gonna have a conversation and hopefully insightful conversation around that very question, but we're also going to show you some television clips. so if historians do not watch enough television, maybe you'll get the chance to do it here and then we're going to talk about how we work with with tv and and at the end we want to bring you into the conversation, of course, and so if you're looking at the program you can see that that frank isn't able to join us today, unfortunately, and then my lights and everything you can tell that this is being recorded for c-span. and with me today to to help moderate this sage goodwin of university of oxford. yes. hi everyone. so yeah, we're getting pretty massive. we're gonna be filmed talking about tv, but first we're gonna introduce some of the political historians we have here to talk about working on tv and we're gonna you know, you can you can google them to find out it'll be amazing things that they've written but we're gonna get to know them a little bit better by asking and their relationship with tv by asking them. what was the first television event that they remember watching as a child and also who is there face of the television news so we'll begin with david greenberg who is a professor at rutgers. so david, what was your right? i mean, i'm fair question because it clearly on the panel. and you know, it's actually quite since last night we had the televised january 6th hearing so for me, i think for a lot of people might generation watergate was kind of the early television memory and you know, it wasn't just television. it was kind of what what were your memories of the world to beyond your world beyond your family and so on and you know nixon watergate with very much the defining moment the to answer that. yeah the face of the news we've been asking who was the face of the new so the obvious there would be walter cronkite, but my distinct memories are john chancellor, i guess we at that stage my folks watched nbc news and john chancellor was i also have real memories of the tagline. in washington, i'm irving our levine nbc news irving. our levine was also very important figure. okay, so nicole hammer of columbia university the earliest memory of an event and the face of tv news. so the earliest news event. i remember is early around contra hearings and seeing ollie north in that brown uniform and i definitely at the time could not have told you what it was about. i had no context for it, but that uniform really stuck out for me and it is really the only thing that i can remember is him standing up there and sitting and testifying and now as a historian knowing a little bit more about it knowing the stagecraft that went into it. it really really worked on the six year old and actually the face of the news for me was not a dan rather or walter cronkite. it was the local news on channel 14. that was the host who like was burned in my brain. i can't remember his name for the life of me, but it was like the male. most of the local news that we would watch at 6:30 every single night before we watch the simpsons and scripted television and sitcoms and things like that. but even though we watched the nightly news, it just didn't have the same impact i think because i didn't have the same kind of connection. and we have carrie babitsky from boston university. great the excellent segue. thank you very much. but my my formative news event was actually extremely local it was the nightly weather report tracking santa claus on the radar. that is the first thing i remember and as a historian now, i was also thinking as we were thinking about like, what's your first news event for me? i was thinking about in the room my own individual anticipation of christmas day, right? what? what was going to get? but also standing in this sea of anticipation with my siblings and you know thinking we were having very three very individual experiences, but also having this sort of group experience of the news together too being so glued to that television watching. tiny little sentence coming across the the radar. yeah, then it was time to scurry off to bed. and that was probably 6:30. yeah. yeah, they were always down with an early news, you know bedtime, but my my personal face the tv news is peter jennings we watched and we watched the evening the 90 news and then the evening broadcast and so for me, it's definitely peter jennings. yeah. and sage you're not from the us so so it might not be well the cronkite or dan rather for you. who's the face of tv news now the face of tv news, i remember as a child was a host on south africa. i'm from south africa originally host on south african channel called mnet whose name was scott scott. please remember the little chiron saying scott with one tea scott with two tease. that's burnt burned into my memory and the earliest television event that i remember watching again as about a i think five year old in south africa is princess diana's funeral and i remember watching that the tv we had in our house was in my parents room, and i remember i think sitting my parents' bed and watching can really vividly remember the shot the sort of overhead helicopter shot of her casket being walked down and crowds either side of it and at the time i didn't know who that was five. didn't know who princess diana was didn't understand why my mom and my aunties were so upset about this all i knews that she was in england and in england in my mind was just this cold far away place. i didn't understand why my family would be upset about this this person as far away place having their funeral, but since then i thought about it and been like that sort of knitting together not just nationally but internationally all watching that same event at the same time, really resonated me resonated with me ever since and when i remember that i see not only the tv screen, but i see my parents room at the same time. so it's kind of these two images working working together. but what about you oscar? so for me, it's the gorbachev bush summit of 1990. and that might sound like i'm a hyper historically aware four year old, but the reason is it was in helsinki, so it wasn't far away from our home and i remember the news were covering this event in helsinki and and that's why it resonated for me and and then the face of television news in finland throughout the 90s and and early 2000s was a man called arvi lind and he was famous for never smiling including when he announced on the television news in 1998 that the hockey team won bronze in the olympics and his son was on that very team. there's not a smile on his face announcing it as as any other day on the job. so let's jump over here to change our presentation. the reason that we've called this panel do historians watch enough tv is actually because it is celebrating an essay that david greenberg wrote 10 years ago in 2012 called do historians watch an ftv broadcast news as a primary source, and that was an editing edited collection called doing recent history by carbon potter and renee see romano. so in that essay, i can just give you a little pricey of it david starts out by surveying scattering of recent political history including his own work and arguing that historians haven't taken television seriously as a useful source. he uses two really great lines to do this historians, like most intelligent people tend to think we have better things to do than watch tv, and then the one really keep it that i know i quote. i'm sure oscar quotes and i've seen other people quoting is this is a collective methodological blind spot of major proportions. in the essay david then goes on to explain firstly why look at tv and he gives us some reasons predominantly that it's such a rich source that it allows us to understand in three dimensions moving through time things that happen in the past that we can't access in the same way through the written word so we can see people's cadence of their voice we can see their body language we can get a better sense of the power and the impact of certain people and events. so it's the things that teach us about the past through enriching our understanding it also shows us the way that the people in the past experience the world beyond their own experience tv in 1963 roper opinion polls show takes over newspapers as americans primary source of news, so if we're trying to get at how people understood the world around them in the past. what better way to do that than the way that they were interpreting the past which buying? your tv and he makes the point that we in our own lives now, this is how we understand the world. so why is it that we don't take that into considering that's how people and the past edit. he then moves on to talk about some of the reasons why historians don't watch enough tv first and foremost the difficulty, especially if you're working anything before 1968 of actually accessing archival news sources as anyone who has tried to do this nose. it's very very difficult because the three networks in america didn't archive before 1968. so it's it's a very long expensive and difficult task to try and actually get your hands on the footage later on. thanks to the brilliant worker vanderbilt. it becomes a little bit easier, but it's still it's still pretty tricky and then the other main point that he makes is methodologically. it's a much more difficult thing for historians to do than a lot of the methods that they're trained in doing with other types of sources you can't keyword search a broadcast you have to sit there and watch it in real time, which is very time consuming difficult and as you get you're more challenges as you get later and have more sources available to you. how do you choose what to watch? so these are the some of the problems that he lays out, but he ends the article by saying in every critique there's an opportunity and sort of lays out for the next generation of political stories to start taking tv news. seriously. so oscar any thoughts on in the past decade whether that's been done right so when i turned in my dissertation, my my advisor was like, yeah, you cite greenberg a lot here on this point, but it's almost 10 years what's happened since that and and so i'm looking at the situation now 10 years later and greenberg mentions. he david goes out and like mentions a couple of books that you can take from your shelf and look through and and are there any television and television sources used? i'm not going to be as brave and like named drop the books, but you can all when you get home go to your bookcase and look at recent books on political history and and it's probably not going to be a lot of television sources in the footnotes and and so in that sense perhaps we get the feeling that things haven't changed but on the other hand if you look at the last 10 years and i think part of the problem that david recognizes is that historians aren't necessarily turning to communication scholars the media scholars to television studies scholars, and i think this is where a change has been happening in the last 10 years or so, and we see scholars such as heather hendershot. nikki and katie brownell alison pearlman, matt delmont who are using television in their work in these works often bridge the media historian political historian or television studies historian divide in how they're using television as as part of of the source material and you also see this by the way in podcasts. so if you look at like chippendales, welcome to your fantasy, there's television sources being used in or epidemics which is like taking oprah seriously in history. and so i think this is a trend that we're going to see accelerating and so the reason for this might be as simple as as advancements in technology where it's easier to day and and when we're going to show television clips, you can notice this because they're available online and so it's easier perhaps to get that access that we were talking about and especially if you know what you're looking for and but at the same time it's as hard as it was 10 years ago to go through like for example the nightly news or or even oprah like we're talking hundreds. if not, what is it 14? yeah, that's a lot of episodes and my work on all in the family. i i watched all of the goal in the family episodes multiple times, and that's a lot of time spent watching television and you can't really fast forward it because then you're not getting that the content and so those challenges remain in a sense, but i think what david also talks about is the habit right? the historians aren't used to turning to television and i think that we're seeing something change here because of the work that i mentioned earlier with media historians political historians turning to television. it's becoming a part of the source material. we recognize and this is also something that the archives see spend for example has been doing putting the material out there and it's easier to get access to and i think that's gonna change the working habits of historians and make it more relevant as we move forward. so what we wanted to do is have a talk through the methodologies of working with tv with some of the people pioneering that work and have a chat about how they're doing it what challenges they're facing what they're getting out of it. so what we're going to do now is we're going to invite our panelists to tell us a bit about their work and have a look at some of the clips that they use and we'll start with we'll start with kerry great. thank you. my research actually explores the central role that the national rifle association played in the rise of the modern of modern american conservatism. i study particularly how the gun rights movement developed the nra's evolving political strategy and how its model of armed good citizenship is sort of question of good guys with guns that were more familiar with today reshaped the american political landscape through the republican party. i've been doing that for the better part of a decade. this is you know. so the combination of some work that i've done in the course of my phds actually what we're talking about today the clip that that we're going to see. is from an episode of firing line that aired july 21st of 1980 what i'd love for you to listen for is how how much has changed and how much hasn't in sort of the messaging that we're about to hear we're tuning in to this clip at a moment when jeff greenfield as a liberal interlocutor has been asking some questions of harlan b. order the executive vice president of the moment of the national rifle association, and there's been a bit of a discussion prior to this about masculinity and guns and now they're having a conversation about why you have them and what that means right for the public and then also there's there's another moment there, too. so if you would please oh, i think you've got a good point there. i personally reject the bumper sticker psychology. i'd like to suggest one. however this beginning to be prevalent. it seems to be interesting and it says quote says what do you have in mind for me mr. politician that my possession of a gun makes you so nervous. it's a bumper sticker. yes. what what's the size of the bum? well the people out in arizona put it on the end gate of their pickup truck. oh, yeah, doesn't it volkswagen here? but the point is that when someone on a shopkeeper hasn't gone it isn't that he seeks to shoot somebody he seeks instead to have something there so that he will avoid confrontations. the criminal community is not seeking confrontations out of which they may or may not get shot. they will stay away if they have an opportunity to do so and if they know what the situation is another thing, is that when people are fearful, and this is historically true when people have fears people are not necessarily wise people are not prudent. perhaps people don't exercise their best choices when they have fear, but we're talking about here in new york the wait a second. it seems to me that your organization the nra has done a lot to perpetuate precisely those fears now indeed we do not. no, no. no. i don't know why anyway, i don't know of any way where the nra perpetuates those fear. let me suggest that the suggestion that if we if we do not have guns or whether that the holding of guns if somehow increasing our security in the face of what sheriff buckley said that it in fact increases our chance of being killed it seems to me that the political that is the point the political argument you're making is you need your gun to be safe. right? wait don't get guns in the nra primarily for this half defense posture, which is being discussed here. principally. we have gun sports and we have hundreds of thousands of people who go out on sunday and saturdays and sundays for recreational purposes. and matches we're going to camp perry next weekend. we'll have 10,000 people. okay, nikki. tell us a little bit about your work and and set off the cliff that you brought sure study. my first book was on the history of conservative media up through the 1970s and my next book looks at conservative radicalism in the 1990s, and i'm particularly interested not just in conservative media, but the way that mainstream and entertainment media helped to develop a kind of conservative punditry and help to mainstream more radical ideas. so what you're going to see here is a clip from politically and correct with bill maher from 1995 by devote one of my chapters to him and i'll talk a little bit more about it later and the guests on this show are gabrielle carteros who played andrea on 90210 george clooney who needs no introduction jay, leno and daryl gates the chief of police for the la police department who was pushed out in 1992 and the conversation start. with bill maher asking him about this idea of defining deviance down and this is where that conversation picks up. what about all right the many years ago coined the phrase defining deviancy downward which means which you know what i'm talking about, which meant that he said that behavior in this country is defined downward because we keep getting lower and lower in what we put as a standardize the show. in the room bigger guy i got me a baton. you anymore. all right. they're out now. i was a pepper spray. i was watching a patrick swayze movie, which is crime in itself. fatherhood. let me see the movie fatherhood. what flight we want? i tell you it was so bad. i walked out. i just know this is i'm not picking on this movie in particular, but there's a lot of movies like this where they try to glorify a criminal criminal is a glamorous thing to be in a movie right before or in it if you show and in the movie, he goes he's a criminal but he says, you know, man, i robbed drug dealers. so we can go. oh, well, you know, you're not drug dealers. what is that? then i saw this movie the assassin or something where the guys with the little french girl and he's an assassin but he says i i never do women or children. we only get --. okay my question, isn't it dangerous for society when you define deviency downward like this? and there's no question about it, but the buys that stuff because the system of justice doesn't work in this country hasn't worked for a long period of time crime is out of control drugs are out of control violence is out of control and so the public buys into that stuff and hollywood is ready willing and able to provide it to to a willing public. and oscar moving to you know, yeah, so my work is on the political history of television entertainment in the 1970s with a focus on on normal lear show all in the family. and so what i brought for you today is an ad that the actor carroll o'connor or should i say the character archie bunker is doing for ted kennedy in 1980 primaries against jimmy carter. friends herbert hoover head out in the white house too responding to desperate problems with patriotic pronouncements, and we got a hell of a depression, but i'm afraid jimmy's depression is going to be worse than herberts. i'm supporting senator kennedy because he's out there facing issues inflation sky high prices and almost worthless dollar unemployment. i trust that kennedy i believe in them in every way folks. kennedy for president we gotta fight back. your clip so the clip that i'm going to show you is from a an nbc documentary called the american revolution of 63 if you go and read david's essay, you'll see he actually begins that essay by talking about thomas seguru's suite land of liberty in which through his really really extensive archival work. he doesn't actually reference any television despite the fact that he name checks the american revolution of 63, so when i started my phd looking at the relationship between tv news in the civil rights movement it quickly became very apparent to me that this is a documentary that really mattered but it looked like hardly anyone had actually watched the documentary so i endeavored to do that and i'll tell you a little bit more about that journey later on but this is a clip from that documentary, which is now available through c-span. when you watch demonstrations like this one a number of questions come to mind about the ideas and emotions of the people involved one way to look for the answers is to put yourself on the picket line. i guess the first thing the strike you is an awareness of pride tremendous pride you sensitive and all the people around you. courage to it may not be much but it is a personal effort the strangest part about it is everybody here keeps going every one of them snows deep down does very low chance that what they want will be given any time soon. it's something like swimming out the sea no end in sight no signs to tell you how much farther you have to go. so you just keep going one slope or one step at a time. maybe somewhere sometimes a wise man will figure out a better way and easier way of fighting back. i'll bet a lot of people here would like that after a while your feet start hurting you get tired you get bored. you start thinking about all the other places all the other things you'd rather be doing right now, but they stayed because they're part of something maybe the most important something of their whole life. that doesn't mean they're friends or even that they know each other. it goes much deeper than that. i say it's a kind of kinship the kind that comes from sharing the same foxhole come to think of it. this thing can be just about as dangerous as the foxhole. another one of those freefalls might break out at any moment, although that thought is crossing a lot of mine. who's the guy next to you once a policeman where would the policeman slugged you well one things to hear that no comfort in thinking about it. what as you walk along you pick up a sense of determination even stubbornness all around you and you can tell that if trouble does come again at one person will run away. okay, so now you've had your fund this is this is the tv clips. we're going to show you and now now the boring part where we talk about working with with television. so, let's see if there's a rush for the doors and nikki. can you talk about how this clip and television in particular and informs and informs your work and how you how you take on television? sure. so television is something that was kind of important in my first book but in the 1950s and 60s and 70s, it was still on a relatively new medium, but most of the conservative activism was taking place on radio because it was just much much less expensive to be on radio rather than television for this book because i was interested in the intersection of culture and politics and it's the 1990s television was just much much more important. i'm writing about presidential candidates like pat robertson who has zone cable news empire and people like pat buchanan who becomes a household name through television, and so it's important to see what people are up to on television and also to dig in behind the scenes to figure out how those television productions are created what their purposes were how they're talked about in the media and politically and correct with bill maher in particular was a place where let me know if i'm proceeding ahead of where you want to be but what is so fascinating about politically incorrect with bill maher? it starts in 93 on comedy central and it will move to network television after the 1996 election. it's that popular and it it is. it's doing a lot of work it mixes celebrities politicians and particularly conservatives. this was a real goal of bill mart to make sure he had a conservative on almost every show and that was really important because it taught a generation of conservative pundits a kind of style of punditry that was in constant conversation with with comedians and with actors that taught them to go for the laugh. and also taught them that outrageous statements. could be covered with laughter or i'm just joking or the point was to outrage people on bill maher show. and so that's what they're doing and in the case of this particular clip. i think it's really important that you see it and hear it rather than read a transcript of it because the laughter and the jokes are doing such big work not only in rehabilitating gates as kind of the voice of reason and knowledge and experience in talking about crime and talking about deviency but his history with police abuse and brutality is played for laughs. and that does real work in rehabilitating his his image and i'll just say one more thing about just the show itself and that is the title of politically incorrect is doing real work, too. it's saying, oh are you are you shocked? are you outraged? that's because you've been coseted in this liberal society and what we're saying is offensive because it's politically incorrect not because it's untrue not because it's offensive and that is a show that is doing a tremendous amount of work. it's where all of these pundits from. laura ingraham and ann coulter and kellyanne conway, they come up through this show and they learn how to be right-wing pundits on politically incorrect. so it has been an invaluable resource particularly to watch it and hear it and hear how the studio audiences responding to it because that's real information about the work work the show is doing thanks so much. nikki, carrie. can you tell us a little bit more about working with firing line? absolutely working with filing. i mean, it's it's firing line, of course where we're aware of what firing line is as the conservative show, right that was on pbs for so many years. what i was more interested in with seeing harlan carter speak. i work primarily in the documentary record. so in the textual record, i work with the national rifle association's magazine american rifleman. and it came up time and again in in sort of all this information about what a magnificent orator harlan carter is i thought well, that seems really interesting. i've read the transcripts and i've seen what he has to say and i can understand how that be very interesting, you know to to listen to but to watch him speak and to see him animated offers as david talks about this chance to see emotion and really experience that first hand that that the written word does not give us and so finding an episode of firing line was a boon for me because i could see harland carter talk, but what it also did was allow me. i mean, this is 1980. this is a moment when massachusetts has passed bartley fox which is the reason why he's on the program itself to talk about bartley fox a bill in the state of massachusetts. that stands up some mandatory penalties for gun carriage and crimes committed with firearms. and what carter does throughout the most of the episode is is basically rebut the statistics ahead of hemis. he's very cool. he's very collected. he's really on task. the whole thing, but when greenfield presses him you see you can see him stop take the first hack and then have to stop again and take a completely different tack to talk about what it is that the nra actually does in 1980 with the nra was actually doing was moving very politically, but carter returns to that original mission of oh, we're a hunting and shooting organization. this is what we do and that is really sort of fascinating to watch the continuity of that over time too. and television allows us to do that. we hear the argument we hear how it's presented. we watch the shift, right? it's and it we see that happen. we saw that happen in houston. um, just what wait two weeks ago. and so that's that's what it's done for me is to just sort of open up that what's carter doing and why is he so exciting now? i know. so sage the documentary that you showed us was on on c-span, but you actually watched it before finding it on on c-span. where did you find it? i did so one of the reasons that i picked this clip is because it really neatly demonstrates the kind of shifting terrain of doing tv research when i set out to try and find this document she was right at the beginning of my phd and i couldn't get a hold of it anywhere. none of the main tv archives that i went to the paley center the birming i mean, but berkeley media resources center the la the ucla filming tv archive. none of them had a copy but the library of congress did in their moving imagery source center, so i got to travel grant together went out to dc for a week and spent a week sitting at a monitor piercing notes to try and capture everything that happened in this three hour tv show and then a couple of years later when it came to finally writing up my dissertation. i wasn't actually looking for this. i think i was searching for something else and found it on c-span and it hadn't even put their that year. so if i had started that journey three years later it would have been right there. i could have watched it from the comfort of my own desk at my own university without having to go to the library of congress. so that kind of just raises how in this kind of new digital age how much it's actually changing doing tv research, but the other thing the other reason that i chose this clip is it really speaks to something that actually watching it did in terms of my thinking about the project and that was this man who's reporting bob teague. who is the first black tv news correspondent at nbc in 1963 at the time of filming this he doesn't actually have a permanent contract. he only guessed that later, but the thing that i really picked out of this is the relationship between news reporters and their audience you'll notice as he's as he is walking on the picket line. he's using the word you a lot. he says you walk along you think in this way you wonder what's gonna happen if a policeman hits you and if that was john chancellor walking along you would have a very clear idea of who he meant by you the fact that it's bob you saying you really made me start to unpack who who do the networks have in their mind when they're talking about the audience and i talk about this in my dissertation. i say bob teague is using this universalizing but at the same time racialized you in a really provocative without being clearly provocative way and it really shows you. that it matters who reports the news. so yeah, that's the reason i wanted to show you guys that oscar. what about what about your one? so all in the family historians have looked at all in the family before me and and something that i noticed in in that work is that they watch the show and that's available today. you can even get it on on like dvd boxes and and get access to it and access is a huge part of all all of our points here. but so what about ads what about appearances by parallel connor on the -- cabbage show on johnny carson? what about those parts that are integral to how people understand all in the family so in the case of all in the family if if you know about the debate around the question of showing this bigot on television the question is is this helping us combat prejudice in society or is this actually it worse if you know about that debate you probably know about laura hobson the author writing in the new york times not bad on the subject and it becoming this debate in the new york times. that's because that's the conversation. that's the debate that historians and television scholars have recognized now these same conversations are being had on -- cavett on johnny carson whenever norman lear or carroll o'connor or even rob reiner or gene stapleton go on those shows in the early years of all in the family. that's the question they want to talk about now. who if we're thinking about the people watching all in the family? is it right for us to go to that new york times debate or is it perhaps integral to also incorporate these other television shows that they are watching that they are getting the connection of seeing carroll o'connor and carroll o'connor plays around as you could see in that clip he plays around with this dual role of being both an actor a very liberal actor and playing this very conservative character and in this ad and he did other ads as well for for john lindsey in 72 for mcgovern in 72. he intentionally plays with this world, right? he's dressed as archie bunker and you can see him talking about herbert hoover now sure there was conversations about jimmy carter being like herbert hoover, but he's also playing on that all in the family opening song where he's talking about how great it was back when hoover was president and and the old rang great and so forth. so in the viewers mind, just carroll o'connor talking about herbert hoover is blurring the lines of the actor and the character. and so we've talked about the value of television. we've talked about the article that inspired this whole panel and and i think we're really lucky and unfortunate and to actually have david here and and be able to to look back on on the article what's changed since then how it's informed your work what prompted it and and also the conversations we've been having here 10 years later. and so david, please take it away. yeah. well, thank you oscar and sage and yeah, it is flattering. i have to say kind of surprising to find this article having some influence 10 later gratifying because you know it emerged almost as a kind of afterthought renee romano and claire potter were putting together a book on recent doing recent history. i think they actually asked me to write about something else dealing with the internet that i absolutely nothing about and sort of propose something else. i knew nothing about but just an idea that had kind of been percolating in the back of my mind as you know interesting problem, but i had never seen fully addressed and so i decided to sort of try to address it in. you know, it's always a little bit of a haphazard way. i just drew upon what i knew. i mean i did i did research but it wasn't, you know, i wasn't coming out of tv studies and had like a deep deep understanding of how television research was done. you know, i mean the the sad. truth, is that in my own work? like in the last 10 years? have i used television that much not not nearly as much as i have prescribed for others or for myself, but but i have some i mean it was good to see sage's clip. there's another it made me wish i had brought a clip which i guess you'd give me the opportunity to do there's another documentary, you know, the the networks used to do these really wonderful hour long sometimes three hour long prime time documentaries, and it was kind of in that age of cinema very tay and where documentary with kind of like a separate thing. so the networks were experimenting with how to do this. yeah my last book republic of spin. i have kind of a whole a wonderful film called. crisis about the university of alabama integration crisis, which you can get on dvd and i encourage everyone watch. now i'm writing a biography of john lewis and the clip. i'm sort of wishing i had brought is from a 1960 nbc documentary called sit in about the nashville sit-in movement. which again like sage when i started when i first wanted to see it couldn't find it anywhere. i found it by googling on someone's syllabus and like i emailed him and he sent me this thomas dot copy and you know, i and now suddenly it's back on youtube like youtube, you know stuff gets pulled it gets put back up copyright issues. you kind of never quite know what's there and there's this i mean first like the first scene is like john lewis walking down the street and then you going on his way to a sit in and then there's another scene where he and james bevel. in our lafayette are sitting by the banks of the cumberland river. and like tom lewis like 20 years old like in his really thick rural alabama accent, you know talking about getting involved in the movement and it's just it's just amazing like this guy goes on to become john lewis and you know, and it's also the case of where television itself had an impact. so andy young tells the story he had by this point moved to queens and was working for forget the united church of christ whether church is there and he and his wife are watching sit in there living room and at the break at the intermission, you know, his wife says we have to go back south and they do like as a result of seeing sin on nbc. so it's also a way to have that personal experience of watching then has historical consequ. a young obviously becomes this really important figure in the movement. i guess a couple thing i will say is i do think it's become somewhat easier to get access partly because of c-span and not just saying that because we're here on c-span now, but i mean the c-span archives are really terrific. you know youtube has a hell of a lot more. it's not systematic. i mean, that's a problem. the other problem that i've discovered is in trying to get access to some of these documentaries. i've tried some of the networks they actually have now digitized quite a lot. but they have this at least nbc has this crazy policy or so. i understand where they will only give access to commercial researchers. like if you're going to pay them for footage to use in a commercial documentary if you're a schol. are a student or someone who wants to use it? it's like the opposite of fair use, right? it's like unfair use it's but there really should be like a campaign of pressure brought to bear on the networks to digitize all of their at least news archives, you know entertainment, whatever there's syndication value, you know, but to to digitize their news archives and make them available at least through educational institutions. it can be done. the technology is there now it should be possible for everyone at her desk at oxford or wherever you are to do your research and and have you know, good indexing good cataloging and you know if you want to watch, you know, every episode of the -- cavett show to be able to search. okay, when did norman lear carroll o'connor are in watch them or if not the -- cabbage show certainly the nightly news show, so that would be sort of my pitch as to sort of. what what a next step might be in improving accessibility on these kinds of news archives. all ended there. i'll jump in the conversation conversation more as we go on. thank you so much david. so we're gonna move not to the q&a portion and we're gonna stop with the q&a between the panelists. we really wanted to make the most of the opportunity of bringing together a group of people that use tv so that we can speak to each other question each other hopefully learn from each other and then we will take some questions from the audience later, but the first question i'm gonna throw out is about writing about tv to any of you have any tips tricks advice things that you methods that you found useful. in transferring from showing to telling because you can't actually do like today and show clips in your written work. anyone that has something that they want to throw out. you know, i don't know that it's that difficult to do that kind of translation work right to you want to really capture the breath of the experience though. you don't want to just transcribe what's being said or detail a conversation. you want to make sure you you convey what somebody actually watching. this is seeing so you want to make sure you're describing the backdrop you want to make sure you're describing if there's a studio audience the audience reaction you want to think about if you can. you know if this is airing on network television like that documentary what came on before it what came on after? what was the viewing experience that evening like for people who were watching it and if you're fortunate enough and this was something that i would occasionally find in the archives and my first book was you can find people writing about their experience of watching it and if you have that your gold right like you can you can convey what the experience was like without having to enter that kind of imagined space of this imaginary viewer, but you can actually convey how people thought about it at the time. so, i think that trying to capture as much of experience of it being aired it is an important part. there's another important part, but i'll save it for my question. and i think what nikki's saying about like contextualizing it and especially like we obviously we're not doing reception studies here. we're not able to and this is something working on all in the family that comes up at every conference and every seminar is like, but i had an uncle i had a granddad i had a father who didn't view archie in the way that perhaps others did or like he cheered him on or he loved our to you or so forth and carlo o'connor talks about also how uncomfortable it was in public where people were like, yeah you tell them archie in his politics was the exact opposite of that and how that made him feel but you can look at like the cues they're giving so if you look at at the studio audience laughter in all in the family, you can see what they're sort of where they guiding the viewer then i was fortunate. to work with norman lear's papers where you can see these letters where people are writing in and there are those guys who are like yeah archie, but at the same time and this is without exception in in the letters. i've gone through they recognize that the producers are liberals and and they're angry at the producers, right? they're like you're making this is what nixon says on the white house tapes. he's like they're making him out to be a bad guy even though he's supposed to be a good guy because he's the silent majority. he's like my guy and they're making him out to be a bad guy. and so i think that sort of contextualizing helps us a lot when we go about writing about it television and i was gonna say i think one thing we don't do enough as historians and this is true and writing about television but lots of other things is description that we you analysis over descriptions of the point where? i am my last book. i made a point not with every character, but with any sort of major character to try to just physically describe whether he or she looked like because sometimes i find them reading a book and someone who's a major character, but i don't know what they look like and i want to be able to imagine the person and maybe there's a photograph, but and i i think you know, it's it's something that historical writing needs more of descriptions of rooms descriptions of scenes descriptions of people because it does help impart some of what television can impart a sense of the visual. there i mean it's in watch someone speaking watching harlan carter say the things that he is saying, you know, it's it's a completely different experience than if you were just to read a transcript for me that two minutes that we watched and it's 50 to 58 or something like that for 158 that two minutes encapsulates about six different policy conversations that are happening around this moment as well. and so when we think about using television about the deep description about the sort of richness of the source itself, but also a way to say you can pull this thread you pull this thread you pull this thread and it is right there together in this very brief moment, and that's really fruitful for a historian when we you know, when you think oh, i'm in the weeds with this policy conversation, and i've spent all this time talking about this one thing then you see it in a clip that's you know, 30 seconds of a two-minute clip. it's brilliant. it gives you a moment to step back out of that. you know, that that high politics talk that we often get into and say oh this is what's happening to someone else. this is how it is described to somebody else. that's really it's quite quite fruitful. yeah hard to do. hard to do but very useful in terms of hard to do and time-consum. mickey how many hours of politically incorrect did you have to sit through so many i mean i was i was i benefited somewhere i benefit it a lot of this is now available on youtube and i also had a very particular question that i was interested in about conservative punditry so you can like watch the first 10 minutes and kind of figure out who's on and then if it's you know, not anyone you're interested in you can kind of move on although you do want to watch a few of those anyway to get a sense of what the rhythm of the show is and how it unfolds. you know this actually raises a question about the kind of difficulties of technology on the one hand you do have all the much of this digitized and that's wonderful. it is a sporadic and sort of uneven archive. but so are they all um, but you know the best way to watch the entire catalog of politically incorrect is to go buy some bhs tapes, and i don't know about you guys, but i have no way if you just days and especially during the pandemic when your ability to access special equipment was largely out of reach for most of us that meant that your your sample size was just going to be limited to what was available. i will also say i have watched a ton of c-span in order to not just get political events, but you know like a lot of radio shows like the rush limbaugh show where simulcast so you can listen in and watch some of those and that is also like it's an expansive archive. it's better tagged than youtube which is i will also say a very difficult archive to to pick your way through the internet archive has some things as well some documentaries. so yeah a lot of a lot of political we actually stay on on the question of access and so because you said that they're on youtube who is uploading so i know that -- cavett show for example are now doing like they're not putting up their whole episodes, but they're doing like individual interviews or like clips and i guess other shows normally or shows are being put on on youtube in individual clips. so is this just somebody monkey boy 1979, it's not so i have a question about that as well because i found that a lot of the a lot of the tv footage. i'm really looking for i found in bits and pieces on yeah these kind of slightly shadowy bizarre accounts that get taken down every so often and then pop up somewhere else probably the same person. seems like it is. try to get in touch with this one particularly when i'm talking about. they did not want to talk to me about where they got their clips from which brings up this really something i've struggled with in my work is how do you cite something like that? that is not an official archive. it's not an official person. i've tried as far as possible any clip that i use from there. i try and cross reference if i can find a transcript or if i've been able to see it at the paley anything like that. so kind of cover cover my basics, but i do have this question of what do you do with these things? and then also this problem of when they get taken down, i sort of drawn a conversation i have with frank garrity who unfortunately couldn't be with us today really early on in my project. frank said anything you find on youtube you think that might be useful downloaded? get it off the internet get it onto your hard drive because you don't know if it's gonna be there. so i have my own personal television archive on my hard drive, but you know how do i set that, you know in author's personal? collection that doesn't seem a the most academic but be also doesn't help other people that are wanting to draw the same things. so any any ideas anyone about i'm kind of lucky mine, i actually ran across mine the firing line episode through the hoover institute and they had it on dvd. which i don't have a dvd. i was just a dvd player this point either, you know, so i actually had to go out and source a dvd player so that i could make it work which then i upgraded my laptop in the middle of the pandemic. thanks pandemic, and that was not the most wonderful thing that's ever happened to me. but anyway, and it was completely all new hardware and then of course there was more to do and all the things. so when you're asking for a clip when we were talking about getting together a clip i was thinking oh lord, please let youtube have this and it did thankfully, but the same sort of thing with you know, i run on blogs a lot of times. i read a lot of blogs and a lot of blogged information. it's the same question of what do you do? do you screen grab? how do you do this, you know citation is always really tricky. it's you know, i get to pull a dvd off my shelf but i bought it through amazon. you know i had to there it was nowhere other available to me and citation for me. it's easy because i just get to say dvd, but i you know, i i think a lot about the other pieces of information that we use i've had students bring in tiktok. for class assignments and you know, it's the same sort of question. how are we going to do this? how do we keep up with this sort of rigor of the academy when using alternative sources. yeah. i don't really know. i will say it's not something unique to television you've certainly seen in footnotes before like in the possession of the author or interview with the author and the interviews aren't transcribed and made publicly accessible. so it's not unique to this but it is one of those things where it's not just the difficulty of accessing them and i remember since i see natalia in the room, we had ebay alerts for anything related to chip and dales and so we were like getting videos from from ebay in order to get the content that we needed in order to create welcome to your fantasy and that in a way, it's just kind of part of the process and yes, you are building an archive. that's not yet publicly available. but of course having a publicly available archive when it comes to television is really difficult for the reasons that david has said vanderbilt has this amazing tv news archive. you can't watch it anywhere, but vanderbilt because otherwise the networks are going to come after you and a lot of really important stuff is constantly taken out of circulation because of copyright. i was having a conversation with tiffany chang who was one of these open internet activists who's done incredible work on things like net neutrality and one of the ways that she got into activism was around pbs's eyes on the prize which had been taken down and so they would continuously have like these gorilla events where they were screening eyes on the prize in contravention of the intellectual property right and copyright laws, but it was about making a point. i want you to pick up the banner of both tang and greenberg in order to try to free some of this information from the clutches of corporate media. but it also races the question of like the chain of custody right if monkey boy is is providing you with with stuff. like how do you know that there aren't editing being done after the fact how do you know that this is the specially if we're talking local television and stuff. like how do we know which channels this was on who did it reach and so forth so my clip was actually from the kennedy library so, you know, i know this ad who's done and then unable to to pray for example, the mcgovern ads and which weren't available anywhere it took a long while before i found reals in an archive and and had to find money to to have them digitize that material but that was something i found in letters to leer. that were like we saw this ad that archie was doing for mcgovern and letters were coming from texas and they were coming from california and they were coming from wisconsin. and so i started to trace that and i found you know political reporters writing about these telephones that mcgovern was doing and part of them was this ad with archie bunker some like okay. this is real. this isn't something they have just like imagine that archie bunker is out there doing ads for mcgovern and and then like slowly trying to to establish the fact like where did these air who saw them who is reporting on it? and can i actually get that clip? so those questions? yeah. well, i mean encouraged me one other thing we could do collectively or individually and collectively is in our graduate education to do. more teaching about methods of video and also audio and photo research it, you know, i don't think any any history phd programs teach how to do that. maybe there are few and probably in some media studies programs will get a little bit of it. but yeah more and more as more of the past, you know is is a past that has appeared on television and more and more students are going to be wanting to do topics where television could be a very viable source. it seems like this is something to incorporate, you know, if only for a week or two into, you know certain first year research methods courses and and that sort of thing that will only become an increasingly important source. and i would just add very quickly that the solution in the meantime is just radical transparency in your footnotes like being clear about what your sources were if you have a note on sources making clear there are limitations to the way that i was able to access this but it's how i accessed it. also i'd put in a plug for the tv guide. i actually have i have a coffee. thank you ebay. i have a copy of the tv guide in which this episode appeared and it's really fruitful because i can see what aired before and what aired after you know, it's this sorts of things. it's fascinating when you start thinking about using television, you have to think really broadly about the landscape within which this was produced and not that is about how did you know? what was on the tv you didn't have the scroll right? so tv guide's really fruitful for that too and it also because i think because of what i study it's so wide it's so culturally wide and politically wide and all sorts of things. i have stuff from everywhere and it it's kind of like welcome to your fantasy. you just pull things from everywhere. so if you guys an excellent resource if you're looking for how do you prove it was on and when right ads are harder i think because they're in the middle and you don't really know you need something more. granular at the station maybe to say when they were running that ad. but yeah tv guide is also pretty clutch. yeah on that point of access. i just wanted to throw out as a piece of advice for anyone that's trying to get their hands on tv. as david mentioned a lot of the i think cbs is the same as nbc. you have to be a commercial body to be able to get access and in i mean from my work in 2018 nbc brought out a documentary called hope and fury mlk the movement and the media and i got in touch with the producers at arc media who made that documentary big shout out to rachel jetson and phil bartlesson who were extremely kind and more than happy for me to come to their production studio and look through everything that there are archivist had collated. they were really thrilled that someone else was going to make use of everything that they had got together. i mean, that was a huge endeavor and actually it was too late in my project to be able to like really make use of it. but, you know, hopefully in future projects, i now know everything that they have there and they world everything that that they thought was useful in the same thing that i was looking at from cbs abc and nbc, so i guess my kind of piece of advice there is if you've found a documentary where they've had the commercial backing to go and get those clips just get in touch with the people. they might they might let you have access, but i could only do it in their production studio in brooklyn because of the copyright they were not to put anything digitally for me. but yeah, it's you've just got i guess be creative with the pathways. i was just like so far. we've talked a lot about what's broadcast and what you actually see on your screen. i'm kind of curious to hear what people think about how you marry what appears on television with the production process behind it and the business incentives, and i'm sure asking me must have have gone into how these episodes were produced and the choices that's channels. we're making about airing them how corporate that into your use of television well, the hard part is getting again getting that conversation to be a part of like finding it in the sources. so actually with the carroll o'connor mcgovernance what i was fortunate enough to find was outtakes where you have carroll o'connor being like because in that ad he's saying i'm a conservative man for mcgovern, right? and which carroll o'connor by no means is he's a liberal actor in hollywood. and and so one of the outtakes he's like --. let's do it again. i forgot the conservative which clearly signals the importance. it wasn't like just something he added in there. it was intentional to present himself as as conservative, but then the question with television entertainment is also like they're not necessarily storing this information like how the decisions are made and and so i had access to lead private papers that was incredibly important for this but also some of the writers on the show had donated their papers to the the writers guild archives and there you could find transcripts of the writer room conversations, which are just so valuable, but you're not necessarily going to find that first of all not all television writers are donating their papers anywhere second of all, you're not necessarily going to find those conversations around happy days or something. like i think in that sense, i was lucky in that there was an understanding or an appreciation of all in the family as quote unquote quality television, which might have changed also how people were and saving documents from that show and the production process. yeah, i also just want to highlight that i'm ask both oscar and i are kind of cheating a little bit in that we work on television like the subject of what we questioned. i mean for me it's as i said the relationship between the tv news industry and the civil rights movement. so our primary questions are talking about these things and what david essay was really talking about is people who don't study tv, but should be using it as source material so i think for like me and oscar it's much easier because you know, i'm gonna i'm gonna go and sit in the nbc archives that uw madison for a month because it has everything that's exactly what i'm looking for. i'm gonna go sit and the brisco center and look at the cbs paper archive because that is everything that i'm interested in if you're just using a couple of clips to spend that time and effort to get into these questions is it's i mean, it's enormous and enormous task and much much harder, but right and you know, i mean we these phase up to this. ellie's publicly is you have to make choices. i mean, there's sort of a notion. oh, you can look at everything and leave. no stone unturn you bob keros is turn every page but like even in the essay where he says and yeah, it's taking them a while. but yeah, even that essay he says, okay. well, i took us election of the johnson papers and turned every page and you know, we all have to think about okay. do i want to like, you know travel 3000 miles and like go to all this great expense for what's gonna be like a paragraph in my book, you know, so i mean these are our hard choices and it's it's not always necessary or self-evident that one has to you know, go the extra mile, but you know, sometimes there are i think situations, you know, i mean, i haven't haven't for example and because it's it's harder seeing like the nightly news coverage of selma in march of 65 that that probably would be really valuable or when the time comes, you know, 1986 lewis runs against julian bond for congress, you know if i can get to like the nightly news in atlanta like the local coverage for like that stretch because it was a runoff period so it's not that many days, you know, that could be incredibly illuminating. i mean as it is i have a rich newspaper source and a lot else to go from for that. but you know, i think you have to think there's strategically again as a political story and someone who's subject isn't television per se where are the times where using television as a source would be most advantageous best bang for the buck? harry do you have any questions you want to direct the panel? um, you know, my questions are really oddly enough. we've talked around almost all of my questions that i would actually ask, but the one thing that i really would love to know is you know, we we have these magnificent public archives. we all are talking about private archives. how do you store this stuff? how do you do it? how do you personally store this kind of data for ease of access for yourself right and for ease of sharing with someone who else who may follow behind so how what do you do? what that look like for you? i've used the sage messenger's method of if it's on youtube immediately download it i put on an external hard drive because computers crash a lot or on a cloud so that is and you can share it that way, which is nice, although of course, they're pretty big piles. yeah. yeah, see i've just decided i'll be playing an annual dropbox. yeah, it's description for the rest of my life. okay, small price to pay. yeah, and then there's also the question of sharing i've had a couple of people that i've that have wanted particular things that i've had that i've shared. i think i also might have some of the selma footage that i'll share with you. i've got it i would be great. yeah. i actually want your whole archives also just being as collaborative as possible finding other people that are working on the same thing as you and you know, sharing sharing your resources and as far as you can yeah that question i think i already mentioned how historians need to look at like television studies need to look at media scholars and like learn from them and actually a friend of mine when he heard about this panel, mike sokolol he said i have any of you any experience working in a newsroom in television because like historians. do not right and and so he both has a background in television production and his father was producer on cbs news working what walter cronkite and so forth and and he's been incredibly generous and valuable for both sage and me to like ask questions about like what the process like who's making these decision? how did the structures at the newsroom look like your father when he worked on this like, how was he reporting to? how are the decisions made? and i think this is knowledge. that's a silent knowledge. and also like how do we as historians get this knowledge if we have no experience working in newsrooms. i think we do it the way that all historians can their knowledge right like you you do your research you read books about the industry you talk to people you do interviews. it's i think because television feels accessible in that way. there's this idea that you need to have that experience in order to talk knowledgeably about it, but you know, i don't need to go to a clan rallied the clan. so i think that we have ways of accessing knowledge that might not be readily accessible to us. it's not an experiential. yeah. right. we don't have that long left. so happy to open it out to the audience. now if anyone has any any questions that was different and if you could come up and stand by like or do we have a roving if you wouldn't mind coming up and standing at the mic to ask your question go for it. is to line up i know yeah. hi. can you hear me? okay, so i have like i have this was so generative for me this whole panel. i have a comment which is it's incredibly hard to get footage for over the mix like it's 4500 episodes the vault is sealed and her both studio like it's there's a lot of stuff on youtube but like some of the more obscure episodes that overcover i think is really hard. i also think that if i had asked harper studios like 20 years ago, it would have been very easy to get that because at the end of each episode, they're like for live transcript this episode male, you know, like you could mail in your request pay $30 they will mail you a vhs of the oprah episode that you wanted now because of the influx of information you can't just mail into who like writing who it's really hard to do that and i've also thought about like how i would transfer my podcast to a class and i think having that footage would be so invaluable, but it's just like again trying to crack that open my question though is how do you use things? like i asked my students now do they watch tv and not so much like it's more tiktok. it's more instagram. it's more, you know, maybe streaming services on netflix or whatever, but it's they're definitely they don't have cable you mean they only have subscription services. they're not watching commercials. they don't really get a lot of commercials and so trying to connect something like tv to them. it's a whole lot harder, especially you don't have the footage a lot of my students have never seen an oprah winfrey show before and so i'm trying to figure out like do we need to also be thinking about tv and like what is the second medium? are we care about blogging tiktok right or or these other mediums? and lastly how to how should maybe we think about film too because i teach a course on understanding the american slavery through film and we use film as a way of exploring because a lot of people won't read books, but they're like, oh i watch that movie and you're like no he's like, how do we use a film as either a substitute or is a supplement to a conversation about these historical moments that we want to cover? those are great questions kelly and i do think that there is we're going to have to come to terms with the idea that we have to start teaching television as a historical medium and not a contemporary one and that really hurts, you know like that, but i think we have to and and you know, there are there are especially in media departments studies going on of internet of social media of tiktok. and while we're incorporating those in our classroom. i don't think we've yet thought of a way, you know, some of us have written a little bit about the internet, but and of course market america who has written extensively about silicon valley and sort of the technology and the development side. but working those into our historical models of media is something that we're still we're still working on but they're hugely important as you, you know, like hugely important classroom tools because it's about meeting your students where they're at and that means both understanding learning these new technologies and then coming to terms with the obsolescence of ours and also i think recognizing that like the name of the game is changing in that the amount of information if you're going to be studying the 21st century like i can go back and look at you know, op ads on all in the family and and that's a lot of them, but it's still limited amount. the all in the family they did this live special with jimmy kimmel a couple of years ago. there was so many so much stuff on social media and i'm not gonna find that right like people's personal facebook pages or or instagram or tiktok or wherever they put this information and and so the question of turn every page right watch every tiktok. i don't think that's gonna be something we're gonna be able to do so, we're gonna have to talk about like boundaries and how how to select material more and more as we move forward i think about that though is the same sort of evidentiary teaching lesson that we use now right when we use a document, you know, you just you give that sort of deep backgrounding information you say here's the thing. here's a source. what do you think right? and so when i when i use these things in my classrooms, i generally think about them as you know, i've given my students as much of the historiography as i quite possibly can explain, you know, where these things come from and then i hand them. this is a primary source and say here you go which still implies is implicates all these other things we've been talking about access right about how do you do it? how do you grab it? what how much is enough can can you make an argument with this? you know, are you using it in that way, but i i use these this clip this show in exact same way that i would a piece of paper. it it just it just is you have to explain what it is. you have to explain the tv thing, right? yeah, like it's this is what you sat down and watched it. yeah. actually, we've got our next question. oh, yeah. thank you all so much that awesome panel. um, i had a question about a i guess how things are changing. um, i was interested by oscar your description of carol o'connor playing with the sort of sorry, excuse me, the audience of all in the family kind of treating carroll o'connor like he was archie bunker, but then also criticizing the liberal production of the show for printing the villain and i would just wondering i guess from the point of view of historians who might dip your toes into contemporary events. do you think that type of audience relationship with television basically, do you think that exist anymore? do you think there's do you think we're so saturated with content and so aware of like the meta nature of content that there can never be that kind of relationship with the characters is just what i mean as if they reflect real life and i guess something that made me think of that as well was the way that 40 years ago, you know, it would be very potent to have celebrities endorsing candidates or i guess celebrities who did participate the march on washington and i can't help but think that now i was thinking about matthew mcconaughey's intervention the gun debate. i just don't see that having an effect in the way that maybe 40 years ago these celebrity endorsements. have a kind of role in guiding public opinions. yeah, if any of that makes sense of it, i would say that so in the archives you could find letters written to edith bunker right or like in the letters they talk about her as if she's a real person like i didn't like how what you did on last week's show or something like that. and by the way, you see this also in the watergate hearings where they're writing the television like bring back that character like as if they're soap operas like that was a fun twist like let's do that again. so and and so your question is then like when we look back in 70s, like how are they this naive and like has this changed? well, i would say that america elected a television character as president. so i'm not sure certain that we're more sophisticated in seeing the differences between the the television persona and and the real person behind whether we're talking about donald trump or we're talking about kim kardashian or whoever i think the blurring has just continued and and i'm not certain. we're more savvy in determining the lines. so thanks for a really thought provoking panel and thanks the audience members for great question because mine actually follow up on the on the line of questioning that has already been approached and that is you sort of frame the panel. as tv in relationship to or against documentary or textual sources, but if we think about film or radio or other kinds of audio visual sources, i guess i have two questions one is the content that is what is different in specific about television. so if you are going to explain the tv thing as carrie said, what is the tv thing what makes reading or using television specific or different from let's say film the other thing is in in the film studies literature. there's a long-standing debate about reception that is how can we understand how audiences received understood? um film and so i'm wondering how do you problematize reception that is do you make assumptions about reception from looking at the television itself. do you have to rely on these audience reactions? how do you think out audience reception. so those would be my questions. well, let me start with the first part. i mean, i think one thing i mean obviously one can distinguish, you know textual versus all kinds of audio and visual source material as a general distinction, but i think what's different about television and of course radio did this to some degree before is that is how much it's just embedded in people's daily lives so film, you know, especially after they, you know televisions arrival becomes like a dedicated experience. yeah, you might say well news reals for an earlier generation. should we should look at newsreels for people's reception of the news and and maybe that's a valid argument but with television it, you know for those of us, you know from yeah the fifties through like the current generation kind of maybe ending now, but it so dominated our lives until kind of the internet took over that space that you know, it's that quality that i was trying to get at the essay like i mean sort of oscar was saying yeah, most people arguing about all in the family aren't doing it through the vehicle of the times op-ed. they're doing it through things. they're seeing on tv a lot of the even the political arguments about whether it's you know, watergate or jimmy carter or what have you. they're unfolding through experiences that are mediated by television first and foremost and that's kind of why i put that at the center of the essay, although i think i think similar critique is similar argument could be extended even to photographs. i don't think historians use particularly well, or as extensively or thoughtfully as we could film radio etc. you have time for one short question from natalie i had to but okay, i'll start with just praise and answer bruce a second. so yeah, first of all, these slides are fantastically good job, whoever made them and this is such a great conversation. so i'll just give one the one question that i have which is about this point david that you bring up about like is i ask is how long will television be like this first and foremost media and it goes to what you're talking about about social media kelly that most like two very concrete examples the dap herd trial, right which was televised anyone could watch all of it. but most people who've been paying attention realize most of the people who are watching it are watching highly edited memes. talk clips like instagram, you know feeds about this and that is super interesting because i think from our perspective of our own generations, but also the people we're studying historically not even an option and we would say well it's all on tv people were watching but it's totally mediated through tiktok, right and another social media. the other thing i think is really interesting too. and this is part of the same question, but i'd love to hear what you think about production. is there was this great article the tv writer meredith blake last week who did this deep dive into the making of november rain the video which turns 30 this week and she made she made the point that in the when that came out. you could be the biggest fan, but there was no option to find backstory in the moment like she wanted to read the story was based on she wanted to know more she couldn't so now it's the role of the journalist for the historian to do it, but it'll be interesting. i know what you think about the future generation studying tv of now when we have a lot of backstory instantly available to us, so i'll stop great panels. i will just say one thing which is that the it's worth clarifying is that there's a real bifurcation in media audiences you and i and many other people consumed the herd depth trial through social media and those formats. remember there are millions and millions of americans who still sit down and watch musty tv on thursday night who sit down and watch fox news as a televised medium, they might interact with it on facebook more likely than twitter, but primarily television is still a very important part of their lived experience in their media diet. and i think we're seeing a real split in that just a since where we're shutting it here for the death of television. it's still doing well outside of this most recent code i think on an end note like we're witnessing a television event right at this moment right with the january 6th hearings and and they're showing just like the olympics before how this is changing where they the ratings. necessarily there in the traditional sense of sitting down and watching but the material is circulating as you mentioned on social media and and that is not only means and commentary but also the actual broadcast material that is being sent that is being broadcast originally on television, which brings up one other point that we haven't really discussed either about the access question and the reception question. what do we do about the algorithm? what do we do? yeah, we will leave you on that. think about for tonight. i am very pleased to introduce to you kevin waite. dr. kevin waite is an assistant professor of history and durham university in the uk. he received his phd from the university of pennsylvania in 2016. he also holds a masters of philosophy from the university of cambridge and a bachelor's in history and english from williams college. a political historian of the 19th century united states was a focus on slavery imperialism and the american west dr. waite has written numerous scholarly articles and he comments frequently on american history