Staying Three

In 1971, Gil Scott-Herron famously claimed “The revolution will not be televised.  The revolution will be live.”  Turns out, it was both.  The insurrection of January 6, 2021 was televised at the same time it was being recorded on video on hundreds of cell phones that eventually yielded a vast panoply of competing narratives from participants, onlookers, staffers, members of Congress, police, soldiers, journalists, and others caught up in the “first rough draft of history.”  Unedited raw video footage taken by participants, bystanders, journalists, and unattended cameras on January 6 captured all kinds of micronarratives as well as singular gripping moments that recalled the televised executions of Lee Harvey Oswald and Nguyễn Văn Lém, the Challenger explosion, and the fatal plunge of United Airlines flight 175 into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. 

It’s hard to forget what you cannot unsee.  Now we know that we have contemporaneous film of the attack on Pearl Harbor and FDR’s “…a day that will live in infamy” speech.  We can watch 86-year-old Robert Frost recite The Gift Outright from memory at Kennedy’s inauguration after struggling with his papers because the glare from the snow made it impossible for him to see to read his new poem Dedication.  We can watch Lyndon Johnson somberly take the oath of office on Air Force One after the president’s assassination with Jackie Kennedy at his side, still wearing her blood-soaked pink Chanel suit. We can see Jesse Owens win the 100-meter sprint at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin with Hitler watching, expecting a victory from Erich Borchmeyer and getting, instead, a one-two finish by African-Americans—Owens and Ralph Metcalfe in the 100-meter and then Owens and Mack Robinson in the 200.  We can watch Tommie Smith and John Carlos join in the Black Panther salute during the medal ceremony for the 200-meters at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, only six months after the assassination of Martin Luther King.  More recently, videographers captured the descent of US Airways flight 1549 into the Hudson in 2009 as it was happening and followed the rescue efforts live.  In January of 2023, the world watched Damar Hamlin die on the field during the abortive Buffalo/Cincinnati football game and watched his teammates cluster around him to shield him from the cameras as he was resuscitated on the field.   

Never in the history of the world has there been a larger archive of primary source materials from which to build public memory. Thanks to the magic of television, we can see Tiger Woods play golf at the age of two, see Ella Fitzgerald sing Old MacDonald Had a Farm, and watch George Carlin and Robin Williams perform live and in person, as well as the Beatles, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Nina Simone.  We can hear the police talking to OJ Simpson as they follow the white Ford Bronco up the 405.  Not all history is ephemeral.  We can watch the Dream team play basketball and the 1980 US Olympic ice hockey team defeat the Soviet Union.  We can watch the moon landing—assuming, of course, that it wasn’t shot by Stanley Kubrick in a Hollywood studio.  When filmmakers and television journalists use video inserts to tell their stories, those excerpts aren’t film or journalism; they are living history.  Film has always allowed us to defeat time and death but now the television and video industry, which controls public access to footage, owns a gigantic stockpile of digital video that grows daily as contributions from private citizens with cameras come pouring in.

Not until the introduction of file-sharing technology to the internet was there a means other than network or cable television to distribute video archives worldwide at minimal cost to the public.  The forties had given us homemade movies but YouTube gave us homemade television.  This was a paradigm shift. Most of the original televised news footage from the forties to the nineties is still owned by communications corporations such as networks, newspapers, and magazines and by the government, and access to it is tightly guarded and expensive. During the years over which it was created, on-the-ground journalists covering war, famine, genocide, and political assassination after political assassination for their employers were not free to share their footage or even disclose its existence because they did not own the film they shot.  But all the still-undiscovered raw footage captured on private 8mm movie cameras (like the Zapruder film), camcorders (like the Rodney King beating) and cellphones (like the death of George Floyd) can now be shared worldwide with the astounding rhetorical velocity made possible by the internet.  First VCR and then DVR technology made it possible for individuals to own private copies of copyrighted material.  It is virtually impossible to prevent those with access to digital video archives from sharing them on YouTube.  No sooner are they taken down by Google for copyright violation than they pop up again from another source determined to share them in the public interest. Copyright law is unenforceable. Streaming has made video piracy even easier   One man’s “pirate” is another man’s “liberator”, and the Library of Congress has it all–or will, eventually. 

Photography and film give us unprecedented access to factual and sometimes even truthful visual information that cannot simply be argued out of existence with words.  This is why Emmett Till’s mother insisted on an open-casket funeral: “Have you ever sent a loved son on vacation, and had him returned to you in a pine box, so horribly battered and water-logged that someone needs to tell you this sickening sight is your son, lynched?…. There is no way I could describe this. And I needed somebody to help me tell what it was like… I think everybody needed to know what had happened to Emmett Till.” Malcolm Browne’s stunning photographs of the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc defy verbal translation.  Although they lack context and cannot convey the historical nuances surrounding the act or the smell of burning flesh or the screams of spectators or the wailing of fellow monks who helped, they evoke feelings that allow us to imagine all of these without difficulty.  Even the monk’s thoughts can be guessed from his body language as he sits silently in the flames. 

Before the invention of photography, history was always constructed from written documents, both real-time records and reflective memoirs.  But now eyewitness accounts, always colored by selective perception, have been augmented and potentially supplanted by video images, which are assumed to be more truthful although they certainly may not be as they, too, are shaped by the perceptions and point of view of the photographer.  We have learned, to our chagrin, from the introduction of video replay to sports, that multiple camera angles yield multiple truths and multiple perceptions and are frequently more useful in calling into question what actually happened than in demonstrating it for certain.  Nevertheless, the sheer volume of historical records that now exist in digital archives owned not only by organizations but by individuals who are free to share them on the internet creates a massive self-contradictory complex of public memory that demands more careful scrutiny than ever in the history of the world to make sure that all the stories are told truthfully and completely.  It will fall to the television and video industry to edit this footage into mediated narratives for scholars as well as for the public. 

History has always depended on access to curated narratives.  Sometimes the storyteller was both mediator and curator, sometimes it was the historian’s employer, and sometimes the subjects of historical investigations themselves self-edited, but information was always presented to its audience after having been filtered through the perceptions of all those who participated in its documentation. We depend on the histories of Herodotus, Thucydides and Josephus because those are all we have, and we must take their word for their professional dispassion.  With verbal accounts, the only hope of arriving at facts, let alone truth, is lateral reading or viewing across the multiple accounts of all witnesses with care to take their self-interest into consideration and with respect for everyone’s human tendency to selective perception.  Attempts to reconstruct the life of Jesus by reading across the four gospels shows us how desperately flawed this enterprise is with ancient documents, no matter how desperate the need for public memory.  It is different now.  Film and video created both intentionally and casually might make it possible for us to get history right.  Film of the events of the Holocaust made by the Germans themselves and by witnesses such as journalists, soldiers, and artists exists in such immense volume as to give a comparatively balanced picture of that moment in history. The United States Holocaust Museum describes itself this way: “The Museum’s Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive is one of the world’s most comprehensive informational and archival resources for moving image materials pertaining to the Holocaust and World War II. Staff continue to locate, acquire, preserve, and document historical film footage from sources throughout the United States and abroad. Unique original film collections and a wide range of videotape and digital formats are preserved and stored offsite in temperature and humidity-controlled vaults (https://www.ushmm.org/collections/the-museums-collections/about/film-and-video-archive).”

To get history right, however, it will be necessary to see all the digitized videos of all the film of all the moments we now have in cold storage. But because this footage is so recent, it is owned.  Allied armies took detailed film of the liberation of the German death camps but, due to their graphic accuracy, many of those films were made available for the first time only with the release of the long-delayed documentary Night Will Fall, begun in 1945 but not completed for almost seventy years.  Film of the accident in the Pont de l’Alma underpass that was fatal to Diana Spencer was confiscated at the scene by the French police.  By common consent, crime scene photographs and videos of school shootings are not made public, although they are carefully stored for later use, possibly in court.  Films made by videographers embedded with the military are also tightly monitored to prevent unedited release, but the archives in which they exist are maintained with great care to ensure their survival as artifacts.  Not every trial in every courtroom is televised.  Videos that will be used as evidence in the courtroom are usually not shared with the public before being introduced at trial for fear of influencing the jury pool.  That alone speaks to their persuasive power. 

Photographs and films cannot be manipulated by their subjects while they are being created; they can only be edited after they exist, so this film is truthful to a degree that is impossible in writing.  The originals represent as accurate a documentation of history as is possible with human tools.  The free or low-cost medium of television and internet video makes it possible for ordinary people to observe history through its video record without the intervening intelligence of what Canadian historian Harold Innis called “knowledge monopolies.”  It is no longer possible to argue that no truthful accounts of the Battle of the Little Big Horn exist because all the US Army soldiers died and the carefully preserved accounts from Native American sources are “one-sided.”  All parties are now able to find an audience if they can find their voice.  The democratization of video information through file-sharing has made it difficult for television networks, cable channels, and streaming services to maintain their status as knowledge monopolies because sites like YouTube provide direct access to our video history for anyone who decides to go exploring and chooses to go without an expert guide. 

Direct access to video information allows people to judge its accuracy for themselves.  Without learned interpreters, they will rely on their own experience to judge the reliability of what they are seeing.  Sometimes this is easy.  Assaults in elevators, parking garages, and other public places that were captured on security video can be relied on.  Bystanders and onlookers can record incidents of police violence, since virtually everyone in America now has the power through cheap technology to record primary video data right as it happens.  Body and vehicle cameras can either confirm or contravene testimony from police officers.  For bystanders to be armed with cameras when they are also suspicious of the police puts those officers at a significant disadvantage now that their authority is no longer accepted without question, but video footage can exonerate as well as convict them.  The fact that almost everyone now carries a camera with them means that there will be multiple videos of almost everything worth filming, and lateral viewing is possible.  Surveillance and cell phone video helped the FBI identify, locate, and capture the Boston Marathon bombers. Video captured from the headquarters of Osama Bin Laden during the raid that resulted in his death is priceless. There is also footage of the raid itself, although it is confined to a vantage point outside the compound (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyXWYgNX7UE).  There is probably more, but right now it is on ice. 

The wide availability of video recording equipment in cell phones has made it difficult for knowledge monopolies to control access to video history that competes with their own versions.  For decades, television cameras and broadcasting equipment were too expensive to be owned by ordinary citizens; only private companies and the government could afford them.  All consumers could afford was receivers: first radios, then televisions, then computers.  Only by miniaturizing the equipment and digitizing the information was it made possible for everyone to buy video equipment in a cellular phone and make homemade videos.  Now it is possible for someone to record the execution of Saddam Hussein in secret on a cell phone and distribute to the world a version that calls into question the Iraqi government’s version of events. 

Just as lateral reading across sources is the best way to extract the facts, such as they are, from sources, lateral viewing makes it possible to reconstruct history from our enormous and growing collection of video footage, both amateur and professional.  Somewhat miraculously, everything from the forties to the nineties can be assumed to be accurate, more or less, because it predates software that permits amateur video editing and manipulation.  Professionals could use studio equipment to edit film but it was not until videotape became commonplace that the cost dropped into consumer range and not until non-linear editing moved from concept to reality that editing software became available for desktop computers. Adobe didn’t debut Photoshop until 1989.  Video editing technology didn’t reach the average consumer until the twenty-first century. 

When the television and video industry lost control of the equipment and software as costs plummeted between the fifties and the seventies, and as digital video replaced analog, democracy replaced corporate and government oligarchy.  To paraphrase Churchill, democracy is the worst form of information-sharing, except for all the others.  Like self-publishing, internet video sharing is a free-for-all.  Anyone can make a video just as anyone can take a photograph or write a paragraph, and it’s now caveat emptor.  There is no curation, no mediation.  People must exercise their own judgment in evaluating the reliability of video information that comes to them without vetting of any kind. 

When video was delivered to us only by corporations or the government, we knew the biases it brought with it.  The majority of Dorothea Lange’s legendary Dust Bowl photos were commissioned by the Farm Security Administration, a division of the EPA tasked with alleviating rural poverty, so they had a clear political purpose, as did Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, which is available free on YouTube for those who want to see how the Third Reich saw itself filtered through the lens of how the world sees it now.  Equally chilling is this account by the Navy of the attack on Pearl Harbor  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2kSnlS4xX8.

Usually, however, the editorial bias of journalists and historians is less easily seen in their products because of the ethical demand on their profession that they be neutral.  The promise to present history dispassionately and without bias dates back to Herodotus and Thucydides, who promise us that they faithfully recorded only what they saw or were told, but then we have to take their word for it because we have no other sources.  We have no real idea what Pericles actually said in his Funeral Oration, but we can watch Martin Luther King deliver the “I Have a Dream” speech and we can tell by watching the video that he began by reading what appears to be a prepared speech but abandoned it halfway through and improvised from there, as gifted preachers and politicians often do.   

Subtler still is the tendency of the witnesses to history to present the facts to favor or protect themselves.  The testimony gathered with such care by the USC Shoah Foundation (https://vha.usc.edu/home) is apt to be trustworthy in all its heartbreaking detail because it was shared privately with a sympathetic audience in a safe place.  Had those stories not been told on film before the survivor’s deaths, they would have been lost forever, along with the stories of all those who died.  The accuracy of the Slave Narratives, a collection of histories by formerly enslaved people also gathered with great care by the WPA, is less clear and has been called into question by some historians because the interviewers were almost exclusively white.  Audiotapes and photographs exist, but no film.  Perhaps with video it would be possible to discern from the nonverbal clues whether the interview subjects glossed over, sanitized, or omitted information that would surely have put them in danger in 1930’s America, which would not have been ready to hear everything they had to say.  Still, Unchained Memories is a distinguished attempt to use gifted African-American actors to bring the words in these narratives authentically to life as they might have been filmed, adding to the original written words the presumed facial expressions and tone that reflect our collective recognition of the horrors of slavery and the unwillingness of the formerly enslaved to talk about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9a4cL3YtIo). If HBO hadn’t made a television documentary in 2003, most people wouldn’t know the narratives even existed. 

The future of television may also lie partly in its ability to reconstruct reality visually where no visual archives exist, using information from written narratives, so as to make history and geography more interesting, inviting, and accessible than page after page of antique prose could ever be. Video is art as well as documentary, and Michelangelo’s David, Daniel Chester French’s statue of Lincoln, and Jacques Louis David’s Death of Marat are not intended to record history as it happened but to imagine it as it might have been so as to influence public memory.  Distinguishing between the two is an important part of the curation process.  The concept of “documentary” didn’t exist before the invention of film and video, in particular, tends to blur the line between fact and imagined truth.  The technological gift of being able to recreate reality through mimesis also demands an unprecedented level of accountability from the industry to tell the stories responsibly and ethically.  This comes at a time in which television is becoming more and more radically democratized through low-cost internet options for broadcasting and access to the industry’s massive archives are being opened up. 

Responsible, careful information mediation will be costly and legally complex for profit-making entities, so it remains to be seen how the existence of firsthand footage such as the death of George Floyd will alter the ways in which privately owned video will be now be collected by the television and video industry and distributed to a waiting public. By reexamining our giant video archive, we can use the fact that we are looking back from the future to make pretty good educated guesses about how it was filtered at the time and why.  Scholars can make even better inferences, assuming they have full access to all the visual records.  We must go back now and study the footage that has survived to see what kind of a picture it paints, flattering or unflattering.  We must salvage all we can to ascertain how we saw ourselves then so we can understand the origins of how we see ourselves now and the path by which we got here. Old home movies can be digitized now.  Copyrights are expiring.  The Freedom of Information Act permits access for the patient and persistent.   

          Even entertainment television is living history that tells us now how we saw ourselves in the past.  Hairdos, clothing, and dialogue reveals whether our self-image as a culture was documentary or aspirational. For example, newscasters were required to speak unaccented English but sportscasters like Dizzy Dean were allowed to speak in their own voices.  This,

of course, helped to build a stereotype that professional athletics was a career path exclusively for the uneducated, not for the children of the upper middle classes (tennis and golf, of course, excepted).  Amos and Andy started as a radio show voiced by two white actors but, when it came to television in 1951, black actors had to be used and the stereotyping is so egregious that it cannot even be screened any more because we are too embarrassed to watch. African-Americans on sixties television were, by and large, white people with brown skin who spoke English without a hint of dialect interference and held jobs in the white community.  However, the Nelsons (The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet), the Cleavers (Leave It to Beaver), the Andersons (Father Knows Best), the Douglases (My Three Sons) and the Bradys lived in all-white neighborhoods and don’t seem to have had Black friends. Diahann Carroll as Julia Baker in Julia was a nurse who worked in the office of a white doctor and lived in a largely white apartment building.  When what are now called “black sitcoms” reemerged in the seventies, Florida Evans on Good Times was still a maid (though now a stay-at-home mom) and her husband had gone from a firefighter in Maude to a career of bouncing from odd job to odd job, sometimes two at a time, ticking the box on every stereotype except for being an absent father, at which Esther Rolle and John Amos used their celebrity to draw the line.  At least Redd Foxx, as Fred Sanford in Sanford and Son , was an entrepreneurial business owner, as was George Jefferson who, as an arrivé, had a maid. 

Never has it been more urgent for the television industry to consider its role as the primary arbiter of public memory as we continue to move into uncharted historical territory, filming ourselves as we go along with video cameras and then manipulating the video to say what we want it to say and releasing it on social media for the public to interpret as they wish.  It is anarchy.  When Kennedy was assassinated, then again when 9/11 caught the world by surprise, then again when the political rally on January 6, 2021 turned into an attack on the US Capitol, video journalism captured the event far more comprehensively in real time than was possible during the 75 minutes of the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Care was taken to record what could be seen through a camera lens but also to curate the footage so as to take into account the feelings of those whose lives had suddenly become part of the public record and to avoid stochastic terrorism.  Although mediated narrative depends on the comprehensiveness and accuracy of raw footage, delivery of that narrative to the public depends on responsible editing.  For many years, only television broadcasters could curate footage in real time, but now anyone can do it with a phone and access to a social media platform, which may or may not consider itself bound by the code of ethics that governs journalism. At present, there appear to be no rules and no limits.  It will be up to consumers to discern for themselves what is real or true and what isn’t.     

If amateurs are going to clip and splice and repackage video so that it is no longer continuous and is therefore misleading, professionals must make sure the full video is also available so lateral viewing is possible.  If greed or envy or pride or anger causes the owner of a video to share it in its entirety without regard to the emotional damage it might cause or the behavior it might trigger, the industries that control distribution must step in for the common good to take it down, provide a trigger warning, or ban the individual from the platform.  In an era when outrage is clickbait worth billions, this is especially hard, but especially necessary, particularly since individuals can now control what video comes into their newsfeeds and the industry itself has perfected information targeting through artificial intelligence.  It must fall to the television and video industry itself to balance profit with the need to regain public trust in times in which the industry is seen by many as corrupt and agendized, prone to promoting its own interests or the interests of those to whom it is indebted, and antithetical to the exercise of free speech.  Only through fair and responsible programming, both for news and for entertainment, can the industry regain respect in a world in which people are struggling to find any sources for information that they can truly trust. 

          Surely the lessons to be learned from the relatively short past of television and video is that how it handles information in the present will determine public memory.  Cameras can be manipulated to make judgments, but they don’t lie. The industry has the resources, the technology, the expertise and the time to reconstruct a hundred years of history from its own archives so as to correct the public memory that now exists and do a better job of managing contemporaneous public memory as it is being formed, not just at moments of great crisis but day to day.  Television and video can be used to help people part with shared false memories and to see events through the filters of others rather than just their own.  It can use its vast resources to distribute information from the marginalized to those in power, which the WPA sought so strenuously to do through photographers like Dorothea Lange.  It can give the marginalized access to free and low-cost information through the internet from which they can draw power—and perhaps hope.  It can give everyone the visual facts, and the facts, after all, are the first step in arriving at the truth, to include the whole truth and nothing but the truth. 

At the very least, the television and video industry can use its wealth and influence to give weight to what is true and provide counterprogramming to what is not.  It can use its increased access through streaming to provide access to the widest audience ever or it can price itself out of the market for the poor, to include organizations without much wealth, such as educational systems.  It can practice socially responsible capitalism, taking into account all of its stakeholders and offer narrative mediation by professionals to all at an affordable price.  This was easier when there were only four networks and all television broadcasting was free but it is not impossible now even with skyrocketing cost of subscriptions.  However, it should be obvious that the television and video industry remains the most powerful single influence on the formation and perpetuation of public memory.  A ruthless inventory of its own past, including its perpetuation of structural racism and toxic masculinity, will be needed to help it create the portrait of the 2020’s that it would like to leave to the 2050’s.  The more seriously it takes this responsibility, the more it will guarantee that commercial television and video actually have a future for which customers will be willing to pay.