Contested Ground

On December 10, 1962, Nbc aired a ninety-minute documentary, The Tunnel, about three West Berlin students who spearheaded the digging of a tunnel under the Berlin Wall through which twenty-one adults and five children from communist East Berlin crawled to freedom in the West. The producer was the innovative Reuven Frank, who created a unique kind of television news with The Huntley-Brinkley Report in 1956, anchored not by one newscaster but by the team of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. Frank did not envision The Tunnel as the equivalent of cinéma vérité, in which an action is recorded as it happens, but as “a linear viewing experience” with the Aristotelian beginning-middle-end format, a rising and a falling action, and a denouement (p. 98). This was television news as storytelling, an idea so iconoclastic that Frank incurred the scorn of print journalists and even newscasters who believed their function was

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