Transcript
Erik Barnouw
July 28, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: Welcome back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week federal regulators made Rupert Murdoch's Fox Television Group the most powerful in the country by allowing it to buy rival broadcaster Chris-Craft. The purchase gives Fox ownership of two stations each in New York and Los Angeles. Such "duopolies," as they're called, were forbidden until the FCC issued new rules in 1999. It's the sort of news that would have dismayed Erik Barnouw. He died this week at the age of 93 after taking jobs in nearly every facet of a century of broadcasting -- as ad man, radio producer, filmmaker, teacher, historian and archivist -- and that's just a few. In fact, he wrote the book. His three volume history of broadcasting in the United States is the work that critic John Leonard says everyone who writes about television steals from. Patricia Zimmerman is an author and broadcast historian. She says Barnouw had an indelible impact on virtually every field he entered!
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: You know one of my colleagues said here is a man who didn't live just one life but lived many lives. You know we often call him the shuttler -- that he shuttled between so many different media worlds, it was hard to ever place him in one.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Let's talk about some of those lives that he lived, first as a practitioner. He wrote commercials, he did propaganda and probably one of the most important films he made is Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1945.
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: This film is a compilation film produced in I believe 1970 from footage that had been squirreled away, confiscated and hidden.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This footage was kept under seal by the U.S. government!
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: Yes, sealed by the U.S. government and through a very complicated set of machinations, Barnouw secured the footage.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now they say that this is the most widely-taught documentary in documentary studies and also one of the most potent expressions of anti-war sentiment ever put on film!
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: Yes, it is. 31 years after it was produced, you can show it to students and they're moved and crying and touched. You can trace films like Eyes on the Prize and millions of public television documentaries, feminist documentaries, civil rights documentaries, all these films that narrate the history of America can really -- you could see as having their forefather, if you will, in this film.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Having written the history of broadcasting he then went on to look ahead and what he saw was a nation that was producing huge media mega-companies. Media conglomerates.
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: He once said to me, these companies are now larger than most nations. Yet at the same time, rather than just focusing on gloom and doom, he would constantly say to me: you know any good independent documentary media that's blowing the cover of these people? So what I would say -- his whole life is a life marked by worry about what are the media doing in American society and internationally and also hope that there's always people doing courageous work.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Just this week you were at a conference that included archivists and people interested in independent film and documentary film. What is it like in all those communities to lose somebody like Erik Barnouw?
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: The passing of Erik Barnouw is for us as though Ghandi has died. A person always steering us towards an ethical and moral and democratic course.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Patricia Zimmerman is a professor at Ithaca College, author and media historian.