Atlas Trail
Contested Claims in Media History
Media history is full of firsts, format wars and disputed accounts. This trail follows five entries where the record itself is the story: a home video format that lost despite arriving first, a documentary staged to look unstaged, a landmark film whose box office figures were never reliably known, a media effects theory still argued over decades later, and a regulatory repeal historians and politicians still dispute.
Stop 1 of 5.
Technologies
Sony's Betamax reached the market first, in 1975, and lost the format war to VHS anyway on licensing strategy and recording time, not on picture quality.
Stop 2 of 5.
Landmark Works
Hailed as the first commercially successful documentary, Nanook of the North staged its igloo, its gramophone scene and even its subject's hunting method, and gave its subject a stage name.
Stop 3 of 5.
Landmark Works
The Birth of a Nation pioneered techniques still used today while normalizing a false and racist history of Reconstruction; its own box office gross has never been reliably established.
Stop 4 of 5.
Concepts
Cultivation theory's own claim, that heavy television viewing distorts a viewer's sense of reality, has itself been measured, qualified and disputed by the researchers who came after George Gerbner.
Stop 5 of 5.
Milestones
The FCC's 1987 repeal of the fairness doctrine is still argued over in Congress and in scholarship, credited with both freeing broadcaster speech and polarizing American media.
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