The Filmed Wars

In the late 1960's, unfamiliar people, exotic places and violent battles—all part of the Vietnam War—appeared on television screens around the world, in living color. Film cameras and sound equipment captured shocking images and stories audiences had never seen before. The Vietnam War, presented by popular networks like CBS and told through the words and expert storytelling abilities of respected broadcasters like Walter Cronkite, “magically” appeared in our living rooms. This top down delivery method (i.e., “one to many” mass broadcasting rather than the UGC bottom up distribution model common in YouTube's digital sphere) made the television viewing experience live rather than pre-recorded in terms of the news cast itself. The audience experienced the Vietnam War narrative as if they were actually there but also in a passive way. However, today, YouTube offers the Vietnam War story as an on-demand active experience and the original network broadcasts have been repurposed, rebroadcast, altered, and appended with YouTubers' textual comments and mashed-up videos about the Vietnam War and current worldwide military conflicts. YouTube provides a bridge between the past, present and future, using words, images and sounds that teach us a great deal about the Vietnam, Persian Gulf, and Iraq wars. Important conclusions can be drawn about how these events connect and relate. YouTubers have a lot to say about the Vietnam War and their comments on broadcast television news shows and programming from the past illuminate that time and the future. Broadcast television news video production technology, specifically the reduction in equipment size, accessibility and production equipment cost has facilitated new ways of telling war stories. Today, the concept of the embedded news reporter is common in war reporting and, in fact, very desirable in terms of driving viewers to broadcast network programming as embedded reporting is an effective and engaging story-telling technique. The embedded reporter has evolved and empowered the average YouTuber to take an active role in producing breaking news content and uploading that content live to YouTube and other websites.

Plagiarism and the Classroom

Recent news reports ranging from national network broadcasts to traditional academic research journals have reported on the growth and ease of cheating in America’s classrooms. While teachers at all levels should become more knowledgeable on how to recognize plagiarized work, higher education can take a lead and educate future teachers, current teachers, and college faculty on plagiarism detection and prevention. In fact, some scholars challenge faculty to better understand plagiarism and how and when it occurs and further, to pass on that understanding to students through better constructed assignments which discourage plagiarism (Jeffes & Janosik, 2002; Kennedy, 2004).