Realer Than Reel: Global Directions in Documentary

Hogarth, David. Reader than Reel: Global Directions in Documentary. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. 198 pp. $19.95 David Hogarth's look at the fate of the documentary in the era of global media markets confronts a transitional moment in the history of the genre. His treatment is not a reflective, systematic study but a look at a media landscape in flux. In his introduction Hogarth shifts the reader's expectations. He redefines the genre and coins television, a category in which he includes all forms of nonfiction commercial programming. A Canadian scholar, he writes from a largely transnational perspective about the major trends that impact television programming markets today-digital technologies, corporate conglomeration, media convergence, and global hypercommercialism-and considers how factual television producers, distributors, and audiences are responding to and shaping these developments. His main point is that the surge of nonfiction programming in the global media market requires reconsideration of our idea of a documentary. He anticipates the social repercussions of actuality-based content that is digitally created and globally commodified. Hogarth's redefined documentary is no longer rooted in a national, public service identity. Drawing from largely Canadian statistics, he demonstrates that funding for the classic, long-form documentary dropped markedly during the 1990s. This was concurrent with the corporate media buyouts that consolidated global nonfiction-bascd networks within the corporate media giants and the rise of commercial documentary offerings by their media distribution outlets-e.g., the Discovery Channel and the History Channel. He worries that while nonfiction programming formats evoke the tradition of independent, journalistic documentary, the corporate priorities stress successful marketing, not integrity, in representing reality and facts. Hogarth attributes these changes in part to the competitive demands of the global marketplace that have spurred a buying-spree by distributors who want to acquire nonfiction format programming because it is relatively inexpensive and sufficiently popular with viewers. He argues that this trend raises several ethical concerns. He notes that the proliferation of global cultural products evoke fears that cultural distinctions arc evaporating into a homogenous global brew where facts, historical truth, and images float without anchors to actual events, authentic images, and locations. He believes this dislocation disturbs cultural integrity and blurs borders between fact and fiction. The foreigner as a producer model leads to interpretation of local realities from an outsider's perspective and reduces the authenticity and diversity of home-grown perspectives. He cynically describes practices like those of the corporate factual television giant Discovery Network International (DNI). Its executives claim that in exporting their branded programming worldwide they strive to be relevant to local audiences by providing programming templates to accommodate customized, local content-a process known as globalizarion. He doubts that these tidy templates provide an adequate forum for local perspectives. …

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