1Introduction

Public engagement with documentary film has, perhaps, never been greater, particularly when one considers the growing number and popularity of feature-length theatrical documentaries such as Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and Citizenfour (2014). Indeed, those two films – both of which explore and critique US government action in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks – bracket a decade in which the film-going public embraced documentary films across a wide range of styles, approaches, and distribution platforms. Beyond the big screen, television, cable, and online venues such as ESPN’s “30 for 30”, The New York Times’ “Op-Docs”, Netflix, and CNN Films, as well as established programs on PBS and HBO, have expanded opportunities for documentary filmmakers to find distribution for their films and to find work on new documentary platforms. Films that overtly advocate or pursue a particular agenda; films that incorporate aesthetics, techniques, and values more commonly associated with art and entertainment fare; and films tackling the kinds of investigations traditionally associated with investigative reporting or reinvigorating old story types are all part of an expanded documentary field. Or is it the journalistic field that has expanded?

Elsewhere in this volume, scholars have conceptualized journalism as a product, a practice, an institution, and a public sphere, and as a gatekeeper, agenda-setter, and framer of information and events. Those varied conceptualizations highlight different ways of understanding journalism’s purpose and power and, taken as a whole, argue against a too-narrow notion of it as something practiced only in a particular way, by certain people, in specific settings, resulting in something that goes by the name of “journalism”. Here, I build on those broader notions of journalism by examining a practice and product, documentary film, which is and isn’t journalism, but also is and isn’t art, is and isn’t advocacy. The focus here is on the distinct journalistic culture of the United States, though the issues likely resonate more widely.

In conversations at film festivals and universities, in journalism trade publications and film magazines, the relationship between journalism and documentary film has been considered time and again. Just why the conclusions to those arguments matter is not always made explicit – if journalism and documentary film do or don’t overlap, so what? – but seems to be rooted in our expectations for, and therefore the bases of our evaluations of, documentary and journalism. To offer one example: Filmmakers on a panel at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival described their work as a variant of journalism. Laura Poitras (Citizenfour, The Oath) characterized documentary as “journalism plus;” Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Going Clear) described himself as “a filmmaker with ‘journalistic baggage’”; and Marc Silver (Who is Dayani Cristal?, 3½ Minutes) described “a journalistic layer at the base of documentary filmmaking” (Das 2015). Poitras, Gibney, and Silver saw these similarities to journalism as mostly beneficial to documentary, providing filmmakers with legal protections and status to the extent they pursue stories according to journalistic principles regarding truth telling, protecting sources, and maintaining independence. Where journalism and documentary film diverge, the panelists seemed to say, was more about form than function, more about differences in the storytelling techniques employed in truth telling than the notion of truth telling as the fundamental purpose itself.

Of course that is just one panel at one film festival, albeit a panel of highly acclaimed filmmakers at the premier US festival. There is good reason to think that the differences actually do go beyond techniques. What makes a documentary a documentary (or, for our purposes, makes journalism journalism) is located in neither aesthetics nor “closeness to actuality or truth”, but rather “resides somewhere else in the complex interaction between text, context, producer and spectator” (Ward 2005: 11). That complex interaction has become more complex in journalism, as the field now encompasses a wider range of producers, texts, and contexts, and a disappearing line between producers and spectators. These changes, by-products of change in the broader digital information landscape, are seen as posing threats to journalism’s autonomy to determine norms and standards (e.g., Deuze 2005; Vos & Craft 2016). An added layer of complexity is that definitions of journalism often include both normative and functional elements (see Shapiro 2014 for an overview of definitions). All of which is to say that journalists might have a stake in defining documentary as a variant of professional journalism as a way of asserting journalism’s control over a particular approach to truth- and storytelling. Documentary filmmakers, working out of different institutional, political, and cultural contexts, have no such stake in bending journalism to fit documentary’s norms; indeed, it’s unclear how or why a diffuse field like documentary film could even attempt to do so.

Exactly who is operating within whose domain is, of course, a matter of perspective. One could easily make the argument that journalism exists in the periphery of documentary film, and not the other way around, or that both are roughly similar, minor players in the larger field of cultural production. I don’t dispute that. Even so, given the current challenges to journalism and the fact that documentary seems to be occupying and flourishing in some of journalism’s traditional terrain, it’s worth considering the lessons journalism misses in its impulse toward defending certain boundaries and definitions, and, likewise, the advantages to be gained by taking a cue from documentary film. The main purpose of this chapter, then, is to map journalism and documentary’s intersections and to consider whether and how documentary’s success offers, in effect, a critique of journalism.

2Definitions, fields, and boundaries

To say that the journalism field is changing assumes we have a somewhat fixed idea of what has constituted or defined the field in the past, including whatever place documentary film has had in it. In Bourdieu’s field theory, fields are “semiautonomous and increasingly specialized spheres of action” governed by shared rules “producing a certain degree of internal homogeneity” (Benson 2006: 188). Those rules, which include establishing who is or is not part of the field and the standards for evaluating quality and ethical performance, are the subject of ongoing tension and contestation. A question, then, is the extent of journalism and documentary film’s homogeneity or, conversely, the extent to which they represent separate specialized spheres of action. Does documentary film share a border with journalism, or is it wholly within the journalistic field? Where are journalism’s boundaries more or less well defended, and why are those defenses in place?

Starting with definitions is necessary, but will get us only part of the way. There is little consensus on the definition of journalism in either textbooks or the scholarly literature, as Shapiro (2014) observes in his very helpful overview. More to the current point, though, are his observations that such a lack of consensus underscores how “any attempt to define journalism might be seen as a hegemonic foray by one discipline against another” and how, in its necessarily exclusionary aspect, “the act of definition often gets confused with the act of evaluation” (Shapiro 2014: 555). Documentary filmmaker Robert Greene describes something akin to this hegemonic impulse in the critical backlash against Joshua Oppenheimer’s Academy Award-nominated The Act of Killing, in which the filmmaker’s relationship to the subject of the story and the use of dramatic recreations of killings perpetrated by that subject challenge a number of conventional nonfiction storytelling practices and ethics. Greene argues that the “old idea that documentaries should behave like journalism”, specifically the “precious ideas of objectivity and subservience to journalism” are an awkward fit for a film that could not have accomplished its purpose if forced to follow those rules (Greene 2013).

In creating his “functional” definition of journalism, Shapiro notes he is employing just one of five possible ways of thinking about journalism that Zelizer (2004) identified: as a profession, an institution, people, text, or a set of practices. Taking that last, functional, approach yielded the following definition: “Journalism comprises the activities involved in an independent pursuit of accurate information about current or recent events and its original presentation for public edification” (Shapiro 2014: 561). This definition works well for Shapiro’s purpose – identifying practices deserving of legal protection – but not for distinguishing journalism and documentary film. One could, for example, substitute “documentary” for “journalism” and still have a sensible sentence. I do not consider this a fault in Shapiro’s definition; rather, it serves to highlight the power of the other approaches to journalism Zelizer identifies, particularly as a profession and as an institution, in shaping how journalists understand journalism and how they are likely to evaluate documentary film. That is, if journalism and documentary are functionally similar, then we might look to norms or purpose or something else to make distinctions. Even so, we need to be cautious about putting too much weight on the distinctions we find. In conceptualizing journalism as an ideology, Deuze (2005) said he “deliberately ignored real or perceived differences between mainstream and alternative news media, between serious and popular journalism or between hard and soft news” because those “binary oppositions [are] increasingly untenable in our liquid modern news times” (Deuze 2005: 458). I would argue that thinking of documentary and journalism as a binary opposition may likewise prove to be simplistic, as the criteria for making distinctions take on different meanings in different circumstances.

Documentary film also lacks a consensus definition; definitional difficulties have been compounded and made both more urgent and more exciting as new platforms and technologies for creating and distributing films force reconsideration of what “documentary” means (see Nash, Hight & Summerhayes 2014, for a discussion of the new documentary “ecology”). Starting with all film, then separating fiction from nonfiction film, and finally locating documentary within the nonfiction category is another approach to definition that may help us locate those boundaries. In his widely used text, Nichols (2010) takes this approach via the construction of two Venn diagrams: The first depicts fiction and nonfiction film as overlapping circles, where the shared space comprises forms that “borrow from both traditions” such as neo-realism, reenactments, mockumentaries, and docudramas. Documentary film along with such disparate forms as informational films and surveillance footage are located in the exclusively nonfiction part of the diagram. Most documentaries are identifiable by:

(1) their representations in sound and image of a preexisting, historical world, (2) their reliance on social actors who present themselves rather than take on assigned roles, and (3) the intricate relationship that may arise between the interaction of the filmmaker and the film’s social actors who clearly co-exist in the same historical world. It is from this interaction that the film’s story, proposal, or perspective frequently arises (Nichols 2010: 144).

Similarly, Smith and Rock (2014) argue that intent, not content, is the appropriate basis for distinguishing documentary from fictional film. A documentarian seeks to make a statement that is received as fact by the audience, while a fictional filmmaker is focused on the art of storytelling.

Nichols’ second Venn diagram breaks the nonfiction category into documentary and non-documentary film, depicting their overlapping space as populated by mere footage, newsreels, television news reports, and industrial or sponsored films (Nichols 2010: 146). Whether a television news report belongs in the documentary or non-documentary circle depends on the purpose for making the categorization – perhaps, as Ward (2005) might see it, to highlight some aspect of the complex interaction among text, context, producer, and spectator.

Corner notes that documentary “intersects across the junction points of a number of media modes” and has resisted attempts to “find an adequately tight set of generic criteria” that might define it (Corner 2008: 15). Those attempts have centered on “matters of form, matters of subject and matters of purpose” (Corner 2008: 15) – a range of concerns similar to those attempts to define journalism have employed. In documentary, as Corner writes (and, arguably, in journalism), form varies too widely to be a useful criterion. Subject and purpose, however, can be markers of “documentary value” (Corner 2008: 17) such that documentaries meant to educate the public on serious topics related to social problems constitute a sort of ideal type.

In Bourdieu’s terms we might say such documentaries are more closely connected to the cultural capital of the field than those aimed at less serious or entertainment-oriented subjects and purposes. In journalism, watchdog reporting (serious topics related to social problems) likewise represents a sort of ideal type closely tied to the field’s cultural capital. These similarities, then, suggest that journalism and documentary share important values and rules such that they could be seen as part of the same field. Yet important differences with regard to other values, related to professional and institutional aspects of journalism, point to where other boundaries between these fields might lie.

3Issues at the intersection(s) of documentary and journalism

The reactions to three true crime documentary series that debuted in 2014 and 2015 – The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, Making a Murderer, and Serial Season One (a podcast, not a film) – illustrate this tangle of expectations about nonfiction work as well as the very different forms contemporary documentary takes. For example, each of these series was described as “addictive”, the potential for binge watching or listening adding yet another new wrinkle to understanding the blurring of boundaries between entertainment and nonfiction stories. In addition, though each series dealt with past crimes, each also became part of the specifically journalistic arena of breaking news, whether coincidentally or as a direct result of the series. And, perhaps most telling, each series faced questions from journalists, reviewers, and audiences regarding how their stories were structured that suggest a mixture of journalistic and entertainment criteria being applied to evaluate the work: When do certain elements enter the narrative? Which elements are emphasized or left out? How do the series’ creators draw conclusions about their subjects’ guilt or innocence? Serial was criticized, for example, for not reaching a definitive conclusion about its subject’s guilt or innocence, while Making a Murderer was faulted for seeming to have started with the conclusion that its subject had been framed. The Jinx was accused of leaving the information most essential to drawing a conclusion – a recorded confession – to the very end to heighten the series’ drama, even at the expense of an ongoing police investigation (see, for example, Garner 2014; Uberti 2015; Schulz 2016). Because these series are all true crime stories, came out at roughly the same time, and because together they represent something “new” about the documentary distribution landscape, comparisons were bound to be made among them. But the specific points of comparison are fairly old. Similar questions, for example, were raised about another true crime documentary series, Paradise Lost. Over the course of completing this big screen trilogy (released in 1996, 2000, and 2011), filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofksy were said to have demonstrated “partisanship” on behalf of the accused who they had come to believe were innocent (e.g., Itzkoff 2012; Hale 2012).

These critiques, then, point to violations of what are offered up as widely shared expectations of nonfiction storytelling: that storytellers must not have an agenda, must maintain a certain detachment from the subjects of their stories, must privilege information over drama. Indeed, a New Yorker article about these true crime series goes further in identifying violations of expectations, drawing an unflattering comparison between Making a Murderer filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos who are “dodging inconvenient facts”, and “good reporters” who “delineate facts rather than contribute to the confusion” (Schulz 2016). While reporters might appreciate that positive characterization of their work as thorough and ethical, of the six principal creators of these true crime documentaries, only Serial creator Sarah Koenig has a journalism background. Ricciardi, Demos, Berlinger, Sinofsky, and The Jinx’s Andrew Jarecki, have backgrounds in film, advertising, and law. And, also with the exception of Serial, these documentaries were produced outside the institutional structures of journalism. So if non-journalists are creating films outside of journalism, what does it mean to judge their work according to journalistic criteria? To do so suggests the journalistic approach is (or ought to be) the default one.

On the whole, Schulz argues in the New Yorker, these documentaries might be dangerous because of their independence from such expectations: “Yet we still have not thought seriously about what it means when a private investigative project – bound by no rules of procedure, answerable to nothing but ratings, shaped only by the ethics and aptitude of its makers – comes to serve as our court of last resort” (Schulz 2016). That these are audience, and not only journalists’, expectations indicates how successful professional journalism has been in promoting its specific vision of what constitutes good nonfiction storytelling. It’s also worth noting that the tone of much of the critique of these documentaries suggests that to call something “not journalism” is to identify a fault, not merely to describe or categorize it. Of course in saying that these documentaries follow no rules and are beholden only to ratings and their makers’ own ethics, Schulz is not only painting with a rather broad brush but also, incidentally, highlighting critiques of the journalism to which she is comparing them. Berlinger, for one, has said he is mindful of journalistic principles in doing his work:

I consider myself a verité filmmaker, but I also philosophically believe I am a storyteller as well as a journalist … It’s important to note I take the journalism responsibility very seriously. I don’t challenge obvious conventions of journalism – like, you would never put words in people’s mouths. We would never set up a situation that would never happen in real life. We would never so manipulate chronology that you’re totally changing the meaning of the event. However, I believe that any documentary maker who tells you they are presenting you with the objective truth of a situation is kidding themselves. (Quoted in Stubbs 2002: 144).

Of course ideas about whether documentaries ought to be judged by journalistic standards also vary across audiences. For example, two writers, one a non-journalist blogger, the other a pop culture writer with a journalism degree, offered their reaction to some of the criticism leveled at these series. The blogger made a simple distinction: “Making a Murderer isn’t a piece of journalism. It’s a documentary. It has a perspective …” (Heisler 2016). The writer observed that all journalism – traditional and not – has a bias and welcomed the idea that “non-traditional journalism” like documentaries and podcasts “can go where ‘straight news’ can’t” (McDonell-Parry 2016).

Certainly, defining journalism as a function of the institutional status of its site of production, the distribution channels in which it appears or the educational and occupational backgrounds of the people producing it, references important components of journalism’s cultural capital but not necessarily the components most integral to shaping the “rules” by which nonfiction storytelling in the journalistic field should operate. As this tale of these true crime documentaries suggests, norms regarding advocacy, detachment, and the balance of aesthetics and information are where we might find the most well defended boundaries.

4Voice, viewpoint and argument

The place where one might look for blurred or porous boundaries is the television documentary, which unlike most theatrical documentary film, comes out of the broadcast journalism tradition. The history of the television documentary in the US illustrates not only its significant cultural capital but also the tensions among different ways of interpreting professional norms of practice that have renewed resonance in the current environment.

As Raphael (2005) notes, embarrassment at how an objective approach to reporting allowed McCarthyism to thrive in the 1950s spurred the expansion of investigative reporting in television in the 1960s, mostly in the form of documentaries. Even so, network executives could not really openly embrace this “muckraking” style and continued to use objective reporting as a sort of counterweight: “Objective reporting helped shield journalists and news organizations from political and regulatory attacks for bias and inaccuracy. Muckraking offered prestige value in the eyes of television’s cultural critics and some regulators, and allowed networks to claim they were good corporate citizens providing a public service by helping to address social problems” (Raphael 2005: 178).

Such disparate forces as the quiz show scandals and anti-communism also shaped the form and subject matter of broadcast documentaries in the 1960s (see Curtin 1995; Rosteck 1994). The former created a context in which television networks saw documentaries as providing a means to restore audience trust and promote television’s public service identity; the latter underscored a tension between the contradictory notions of documentary as an unbiased record of events and an argument about how to understand those events.

This struggle in in the “Golden Age” of television documentary to reconcile the demands of information dissemination and storytelling, of detachment and engagement was echoed in the negative reactions to “new” or literary journalism in the 1970s, which expanded the repertoire of techniques employed in the service of telling a “true” story and questioned the ability of objective journalism to represent reality (Prager 2015; Frus 1994). In the case of the television documentary, however, this struggle was (and still, perhaps, is) not just an internal one among players trying to assert their view of journalism’s norms as the correct one, but also a pitched battle between journalism’s cultural capital and exogenous (economic and regulatory) pressures. These internal and external battles continue to shape whether and how journalists see documentary film as part of the journalistic field.

Consider the discussion in journalistic circles when documentary began its most recent surge. A 2001 issue of Nieman Reports, a publication of the Nieman Foundation whose mission is “to promote and elevate the standards of journalism”, was largely devoted to examining where documentary and journalism “converge”. Articles cover a wide range of documentary and journalistic platforms (radio, photography, the Internet, television, and film) but taken as a whole reflect a definition of – or at least a particular focus on – documentary as a kind of journalism, a descendent of broadcast pioneer Edward R. Murrow, who created a range of nonfiction work under the auspices of a professional, commercial news organization. Of course, working within those constraints was not sustainable even for Murrow, who helped bring an end to McCarthyism but whose sometimes-controversial work eventually fell victim to a lack of advertiser, and then institutional, support. One Nieman contributor, a veteran journalist, addressed a more contemporary version of the pressures Murrow faced. The rise of television news magazines, a “ratings fixation”, and related profitability pressures “combined to crush the documentary on commercial television” (Balboni 2001: 49). He observed the “near extinction” of documentary journalism on network and local television, though documentaries continued to find a home on public television and, to some extent, on cable television channels such as HBO. Now, 15 years later, documentarians have a much broader range of funding and distribution options outside of these traditional broadcast outlets, though public television continues to be an important venue.

Indeed Frontline, which airs on public television, is perhaps the most influential current outlet for television documentary in the US (Nisbet & Aufderheide 2009). However, the relative freedom of the public television environment does not necessarily translate into a reinterpretation of professional norms; rather, Frontline illustrates some of the tensions among those norms. For example, Michael Kirk, a prolific and award-winning Frontline producer, describes the program’s approach as “long-form, serious television that [is] also filmic and interesting to watch” (Idaho Public Television 2013). The filmic, or dramatic, aspects however, seem to have a lower priority than adherence to traditionally journalistic norms such as detachment. Kirk says “it’s not important that I inject myself” into the story but also describes the process of creating the archetypical Frontline documentary as one in which journalists construct the narrative and then “populate” it with “people in the story”, (PBS 2009) without acknowledging that the use of such a narrative formula is akin to “injecting” oneself into a story by fashioning an argument. The fact that many Frontline producers formerly worked in commercial television news may at least partly explain this privileging of journalistic (detachment) concerns while playing down their contradictions with documentary (filmic) concerns.

Documentary scholars point to a sense of voice as a significant, if not entirely straightforward, criterion of distinction between television news and documentary. As Nichols explains:

Documentaries are not documents. They may use documents and facts, but they always interpret them. They usually do so in an expressive, engaging way. This lends documentaries the strong sense of voice that nondocumentaries lack. This voice distinguishes documentary films. We sense a voice addressing us from a particular perspective about some aspect of the historical world. This perspective is more personal and sometimes more impassioned than that of standard news reports. Television news adheres to journalistic standards that have a strongly informational bias although they are far from free of qualities of voice. Bias, framing the context within which to present information, assumptions about who counts as an expert or authority, and choices of words and tone can all push news reporting toward the documentary camp while journalistic standards of objectivity and accuracy pull in the direction of the informational film (Nichols 2010: 147).

Having a strong sense of voice – personal, impassioned, biased – is characterized as contrary to journalism standards. Put in the language of field theory, voice is an important component of cultural capital – but it points in different directions depending on whether one is talking about documentary or journalism. A detached, neutral voice is valued in journalism; an engaged, expressive voice is valued in documentary. Furthermore voice is not just how a story is told, but the purpose for which it is told. The neutral voice of journalism delivers information; the biased voice of documentary tells a story or makes an argument about that information. These differing values and purposes are not mere preferences but rather defining features that serve to mark documentary film and journalism as specialized spheres of action.

While voice offers one criterion for making distinctions, it’s worth keeping in mind that Nichols employs overlapping circles and not bright lines to map the various categories and subcategories of film. Exploring how each form, beyond its distinctive voice, treats “information” in the “real world” may offer a clearer view of the terrain. What is useful for our mapping purposes is to consider the ways in which documentary film is described as inhabiting the space between fiction and journalism or, as Corner characterizes it, between drama/aesthetics and news/cognition (Corner 2008: 24).

Grierson, who first applied the term “documentary” to film some 90 years ago, called it the “creative treatment of actuality”, a description that suggests a documentarian does not attempt to convey “actuality” so much as deploy it for her own creative ends. As Winston, summarizing Grierson’s views, puts it: “Documentary was not journalism; rather it claimed all the artistic license of a fiction with the only constraints being that its images were not of actors and its stories were not the products of unfettered imagining” (Winston 2000: 20). In Grierson’s view “documentary encompassed the use of images of the real world for the purposes of personal expression” (Winston 2000: 20, emphasis added).

This notion of personal expression as the primary purpose of documentary, while certainly something with the potential to draw a bright line between documentary and journalism, varies in relevance across the many nonfiction models and cinematic modes documentary film can employ, in a listing constructed by Nichols. Models include investigation/report, advocacy, testimonial, first-person essay, and autobiography; modes include expository, observational, participatory, and performative (see Nichols 2010: 148–153 for the complete list). These categories are not mutually exclusive but do offer tools for making distinctions between documentaries and journalism based on the treatment of information and facts about the real world, the varied purposes for telling stories with those facts and information, and the extent to which the filmmaker shapes the action. For example, a film like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room reflects aspects of the investigative (“assemble evidence, make a case or offer a perspective”) and testimonial (“assemble oral history or witnesses who recount their personal experience”) models as well as the participatory mode (“filmmaker interacts with his or her social actors, participates in shaping what happens before the camera”).

Nichols takes the view that documentary does not just use aspects of reality but rather seeks to represent that reality – typically, to make an argument about it. While this stance is much closer than Grierson’s to how contemporary journalism approaches the real world, the notion that an argument or explicit viewpoint regarding reality is the purpose of a documentary film marks a significant point of divergence. Moreover, non-documentary films have “a highly indexical relation” to the real world that contrasts with the ambiguity sometimes prized in documentary (Nichols 2010: 147). Journalism, like other types of non-documentary film in Nichols’ scheme, tends toward a straightforward, sometimes didactic presentation of the real world valued for how closely it corresponds to actual events. Harvest of Shame, perhaps the most famous American television documentary, appears on Nichols’ list under the investigation/report model told in the expository mode (“speak directly to view with voice over”). Significantly, given that it is typically lauded as a high point in broadcast journalism, Harvest of Shame is much more explicit in making an argument than its contemporary journalism descendants. Of course what Nichols calls journalism’s “informational bias”, which emphasizes accuracy and balance, constitutes its own kind of argument. Frus describes this unacknowledged argument in comparing literary journalism to its traditional, nonliterary counterpart:

Because the goal of this dominant mode of journalism is to give a faithful picture of events and characters as they appear to the representative eye, rather than to acknowledge the existence of competing representations, journalists do not believe they are persuading readers and viewers to accept only one of many possible orientations toward the world; they regard themselves as neutral, rather than partisan (Frus 1994: 91).

Indeed it is journalism’s style of “argument” – the bias of its traditionally objective approach – that might at least partly explain the surge in documentary’s popularity over the last couple decades. Aufderheide (2011) argues that documentary’s late 1990s surge can be seen, at least in part, as a reaction to a formulaic television landscape. Specifically, the success of documentary as a “individually crafted, courageous, human-scale response against social injustice and the abuse of power” contrasts with the “factory values that reflected the TV industry’s vast need for programming” (Aufderheide 2011: 1). Moreover, this contrast has “raised questions about the social role of documentary, including the responsibility of filmmakers to serve the public’s informational needs and to honor traditional journalistic goals, such as accuracy” (p. 1). Similarly, Goldson (2015) points to decreased opportunities for “creative documentary” on television as a reason for the theatrical documentary surge. But the rise of reality television programming and of new documentary distribution platforms such as Amazon and Netflix, are also important factors in this surge, Goldson argues. As television audiences become bored or disillusioned with reality programming, and as mainstream news becomes ever more tabloid, documentary film has stepped into the gap, even taking on previously journalistic roles such as investigative reporting.

There is a certain irony to this recent history of conditions in commercial television sparking a surge in documentary. Winston argues that roughly the reverse occurred in the mid-20th century, when the arrival of television pushed documentary into a more journalistic mode. The impetus was less a matter of “factory values” than of technological and related economic factors. The invention of lightweight and portable equipment enhanced the ability for filmmakers to work in the distinctly observational mode of direct cinema, which had specific benefits: “Direct Cinema’s journalistic rhetoric of non-intervention and limited mediation allowed documentary to lay a stronger claim on the real than was possible previously” (Winston 2000: 22). But that greater ability came at a price. “Documentary was being limited by journalism. Its creativity was becoming increasingly suspect as the requirement for strict observation replaced it.” Documentaries became “extended journalistic reports” (Winston 2000: 23).

5Categorizing and valorizing journalism and documentary

Given the “convergence” its title anticipates, it’s not surprising the Nieman Reports special issue in 2001 ends up identifying more similarities than differences between documentary film and journalism and that some of the differences, such as length, are mostly superficial. This latter point is reflected in the title of one article: “Long-Form Documentaries Serve a Vital Journalistic Role”. In other words, the positive light in which documentary as essentially a longer form of journalism is presented here directly contrasts with Winston’s negative characterization of documentary as an “extended journalistic report”. The distinguishing features of voice and viewpoint discussed above also get somewhat different treatment here. One Nieman contributor, a documentarian with a background at the BBC, even argues that, while similarities abound, many people consider documentary to be “more objective” than print journalism, its seeming impartiality a function of its observational style. While this sort of comparison affirms objectivity’s status as a key criterion of journalism, another article describes an independent filmmaker approaching her work “from a position of advocacy” while still maintaining that that work overlaps with journalism. It is telling that this filmmaker started her career in commercial television but she and her partner became frustrated because “there seemed too wide of a chasm between what we saw going on around us and what was considered ‘acceptable’ television programming” (Lazarus 2001: 57). This advocacy approach had often limited their opportunities for distribution in mainstream journalism venues. “If objectivity and balance are the test of journalism, then our work doesn’t qualify. But if fairness and solid reporting are the benchmarks of journalists’ work, then our work as documentarians has a home in this community of those whose job it is to question what we see and hear around us” (Lazarus 2001: 58). One of the newer venues for documentary is the New York Times, which has approached the voice and viewpoint challenge by placing its Op-Docs forum for short documentaries that “present a unique point of view” in the opinion section of the newspaper. That some of the Op-Docs pieces have been excerpts or summaries of feature-length documentaries muddies these boundaries. A piece by Amir Bar-Lev called “We Are Penn State” is from his 2014 documentary Happy Valley, which received an Emmy in the News and Documentary category.

Perhaps some of the best evidence for the perceived affinity of documentary to journalism – from the perspective of broadcast journalism – is found in documentary’s inclusion in professional awards competitions. Such awards are important markers of journalism’s cultural capital, as they express and affirm how the field defines its members and standards. The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which recognizes outstanding achievement in television programming via the Emmy awards, groups documentaries with news while noting that awards in the category “are intended as incentive for the continued pursuit of excellence for those working in the broadcast journalism profession” (emphasis added). While that characterization would appear to fit the makers of most of the nominated work, it’s worth noting that many of these films were produced and directed by people with no journalism background. Even some filmmakers with a journalism degree or professional experience on their resumes, do not produce exclusively journalistic work. For example, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism graduate Rachel Boynton, whose film Big Men was nominated in the “Best Documentary” category in 2015, does documentaries, reality television, and fiction features.

As we have seen in the Nieman report and elsewhere, length or running time is considered a key feature for distinguishing documentary from journalism. The term “long-form” is used to describe many of the subcategories in which Emmy awards are given, such as “Outstanding Business and Economic Reporting – Long-Form” and “Outstanding Investigative Journalism – Long-Form.” Other awards are given for achievement in “Coverage of a Current News Story – Long-Form” as well as “Best Documentary” and “New Approaches – Documentary”. The award guidelines also note that the maximum running time for work nominated in the long-form and documentary categories has been increased to 120 minutes this year, a nod, perhaps, to the increasing number of feature-length documentary films made with theatrical, and not only television, distribution in mind.

Technical aspects such as running time are admittedly superficial ways to differentiate documentary and journalism. Voice, viewpoint, and advocacy are certainly richer ways of considering what distinguishes the two, especially when considered in the context of the broad professional and ethical values – markers of cultural capital – that they reflect. In general terms, we might think of journalism’s primary ethical orientation to be to the public. While such an orientation certainly does not prohibit expressing a single, even personal viewpoint, offering many points of view might be considered more aligned with obligations of fairness to the public broadly speaking. In contrast, a filmmaker’s primary orientation might be considered to be the subject of her film such that whatever public good is served by telling the subject’s story could be trumped by the interests of the subject with whom the filmmaker has formed a bond. Nichols (2010) seems to say as much in pointing to the “intimate relationship” between filmmaker and subject as a defining feature of documentary. Likewise Winston claims “ethics in documentary has more to do with the treatment of participants than with media responsibilities to audiences” (Winston 2000: 132). A Center for Media & Social Impact study describes what I am calling different orientations or values as part of the differing “cultures” of journalism and documentary. Asked in the study to comment on widely accepted journalistic principles, “filmmakers sometimes found the journalists’ ubiquitous language about serving the public to be less familiar in their cultural context, [but] they understood their work as oriented generally to the public good” (Center for Media & Social Impact 2015: 6). Interviews with veteran documentary filmmakers revealed a sense that ethical responsibilities to subjects, viewers, and their own artistic vision are conflicting and subject to external economic pressures (Aufderheide, Jaszi & Chandra 2009). There, perhaps, the cultures of journalism and documentary share common ground.

6A changing landscape

The seismic shifts in journalism have prompted questions and no small amount of hand wringing about the kind of information landscape we will be left with once the shaking stops. It is easy in this unsettled period for journalism to see theatrical documentary film as a sort of interloper, its popularity with audiences both a challenge to journalism’s role as primary information provider and a sort of rebuke to journalism values such as objectivity that are seen as central to fulfilling that informational role. This chapter has attempted to map the terrain journalism and documentary film share, or at least to identify significant markers along the way. Voice, viewpoint, professional and ethical values are among the distinguishing features, but are they distinguishing enough? That is, do they resolve questions about whether documentary and journalism “belong” in the same or separate fields? Not really. Both documentary and journalism seek to convey aspects of the real world; both seek to do so for the similar reason that those stories are important to tell. Just why or to whom they are important does not necessarily matter. And a little ambiguity about the way they convey those stories might be preferable if the goal is to garner attention and engage audiences. As Frus observes: “Once the tension between nonfiction and fictional tendencies signaled by a given narrative has been resolved in favor of literature, the text becomes nonpropositional, and thus unlikely to be a factor in the politics of ordinary life, the domain of social experience and public expression where change is possible” (Frus 1994: x–xi).

Journalism might, in fact, have good reason to welcome documentary’s encroachment, if that is what it seems to be doing, as it may help to ensure that important stories will get told and will find an audience even if the institutions of journalism we once depended on to tell those stories do not survive the shaking.

Of course, whether documentary “belongs” in the journalistic field is not a determination to be made from the outside, by a disinterested party. Those with the lion’s share of cultural capital in a field decide who belongs in it. What, then, might the journalists who hold sway over the field learn from those who are pushing at the boundaries? One perhaps too-obvious lesson is how journalism’s norm of objectivity – poorly articulated by professionals and poorly understood by audiences – can limit, rather than aid, the practice of good journalism. Expanding what journalism is “allowed” to do, such as offering personal testimony or making an argument from the assembled facts as documentaries do, may serve the public’s need for truthful accounts of the world just as well if not better than the detached, objective approach. Obvious or not, there is a lot to untangle here: Audiences seem to expect objective journalism, if not necessarily objective documentary (and certainly less in film than television documentary). But the appetite for objectivity can be sporadic. The increasingly polarized American audience often favors partisan news outlets even while continuing to demand objectivity. Meanwhile, journalists often fail to acknowledge that the narratives they create are, in fact, arguments about the real world and not mere reflections of it.

In a political environment in which truth claims are increasingly challenged and an economic environment in which financial support for journalism is not assured it may be worth considering whether the cultural capital of the journalistic field could be bolstered by expanding it to include those with different norms of practice employed in the pursuit of truth. One answer to the “so what if journalism and documentary film intersect” question posed at the beginning of this chapter is that in their intersection we can find a space to reinforce and clarify important values in telling stories of public importance, thereby reshaping and strengthening the journalistic field.

Further reading

Nichols’ (2010) Introduction to documentary offers a comprehensive exploration of the form. A special issue of Nieman Reports (2001) devoted to documentary journalism includes a wide variety of perspectives, from practitioners and scholars alike, on what was then perceived as a decline in documentary production, while Aufderheide’s (2011) “Mainstream documentary since 1999” entry in The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film provides an overview of US documentary’s subsequent expansion. Useful historical accounts of documentary in journalism, particularly focused on the politics of early broadcast documentary, can be found in Rosteck’s ‘See It Now’ confronts McCarthyism (1994), Curtin’s Redeeming the wasteland: Television documentary and Cold War politics, and Raphael’s Investigated journalism: Muckrakers, regulators, and the struggle over television documentary (2005).

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