ABSTRACT
For any exposition of the television news medium to hold merit it
becomes imperative to glide into the past to recover its earliest antecedent –
the newsreel. Newsreel presentation involved an intimate relationship
between its producers and events that print reporters had never faced: it was
entirely dependent on pictures that required the camera to be in position
before they unfolded (Montague, 1938: 49). Thus, the early producers of
newsreels discovered that at times when there was a lack of any worthwhile
or pictorial news it was possible to create it. It was also possible to ‘experiment’ with news. Newsreels in the United States, therefore, experi-
mented with everything: news borrowed from newspapers, studies by college
professors, animated diagrammatical representations of a volatile stock
market, and so on. Since newsreels were exhibited before drama perfor-
mances and film shows in theatres, a great degree of dramatisation and
sensationalism was not deemed out of place. They too became part of the
entertainment media.
