ABSTRACT
This chapter offers two case studies to explore core methodological and analytical questions about television newsfilm as historical evidence: network and local coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and network coverage of the Selma campaign in 1965. Both episodes produced indelible images that have stamped national consciousness. Even outside media studies, historians present the television coverage of these events as politically and culturally consequential. Traditional historians have less often known how to describe and appraise the specifically visual qualities of the surviving coverage, however, and all researchers of such materials are likely to face challenges accessing the moving image record (as opposed to stills and transcripts). Because the surviving Kennedy material is much more voluminous that that of events in Selma, the two cases also present contrasting difficulties that historians of television news must confront. Clocking in at seventy hours, the televisual “text” of the Kennedy assassination demands research strategies capable of grappling with superabundant evidence in a time-based medium. In contrast, the fifteen minutes of surviving footage from Selma presents the challenge of the fragmentary televisual text, which has come to circulate apart from the historical context in which it would have first aired. Engaging these challenges, Aniko Bodroghkozy provides strategies for writing histories that embrace the value of television newsfilms as historical documents.
