe did Shabbos morning in his house. But even if he did, there's no reason to assume that R' Kook read the entire MB before giving a haskama on it. When assessing the validity of historical evidence, it can be useful to imagine that we're assessing this same evidence today. Do insiders make claims about great rabbis' practices that are of dubious veracity? Do people give haskamos on things that they've not read in full? It was probably no different then."

R. Mazuz in his Mekor Ne'eman references the Mekor Baruch's report twice. On p. 95 he relies on it to be Matir reading newspapers on shabbos and on p. 254 in a letter to Moshe Chavusha he quotes it to defend himself for citing R. Ovadia's practice of listening to the radio every day.