Journalistic Practices in Media Events Before Broadcasting: The Public Funeral of King Oscar II in Early Twentieth-Century Sweden

Abstract

ABSTRACT According to Dayan and Katz, media events require live transmission, firmly dating their birth to the age of television. However, the application of such a media-centric criterion runs the risk of projecting an a-historical perspective to the phenomenon as such. By contrast, using the example of the public funeral of the Swedish King Oscar II in 1907, the purpose of this article is to scrutinize and categorize the different efforts on part of the journalists to create media events before broadcasting. Four types of journalistic practices are uncovered: (1) highlighting the attention of media in a broad sense in public space (such as church bells, flags, shop windows, etc.) as well as journalistic presence, to endow eventfulness to the occasion; (2) acting as witness ambassador to evoke the senses of the media audience; (3) mediating the witnessing public participating on location to emphasise the engagement of the whole society; (4) using different kinds of narrativization, such as cross-cutting, to bring a sense of immediacy to the reporting. In terms of theory, the ambition is to draw attention to the journalist’s role as a historical narrator, as well as to bring the historical perspective back to the discussion on media events.