Commemorative Journalism Research Articles

“Despite everything, love”: Commemorative journalism and the rereading of the critical rereading of the Israeli past

This study examined how commemorative journalism shapes collective memory by exploring 18 supplements and special projects commemorating Israel’s 70th anniversary. The research questions focused on three central narrative characteristics of journalism: protagonists, plots, and narrators. Our examination revealed the ways in which those located at the fringes of the ethnic-national community were excluded from these journalistic narratives, conveying mostly a tale of Israeli strength, narrated mostly by Jewish men. We maintain that the current dominant memory version narrated by the supplements reflects a withdrawal from and rejection of recent, more critical journalistic readings of the Israeli past. This conscious return to older, hegemonic patterns of narration of the national past could be understood within the context of two central conditions, shaping the construction of Israeli reality over the past two decades: the growing dominance of the political Right and changes in Israel’s media map.

Anniversary Journalism in China: Mediated Memories of the Second World War

ABSTRACT The concept of prospective memory has been suggested as a way of theorising the importance of forward-looking memory in mediated accounts of past events. As yet, however, there was insufficient work to analyse the relationship between retrospective and prospective memory especially in collaborative journalistic cultures where one might expect the importance of prospective memory to be significant. Here, we apply the concept of mediated prospective memory, together with retrospective memory, to understand the commemoration of the end of the Second World War in China. We compare the commemoration—or indeed the absence of commemoration—in the People’s Daily over the last seven decades, showing how the Second World War was retrospectively remembered, which remaining geopolitical or domestic tasks the Chinese people were reminded of prospectively, and how retrospective memory has been reinterpreted over time in order to construct a narrative suiting the perceived changing needs of the future. Through doing so we contribute methodological and conceptual resources for the analysis of the relationship between retrospective and prospective mediated memory and commemorative journalism beyond China.

Negative Memory Mobilization: Moments of Journalistic Failure as an Interpretive Lens

ABSTRACT While ample scholarly attention has focused on how, through commemorative journalism during anniversaries, deaths or retirement, the journalistic community mobilize past accomplishments to bolster their cultural authority, very limited attention has been paid to how the journalistic community can mobilize negative memories in dealing with problematic situations that are similar to past journalistic scandals or shortcomings. Examining how financial journalists made sense of accusations that they missed the 2008 Global Financial Crisis story, this study analyzes how the journalistic community makes use of past shortcomings to negotiate its understanding of a new case from its breaking moment to its anniversary a decade later. The study finds that reporters relied on previous moments’ incidents to explain and contextualize the Global Financial Crisis coverage as another missed story and use it as an opportunity to restate how they should refine their practice going forward.

The critical potential of commemorative journalism

Previous studies of commemorative journalism have mostly stressed its integrative functionality and tendency to provide oversimplified narrations of the past. Correspondingly, this article explores the critical and at times subversive potential of commemorative journalism. It does so via the analysis of commemorative-photographic supplements, issued by Israeli dailies between 1968 and 2013. The study first identifies the storytelling building blocks used to construct the dominant commemorative narrative. Next, it illuminates three storytelling strategies – challenging the national voice, the national plot, and the national gaze – all contributing to an undermining of the national synecdoche. Finally, these findings are contextualized within the political and cultural rereading of the Israeli national past.

The Depth of Hurricane Katrina Imagery: A Longitudinal Study Through the Lens of Commemorative Journalism and Iconicity

This longitudinal research uses content analysis and survey data to consider both news media presentation and audience interpretation of images from the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina within the theoretical frameworks of iconic imagery and commemorative journalism. The data show that imagery themes, rather than select images, are remembered regarding Hurricane Katrina. Comparing print and digital news as sites of media content, and in consideration of commemorative journalism, the data showed that while print news focused on current visual imagery best classified as “moving forward,” digital news galleries focused on original visual imagery best classified as “looking back,” with internet space functioning in such a way as to make historic images ubiquitous, and, in a sense, permanent.

Zwischen Panegyrik und Tatsachenbericht. Zu Struktur und Zielsetzung von Medienereignissen zur Zeit Maria Theresias

<bold>Between Panegyric and Factual Report. Structure and Purpose of “Media Events“ at the Time of Maria Theresa</bold> This paper examines three decisive historical events that took place during the reign of Maria Theresa of Austria. It considers them as “media events“ comprising the birth of Joseph, the heir to the throne (1741), the Battle of Kolín (1757) and Maria Theresa’s recovery from smallpox (1767). In general, media events during the early modern period point to the construction of messages not merely confined to imparting information. The intrinsic aim of this paper is to analyse the political and historical dimension and both the structure and dynamics of the three media events in terms of their visual and textual genres. Furthermore, the paper refers to performative practices and examines the public information strategies of the players involved. The birth of Archduke Joseph, the first son of Maria Theresa, is remarkable given the public’s wide involvement in the celebrations. In particular, the involvement was organized with the use of aphorisms and ephemeral festive architectures. The birth itself served as an event intended to promote a feeling of community and shared unity. Its ulterior purpose was to exert a stabilising influence in the difficult early stages of Maria Theresa’s rule. The Battle of Kolín marked the first victory over the Prussian King in the Seven Years’ War and became the subject of a significantly personalised form of commemorative journalism in which the role of the heroic redemptress or redeemer was on occasion ascribed to Maria Theresa or to Field Marshal Daun. This indicates that while wars were especially prone to a superficially simple exercise in communications, their coverage in the media had an enormous impact on the overall population. On the other hand, Maria Theresa’s convalescence from smallpox was characterised by the population’s religious anxieties regarding the fate of their sovereign. Church sermons served as a pivotal means of imparting information, of interpreting the event and of describing how it had transpired. Moreover, these three types of events display a deep divide concerning their respective degrees of “Präsenzöffentlichkeit“ – meaning the public as recipients of Habsburg propaganda – and “Medienöffentlichkeit“ – which refers to those imparting such propaganda (cf. Harriet Rudolph). In the case of dynastic events such as births or recoveries from serious illness, there was no “Präsenzöffentlichkeit“ to witness what had happened. Consequently, performative rituals such as church services and contemporary mises en scene were the sole means of ensuring that such news was understandable and accessible among the public. Hence, while structural continuities became evident in the exercise of Habsburg representation under the rule of Maria Theresa, they were also accompanied by substantial realignments: in general, the conventional and universally accepted topoi of paying homage to male rulers proved inadequate in regard to the case of transfer to a female sovereign.

The Death of Phillip Hughes

Cricketer Phillip Hughes died after being struck by a ball in a match, triggering a rare example of commemorative journalism of an Australian athlete in his prime. This case study explores the perceptions of print and online cricket journalists who covered the story, providing an analysis of how their emotions influenced their reporting of an event they were professionally and personally involved in. Employing this approach differs from the dominant focus of examining content in commemorative journalism scholarship. The circumstances of the Hughes story created an unfamiliar environment for cricket journalists, who had to deal with their own emotions while being messengers to audiences in Australia, and across the world. The impact of social media also altered the direction of aspects of the coverage through the Twitter hashtag #putoutyourbats. To examine elements of this commemorative journalism example, in-depth interviews were conducted with 11 Australian cricket journalists. The results reflect the respondents’ difficulties in covering the story, their usage of emotion in their work, and their perceptions of social media’s influence.

Como recuerda la televisión. El pasado evocado en los informativos españoles

Mass media relationships with collective memory are the subject of ongoing debate; either they are blamed for immersing the audience into a fleeting amnesic present; or they are hailed as crucial mediators of remembering and forgetting in contemporary society. This article contributes to the discussion with a research about one of the ways television has to remember: anniversaries. The content analysis of Spanish news programs confirmed the regular broadcasting of anniversaries. These news narrate a version of history highly dependent upon the news program format, reshaping the borders of the subjects, countries and facts worthy of remembrance while legitimizing television as witness to history and as history narrator. Far from promoting social amnesia, this commemorative journalism allows television to get involved in the management of collective memory.

Unmasking Title IX on its 40th birthday: The operation of women’s voices, women’s spaces, and sporting mythnarratives in the commemorative coverage of Title IX

As society’s storytellers, journalists often draw upon a standard set of archetypal forms to convey all of the day’s news to their readers. This study considers the practice of commemorative sports journalism, in particular how (and by whom) the stories surrounding Title IX’s 40th anniversary were constructed at two of the nation’s leading sports news outlets. Drawing from a combination of narrative and critical discourse analysis grounded in hegemonic theory, we contend that ESPN and Sports Illustrated shifted away from the traditional battle-of-the-sexes narrative; the end result was a celebratory women-centric model, one that offered progressive ways of understanding Title IX but sometimes fell prey to flaws associated with what White has called the ‘content of the form’.

“Redemption for Our Anguished Racial History”: Race and the National Narrative in Commemorative Journalism About Barack Obama

This article considers how race was discussed in commemorative journalism produced after Barack Obama’s election and inauguration by major American newspapers, magazines, and television news. A discourse analysis of these commemorative media texts reveals competing—though often overlapping—narratives. Some celebrated Obama’s victory as a racial milestone, claiming it for African Americans past and present, yet another hurdle crossed in the continuing struggle for equality. Other commemorative texts either elided or marginalized racial issues, instead emphasizing diversity and democracy in a narrative of generalized American “freedom” and unity. The narrative in each text, however, was ultimately a tale imbued with nationalist ideology, emphasizing unity and progress at the expense of discussing issues related to contemporary racial inequality in America. Overall, although the coverage of this election demonstrated some change in racial representation, the overall discourse on race in America—and journalists’ thematic avoidance of racial issues—did not.

Recontextualizing participatory journalists’ mobile media in British television news: A case study of the live coverage and commemorations of the 2005 London bombings

This article examines contributions from members of the public featured in British television news coverage of the 2005 London bombings (‘7/7’). Specifically, it explores how images (photographs and videos) captured by ordinary people on their mobile devices were used in the live news reportage of 7/7 and, given the current salience of commemorative journalism, how these were (re-)used in the tragedy’s first year anniversary coverage. The analysis reveals broadcasters’ selection of uniform, repetitive and ‘sanitized’ mobile media footage, as well as a tendency towards non-attribution. This article contributes to the scant body of discourse analytic research into ‘participatory journalism’ practices, particularly their interaction with ‘traditional’ forms of journalism.

Commemorating the Kent State Tragedy Through Victims' Trauma in Television News Coverage, 1990–2000

On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd at Kent State University and killed four students. This essay critically interprets mainstream television journalism that commemorated the shootings in the past 18 years. Throughout this coverage, predominant framing devices depoliticized the Kent State tragedy by characterizing both former students and guard members as trauma victims. The emphasis on eyewitnesses as victims provided the basis for a therapeutic frame that promoted reconciliation rather than political redress as a rationale for commemorating the shootings. This dominant news frame tacitly advanced a model of commemorative journalism that promoted reconciliation at the expense of articulating political critique, thus deflecting attention from public controversy over how citizens should respond to tragedies that occur when state agencies repress contentious dissent.

‘The Australian We All Aspire to Be’: Commemorative Journalism and the Death of the Crocodile Hunter

This article examines the news coverage generated in Australia by the death of Steve Irwin, widely known as the Crocodile Hunter. In line with past research on commemorative journalism, the study demonstrates the dominant discourses employed in the reporting of Irwin's death. It is argued that Australia's newspapers invoked a number of national myths, such as mateship, larrikinism and anti-elitism, in order to reassert notions of Australian identity and social values and to deal with the widespread grief over his loss. Most importantly, the study sheds new light on how news media deal with challenges to the dominant memorialising discourse. Past studies had not been able to investigate alternative discourses in much detail, but in examining Irwin's death we are able to see how the media deal with such an unwanted interruption. It is argued that newspapers appropriated the alternative perspective within the mythical terms of their memorialising discourse, thereby not allowing it to disrupt the memorialisation itself and in fact further strengthening the process of mythologising the Crocodile Hunter.

‘A news of feeling as well as fact’

When famous people die, the public mourns them primarily in the same forum where they came to ‘know’ them in life – the news media, which become national healers. This study examines how American newsmagazine journalists have covered the deaths of 12 major celebrities. It reveals that this practice did not begin as ‘the Diana phenomenon’, but rather has been taking shape for four decades. The death of Diana, and more recently that of JFK Jr, were the same journalistic story as the passings of other figures as diverse as Judy Garland, John Lennon, John Wayne, and Elvis Presley. Their lives and deaths were made meaningful through a ritual narrative with consistent themes: the celebrity was ‘one of us’ while also representing our greatest hopes; and though the death was tragic, it reminded us of societal values that somehow had been forgotten. Commemorative journalism reaffirms rather than informs, and its subject is collective identity – social, generational, and national.

Journalistic Uses of Collective Memory

It has become cliched to assert that journalists write the first draft of history. Far less attention heas been paid to who does the rewrites. Frequently, second drafts of history are also written by journalists. The typology developed here describes the ways journalists use our public past and offers some insights about the process of collective memory development in the news media. Commemorative journalism seems to offer the best chance to reexamine our past, but may offer little incentive to do so. Historical analogies may not encourage us to contest the meaning of the past due to the simple, dramatic narratives of news reporting. Historical contexts may not encourage us to look closely at the meaning we ascribe to the past either, because they are presented as facts rather than interpretations.