The repertoire, not the archive: The 1950 Life and Time coverage of the Korean War

Abstract

Journalists plunge into a social drama in which they interact with other actors, witness an event, and translate their observations into sensible texts to communicate with audiences who are not ‘on location’. A journalist’s account is the partial representation of the very reality that he or she constructs at the moment of witnessing an event within a specific context. A journalistic text thus does not merely create the archive, but works as the repertoire that invites us to participate in a continuous meaning-making process during subsequent memory constructions. Based on media coverage of the Korean War in 1950 by Life and Time magazines, this article identifies five plausible scenarios of how US journalists performed acts of witnessing the unknown battlefield of Korea. This exploration prods readers to critically appreciate both the journalist’s role as memory agent and the journalistic text as the repertoire in our act of remembering.