Abstract
At the start of this book, Halliki Harro-Loit notes that time and temporal phenomena have remained on the periphery of media and journalism studies. This relative neglect is beginning to be rectified, following the publication of Emily Keightley’s edited collection, Time, Media and Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), which explored the ways in which communications media are closely involved in a range of modern experiences of time, and not only those associated with speed and acceleration. More particularly, the book considered how time is structured by media technologies, how it is represented in cultural texts, and how it is experienced in different social contexts and environments. This more recent edited collection has a more specific focus, looking at the relations between time, memory and commemoration in news journalism. It is concerned with the temporal structures of news journalism, the connections between past and present in day-to-day news stories, and the influence of journalistic discourse on collective memory. These issues are clearly important, for the rhythms of social life are variably interwoven with the different and at times competing temporalities of mediated communications.
The book does not engage with these issues at an abstract level, delivering instead a set of empirical analyses on temporal construction and the contours of commemoration in the national calendar. The nation in question is Estonia: all five main chapters are devoted to Estonian news reporting and media commemorative activities at different periods of the country’s history from the mid-19th century onwards. They derive from research conducted at the Centre for Excellence in Cultural Theory, which is based at the University of Tartu. In this sense they are all interrelated while also offering individual case studies of temporalities, commemoration and daily news flow, both within and across particular passages of time.
The first two chapters analyse the ways in which newspapers act as vehicles or facilitators of memory for different memory communities. They show that the temporal focus of news texts and their references to past, present and future shift over time, with the past at times coming much more to the fore, and at other times current affairs and future prospects becoming more prominent. Comparative attention is paid to the (re)construction of the past in the Russian-language and Estonian daily press. Both these chapters use quantitative content analysis in a rich and productive manner.
Two further chapters turn to anniversary journalism. One of these analyses a past-related anniversary in the Estonian calendar during the Soviet period as well as during the Estonian Republic. This is the commemoration of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which is seen very much as a turning-point in leading on to the occupation and annexation of the Baltic states by the USSR. The chapter shows clearly the interlinkages of anniversary journalism and social remembering. The second of these two chapters attends to the anniversary of 22 September 1944, which, during the Soviet period, was celebrated as the day Tallin was liberated by the Red Army, but which by 2007 had become a celebration of Resistance Day, commemorating the highly abbreviated Otto Tief government. The final chapter in the collection is rather different to the rest. It explores the visual representation of women in Estonian newspapers and magazines from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. There are various points of interest, but overall the chapter tracks the relationship between processes of social modernization and the changing roles and representations of women, this including the influence of consumerism and commercialized news media in the second part of the period covered.
A short concluding section bringing the concerns of the chapters together and bringing out the main interconnecting themes and issues would have been useful, as would a subject index, but otherwise this is a well-researched and solidly supported collection. It will help increase attention to relations between time and media technologies, media texts and processes of media reception.