ABSTRACT
When differentiating the documentary’s imagery based on the four genres, about 56.4% of the original shots could be assigned to the presentational genre of past broadcast spectacles, about 42% to the creative genre of either journalistic origin (about 28%) or fi ctional origin (about 14%), with the remaining 1.6% devoted to the microcommunicative context of scientifi c pictures and idiomatic pictures taken by amateur cameramen.1 The documentary’s producers, however, approach the historical pictures with few exceptions in the presentational mode, suppressing the pictures’ creative origins in favor of accentuating their faithfulness to reality. This tendency also underscores the sources’ ability to evoke an immediacy that typically complements the spectacle’s power to attract the gaze. Both aspects of presenting pictorial information appear anchored in the world of newsreels, which television had early on started to integrate. In fact, NBC directly adopted the Camel-sponsored Fox Movietone Newsreel in 1948 before establishing the fi fteen-minute-long Camel News Caravan. Eventually, all three networks established the nightly fi fteen minutes of news, before switching to the thirty-minute format during the 1960s. By the late 1960s, when the depiction of “too much violence” on American home screens led to a lively controversy about the public role of television news, the moving picture was well established as one of the nation’s most important sources of information and the role of objectively mirroring the nation’s “public sphere” was hardly ever questioned.2 It is the triumphant advance of the moving picture to the omnipotent status of grounding almost all the nation’s cultural, social, and political events that the documentary’s compilation ultimately comes to refl ect some decades later, when it presents the fragments of past news by and large in the same editing order, thus drawing on their original narrative matrices as if they were free of bias and opinion.3 Searching for the bias and opinion of past and modern broadcasters, one fi rst notices the quite standardized, newsreel style, a format that shaped the typical characteristics of the broadcast news spectacle and that continues to leave an impression on contemporary broadcasting.
