ABSTRACT
Greg Wilsbacher looks at the historical moment that decisively redefined the terms “news,” “propaganda,” and “entertainment” in order to reappraise Raymond Fielding’s suggestion that American newsreels were a combination of these categories. Drawing on trade publications, records of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and the scholarly work of Fielding, Richard Abel, Cooper Graham, David Mould, Larry Ward, Leslie Midkiff-Debauche, and others, Wilsbacher shows how America’s entry into World War I changed the industry’s relationship to the production of filmed news. The end of U.S. neutrality required a realignment of the newsfilm pipeline as the federal government established mechanisms, via the Committee on Public Information (CPI), to regulate the filming of war activities at home and abroad. For the first time, the film industry had to negotiate and maintain an ongoing relationship with the federal government as part of its regular production and distribution efforts. The government, in turn, drew on the industry to fill positions in the Signal Corps and CPI. This intermingling of production cultures had a lasting impact on newsreels after the war when, remarkably, the industry did not suffer from the absence of war film. Instead, the industry expanded. Fox News and Kinograms launched in 1919 and Selznick News debuted in 1920. Throughout the postwar years, newsreels cast themselves as members of an increasingly professionalized journalistic culture preoccupied with authenticity, timeliness, and competition: “scoops” and “beats” became a routine measure of a newsreel’s value to exhibitors; press releases regularly noted the cultural ties between newsreel and newspaper editorial staff. The war had created consumer demand for moving image journalism and through the industry’s relationship with the CPI and Signal Corps also established expectations for how newsreel operations could function on a larger scale and charted the course for the next half century of newsreel production and exhibition.
