The Power of the Moving Image

Peter B. Kaufman argues that video has become our dominant cultural medium, yet we lack reliable archives for the audiovisual record.

By Peter B. KaufmanFebruary 11, 2025

• Film

• Television

• Politics

QUIETLY, ALMOST ELUSIVELY, video has become the dominant medium of human communication. There are hundreds of billions of cameras out in the world filming as you’re reading this article. Two-thirds of global internet traffic is video; that number continues to climb. If we date print back to 1455 and Gutenberg’s Mainz Bible, and the moving image to the Lumière brothers’ first public screening in Paris in 1895, print has had a 440-year head start. But Americans now get their news and information more often through screens and speakers and video-enabled media platforms than via ink on paper.

Even though the moving image has reached this juncture so quickly—indeed, perhaps because it has gotten here so quickly—there have been no mainstream usage guides that respect its leading role in our culture and our knowledge ecosystem or the rapidity with which it has arrived. There have been no popular manuals of style that focus on how we should be using video in modern communication, which is to say, how we should best be producing it, citing it, distributing it, and ultimately archiving and preserving it, especially given the vital roles it now plays in knowledge dissemination and in politics, culture, and society.

And one cannot help but notice, if one has been involved at all in publishing, education, or any form of media production, that the world of print today is a hot, unholy mess. If you were to design a book or journal or magazine or newspaper universe that would respect the rights and roles of creators and investors and underwriters but also serve society’s interests, such a system would not, it’s fair to say, be the one we have in operation today. Five publishers control 80 percent of the trade book market, five publishers control the academic market, and Amazon controls US retail book sales. The ever-tightening concentration of ownership is particularly concerning for the scientific and scholarly publishing sector, where knowledge that is often essential for society’s advancement gets distributed (or suppressed). One can see that this hyper-consolidation of power is accelerating across all the communications industries—film, music, television, gaming—as well as across social media and the web. If freedom, as people say, involves participation in power, then we are losing our grip on both. And that grip will disappear entirely if we let go of our control over the moving image.

One issue that is particularly delicate is who has access to our century’s (our two centuries’) audiovisual record. It is rarely discussed in public forums. Yet as we think of how most of the world’s advanced societies run today, how their leaders govern, and the ways in which cameras and recording devices are present with us 24 hours a day, seven days a week, one ought to wonder: Why not? Moving image archives, ripped by evening newscasts and social media, delivered anew in recut clips on television, radio, and the web every day, all year long, are becoming increasingly essential to our understanding of each other and society. Indeed, television, film, and online video—together, the moving image—has gotten to the point, only some 440 years after Gutenberg, of displacing print as the world’s medium of record.

As a result, our audiovisual record, and access to it, has become more and more important to society—to our study of the past, our knowledge of the present, and our planning for the future. Access to the archives should become a right more specifically enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a touchstone charter for human freedom, which set forth in 1948 that “[e]veryone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” UNESCO’s Constitution, established in 1945, had already committed its signatories to protecting and promoting “the free flow of ideas by word and image.” At the time, the “image” was mainly photographic. The United Nations, through the UN Human Rights Council, passed a follow-on resolution in 2016 “affirm[ing] that the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice,” and “unequivocally condemn[ing] measures to intentionally prevent or disrupt access to or dissemination of information online.”

That assertion of rights includes access to the audiovisual record. Archiving, properly defined, is the establishment and stewardship of the human record, and the remembering that it facilitates may be the most critically important imperative in modern human society. The Hebrew verb “Zakhor” appears in the imperative—“Remember!”— in the Bible more often than any other command. It is no accident that the etymology of the word “archive” comes from the Greek “ἄρχω”—to begin, to rule, to govern—and thus no accident that “archive” shares the same root as the word for monarch, autarchy, and hierarchy. Archives started in the “archon”—the seat of government—and the centrality of the power of the archive, and the audiovisual archive in particular, may well become the story of power in the 21st century. The current and future significance of audiovisual archival work cannot be overstated.

In recent years, the world experienced not only a global health pandemic but also an information and education “infodemic.” COVID-19 has infected more than 777 million people and killed or contributed to the deaths of seven million worldwide. The disease forced 300 million schoolchildren out of school, disrupting their access to education. The crisis of truth, misinformation, disinformation, and malignant media, on air and online around the world, which accelerated with the accession of Donald Trump in 2016, has led to our contemporary moment no longer being called the Information Age but “the Disinformation Age.” World leaders, including many from the largest countries, such as the United States, China, India, and Russia, have systematically been pumping lies into the global media ecosystem, and the communication networks beholden to them continue to disseminate their nonsense to billions of viewers, listeners, and readers. In 2024, the World Economic Forum described the peril of disinformation as the single most severe global risk over the next few years—ahead of climate catastrophes, armed conflicts, economic crises, and more. With Trump in power again in 2025, that peril is likely to deepen.

The key vaccines, the vital therapeutics, for such an infodemic are the facts and the verifiable truths documented and recorded and held—where else?—largely in our archives and our knowledge and memory institutions. It is, therefore, all the more important to see how access to those archives is being facilitated by their keyholders and gatekeepers. Guaranteeing access to our past—to our archives, to our history—probably should be enshrined as one of the United Nations’ 17 (perhaps there should be 18) sustainable development goals for the planet, because truthful and verifiable communications form the foundation, really, of our ability to fight for all of the others.

It may be that audiovisual archives constitute the main laboratory for antidotes to the global infodemic—and if so, then the scale and scope of our work to date have been, to use some understatement, incommensurate with the dangers of the disease. In the United States, more than 20 million Americans, informed primarily by lies, many if not most of which are conveyed via audiovisual media, are identifiable as committed insurrectionists, firm in their belief that violence against the established government is not only legitimate but also warranted and even necessary. Analysts have warned how the stages of violence we’re passing through demonstrate clear and present dangers. Of the three phases political scientists use to describe nations around the world that are teetering on the edge of civil war—the pre-insurgent phase, the incipient conflict stage, and the final stage of open insurgency—we’re quickly approaching the third.

The value of the work of audiovisual archivists in these dire times, then, is peerless. Indeed, the attack that Donald Trump led in January 2021 on the US Capitol—and on the peaceful transfer of power—can be fully described, and indictments fully drawn, only by reference to the full media record, featuring audiovisual material, that public servants with a curatorial and archival sense of purpose have managed to harvest and preserve as evidence. There are some 20 million pieces of media—records of phone calls, text messages, photographs, radio intercepts, social media posts, video recordings—in the evidentiary basket of the congressional committee that investigated the attack of January 6. Many of these points of data are video. From the Capitol Building alone, there are 14,000 hours of closed-circuit camera footage recorded that day. Fourteen thousand hours of footage. From one day. From one building. These images and sounds provided the primary sources of evidence for a series of judicial proceedings that addressed existential questions of American governance and the transfer of executive power. More important, they—and moving-image collections like them—are the bedrock of the epistemological process required to escape the delusions we have entered into as a nation and a world. Those videos, which the Democrat-led House of Representatives posted publicly online, came down at the command of Republican House leaders in 2023; they are fully curated online now at only one place—the independent nonprofit Internet Archive, which is a gift to all of us, much as the government deleting our history is a travesty.

We can’t really tell the story of the 21st century—we have trouble even telling the story of the 20th, which was the first century of film, after all—without access to the sights and sounds that shaped these years. Control over the relevant archives thus needs to stay in our hands—the hands of the people—not in the control of governments or private interests over which we have no or limited say. It’s about power over power.

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The situation appears overwhelming, but it is not new. States, religious organizations, and publishers have always spread lies—they have been doing so for millennia. And for as long as there has been information, even information based solidly on facts, people have doubted it and dubbed it false. What is new is the power of the key players in what we might call the fact business—players that include audiovisual archives around the world. In the United States, this includes 4,000 institutions of higher education, 35,000 museums, 120,000 libraries, public service media, and vanguard actors in the information commons like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. They can help correct the chaos. The activism of these institutions, together with the support of the world’s leading philanthropic organizations and government agencies, can flood the zone with antidotes and cleansers. Thanks to the internet, we have the power today to connect with one another and publish facts much more aggressively and systematically—as well as the potential to build new systems of verifying the truth of information wherever and however it appears. What is also new is the power and responsibility we have to advocate for legal and copyright reform, so that we can post and share more facts and analyses more freely online.

The parlous state of our worldwide information ecosystem requires attention and regulatory overhauls, because underneath all the untruths that are in circulation, violence has begun to boil again. The Washington Post maintains an online database of the 30,573 lies that Trump, in his first term as president, told in public, which a reader can access, filter, and search—by topic, source, and date. The most popular American TV news network, Fox News, possibly the most pernicious force in American politics and society, amplified and continues to amplify these untruths, and there’s a whole system of megaphones and magnifiers such as Newsmax, One America News, Infowars, Sinclair Broadcast Group—you’d need a Magellan to navigate these fetid waters. This is to say nothing of what transpires on Truth Social and other social media, or of what teachers and preachers and everyday citizens themselves amplify in their daily lives. Trump’s personal account has 100.4 million followers on X now (and 8.8 million on Truth Social), many with cameras and microphones that allow them to record and rebroadcast his nonsense. Television critic James Poniewozik wrote in 2019 that “Trump got elected. But TV became president.” This is true. The judge in a trial of Infowars’ founder Alex Jones berated him for his behavior in the courtroom. “This is not your show,” she said.

But as a society, we’re letting the show get away from us. We now need, collectively and professionally, to organize around providing better pathways into the audiovisual collections we curate and sometimes control. Archives of film and television can burn just as easily as books and libraries—the power and evidence and proof they contain make them attractive targets both in war and peace. Challenging as they may be to catalog and digitize, the media collections that we hold and curate have to make it from the basements and buildings into the digital bloodstream of society—now, before they, too, fall victim to the enemies of free thought and information.

This includes collections of all kinds but especially those relevant to the highest human pursuits of freedom, justice, and equality. The court recordings of Nelson Mandela and his colleagues in 1963 and 1964 arguing for their humanity in South Africa—270 hours, preserved by archivists—come to mind. So too do the films of Nazi society preserved by the Austrian Film Museum and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Likewise, the memories of Holocaust destruction and 14 other recognized acts of genocide preserved in USC’s Survivors of the Shoah collection—57,466 video testimonies (and counting). Or the archives preserved by WITNESS and others of basic human rights abuses—which archivists have trained good citizens to record. Or the recorded testimonies from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (the latter being “the first ever international tribunal to deliver verdicts in relation to genocide”; “the first to interpret the definition of genocide set forth in the 1948 Geneva Conventions”; “the first international tribunal to define rape in international criminal law and to recognise rape as a means of perpetrating genocide”; and, not unrelatedly, “the first international tribunal to hold members of the media responsible for broadcasts intended to inflame the public to commit acts of genocide”). The great film archives—media produced expressly for the screen—count as well, as do archives of musical performances, interviews with visual artists, recordings of Indigenous languages, lab experiments, television news, all television shows, in fact; the list is long.

With all this power and potential in our hands, what can we do?

The first thing might be to recognize that power. Leaders in the archive world have begun calling for a rally, a reveille, a statement of purpose. We should construct not just a database of lies tracking “false or misleading claims” from the president, as The Washington Post has built, but also a more affirmative and progressive database of truths—accessible, searchable by topic, source, and date—something that all audiovisual archives can work on together. The Post’s text-centered database of Trump’s lies features the following topics: economy, immigration, jobs, foreign policy, taxes, Russia, healthcare, election, environment, biographical record, crime, terrorism, guns, education, trade, Ukraine probe, coronavirus, miscellaneous. “Foreign policy” surfaces 3,165 matching results across Trump’s speeches, interviews, press briefings, and more; a typical Trump lie (about rebuilding the American military) has 250 records over four years. But the fact-check that’s provided—here, for example—is from text alone. Where are the audiovisual plug-ins and clips for this database, one that’s envisioned to counter lies that have largely been told—and told effectively—over audiovisual media? And what good do these audio and video clips do in proprietary firewalled archives that are, effectively, dark to so many of us?

Can something be built by the archival community that might help unite audiovisual archivists in their common sense of purpose and strengthen the sense of relevance—and urgency—in their work? Something that could be international, if rooted in English, and as relevant to the worlds of Xi, Modi, Putin, and Netanyahu as to the world of Trump? Something that could connect to the work of international fact-checking networks, investigative journalists like those who serve at Bellingcat, and the power of the open-source intelligence community? Committing to such international collaborations might help audiovisual archives more comfortably take their place at the head table of the scholarly knowledge ecosystem, where collectives from various sectors and disciplines are busy bringing the system—a system “plagued by exclusion, inequity, inefficiency, elitism, exorbitant costs, lack of interoperability or sustainability, commercial rather than public interests,” as well as by “opacity rather than transparency, hoarding rather than sharing, and myriad barriers at individual and institutional levels to access and participation”—under a new and different “values regime.” How valuable it would be to add the voices of the audiovisual archive community to this effort.

The second thing we might do is recognize that we all are archivists now. Public broadcaster WGBH and the Library of Congress, professional memory institutions, have, through the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, already digitized more than 100,000 historic television and radio programs and put them online—and they are only getting started. New Jersey Public Broadcasting, a professional broadcaster, has digitized thousands of their legacy video tapes to ensure that these materials are preserved, accessible, and findable. Indiana University has digitized more than 350,000 legacy audiovisual recordings, making over 300,000 hours of content available to students, faculty, and researchers. Every university, every museum, every archive should do this. The power of the archive is tremendous—and we hold it.

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The disease of untruths has affected us in every part of the globe. The infodemic is universal now. Our television and film archives remain, at best, incomplete; their collections bow to the narratives that were dominant at the time of their establishment; the curators and the catalogers and the tools they have selected all reflect various kinds of bias; and commercial rights restrictions have kept many of the essential documents of our time basically unavailable online. How many of the 900 films on the Library of Congress National Film Registry, for example, are really freely accessible? The healing potential of all of these essential texts is yet to be fully realized, or even recognized. Archivists and others in the business of maintaining memory and keeping up the public square are doing their best to rise to this challenge. Yet we all have to act.

The founding constitution of UNESCO opens with a declaration, written at the end of World War II by poet and US Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, that gives us a key to why all of this is so important. “[S]ince wars begin in the minds of men,” MacLeish wrote, in a line that is now enshrined (with a gender correction) as the UNESCO Charter’s preamble, “it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.” This was a line that MacLeish wrote shortly after the Allies had defeated the Nazis and their propaganda machine, and as the United States and others were beginning to confront the Soviet Union and its new system of thought control. But the statement holds in many other contexts because, as we plan our futures now, isn’t that what our real work—what our fight—is all about?

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This essay is an edited excerpt from the author’s new book The Moving Image: A User’s Manual, forthcoming on February 25. Reprinted with permission from the MIT Press. Copyright Peter Kaufman, 2025.