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Abstract
This essay investigates World War Il-era newsreels in order to understand how journalistic discourses create the means for understanding emerging technologies within the practice of journalism. The essay lays out a theoretical rationale influenced by Walter Benjamin for looking at how emerging technologies are understood through public discourse. The analysis looks at newsreels as a form of visual storytelling that presaged television news, and we argue that the wartime press provided a milieu for understanding how newsreels, as a journalistic medium, could be critiqued and understood as a storytelling form and how this form of critique played an important part in characterizing their content as journalistically valid. By focusing on issues of production and censorship alongside the aesthetic and technical aspects of the newsreels, the press created the terms by which newsreels could be judged, evaluated, and eventually integrated into the broader production of journalism. Our analysis shows that while issues of production were important, newsreels gained their greatest legitimacy through the celebration and lionizing of the cameramen as courageous newsgatherers, equal in stature to the soldiers they filmed.
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Notes on contributors
Stephen McCreery
STEPHEN McCREERY, left, is an assistant professor in the department of communication at Appalachian State University. His research focuses on the use of new technologies to consume legacy media, including how these practices affect consumption behaviors. His research interests include the effects of new media technologies on traditional media consumption habits and behaviors, as well as their impact on media production practices.
Brian Creech
BRIAN CREECH is an assistant professor in the department of journalism at Temple University. His research focuses on multiplatform journalism and mobile technologies, particularly the ontological and epistemological effects these technologies have had on the practice of journalism.