Abstract
Ideally, mediated collective memory of a society’s past should be both inclusive and communal. Documentaries commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots reveal that a film which relies primarily on mainstream journalism’s news archives tends to privilege the perspectives of social authorities. In contrast, films produced by those from marginalized communities create more inclusive mediated collective memory by altering the rationale for incorporating speakers and stories: from status, having social authority at a moment in history, to witness, the personal experience of history. These films use news archives to authenticate the presence of witnesses to events, authorizing them to speak yet fundamentally altering the story preserved in the journalistic archive because witnesses both talk about their experience and characterize the meaning of the event. Transforming narrative convention from having status to bearing witness allows perspectives to compete more equally, destabilizing social inequities that contribute to marginalization and building a more inclusive, communal collective remembrance via media.
A lasting challenge of the American experiment has been communicating a sense of shared history and tradition. Until recently, older or more culturally homogenous nations could draw upon a long, shared history as a source of national identity. The United States, in contrast, was a new political entity, culturally diverse, and without the national memory scholars (Anderson, 1983; Bodnar, 1992; Zerubavel, 1995) argue is needed to give a nation’s people a sense of shared identity and shared goals. Historian Henry Steele Commager (1965) observed, The problem which confronted the new United States then was radically different. [Other] states were already amply equipped with history, tradition, and memory. . .. Of them it can be said that the nation was a product of history. But with the United States, history was rather a creation of the nation.
In a rapidly globalizing world, however, this challenge is no longer unique to the U.S. but rather one recognizable across much of the developed world (Winter, 2006).
The assimilationist approach to collective remembrance Commager described in 1965 is thoroughly rejected today. Many point out the fundamentally oppressive nature of the nineteenth century literary canon he identified as providing U.S. Americans with a sense of themselves as a people. So many voices were absent or forcibly erased from it, and it normalized the lives and values of a particular group at the expense of so many other histories, identities and experiences. This problem echoes through the cultural materials available to produce shared public memory, including the first drafts of history produced by journalism. News archives, like most archives, tend to preserve the frames of reference of elite actors and established institutions, while the perspectives of the marginalized are lost.
Thus, the old problem has acquired a new form: How can we create a public past which is simultaneously inclusive and communal? Can existing cultural repositories, like news archives, be re-purposed to generate more inclusive collective remembrances, or are the values that produced them ‘baked in’? This analysis, drawing upon theoretical insights from media studies, memory studies and journalism, begins to address that question. Using documentaries produced to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, it demonstrates how collective remembrance grounded in the archives of mainstream news tends to sustain the perspectives associated with social authorities. It then examines how a more inclusive version of collective memory emerges when the authority to narrate the past is grounded in witness, the personal experience of history, rather than in status, having social authority at a particular moment in history. The fundamental journalistic value of witnessing has the potential to generate more inclusive collective memory when marginalized people as well as authority figures are empowered to both describe their experiences and characterize what those experiences mean.
Literature review
Journalism’s first drafts of history provide key resources for remembering the public past. Though it may later be supplemented by governmental investigative reports, trial transcripts, or other public documentation, what journalism produces in the moment that history is ‘made’ becomes the material basis for future remembrance (see especially Zelizer, 1992). Assmann A (2008) conceptualizes such repositories of material as an archive and observes, ‘The archive is the basis of what can be said in the future about the present when it will have become the past’ (p. 102). She notes that archives are systematically incomplete, having ‘their own structural mechanisms of exclusion in terms of class, race, and gender’ (p. 106). Choi (2015) makes a similar point specifically about journalism, arguing that the repertoire of news tropes available at a moment in history creates an archive which in turn limits the subsequent interpretations of an event. While Assmann is hopeful that such archival limitations can be overcome through critical scholarship and the serendipitous ways in which everyday life is preserved by accident, Choi suggests the systematic absences of news archives have lasting influence on collective remembrance. These insights raise two related questions. First, what sorts of systematic absences shape news archives, and second, how might those absences be redressed in collective remembrance?
A substantial body of scholarship demonstrates that journalism largely reproduces the values and perspectives of the socially powerful. Many traditional surveillance routines, or beats, of news organizations monitor the activities of public officials (Gans, 1980; Tuchman, 1973). Events that occur outside the context of these beats may not receive coverage and thus be absent from the archive. Indexing theory (Bennett, 1990) states that perspectives not embraced by mainstream political actors are absent from the news, suggesting that certain points of view may be systematically missing.
Most telling of all about the absences of news archives are the numerous studies of news sourcing. Carlson (2009) observes, ‘The news composes a vision of the social order through aggregating the visions of its sources’ (p. 527) and notes that ‘the reliance on official sources and routine news channels is one of the most reproduced findings in studies of journalism’ (p. 529). Study after study (Dimitrova and Strömbäck, 2009; Grabe et al., 1999; Hopmann and Shehata, 2011; Kleemans et al., 2017; Reich, 2015; Sigal, 1973) reveals how official sources’ vision of the social order dominates the news. When citizens appear in news, Kleemans and her colleagues find that they rarely make substantive contributions, used by journalists to illustrate a story or as ‘vox pops’ rather than appearing as representatives or experts. There are, of course, practical reasons for this. Public officials and their representatives are better able to facilitate the many production pressures of journalism, particularly deadlines and the need for concise quotes. Even in cases of event-centered news (Lawrence, 2000) that slip the bonds of public officials’ news management techniques, alternative sources can be hard for journalists to include. The perspectives of people participating in urban unrest, trapped by natural disaster, or under arrest may be difficult or even dangerous to obtain and include in news reports. Whatever the reason, however, the outcome is likely to be the same: Status, a combination of social authority, the power to affect outcomes (see Entman and Page, 1994) and availability in the moment, governs who speaks in the news. Consequently, news archives documenting history as it is made preserve the perspectives of those in power and neglect marginalized people’s perspectives. This has long term impacts upon the public’s discursive resources. For example, news archives provide a means of interpolating between protests in the present and the memory of protests past, one used by citizens (Kitch, 2018) and journalists (Jackson, 2021) to contextualize contemporary activism.
Assmann A (2008) suggests that such absences of marginalized people might be redressed when the past is recalled in the present. She refers to public recollections as a canon, the version of the past put on public display, contrasting it to the larger archive which is extant but not publicized. Edy (2006) observes that high-status sources used by reporters during and immediately after the Watts riots were gradually replaced in commemorative journalism by residents of the affected neighborhoods. However, Frisch (1986) notes that what sources are allowed to say is just as important as who is included. Examining documentaries about the Vietnam war, he finds that veterans are empowered only to speak about their personal experience. In contrast, only academics and former officials are empowered to characterize the meaning of the event. More recent research on the increasing appearance of citizen witnesses in the news suggests that Frisch’s depiction of how narrative authority is constructed remains accurate (Kleemans et al., 2017). Journalists, concerned about the veracity and credibility of citizens as news sources (Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti, 2013; Lewis, 2012), use citizens as exemplars and icons rather than as authorities or critics (Kleemans et al., 2017; Robinson, 2009).
How, then, might marginalized voices become a part of the canon (the public recollection of the past) and the archive (the repository of materials available for remembering)? On what basis might citizens acquire authority to tell a story beyond their own experience? Using Assmann’s J (2008) terminology, how can such voices pass from communicative memory, in which informal stories are passed from person to person and do not survive beyond the living memory of generations, into cultural memory which is institutionalized and thus preserved as part of the public past?
When members of marginalized communities produce cultural memory (Assmann J, 2008) in the context of the larger society that marginalizes them, their approach to collective remembrance can illuminate ways to expand existing archives and supplement their contents. As they contribute to the canon (Assmann A, 2008), they expand the archive by incorporating the communicative memory of marginalized communities into it. Research on the Black Lives Matter movement (Liebermann, 2021; Smit et al., 2018) demonstrates how social media offer marginalized groups an alternative to institutionalized archives, creating new possibilities for preserving the communicative memory of marginalized communities (J. Assmann). Yet news archives remain an important repository of collective memory, for social media do not have a tradition of preserving content and news archives stretch back further in time. Moreover, there is no established relationship between social media repositories and their canonical use. In contrast, news archives are commonly used in mediated commemorations (Meyers et al., 2014).
The documentaries examined below invoke techniques of journalism but rebalance news norms about sourcing. These commemorative documentaries, as part of a canon of public recollection, do more than merely supplement existing archives by including the voices of people who were unavailable to reporters at the time of the event or by incorporating the neglected experience of marginalized communities. They suggest a different basis for collective remembrance by altering the rationale for inclusion from status to witness. In these documentaries, being physically present during an event gives speakers narrative authority to both talk about their experience and characterize the meaning of the event itself, regardless of their social status. The news archive becomes the means to authenticate the presence of witnesses to events, authorizing them to speak and yet fundamentally altering the story preserved in the archive, and thus in collective memory.
Three research questions structure the analysis to illuminate how news archives preserve elite perspectives and how changing the basis for inclusion in journalistic discourse has potential to shift both the canon of collective memory and the archive upon which it is based to be more communal and inclusive.
How do public remembrances dependent upon news archives reproduce structures of status and authority prevalent at the time the archive was created?
What are the differences between a narrative generated by status-based claims to narrative authority and one generated by witness-based claims to narrative authority?
In what ways can perspectives preserved in archival news be disrupted when archival material is re-used?
Methodology
Case study
Documentaries made to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles riots offer leverage for examining these questions. In March,1991, African American motorist Rodney King was beaten by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The incident was filmed by amateur videographer George Holliday, whose footage aired on local and national television news, sparking outrage. Four officers involved in the incident were eventually indicted for their actions. Nine days after King was beaten, African American teenager Latasha Harlins was shot and killed by Korean immigrant shop owner Soon Ja Du. Du was convicted in November but released on probation rather than imprisoned. Thus, tensions were high between the African American and Korean/Korean American communities in Los Angeles. On April 29, 1992, all four LAPD officers were acquitted of assault in King’s beating. That night, violence broke out in the city and continued for 6 days, resulting in more than 50 deaths and over $1 billion in damage. Among the most memorable incidents during the unrest was the beating of white truck driver Reginald Denny at the intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues in South Central Los Angeles.
The central confrontation leading up to and during the unrest was between public authorities and marginalized communities, creating a clear difference in the social status of sources in the news of the time. A documentary relying almost entirely on archival news illuminates how journalism’s first draft of history preserves the perspectives of social authorities from the time of the event. Conversely, other documentaries made by African American-led creative teams, that is, by members of the marginalized community, rejected the pattern of privileging public officials and limiting citizens to recounting experience typical in news coverage of an event like the Los Angeles riots. Rather, using material from the news archives and applying journalistic-style techniques of interviewing and of fairness, they altered the basis of testifying from one of status to one of witness. Their ability to interview previously unavailable witnesses and their inability to interview those who declined to speak, combined with their relatively equal treatment with regard to what witnesses were allowed to testify about, upended the perspectives embedded in the archival news reports. The result was a new way of narrating the riots, still grounded in journalistic forms but inclusive of marginalized perspectives.
Materials
Three documentaries, all made in 2017, are analyzed. While other documentaries were made to mark the anniversary of the riots, these three drew large national audiences when they aired, totaling approximately 4 million viewers for the three combined. All earned Emmy nominations. The National Geographic Channel’s LA92 contains only footage shot before and during the Los Angeles riots. While not all the film in the documentary is news footage, local and national news reports provide its basic structure. The re-presentation of archival footage is an important part of its claim to authenticity as it promises that it ‘immerses viewers in that tumultuous period through rarely-seen archival footage’ in its Amazon product description. LA92 had an African American co-director, but the other two documentaries had creative teams led by African Americans well known for previous work on racial issues. Let It Fall, written and directed by John Ridley, aired on ABC, and LA Burning, executive produced by John Singleton, transmitted on A&E. Both use present-day interviews with key figures from the time of the riots in addition to archival news footage and home video footage shot during the riots.
Analytical approach
All these documentaries employ narrative and representational techniques grounded in journalism, making an analytical perspective grounded in journalism appropriate for examining them. As Aufderheide (2007) argues, documentaries, like news, are representations of reality. They promise ‘a fair and honest representation of somebody’s experience of reality’ (p. 2). Boundaries between journalism and ‘not journalism’ have become increasingly blurred as media technologies have advanced (Carlson and Lewis, 2015), and television news magazines such as 20/20, Dateline NBC, and 60 Minutes have long blended news and documentary styles. Ultimately, Ryfe (2006) argues for defining journalism as what journalistic practices produce, regardless of whether the practitioners see themselves as journalists or see their practices as journalistic. LA92 relies almost exclusively upon archival news footage, and both Let It Fall and LA Burning draw from journalistic practices to build their representations of the past. Both include eyewitness interviews, as print journalists commonly do in their commemorations of the past (Edy, 2006). Many of the witnesses interviewed were in positions to influence the flow of events, a source selection technique used in news contexts (Entman and Page, 1994). The interviews are presented as diverse perspectives on the event, which is one way journalists seek to be fair and balanced in narrating controversial events and is reminiscent of news in an era before reporters felt obliged to critically assess their sources’ claims (Baym, 2006). In this, they are more like news, which works to make its perspective invisible (Epstein, 1973), than like many celebrated documentaries that capture distinct, sometimes critical, perspectives (Aufderheide, 2007). 1
In the following analysis, differences between the documentaries are demonstrated in two ways. First, to demonstrate that the differences identified between the documentaries are not impressionistic or a product of stereotyping, a key section of each documentary is parsed in detail. Second, a textual analysis of the films in their entirety illuminates how and why these differences matter for collective remembrance.
Detailed parsing
Because each documentary is uniquely structured, a granular, quantitative comparison of differences across the films as a whole is not very useful. LA92 primarily focuses on historical events, while Let It Fall and LA Burning include contemporary examples of police brutality. Nevertheless, differences between narrative authority based upon social status and narrative authority based upon witnessing can be documented in ways which cannot be dismissed as impressionistic. The films’ presentation of Holliday’s videotape of King’s beating is the most parallel element across all three documentaries, offering a way rigorously and clearly to demonstrate differences between the documentaries in terms of who speaks and what they are allowed to say. The section of each documentary following the presentation of Holliday’s video is parsed by conversational turn for the following details:
how long the speaker speaks (in seconds)
whether the footage is archival (i.e. from the time of the riots) or contemporary
speaker’s name
(apparent) race of speaker (white, African American, Asian American)
relationship of speaker to riots
whether the speaker characterizes the situation or describes his/her/their own experience
Describing experience includes statements about what a person had seen or experienced, including personal feelings (e.g. when King is asked by reporters to describe his experience of being beaten). Characterizing involves statements or questions that draw conclusions or express opinions about the situation (e.g. when King’s attorneys characterize his beating as racially motivated).
Two researchers independently viewed the content and then discussed all categorization until agreement was reached. The analysis ends when the documentaries move on to another topic – LA92 and LA Burning to discuss the police officers’ indictment and Let It Fall to depict calls for Police Chief Daryl Gates’ resignation. Each documentary’s sourcing is depicted in a table, and each speaker is represented with a line in the table.
Textual analysis
Textual analysis of the documentaries in their entirety shows how altering the basis of narrative authority changes the overall narrative. It illustrates what happens to the representation of the Los Angeles riots when narrative authority is grounded in having witnessed the riots rather than having been in a position of authority during the riots.
Analysis
Status versus witness: Changing the speakers
Tables 1 to 3 reveal differences between the documentaries in terms of who speaks, for how long, and what they are allowed to say. Table 1, which depicts the section of LA92 devoted to the videotape of King’s beating, reveals how norms of journalistic practice influence public remembrance. The entirely archival footage features mostly journalists and public officials. Even the ‘average citizens’ are not very average: An American Civil Liberties Union spokeswoman and lawyers for King also appear. Only three people caught up in the beating itself are featured in this section of the film: King, his wife, and Holliday. Of these three, only King’s wife speaks beyond her own experience, questioning why the LAPD beat her husband instead of just arresting him.
LA92: King beating tape through indictment of LAPD officers.
Time indicates when speaker starts and stops narrating. Timeline gaps indicate no narration. Footage is archival (A) or contemporary (C). Race is White (W), Black (B), or Asian (A). Italics indicate journalists; boldface indicates public officials. Experience means describing one’s own experiences and emotions; characterizing means discussing the situation.
LA Burning: King beating tape through indictment of LAPD officers.
Time indicates when speaker starts and stops narrating. Timeline gaps indicate no narration. Footage is archival (A) or contemporary (C). Race is White (W), Black (B), or Asian (A). Italics indicate journalists; boldface indicates public officials. Experience means describing one’s own experiences and emotions; characterizing means discussing the situation.
Let It Fall: King beating tape through calls for Gates’ resignation.
Time indicates when speaker starts and stops narrating. Timeline gaps indicate no narration. Footage is archival (A) or contemporary (C). Race is White (W), Black (B), or Asian (A). Italics indicate journalists; boldface indicates public officials. Experience means describing one’s own experiences and emotions; characterizing means discussing the situation.
Table 1 suggests that decisions about who and what to include in news are strongly shaped by a person’s social status and that status is more typically possessed by whites. White journalists spoke most often, followed by not-very-average white citizens. White officials and African American citizens appear less frequently. Whites speak for 92 seconds as compared to African Americans, who speak for 58 seconds (27 seconds of unidentified voiceover cannot be classified by race). Although the filmmakers would have known that in the larger context of the riots, King’s beating had implications for the Korean and Korean American community in Los Angeles, people from this community do not appear in this passage.
As Zelizer (1992) might predict, the heavy use of news discourse tends to privilege journalistic authority, in this case even over the authority of public officials. In this passage, journalists are the primary narrators, speaking for 63 seconds, all of them spent characterizing the situation, as compared to 17 seconds for public officials. Citizens mainly speak about their experiences (58 seconds) rather than characterizing events (39 seconds). Narrative authority has a racial component in this passage as well. Authority to define the situation is largely given to whites. Of 97 seconds devoted to characterization where race can be identified, 91 are from white sources, while only 6 come from an African American. Conversely, only 6 seconds of footage from a white source involves describing experience while 52 seconds of African American speaking time is devoted to relating experience. King describes his experience of being beaten; his white lawyer characterizes what it means.
Table 2, illustrating LA Burning’s depiction of the same event, shows how Singleton turns the collective remembrance based on archival news footage on its head. Where LA92 features public authorities and journalists almost exclusively, LA Burning includes only four: two public officials, an African American authority figure and a journalist. All the other speakers are people caught up in the events, including Singleton himself. The documentary also includes an interview with Henry ‘Kiki’ Watson, who participated in the unrest. All speakers are African American except news anchor Tom Brokaw, President George H.W. Bush, and Holliday.
In this section of LA Burning, whites and African Americans speak for similar amounts of time: African Americans for 170 seconds, whites for 150 seconds. African American citizens, including Singleton and First AME Senior Pastor Cecil Murray, speak most often, followed by white citizens. Officials, regardless of race, appear less frequently. Similar to LA92, Asian people are absent from this passage. All the speakers, save one, characterize the situation in one or more of the clips that feature them, even those who are not social or public authorities. Public officials and journalists speak for a combined 20 seconds, so narrative authority largely falls to average citizens. Moreover, where passages can be cleanly classified as either characterizing the situation or describing experience, whites are more likely to describe (69 of 77 seconds) while African Americans are more likely to characterize (103 of 118 seconds).
The difference between Ridley’s Let It Fall, depicted in Table 3, and the one grounded in news archives is less apparent at first glance. Let It Fall features several ranking police officers (retired, save for archival footage of Gates speaking as LAPD Chief), as well as a deputy district attorney, the mayor of Los Angeles, and the President of the United States. More than the other two documentaries, it features a relatively even mix of African American and white speakers, but white speakers still speak for a substantially greater time (340 seconds for whites vs 127 seconds for African Americans). White officials spoke most often in the passage, followed by African American citizens, then African American officials. This the only documentary to feature an Asian speaker in this passage, for a marginal 5 seconds. Officials spoke for more time (334 seconds) than either citizens (128) or journalists (10).
Where it departs radically from the other two is in how it rejects status in favor of witnessing. Unlike LA Burning, which essentially ignores public officials, and LA92, which essentially features only public officials, Let It Fall puts public officials and average people on an even footing. Public officials narrate their personal experience as well as characterizing the situation, and average people characterize the situation as well as narrating their personal experience. Almost half (7 of 15) of the speaking turns featuring public officials include descriptions of the person’s experience, including turns devoted to President Bush and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley describing their emotional reactions. Half (4 of 8) of the turns featuring citizens are characterizations of the situation, including South Central Los Angeles residents characterizing the relationship between police and the African American community. Much more time is devoted to relating experience (324 seconds) than to characterizing the situation (110 seconds). White public officials spend far more time describing what they experienced (213 seconds) as opposed to characterizing the situation (64 seconds). In other words, former LAPD officers are put in the uncharacteristic position of having to explain what they themselves did rather than offering omniscient descriptions of the situation. To the extent that those in the wrong, rather than those who have been wronged, are the ones expected to explain themselves, the fact that the officers spend the most time doing so undermines their authority.
This close reading of the same event represented differently across the documentaries shows how narrative authority based upon bearing witness rather than having status changes the mix of voices. It also demonstrates that these differences are not merely impressionistic or grounded in stereotyping. Next, attention turns to how this changes the overall narrative.
Status versus witness: Changing the story
LA92 is structured principally by news content and so is bound by journalism’s work routines, especially during the period before violence broke out. These routines mean that sources in the news and the aspects of public life about which they speak are shaped primarily by their status and the way that status gives them authority. Public officials, such as police officers, elective office holders, and officers of the court, are the key sources of information for journalists, and their activities, such as trials, news conferences, and public meetings, are the main targets of everyday news reporting. Because this is what is available in the archive, it is typically the perspectives of public officials that are preserved.
The authority of specific actors is sometimes complicated by the passage of time. LAPD Chief Gates’ comments to the press and videotaped addresses to the LAPD are repeatedly featured in LA92, but in 2017, they suggest malfeasance, cluelessness and villainy, rather than authority. His prediction that there will be no violence and that those who suggest there will be are ‘voices in the wilderness trying to stir up some kind of problem’, as well as his jokes about King’s beating being aired on local newscasts (‘If it wasn’t for our helicopters, the lighting would have been horrible’) seem incompetent and arrogant. Similarly, an interview with Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Joyce Karlin from before the riots may read differently by 2017. She justifies her decision not to imprison Du, the Korean shopkeeper convicted of killing Harlins, a 15-year-old African American girl, saying, ‘I know a criminal when I see one; I know a person who presents a danger to the community when I see one’. In 2017, her claim to all-knowing judicial wisdom about minority communities appears arrogant and privileged. However, these individuals appear as bad actors who do not call into question the legitimacy of the system. The event-centered orientation of news, now as then, does not capture systemic, structural problems.
Riot footage in LA92 is typically narrated by reporters witnessing the violence rather than by the people caught up in it. Once the violence begins, journalists can be seen drawing upon their authority as eyewitnesses to events to challenge the narratives of public officials in what Lawrence (2000) terms event-centered coverage. News footage from the riots shows journalists sometimes losing their impartiality while narrating what they witness. Helicopter pilot and reporter Bob Tur, covering the violence live on air, begins editorializing while watching motorists being pulled from their cars and beaten: ‘Terrible, terrible pictures’. Journalists also criticize the official response, both in their questions during formal briefings and as they present information to the camera. They decry the police response to the violence, and they question California Governor Pete Wilson about the slow deployment of the National Guard. Thus, once the violence begins, journalists assert their own narrative authority rather than deferring to public officials’ narrative authority. Nevertheless, the perspectives represented in this conflict about how to handle the situation are essentially those of elite (and mostly white) institutions, and the concern is restoring order rather than redressing the conditions that produced the disorder.
Since sources appear in the news based on their status and most authority figures are white, LA92 paints white authority figures in a better light than the minorities caught up in the violence. Although African American authority figures, such as Mayor Bradley and Pastor Murray, appear in the news of the time as does King, African Americans most commonly appear in LA92 in ‘person on the street’, or ‘vox pop’, interviews. Their anger and resentment reacting to decisions of white authority figures appears outrageous, aggressive, and abnormal when contrasted with the demeanor of white lawyers, judges, and public officials, who are painted as dispassionate, objective observers of events. Koreans who speak on camera are also depicted as emotional rather than rational, grieving their lost businesses. King receives more on-screen time than any other African American individual in the documentary, but he is empowered only to describe his experiences. Public officials, journalists, and his attorney are the (mostly white) people who interpret the social significance of his experience.
Although both Let It Fall and LA Burning contain news footage from the time of the riots, that footage does not structure the films. Instead, both films rely upon the authority of eyewitnesses who are interviewed on camera. Archival news footage is used to authenticate their status as eyewitnesses: They appear in the news of the time. In LA Burning, and especially in Let It Fall, the authority to describe experience and characterize situations is tied to a person’s presence at the event itself rather than to their social status or authority at the time of the riots.
Some interview subjects were public officials at the time, for example, LAPD officers and the prosecutor in the LAPD officers’ trial. Some were journalists, such as a New York Times reporter caught in the violence at Florence and Normandie and Tur, the local news helicopter pilot whose footage of the violence has become iconic. Some witnessed specific events, including Holliday and a woman who witnessed Harlins’ murder. Some were friends, relatives or associates of the narrative’s central actors – King’s attorney and a juror in the LAPD officers’ trial are interviewed. Some were victims of the violence – a woman whose mother’s shop had burned and a woman whose boyfriend died in an LAPD chokehold appear in the films. These documentaries also include interviews with people who participated in the violence, such as the men involved in beating the truck driver, Denny, and one of the Korean shop-owners who fired on people during the riots. This perspective is entirely absent from LA92.
There are some people whose retrospective view of the riots cannot be obtained. Let It Fall notes that the LAPD officers tried for beating King declined to be interviewed. Both Gates and King passed away before the documentaries were made. These voices are represented with archival footage, but here, too, the LA Burning and Let It Fall include material recorded after the riots were over. Television news magazine interviews with the acquitted officers are used, as are video and audio interviews conducted with King in later years.
Because it is their status as eyewitnesses or people with personal experience that the filmmakers draw upon, their authority is not tied to their social status. Like citizens, journalists and public officials narrate their personal experiences. Clips of Tur included in LA92 feature him authoritatively narrating from a journalists’ omniscient perspective. Interviewed in LA Burning, Tur recollects her experiences shooting the film. In Let It Fall, Robert Simpach’s narrative of how he came to be at the scene of King’s beating carries no more weight than does Holliday’s narrative of how he came to film it, although Simpach is a former police officer while Holliday is an average citizen. Ridley commonly goes further in encouraging viewers to give witnesses a fair hearing by failing to identify how his interview subjects are related to the events at the point where they are introduced in the film. Even people relatively well versed in the history of the Los Angeles riots would be unlikely to recognize all Ridley’s interviewees, and some remain nameless until much of their story has unfolded. Unable to determine at the outset whether the speakers are ‘heroes’ or ‘villains’ in the story, the audience must listen to their stories of what happened to them. One man identified as a South Central resident helped rescue Denny; another man identified as a South Central resident went through Denny’s pockets as he lay in the street. Simpach narrates the story of a controversial and deadly arrest in which he participated in 1982 before the audience learns he was present at King’s beating, too.
These films also empower their speakers to both relate personal experiences and characterize situations. For example, in LA Burning, a voice actuality features King describing how he strategized where he was going to be pulled over because ‘Either I’m gonna get killed or I’m just gonna get beat’. In Let It Fall, Donald Jones, a retired, African American firefighter who rescued motorists during the riots, characterizes the difference between traffic stops of white drivers and African American drivers. Watson, who was convicted for beating Denny, characterizes the violence as a revolution. Many interview subjects speak about events and conditions other than the ones in which they were directly involved. The chorus of voices, official and unofficial, offers diverse perspectives on the riots rather than preserving the authority structure of the time, creating a canon of public remembrance that uses the archival materials yet relies on witness rather that status to construct narrative authority.
Conclusion
LA92, which relies entirely on footage shot before and during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, demonstrates how the repertoire of news practices affects the archival material available for recalling an event. The voices of journalists and public officials dominate the documentary, as they almost certainly dominated the news of the time. Average citizens are rarely heard, and when they are, few speak beyond their own emotions and experiences. Since most public officials involved with the Los Angeles riots were white while the average citizens most affected by the riots and the events that led up to them were non-white, the documentary offers a glimpse into how structural racism emerges in news coverage and is preserved in news archives. When status disparities correspond to racial disparities, news is shaped by both status and race even though race may not play a direct role in the sourcing patterns of journalism.
Let It Fall and LA Burning show how journalistic practices can be used to generate a different, more egalitarian narrative by selecting sources based upon witness rather than status. This, in turn, enables the documentaries to embrace multiple perspectives and the narratives associated with them rather than advancing one narrative over others. The filmmakers’ approach recalls the journalistic convention that places the high value upon bearing witness to public events (Zelizer, 2007). In their films, being present authorizes people to speak about events, regardless of their relationship (having status or marginalized) to those events. The filmmakers use archival news materials to resolve the credibility issues journalists associate with using citizens as sources (Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti, 2013; Lewis, 2012): The archival footage substantiates claims to eyewitness authority. The films also remedy Frisch’s (1986) criticism by empowering the people depicted in the news footage to both describe what happened and give context to the events captured on film. Particularly in Let It Fall, everyone interviewed draws their authority from being an eyewitness and describes their personal experience. It is not that the perspectives of public officials are absent from these documentaries; rather, citizen perspectives and official perspectives are treated more equally. Both former authority figures and average citizens characterize situations beyond their own experience, but both offer personal narratives that undermine any claim to omniscience. Since the sources’ key characteristic is physical presence (witnessing) rather than social status, structural racism does not emerge to the same degree. The mix of voices is more racially balanced than in LA92, and importantly, the documentary makers do not adjudicate between them for the audience.
These documentaries may tap into a shift in public perception characteristic of the turn to networked media. Personal experience and witnessing have acquired a new kind of resonance in the digital era (van Zoonen, 2012), while trust in traditional authorities has declined in a networked era (Quandt, 2012). The documentaries also raise questions about whether news practices could and should give more narrative authority to citizen witnesses, a question with which the field of journalism studies has grappled (e.g. Kleemans, et al., 2017; Lewis, 2012; Reich, 2015; Robinson, 2009). News sourcing grounded in witness rather than official or social status and influence (Entman and Page, 1994) could help undermine troubling social inequities that marginalize groups and their perspectives. At the same time, however, pitting personal experience against broader knowledge bases may have unintended consequences, as when personal testimony contradicts scientific findings or when boundaries between personal vengeance and social justice become blurred.
Finally, this analysis suggests a mechanism by which, as Assmann A (2008) hopes, canonic practices can supplement available archival material. By shifting the source of narrative authority from status to witness, these documentaries capture a marginalized community’s communicative memory (Assmann J, 2008). Such memories can then be included in cultural memory, not merely within the marginalized community but for the larger community of which it is part. Since the basis for inclusion involves transforming narrative convention from having status to bearing witness, the memories compete on a more equal footing that destabilizes the social inequities contributing to marginalization. Not only experience but also marginalized community members’ characterization of the situation is preserved in cultural memory. Capturing such communicative memory, making it part of the canon of cultural memory through the mechanisms of popular culture, and incorporating it into the archive are a way to begin building a public past which is both inclusive and communal.
