Volume 35, No. 2
Spring 2018
Tom Mascaro is the author of “The Blood of Others: Television Documentary as Literary Engagement.” In an interview with Editorial Assistant Virginia Harrison, he discusses his research in this area and what it means in understanding the role of engaged journalists today.
What inspired you to analyze documentary journalism through the lens of literary engagement?
The inspiration came from oral history interviews while researching my book Into the Fray: How NBC’s Washington Documentary Unit Reinvented the News. A common theme emerged from conversations with dozens of producers and crew members—the visceral nature of being involved with the documentary unit and their subjects. Lois (Farfel) Stark helped me understand the settings for documentary meetings, research, travel, and the direct engagement with subjects. Rhonda Schwartz reinforced this sense of being engaged and transformed by the experience of reporting from refugee camps in Bangladesh. Crewmembers like camera operator Jim Norling and sound technicians Al Hoagland and Chris Newman recalled survival stories.
A second component was the emphasis on writing, especially in the person of Robert Rogers. Rogers left a career position in the U.S. Army to answer the call of Ernest Hemingway, as had many of his colleagues. They wanted to be involved professionally in matters of great public urgency, including coverage of civil and foreign conflicts, and engage intellectually. The third element was the repetitive, sometimes daunting nature of documentary journalism. I can remember many producers saying, in effect, “You put your life and soul into these programs, they air for an hour, and then they’re gone—and you start again.”
It was this Sisyphean toil that took me back to Camus, a favorite from my college lit days. Camus’s inner conflicts over his love for life versus the agony of the oppressed led to my deeper investigation into the literary themes of journalist-novelists like Beauvoir, Gellhorn, Hemingway, Saint-Exupéry, Sartre, and others. Lit review took me to the literature of engagement, which surfaced the same themes I was seeing in documentary journalism. Among the many common elements were intense, visceral involvement with subjects, a desire to influence positive social change, a deep commitment to democratic principles and civil rights, and an unrelenting focus on writing meant to stimulate action.
While journalists are supposed to “bear witness,” the ideal of journalistic objectivity seems to conflict with the concept of literary engagement. How did documentary journalists view their roles in light of this conflict?
“Objectivity” is journalism’s miasma. It is the term used to deny journalists their humanity, hurled like a cudgel by people secure in the warm, dry comfort of their homes and offices, from where they would vigorously defend their own occupational or personal principles while showing little respect for the values, commitment, and expertise of others—wielded against journalists willing to witness human suffering, slog through mud and obfuscation, and dodge bullets and bombs, and for failing to meet the self-serving expectations of outsiders who lack the courage to venture into the fray.
Of course we want honest, truthful, accurate reporting, but do we really want journalists to be devoid of human values? It’s neither a reasonable standard nor possible. During the Spanish Civil War Martha Gellhorn stopped being a pacifist and became anti-fascist. When Murrow entered Buchenwald, he could not find words to express his revulsion at the inhumanity he witnessed. His journalistic values manifested forcefully through his challenges to McCarthyism, Apartheid, and the shoddy treatment of migrant workers in America’s South. Many southern newspaper editors during the Civil Rights Movement showed great courage in supporting the end of segregation laws. NBC correspondent and news anchor David Brinkley said in a documentary program about U.S. food aid to Peru, “A hungry child should not be mixed up in international politics, he should just be fed.” Brinkley outwardly expressed contempt for those who expected journalists to be value-free recorders instead of flesh-and-blood witnesses.
“Objectivity” is critical to the work of news service reporters and stringers who feed information to various distributors. Rather than favor a side or traffic in propaganda, they should remain “objective,” to report what can be seen and/or verified through direct observation or credible sources. But “objectivity” also implies reports that are somehow more useful than those that are not, which is a poor application of the importance of the value. The Zapruder film records the moment President Kennedy was killed—it is the ultimate objective document, and yet utterly worthless in revealing who fired the shot or why. Parking-lot, ATM, and gas-station security cameras record images objectively. But these “documents” are not “journalism” until tempered and shaped by professional values. Whether reporting a murder, protest, stock market slide, or official stewardship, it is hard to imagine any reporting that does not somehow derive from subjective values.
In the realm of documentary journalism, other standards matter more than “objectivity” on the value spectrum: accuracy; credible sourcing; fairness, in not withholding pertinent information; balance, where appropriate; favoring complexity over simplification; or respecting truth. Documentary journalists, like their engaged literary counterparts, often spend long periods of time on a subject and have the freedom and responsibility to weigh bodies of evidence collected through research, on-site reporting, and incubation during postproduction. News documentaries differ from theatrical or independent documentaries—documentary journalism may express a thesis, but it is more willing to also report contradictory points of view. It is common—some would say required—for independent documentarians to argue from a strong, one-sided position.
The television documentary journalists presented in this study, and in my experience across the history of network news, would occasionally tip their hands and lean toward a point of view. Harvest of Shame forced Americans to appreciate that the luxe of their Thanksgiving leftovers resulted from the oppression of migrant farmworkers and called on Americans to be proxies for their cause. The perils of human existence require that at times and places we do not hamstring reporters or novelists by expecting them to conform to others’ notions of “objectivity.” What we want and need are courageous documenters committed to deep involvement with the material, faithful to facts and truth, and able to package available evidence in ways that challenge existing notions of objectivity, not simply abide by them—whether in a prescient documentary like Vietnam: It’s a Mad War or novel like The Plot to Overthrow America.
In the article, you write “information transparency is innately progressive.” How might this interpretation help us understand the role of engaged journalists in our society today?
The early television impresario Tex McCrary once shared an anecdote about leading the first team of American reporters into Hiroshima. He told them not to write about what they had seen because Americans could not stand to know “what we’ve done here.” Conversely, John Hersey revealed the horrible truth about the destruction and human suffering caused by the atomic bomb blast, which he reported in the New Yorker. “I covered it up,” McCrary said years later, “and John Hersey uncovered it. That’s the difference between a P.R. man and a reporter.” Even apart from our traditional political definitions, the terms “progressive” and “conservative” evoke different values vis-à-vis information management. “Conservative” seems to be less about conservation and more about preserving the status quo in terms of power. Being “progressive” requires a different kind of commitment—the courage to confront evidence that counters one’s hypotheses.
A person who is afraid to ask a question that will yield information he/she doesn’t want to hear would not be a very good journalist, or a committed progressive. Today’s debates about climate change, evolution, school choice, environmental regulations, immigration policy, health insurance, trade policy, the public release of a president’s health or tax records, et al., reflect how many people in power fear transparency. Why are curbs on fossil fuels being relaxed in the face of irrefutable evidence that they contribute to global climate change? If there are concerns that a foreign power meddled in or influenced a free democratic election, why would anyone not want a full disclosure or investigation into perpetrators of that meddling? Being “innately progressive” means having the courage to face unknowns, and that requires that information be made transparent.
The #MeToo movement is an example of how men in power withheld information—and legally quashed information through non-disclosure agreements—to protect their power over people they had abused. The revelations by many contributors to that movement reflect information transparency that is innately progressive. It’s hard to see how a civilization survives and grows without it.
How important is engaged documentary journalism in today’s so-called “post-truth” era?
More important than ever. That is why PBS’s Frontline remains so vital to American journalism. They stayed on the case long after the commercial networks abandoned their commitment to in-depth, fearless reporting. Frontline aired a documentary showing that playing football causes brain injuries. Can anyone imagine, say, a commercial network that earns tremendous revenues by broadcasting contact sporting events airing the same kind of report—which would put enormous revenues at risk?
The 24-7 information channels (not all of which are “news”) have converted what was a reliable but time-bound broadcasting of limited network news reports into a kind of free-wheeling talk radio on cable television, providing endless commentary and competing voices on talking points of the day. Often these networks move iterations of the same talking points through an entire day’s programming, adding new details as they come to light but also rehashing the same line of reasoning. Imagine if a cable network decided to use an hour every week featuring documentary-style reporting on current military operations, educational issues, business and industry mergers, consumer affairs, Internet privacy and security, labor issues, legislation under review, poverty, wealth, etc. By the end of a week, we could have a full briefing on many more issues of note rather than the political leanings that vapid talk radio exported to television after the end of the Fairness Doctrine
Engaged documentary journalism offers the sweeping view based more on reporting than on commentary, more on logic and reason than passion. We are in a springtime thaw for documentary today—in part due to the voracious demand for content to fill the ever-increasing number of distribution channels, because documentaries are typically less expensive to produce than comedies or dramas, and because of the audience’s tolerance for what appears to be “reality” programming, even if it is highly structured to shape predictable outcomes. But we remain impoverished in terms of documentary journalism of the type produced regularly by Frontline.
Can you recommend any resources for people who would like to learn more about documentary journalism and literary engagement?
Useful works on literary engagement include: Konrad Bieber, “Engagement as a Professional Risk,” Yale French Studies, no. 16, 1955; Barnett DeRamus, From Juby to Arras, Engagement in Saint-Exupéry (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990); and David L. Schalk, The Spectrum of Political of Engagement: Mounier, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Several critical biographies address themes of engagement: Elizabeth Fallaize, The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir (London: Routledge, 1988); Kate Fullbrook and Edward Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Penguin, 1989, expanded ed.); and Joseph Mahon, Existentialism, Feminism and Simone de Beauvoir (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1997). It is also useful to examine the literature of engagement in works by Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Richard Ellison, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others.
For works on documentary, including documentary journalism, see the classic A. William Bluem, Documentary in American Television: Form, Function, Method (New York: Hastings House, 1965); Raymond Lee Carroll, “Factual Television in America: An Analysis of Network Television Documentary Programs, 1948–1975,” diss. 1978, University of Wisconsin—Madison, Ann Arbor, MI: Xerox University Microfilms; Matthew C. Ehrlich, “Radio Utopia: Promoting Public Interest in a 1940s Radio Documentary,” Journalism Studies 9, no. 6 (2008); Daniel Einstein, Special Edition: A Guide to Network Television Documentary Series and Special News Reports, 1955-1979 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987), and1980–1989 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997); or Daniel J. Leab, “See It Now: A Legend Reassessed,” in American History/American Television: Interpreting the Video Past, ed. John E. O’Connor (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1983).
Documentary histories I like include Ian Aitken, The Documentary Film Movement (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998; Dorothy Fadiman and Tony Levelle, Producing with Passion: Making Films that Change the World (Studio City, CA: Michael Weise Productions, 2008); Phyllis R. Klotman and Janet K. Cutler, eds., Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999); William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); or Patricia R. Zimmerman, States of War: Documentaries, Wars, and Democracies (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). I also very much like the historical-critical book by Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary, 2nd ed., (London: Routledge, 2006). Bruzzi does much to rehabilitate documentary’s truthtelling potential in the face of critics who use documentary as an opportunity to showcase their own pet peeves.