In a lengthy shot from Ross McElwee's Six O'Clock News (1996), the camera scans a bridge destroyed by a hurricane, panning the extent of the disaster, the media filming it, and the locals observing both them and it. In the shot, we are reminded that mediated realities are at the same time both packaged entertainments and ‘real’ experiences. As McElwee trails journalists that seek ‘news’ and ‘stories’ in lives devastated by natural disasters and traumatic events such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and murder, the film examines the blurred lines between first-hand experience and manufactured reality, closeness and distance. Ultimately, the different levels of filmic engagement with tragic events in Six O'Clock News create a kind of hall of mirrors: crews fabricating news out of disaster and trauma reflect and are filmed by the self-reflective documentarían chronicling his own version of events. Highlighting this interplay and blurring of documentary ‘truth’ and mainstream media ‘infotainment’, the film anticipates central questions facing documentary in the intensely mediatized world of the twenty-first century.

Representational and existential questions overlap in the film: how do we reach the ‘true’ experience of trauma beyond the anonymous media screen? How might the filmmaker make sense of a world rife with personal tragedy? McElwee reaches an ‘epiphany’, he states, when he befriends an earthquake survivor in Los Angeles called Salvador Peña, who suffered terrible injuries when trapped by a falling building. In spite of continuing debilitation and poverty, Peña remains stoic and deeply religious.