The magnitude of our annual meeting resembles a force of nature. Every March, as the tide of SCMS rises, we scurry to finish our papers and pack our bags. We arrive to the airport in droves and board buses to the conference hotel, mounting a peaceful but impressive take-over of the conference city. This year, one customs official looked over my shoulder at the line behind me with some wonderment, asking, “How many of there are you?” My favorite tweet of the conference came from Daniel Grinberg, who posted this exchange at the airport: “Customs guard: How much money are you carrying on you? Me: $10 to $15? Customs guard: Oh, are you here for the film conference?”

At the conference hotel, we squeeze into elevators, dash from panel to panel, converse in hallways, and, later, drain the liquor supply, a sea of name badges dotting the hotel bar in bursts of red and black. Anticipating our whirlwind conference schedule, we plan dinners and drinks with publishers, colleagues, and fellow panelists weeks in advance, and still somehow miss seeing some of our friends, hence texts sent like, “Hope you’re having a good SCMS. I’m here, too. Miss you.” Finally, we return home, exhausted but exhilarated, already contemplating what panel we may propose for next year’s conference.

Ultimately, SCMS’s large conference size marks an advantage for all its members, offering a diverse and stimulating meeting and increasing our odds of getting papers accepted, a factor we all deeply appreciate. The spring gathering provides a central, one-time-a-year gathering point for film and media scholars in all of our various interests, which allows us to more accurately trace shifts in our fields, as well as to engage in truly interdisciplinary scholarship.

Yet, for those conference attendees who seek a stronger network in their field or who feel lost in the crowd, allow me to pass along some good advice that I took this year: join a Scholarly Interest Group. While this is especially important for those film and media scholars who are still in the process of making professional connections, such as graduate students and junior faculty, it holds true for any SCMS members who wish to make meaningful, professional contacts.

There are now 27 Scholarly Interest Groups in SCMS, ranging from Animated Media to Radio Studies to Scandinavian Studies.

These groups provide a meeting point and a forum to share ideas for scholars who share particular interests in sub-fields within film and media studies. However, SIGs can also provide the much-needed service of reducing the enormous scope of SCMS to a manageable and productive size. Thus, SIGs function like a home base, a site where fellowship, mentorship, and scholarship can ignite and flourish under the umbrella of a shared concern/passion.

This year, I joined the War and Media Studies SIG, a newly-formed organization devoted to studying war and militarism in film, television, radio, and an array of new media formats. Exploring the history and culture of warfare, the War and Media Studies group will be highly interdisciplinary, intersecting such varied fields as rhetoric, history, political science, sociology, trauma studies, gender/race/sexuality studies, surveillance studies, cultural studies and peace studies. At the inaugural meeting, the range of scholars (grad students to full profs) and approaches to studying war and its representations impressed all of us. This was also reflected in the conference program, which listed several sessions that spoke to the theme of war and militarism in some form or fashion. I found the “Teaching 9/11” workshop, for example, to be especially thought-provoking and relevant, not only in terms of how we can address the subject of 9/11, and war in general, in our classrooms, but also how we can face the challenges of teaching in post-secondary institutions that are increasingly under threat of severe cutbacks and censorship. In other words, SIGs and their related sessions—especially workshops—bridge scholarship and pedagogy and provide a forum for larger professional concerns to be discussed openly.

The War and Media Studies SIG, of course, is only one of many. The list of SIGs grows each year. Scholarly Interest Groups are poised to provide support, fellowship, and mentoring for their members. When they do, SIGs help balance the scale of SCMS, making it navigable, while also allowing us to mine the riches of the vast conference.

I’m a media scholar, so I approach TV news a bit differently than other folks. First and foremost, I’m interested in television news as television—as a ratings-driven commercial artifact that juggles the responsibility of journalism with the stylistic and narrative demands of television. As a result of this primary interest, I’m also concerned with the way the demands of television often adversely affect the information we get, particularly during times of crisis when the appeal of liveness and breaking news can overwhelm little things like facts. It’s the fog of live television. The archive has a tremendous role to play in helping researchers reconstruct the past as seen on television, but it also helps us pinpoint precisely how history’s televised narrative is already a construct—a carefully crafted and complex set of signs and symbols. So I’d like to talk about the television news archive in terms of accessibility and analysis and why both of those things matter.

When I started researching Ugly War Pretty Package in 2004, I was in the third year of my Ph.D. program, meaning I was relatively poor. I didn’t realize this would factor so heavily into my ability to access news coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I actually had no trouble finding CNN’s coverage. My university’s media center maintained its own collection of CNN coverage, but—in a move that makes perfect sense to some but was a bad decision in the long run—they neglected to archive Fox News. CNN had become the newscast of record, so why collect anything else? I needed over 100 hours of Fox News coverage, so paying the Vanderbilt Archive for that amount of time was out of the question. Vanderbilt had just started putting clips online, but I needed days of coverage. I had to rely on the kindness of strangers, namely a journalism professor from the University of Arizona who didn’t think twice about mailing me every single Fox News tape her department had made. This was just seven years ago, and it was all very low tech. Video tapes. Snail mail. It got the job done, but not without anxiety.

Once the problem of access was solved, the next one revealed itself when I was transcribing the coverage and conducting my actual analysis. It was less of a problem and more of an intellectually complicated new experience—the experience of watching five 24-hour cycles of news. Nobody does that. As a television scholar, this was an exciting prospect. It forced me to argue that the basic unit of analysis of cable news is the 24-hour cycle. It’s not one particular program or even one daypart. Most people, even news junkies, consume news in snippets or in hour-long blocks. When you decide to study news with an eye to its aesthetic and narrative attributes, you’ve made the decision to remove news from its normal context. Even though much of my motivation was to reinsert news into the television context, the experience of watching hours of news in a cubby in my university’s media center, and the sadness of re-watching the shock and awe bombing next to strangers who were all watching something else, highlighted the very odd artifact that news becomes when it is placed in an archive.

So why does any of this matter? Television news has always been considered an ephemeral text. Certain clips, and I emphasize the word CLIPS, live on and pop up again and again: the moon landing, Cronkite’s announcement of President Kennedy’s death, the Challenger explosion. But aside from those morsels, there has been little effort to save, to catalogue, and to archive. When CNN released its Persian Gulf War coverage on home video, it was composed of highlights. Again, these were the morsels that stood out, but those morsels probably accurately represented how most people experienced the war in their living rooms. Researchers can’t live on morsels. It’s only when you can lay out every moment of concentrated coverage and truly study it as a coherent text that you can detect and explain the patterns and motifs in the genre of television news.

See, I’ve come to believe that the “ephemerality” of 24-hour news encourages sloppiness. I’ve worked in live television, and I know that screw-ups happen. Couple liveness with the pressure of covering a breaking story, and the potential for disaster is huge. The idea is that everyone will forgive CNN or FOX for living in the heat of the moment and speculating wildly. One news cycle simply replaces the last, and short of the satirical interventions of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, no one will really hold TV news accountable for the problematic statements, characterizations, and images that can dominate during moments of crisis.

The archive changes this. The archive replaces ephemerality with permanence and gives television the same respect as the written word. When TV news becomes institutionalized in this way, it is easier to study. This is a gift to people like me and especially to students and independent scholars who lack the resources that a university job often provides. And, of course, the 9/11 TV News Internet Archive is a gift to people like my students, who were barely old enough to grasp what was going on in 2001. It opens up so many avenues for research and discovery, critical or casual, and that value can’t be overstated.

As Jodi Dean has observed, one thing that differentiates members of the self-appointed “9/11 Truth Movement” from earlier advocates of “conspiracy theory” (such as the alternative knowledge communities that have adduced counter-evidence and counter-narratives around, for instance, the assassination of JFK, or the involvement of the CIA in the distribution of crack-cocaine within African American communities in order to generate funds for the Nicaraguan Contras and so undermine the strength of political oppositionality among both Sandinistas and US Blacks) is a certain degree of conviction, certitude, or what Dean labels “drive” regarding the incontrovertibility of their assertions and the righteousness of their activism.  However, such an observation does not fully capture the diversity of attitudes and orientations toward the numerous counter-discourses circulating among those who are skeptical of the official conspiracy narrative propounded by the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the members of the 9/11 Commission (some of whom have themselves famously denounced the deep flaws in their own final report).

Richard Gage, for instance, provides a compelling example of drive: he has for years been passionately asserting and painstakingly documenting (with what many academic researchers and others consider to be scientific precision) the physical impossibility of the three WTC towers collapsing symmetrically at nearly free-fall acceleration into their own footprints, as they did on September 11, 2001, except under conditions of controlled explosive demolition.  Gage has attracted considerable international attention as a member of the American Institute of Architects who in 2006 founded the organization Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which has secured the signatures of about 1,400 architectural and engineering professionals on its petition demanding a new Congressional investigation into the September 11 attacks.  See: http://www2.ae911truth.org/videos/Close-Up_Richard_Gage.mov

Among the most astonishing pieces of evidence touted by Gage and his associates are the studies published in peer-reviewed physics journals by well-respected professors such as Steven Jones that demonstrate the inexplicable presence of large quantities of a high-tech explosive incendiary substance known as “nanothermite” (manufactured by only a few secretive military contractors such as Livermore Labs) in the dust blown across lower-Manhattan on September 11, 2001.

Geraldo Rivera, by contrast, took many years to shift from a position of unyielding refusal to even consider the viability of alternative accounts of the 9/11 attacks (“Oh, get a life!” he once yelled on camera at a group of protesters chanting, “9/11 was an inside job”) to one of self-proclaimed open-mindedness toward such accounts, which he announced last month on Geraldo at Large in the wake of the recent “Building What?” media campaign launched by key members of the 9/11 victims’ families such as Bob McIlvaine.

Indeed, the existence of a large group that adamantly dismisses out of hand any evidence that undermines the official conspiracy narrative of the 9/11 attacks may be more notable than that of a somewhat smaller group that asserts conspiratorial counter-narratives from a stance of righteous certainty.  Meanwhile, there seems to be very little discursive space for suspended judgment or considered agnosticism.  Is this yet another byproduct of the oft-noted “unprecedented polarization” of the political terrain in the contemporary US?  Not in any clear-cut sense of partisan or left/right division; recent sympathizers with the 9/11 Truth Movement include, for example, Marxist intellectual and former European Parliamentarian Gianni Vattimo, right-wing Fox News commentator and former New Jersey Superior Court judge Andrew Napolitano, and political category-defying gadfly, investigative news show host and former independent Governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura.  Moreover, media figures claimed by both progressives and conservatives are united in their willingness summarily to dismiss the mere discussion of alternative 9/11 narratives as “crazy talk,” including Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Bill O’Reilly, and Glen Beck.

This dismissiveness reveals very little about the evidence in support of either the official 9/11 conspiracy narrative endorsed by the Bush Administration or the counter-narratives suggested by the Truthers.  However, it tells us much about the denunciatory force and exclusionary power of the discourse of “conspiracy theory,” which at this point in history seems capable by its mere invocation of rendering dissident perspectives and counter-knowledges illegitimate a priori.  As Jack Bratich has shown, this denunciatory discourse of “conspiracy theory” is part of a larger discursive apparatus that works to keep US politics “within reason” and thus to exert control and discipline over dangerous forms of thinking.  This power-bearing “reasonability” expresses of course not a universal position but rather an historically specific (and contested) formation of reason.  While the Enlightenment was surely indispensible for the American Revolution, so too was the highly active conspiracy-mindedness of leading colonists bent on discerning obscure patterns of orchestrated deceit, manipulation and treachery in the machinations of key British parliamentarians of the day.  If the American Revolution was a product of both Enlightenment rationalism and colonial conspiracy theorization, today it is the shadow cast by a particular historical formation of “reasonability” that makes it difficult for most of our mainstream media outlets to contemplate either the possibility or the evidence of something deeply rotten at the core of our democracy.