Methods of Historical Analysis in Electronic Media

Donald G. Godfrey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780805851861
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135607401
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: History

Methods of Historical Analysis in Electronic Media provides a foundation for historical research in electronic media by addressing the literature and the methods--traditional and the eclectic methods of scholarship as applied to electronic media. It is about history--broadcast electronic media history and history that has been broadcast, and also about the historiography, research written, and the research yet to be written.

Divided into five parts, this book:
*addresses the challenges in the application of the historical methods to broadcast history;
*reviews the various methods appropriate for electronic-media research based on the nature of the object under study;
*suggests new approaches to popular historical topics;
*takes a broad topical look at history in broadcasting; and
*provides a broad overview of what has been accomplished, a historian's challenges, and future research.

Intended for students and researchers in broadcast history, Methods of Historical Analysis in Electronic Media provides an understanding of the qualitative methodological tools necessary for the study of electronic media history, and illustrates how to find primary sources for electronic media research.

Part I
Traditional Historiography

1
Researching Electronic Media History

Donald G. Godfrey

Arizona State University

In the late 1950s, a political science senior visited a broadcast archive for a research paper assignment. His assignment related to World War II and a specific Moscow conference held late in 1943. That conference had been well covered by the CBS Radio Network and the broadcasts had all been preserved, including Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s report to the Congress at the meeting’s conclusion. The student dutifully scoured the electronic transcriptions of the live radio broadcasts. He reasoned these firsthand accounts of the conference were invaluable pieces of historical evidence. He wrote his paper conforming to the standard, traditional, research style and the assigned length— but received an “F.” The professor appended only a brief note of explanation—the broadcast record was, “not a valid research tool.”¹

Decades later we have the opportunity to reverse that young scholar’s grade, as we “go beyond the printed descriptions to the primary source material of our age.”² Broadcasts are now accepted records documenting history. Federal repositories, such as The Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Film Archives, and the National Archives and Records Administration, house our nation’s largest collection of electronic media materials. In the 1960s, news-film archives grew in both number and quality. The Broadcast Pioneers Library (University of Maryland), The Wolfson Media History Collection (Miami-Dade Public Library), the WSB-TV NewFilm Archive (Atlanta), the Peabody Collection (University of Georgia), and the Vanderbilt News Archive (Vanderbilt University) all attest to the growing importance and availability of broadcast records. Similarly, increasing interest in social history and popular culture has led to the growth of television and radio museums across the country—the Museum of Broadcast Communication (Chicago), and the Museums of Television and Radio (New York and Los Angeles) cater to these interests. Just a cursory examination reveals hundreds of nonprofit, private, and commercial collections across the country. Finding one collection often leads to use of another (see chapter 14, “Archive Records”).

Among the pioneering scholars recognizing a broadcast as an archival primary resource was Professor Milo Ryan. In February 1956 Ryan stumbled upon a stack of 16-inch electronic transcription radio discs from World War II at KIRO-CBS. There was a total of 52 cases of aluminum and glass disks, what he came to recognize as “a treasure house of broadcast history.”³ They unveiled an eyewitness history of World War II with more than 2,200 CBS network radio newscasts originating daily from March 1938 through April 1945. They included speeches by Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, and hundreds of interviews or talks by reporters and personalities from the war period. Ryan dutifully copied the contents to audio tape, catalogued and created a computerized search mechanism for easy access to the broadcast subjects and personalities, and coined the phrase “phonoarchive” as he organized his find.⁴ When it was all set, he wrote, “Here are the materials, where are the scholars?”⁵

In response to Ryan’s question, the volume of scholarship has grown substantially over the years (see chapter 15, “Assessing the Record”) and there are volumes yet to be written from our broadcast record. Interestingly, those pioneering in historical research were often producers in the commercial media, as they were prompted by the growth of broadcast, film, and video archives/ stock shops/libraries. These sources were used creating an explosion of news documentary and information programs on cable, satellite, and broadcast channels. They were researching material to meet a commercial demand of a program or a network. Similarly, other commercial researchers also produced voluminous pop culture and pictorial histories highlighting the lives and entertainment value of the celebrity people and events. Unfortunately, most of these writings were hardly scholarly—being written from memory, with limited research, produced solely for commercial distribution. Those in the humanities scholarship followed closely where national grants funded non-commercial documentary and research projects. Academic electronic media historians were the first to tackle the media history and the accompanying technical challenges.

Technology aside, electronic media history is exactly like any other historical research—its purpose is the discovery of supportable truths. Broadcast historiography includes description, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation. The researcher’s challenge is in amassing a body of organized evidence sufficient to support the reported facts and interpretation. This chapter reviews the basic historical research process and the unique methodological challenges that face scholars who use electronic media records.

WHY STUDY HISTORY?

Most people live for the present. They plan days, weeks, and months ahead, but few give thought to their past. History is about those recorded events of the past. History is the heritage upon which the future is constructed. History is about the preservation, recording, systematic analysis, correlation, and the interpretation of events of the past. Asa Briggs, author of the five-volume History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom,⁶ among a host of acclaimed works of English history, says the purpose of history is fourfold: “(1) to obtain a knowledge of English people [and I think he’d include American]; (2) to compare population and social structures; (3) to reconstruct … family life of our ancestors; and, (4) to provide evidence against which to judge the societal policy of the present day.”⁷ Briggs adds a personal note describing the research experience, “The historian restores life. He[she] is interested not in dead people but in living people ”…“ I have a queer sensation,” he says, when, “the dead entries begin to be alive. It is rather like the experience of sitting down in one’s chair and finding that one has sat on the cat. These are real people.”⁸ Christopher H. Sterling, author of several works on electronic media history described history as a single word, “context.” History, Sterling continues, is understanding, “the situation [context] at the historical time to really understand what is happening at a given moment.”⁹ History provides the context for the present day, and the research provides the context for the historical event. Critical historian, Robert W. McChesney, says we study history, “because we are living on the edge of history, and if you want to know where you are going, you have to know where you are coming from. More important, if you want to change this world, to make it better and to preserve what is good, there is an expression for what you are trying to do: make history. And if you want to make history, you had better know what you are doing, or you will do it poorly.”¹⁰ Peter N. Stearns, author of numerous mainstream historical works indicates “History should be studied because it is essential to society, and because it harbors beauty.”¹¹ “In the first place,” Stearns states, “history offers a storehouse of information about how people and societies behave.” Any analysis of the present would be disadvantaged without the analysis of history. “How can we understand genius, the influence of technological innovation … if we don’t use what we know about experience in the past?”¹² It is the past that causes the present and hence the future.

These philosophical scholarly purposes are complemented by pragmatic benefits in historical research. In years past, a person was thought to be more intelligent if he or she could quote the date and the name of a historical event. Unfortunately, mindless memorization accomplishes little and the data is too quickly lost. The study of history can increase communication abilities, facilitate problem-solving skills, and instill the skills of reasoning, deduction, organizing, and analyzing evidence that is prepared in defense of a position. The challenges of historians are like those of good journalists, attorneys, or detectives who after amassing a body of evidence must organize, analyze, present, and defend a case.

Finally, study of electronic media history furthers our knowledge of the role and function of radio and television in society. Writing four decades ago, Barnouw, said, “it is far too early to attempt an assessment of the impact on our civilization of the shift from printed words, as carriers of information, to the ever-present broadcast word, sound and image.”¹³ Today, that is no longer true, media are widely recognized as vehicles, even drivers, of our current society. They are the focus of popular culture and many other methods of analysis. They are the indexes of the collective thinking of a population as well as important business structures within our environs.

THE HISTORICAL PROCESS

This chapter approaches the examination of the historical method, or historiography, from the widest possible perspective. The term historiography means the study of methods and techniques in historical research as a part of a body of historical writing. In The Gateway to History, Nevins indicates that there are few fixed methods in the historical-research process.¹⁴ Briggs suggests that once students have “immersed themselves in the evidence,” they will continue, “learning to analyze … [the evidence] and instead of applying somebody else’s framework they will construct their own scaffolding.”¹⁵ While true, these statements are overly simplified. Stearns says the process includes, “the ability to assess evidence; the ability to assess conflicting interpretations; and the experience to assess past examples of change”¹⁶ (see chapter 2, “Historical Evidence”). David Sloan and James Startt said journalism history was about “first, gaining an understanding from what others have said about the object of historical study, and from the materials available; second, locating the various sources that are applicable to the inquiry. This includes family sources, archives, museums, data bases, and all other repositories of information; and third, the extrapolation of information from the primary sources and the evaluation of that evidence,” they concluded noting, “the historian must place in context the information they have collected and do this by addressing questions related to causation, generalization, interpretation, and the establishing of significance.”¹⁷

Broadcasting, yet only 84 years old, is still young when compared to other historical subjects and while there are few conventional traditions for dealing with it, we can learn from the traditional approach, and related theoretical constructs, as we work to build the scaffolds for understanding the past.

IDENTIFY THE TOPIC AND REVIEW THE LITERATURE

The first stage in the process of historical research begins with the identification of the topic, meaning the identification of the specific research question. For most, the quest starts as a general interest subject—something that intrigues us. Narrowed, this topic becomes the nucleus of the study. In critical historiography, the topic becomes an object. It dictates the research directions undertaken and the evidence gathered. It helps the researcher identify the environment, the era, the interrelationships of people, the politics, and the culture of the period under study. In other words, the topic, question, or object is distinguished by the variables surrounding it and comes into focus as we learn to understand those variables. For example, a journal article, such as Louise Benjamin’s “In Search of the Sarnoff ‘Music Box’ Memo: Separating Myth from Reality,” is selectively focused on a single point in history—indeed a specific document.^18...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• PREFACE
• PART I: TRADITIONAL HISTORIOGRAPHY
• PART II: ECLECTIC METHODS IN HISTORY
• PART III: A NEW LOOK AT ELECTRONIC MEDIA
• PART IV: NEW PERSPECTIVES IN TOPICAL ISSUES
• PART V: FOR THE RECORD …
• APPENDIX: ADAPTING HISTORICAL CITATIONS TO APA STYLE
• BIBLIOGRAPHY