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Witnessing is a common but rarely examined term in both the professional performance and academic analysis of media events. This article explores the practice of witnessing in general to clarify such problems in media studies as veracity, reliability, liveness, responsibility and historicity. The long history of puzzlement and prescription about proper witnessing that developed in oral and print cultures is a rich resource for reflection about some of the ambiguities of audiovisual media.
John Durham Peters (2001) studied this question.