By Denitsa Yotova, Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland

Dr. Tom Mascaro recently retired from his position as professor in the School of Media & Communication at Bowling Green State University. Mascaro is a documentary historian who is currently working on a sequel to his highly acclaimed book, Into the Fray: How NBC’s Washington Documentary Unit Reinvented the News (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012). Into the Fray won the 2013 AEJMC James W. Tankard Award for Best Book on Journalism and received an honorable mention from AJHA. Into the Fray covered 1961 to 1967; Mascaro’s new manuscript will span 1967 to 1989.  

Q: How did you come to your area of scholarship and what was the turning point when you decided on this approach to historical research?

A: There’s two parts to that. The first was just kind of an accident. I was a corporate communication writer and I was involved in automotive repair and technology. My job was to produce training filmstrips about various parts of automobiles. I got to the point where I had covered just about as much as I could on cars, so I became more interested in people. It really was kind of the beginning of my interest in documentary as nonfiction communication that had a human angle to it.

When I went to grad school at the University of Michigan in 1985, I became interested in the film and television production courses. My professor was a broadcast historian, Mary Ann Watson, and I became her research assistant. Part of what I did for her was research on television documentaries that aired during the Kennedy years ­­–– the most fruitful for broadcast documentaries, up until recent times. I think the first one that I really got devoted to was Bob Drew’s documentary Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment and I just researched everything I could find about it. That was the real turning point when I was ready to focus my research on documentary history.

Q: What is the most recent historical research project you have worked on?

A: I had published a book on an NBC News documentary unit that covered the period from 1961 to 1967 and now I am working on a second book that picks up that story from 1967 through 1989 ­­–– a period of history when quite a few women were involved with documentary production at NBC News. I was driven to the story by the main producer Bob Rogers. While I haven’t done very much with it since August, I just retired, so I am trying to get back into the manuscript. I also have a chapter from it about some of the controversies involving network news and conservative organizations in 1969. I’m hoping to get that chapter submitted for consideration next year.

Q: How does your research inform your teaching?

A: Until a few weeks ago I taught a couple of documentary history classes. In addition to showing different examples of techniques in different historical periods, I try to weave the documentary story with an American history story. I want students to see it is not just a list of films and what the films look like, but to learn about the contexts from which these films came.

Q: Given your passion for documentary and human stories, do you view documentary works the same as journalistic ones? Why or why not?

A: Well the short answer is yes, but it’s more complicated than that. There’s always been a debate about the difference in the approach between a filmmaker and a documentary journalist. A filmmaker tends to create a case the same way a lawyer would align the evidence to make a case. This is opposite to what a journalist would do, which is to ask questions until they get familiar enough with the material and then try to draw some conclusions with at least an eye towards some balance. And the issue of balance is what bothers documentary filmmakers. They don’t like the idea of balance and they reject the idea of objectivity.

Through my research and talking with people I have found that documentary filmmakers have excellent creative skills and are excellent writers, but they operate in a format where they could also be controversial and provocative. There are many documentary films that have a point of view, yet they report on some objective facts, while making a particular argument. So even though a Michael Moore documentary probably wouldn’t pass as a network journalistic piece, it still has a lot of journalism in it. It has a lot of research, reporting, facts and evidence on camera, but there is a difference in the rules for a journalistic documentary and the rules for film documentary.

I think the idea of objectivity is also something that’s been foisted on journalists mostly by academics, yet many journalists have gone on record saying you can’t expect a human being to not respond to situations, i.e. it’s impossible to be objective and to be human at the same time. The question then becomes what are you omitting that’s essential and what are you adding that is embellishing the story. In this sense, I think many documentaries are objective but I also know that many of them have a point of view too. One of the most famous network documentarians, Edward R. Murrow, had a very clear point of view.

Q: Where do you think documentary will be in 10 years?

A: I think it will go to more of a larger number of niche audiences as there are many more expressions today, especially by underrepresented groups. This is one of the strengths right now as there are more kinds of documentary offerings that represent a large variety of groups wanting to define themselves more accurately. While this is one of the strengths, I think a concern is that today’s niche documentaries are sort of atomized into spray droplets, as opposed to the network documentaries that used to stream like a firehose –– they had some power.  

Q: What advice do you have for junior faculty/scholars?

A: A few things. Do not “pigeonhole” yourself. In order to successfully write and defend a dissertation, it needs to be narrowly defined and in order to establish a career as an academic you need to carve out your own space, but with all of the above you run the risk of pigeonholing yourself in the job market.

For instance, if a job posting is for something more general and you are very specific, you have to do a lot of work to convince the prospective employer you’d be a good candidate. You have to think of your research constantly in terms of some of the specifics of what you do, but also be able to frame it in a context that’s a bit more general. That way, you’re not saying “I’m a one trick pony,” but “You know, my pony is part of a big herd and this is what the herd looks like.”

Teach in your research area. One of the things you need to do when you get hired or when you negotiate for hiring is you absolutely need to teach a class in your research area at least once a year.If you’re not teaching in your research area, your teaching overwhelms your research and it gets to be very hard to keep your research connected to your teaching, i.e. your research must inform your teaching and vice versa.

Set time aside to do your writing and research, and be ruthless about it. See, teaching is like water –– it will fill every crack and crevice and you’ll always be able to spend more time teaching. But if you don’t write from say 8 a.m. to noon on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or whatever the time period is, it gets to be really hard to keep some momentum. In history, for example, what’s tricky is that most of it is based on primary documents, so it takes a while to accumulate enough documents to be able to write an article. It’s not the same as doing a quantitative study where you can generate some data and write an article from it. You have to make sure that you get something out on a regular basis.

You have to have enough balance so that there is a portion in there for you and your research. When you leave a position, the only thing you take with you is your research agenda. So that goes back to the first point which is—figure out how to be true to your research agenda, be sure to teach in it, and make time to keep it going. Finally, you also have to fit into the community and establish your identity without being a snob about it. It’s a tricky profession.

Interview conducted by Denitsa Yotova, a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland