2020 IASA - FIAT/IFTA Joint Conference

The post-2016 era has pushed many to reevaluate their work in the context of racism, xenophobia, political corruption, and even physical isolation.  Academics need to ask themselves how their research and their teaching can address our current situation. In the field of television studies, researchers require access to audio-visual archives to support their critical research agenda, but the pandemic has obviously made that difficult. Outside of the current moment, though, a persistent problem bedevils television research that is engaged with issues of social justice, and that is the uneven preservation of TV news. Pandemic or no pandemic, access to television news is compromised by a number of factors, not the least of which is the overwhelming amount of programming to capture and archive. In this address, I highlight the importance of TV news archives to researchers who wish to understand and communicate to their students how the news straddles information and entertainment.

*Available in Spanish and French via Interprefy