Edward R. Murrow Sociology

There have been many issues with journalists being honest or dishonest in our generation. Not all of journalist are bad, there are many great ones who have impacted society in positive ways. Journalism is the activity or profession of writing for magazines, newspapers, news websites, or they prepare news stories to be broadcasted to the public (Journalism.org). Edward Murrow said, “To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.” This holds true because the world does not want to hear false stories, they want to hear credible ones, Edward Murrow shows that by his truthfulness and his dedication to journalism. Murrow has impacted society in positive ways including his accuracy, political knowledge, and his social impact.

Through time, educational information has been passed on using films otherwise known as documentaries, which are illustrated through pictures, interviews and recordings of real life events to provide a factual record or report.

As I sat in my apartment and waited for my guest I opened up my laptop to skim my notes. Edward R. Murrow, radio broadcast legend and American hero. This man survived London during World War II and now he’s coming over to my house for an interview. So many thoughts circled my head while I waited. What questions will I ask? How will he answer? Will I be able to use this interview at all? I kept frantically flipping through my notes when I heard a knock at the door.

Documentaries also include films which are intended to ‘expose’ and often carry interviews, for example Michael Moore’s films on social concerns

Edward R. Murrow was born on April 25, 1908, in Polecat Creek, North Carolina. He went to Washington State University and studied political science, speech, and international relations (Edward R. Murrow Biography). He began news broadcasts in 1928 and continued throughout World War 2 (Edward R. Biography). He graduated Washington State University in 1930, and went on to work for the International Institute of Education. He married Janet Huntington Brewster in 1935, five years after graduating university. (Edward R. Murrow Timeline). Murrow later then left broadcasting in 1961 and died on April 27, 1965 in New York.

According to Martha Rosler (1989), documentary photography started in the early twentieth century with Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis in United States. At that time, it acted as a visual medium to reflect social conscience through liberal sentiment expression.

Edward R. Murrow is a universally recognized, courageous news broadcaster who brought stories to life through radio and television programs. He developed the term “broadcast journalism,” earning creditability with his eyewitness coverage of the London bombing which gave him the public acclaim “As Kendrick noted, he was recognized as “a proficient debater, and preferred the spoken word, never having been a writing journalist” (Kendrick, p.214).

Since the advent of documentary film with Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), those with power have sought to use it as a tool in their arsenal to reach people. Advances in communications technology in the early twentieth century allowed it to be used as a one-way message delivery system to the masses, however the ways in which this has been implemented have varied hugely based on context and political viewpoint. Through consideration of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), and Lorentz’s The River (1938) this essay will analyse the concepts of persuasion, education and propaganda in documentary film, discussing the similarities and differences between these areas by.

(SLIDE 1) According to the Oxford dictionary, documentaries use pictures or interviews with people involved in real events to provide a factual report on a particular subject. However, documentaries are much more than that, they educate the general public and make them aware of what is going on in the world and within our society, some are for entertainment purposes or can just be observational. Good morning / afternoon fellow documentary filmmakers, my name is Charlotte Thompson and the documentary I am presenting to you is ‘Food, Inc’. ‘Food, Inc.’ is about how the production of food has drastically changed since the 1950s, how it is controlled primarily by a handful of multinational corporations and it has changed my perspective on food consumption as it has shown the negative consequences of cheap fast food.

My view of the bushmen teaching humility in their Christmas practice is contained in this paper based on the information gleaned from Lee’s article Eating Christmas in the Kalahari. I list excerpts from the article and our textbook to illustrate my views. Also, I address how the tribe is an agent of socialization and is a representation of Gemeinschaft. I talk about the difference

The creation of a documentary is a fine balance. One must be cognisant not to have misconstruing messages within the film, while still not trivializing those very same messages. It must strive to present its case with as little bias as possible. Moreover, that message must succeed in reaching the audience. With this in mind, Andrew Morgan succeeds in being a skilled documentary filmmaker with The True Cost; a documentary with hard hitting commercial implications, social/political implications and manages persuades the audience using facts and figures to its advantage.

The assignment task for Term two was for a small group of people (three), to create a documentary and then each person to write a reflection. Before starting this documentary, we studied the history and development of documentaries. We then looked more into how different documentaries, Spellbound (objective) and Bowling for Columbine (subjective) have different effects on people.

Reflexive documentaries do not aim to hide their objectivity and instead encourage viewers to embrace “documentary for what it is: a construct or representation” (Resha 2). Morris’s highly constructed shots and reenactments do not try to give the viewer a false reality but instead are used to progress the narrative. The reenactment sequence is the most groundbreaking characteristic of the film. The stylized shots of a milkshake flying through the air, the officer falling to the ground, and the car speeding away bring drama and excitement to the film in a way a simple retelling never could. The reenactments replay multiple times, highlighting the atypical path along which Morris is retelling the murder’s narrative.

“Our criminal justice system, on paper, is the best in the world… but we're human, and so we make mistakes. If you execute and execute and execute, at some point you will execute an innocent man.” - Randall Adams Belgian documentary filmmaker Jean-Pierre Dardenne was quoted as saying that “in documentaries, you're confronted with reality; you can not manipulate or move it”. The documentary film genre has always been at the forefront of cinema, providing insight into humanity at its core. The focus of my study is documentary film with the purpose of bringing an injustice to light, in the hopes that the film will help galvanize the masses, particularly in regards to criminal justice.

C.Wright Mills or Charles Wright Mills was born on August 28, 1916 in Texas. He attended the University of Texas where he got his bachelor 's degree in 1939. Before even graduating, Mills had already been published in the two leading sociology journals in the United States, the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review. After his bachelors degree, he pursued his Ph.D at the University of Wisconsin in 1941. During his time in Wisconsin, he met his wife, Dorothy Helen Smith. While he went to school, Dorothy worked and supported the two of them until he obtained his Ph D. During his years at Wisconsin, Mills began contributing well known “journals of sociology” and opinionated pieces to intellectual journals such as The New Republic, The New Leader and Politics. After obtaining his Ph.D, Mills became a professor of sociology at The University of Maryland, College Park until he began teaching at Columbia. A year after obtaining his job he became assistant professor in the university’s sociology department. Mills teached there until his time of death in 1962.