Twentieth-Century Tales: Newsmagazines and American Memory

Abstract

In 1989, Daniel Boorstin claimed that [h]istorians like to bundle in ways that make sense, provide continuity and link past to present. Hundred-year packages-centuries -are most form, and close behind is decade, as if God had designed world on decimal system.1 He was writing not in a history journal of his own profession, but in a special issue of Life magazine reviewing 1980s. Since their founding in early twentieth century, Life and other magazines have made a regular practice of bundling years at decades' end, and they are now engaged in producing issues that claim to offer an entire hundred-year package of magazine memory. This monograph considers form and impact of such journalistic practice at a moment when, as Time's managing editor puts it, we stand in the vestibule of [a] new millennium.2 As such language suggests, this study contends that news media have become public historians of American culture: they have self-consciously taken on role of selecting most important people and events of past and explaining their historical significance. This is a provocative notion in at least two senses. To trained historians, journalistic media are not historical work, but rather popular culture, tainted by commercialism and lack of method. To journalists, tasks of interpretation and reminiscence are antithetical to professional codes that define news (i. e., timely and unknown) and objectivity, which maintains that journalists merely report reality without experiencing or explaining it. Yet those tasks are precisely what news media increasingly assume, offering perspective on and explanation of not just century, but also particular generations and events. This work is overtly subjective and analytical, a process not of reporting without an agenda, but rather of narration with a clear goal of making meaning of past. It places journalism within a broader realm of cultural production that, as Raymond Williams argued, is a process of selection and interpretation.3 When journalists look back over time, they disregard inverted pyramid of news and instead tell stories in order to define eras. What's more, they tell essentially same stories they have told before and will tell again. They characterize specific slices of past in ways that merge past, present, and future into a single, ongoing tale. In doing so, they extend cultural authority of mass media as shapers (and repository) of public memory, a shared understanding of American past that is negotiated in public sphere and that draws on a common cultural framework of values. Media century summaries began in mid-1990s, and by end of 1998, several books had already been published on theme. One of most prominent, bestselling The Century, was co-authored by a journalist, television-news anchor Peter Jennings, and was basis for two television documentary series, one on ABC and one on History Channel (a corporate cable sibling).4 Yet no medium so commands this topic and treatment as do American newsmagazines. They have been honing story of century - declaring its themes, weaving them together, and speculating on their meaning - for decades. They have created blueprint for how journalism remembers American past. This is a study of such memory-making in four U. S. magazines, Time, Newsweek, U. S. News & World Report, and Life, publications that have, for much of twentieth century, been considered news media and yet are also one of most common sites for national reminiscence. The analysis of that work is grounded in four interrelated theoretical perspectives, each discussed briefly below: first, idea that news is most effectively communicated in form of recognizable stories; second, belief that memory is formed and stored collectively as well as individually; third, understanding of time as socially constructed; and, fourth, a model of communication (including journalism) as a reciprocal form of communal ritual rather than a one-way, sender-receiver process. …