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Description
Investigative journalism, producing documentaries, and the writing of history are tempestuous parallels (Godfrey, 2006). Indeed, a famous quote often attributed to Philip Graham of the Washington Post, among others, suggests that "journalism is the first rough draft of history" (Rees, 2006, p. 219). So, why is history not a central part of every media academic program around the globe? Required research courses nearly always reflect behavioral science methods of analysis as opposed to historiography. Historical methods are often skipped, forgotten entirely, or relegated to a minor part of another course--in any case rarely emphasized. As a result, we leave our future of the profession to be auctioned to the current moment.
The research method of historiography requires skills similar to an experienced journalistic producer in gathering, organizing, and verifying facts, along with the vital evaluation of different kinds of evidence. Even the uses by historians and journalists are often similar. The journalist-producer must dissect written, oral, and visual records; analyze physical evidence; and make sense of these as a factual story. We hear often about an historian acting as a kind of detective, and while that analogy fits, it would be more appropriate to see the historian as an investigative journalist looking at the past.
On the other hand, most students and faculty live for the day.... They may plan days or weeks ahead, but few give much thought to their own past, let alone that of the field they are studying. History for most of them has little interest or meaning, so why spend time studying it?
What the field needs, in fact, is historical research in mass communications to build the foundations history can provide in our discipline and its practice.
History is about recording and assessing past events. History is the heritage upon which the present and the future are constructed. History includes the preservation, recording, systematic analysis, correlation, and the interpretation of past events. Asa Briggs, author of the five-volume History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (Briggs, 1961, 1965, 1970, 1979, 1995) among other acclaimed works of English history, argues that the purpose... |
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