ABSTRACT
Journalism and documentary have always been linked, and with the migration of news online, documentary journalism has seen a big resurgence. This chapter describes the key features of this productive nexus of journalism and documentary, the challenges it poses for traditional codes of ethics, and the evolving response by professional organizations to the use of visual storytelling as part of online journalism.
The legendary television journalist Edward R. Murrow’s last great project at CBS was a classic documentary that is sometimes credited with the extraordinary marriage of journalism and documentary filmmaking. Harvest of Shame aired on Thanksgiving night, 1960. It was a brilliant stroke of scheduling since the film was about the shabby treatment of East Coast migrant farm workers, whose misery and poverty must have framed the plates of celebrants gouging on feasts of Brussels sprouts, cranberries, and green beans like a sour ring of guilt. Murrow’s biographer, A. M. Sperber (1998), wrote: “ ‘Harvest of Shame’ burst upon the public, an updated Grapes of Wrath, a black-and-white document of protest ushering in the sixties on TV” (p. 610).
