Abstract
The role of journalism in collective memory is neglected if the repeated calls for its study are any indicator. James Carey’s 1974 call for a cultural approach to journalism history is a spiritual forefather of the movement, and 40 years later, we are still hearing of this unfulfilled need. Journalism and Memory (edited by Barbie Zelizer and Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt) is the latest call to arms, a sturdy attempt to provide scholars with some tools to investigate the memory–journalism relationship.
The above isn’t to say that none have heeded the call. Although journalism may seem to shake off attempts to tie it to the past, this text illustrates the tenacious (if undernourished) vein of scholarship here. In addition to Zelizer, the list of authors includes work by Carolyn Kitch, Jill Edy, Jeffrey Olick, Michael Schudson, Robert Hariman, and John Lucaites, and many recognizable others; newcomers to collective memory studies could easily just search the contributors’ names to compile a solid literature review. The text is not, however, merely a collection of established titans, and its co-authored nature exemplifies the entrance of newer thinkers to this area.
Journalism and Memory is grounded in how its title’s two concepts ‘mutually support, undermine, repair and challenge each other’, overlapping functions that call to mind Carey’s argument that communication IS culture, not merely an impartial report of it. It is structured around two constructs: trajectories (the temporal aspects of memory) and domains (its spatial aspects), which are respectively described as activities between points in time and at a point in time. Focusing on the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of memory seems well-suited to study of journalistic practice, and the framework helpfully wrangles the many concepts being explored.
The first section, on trajectories, contains just four of the book’s 15 chapters but serves to illustrate the need for change in how the intersection of journalism and memory is addressed. Jeffrey Olick, in the leadoff chapter, approaches the issue as a memory (rather than journalism) scholar, ‘one of the guilty who has not given journalism its due’. This section focuses on whys and hows: Why has memory studies ignored journalism as a focus even while it depends on its products? How can the field adjust to address a global rather than national journalism, and how is the concept changed in a world with less common media ground than in the past? In harmony with its subject, this section draws from what has been done to suggest what should happen next.
‘Domains of Journalism and Memory’ is the more robustly illustrated of the book’s two constructs, with three subsections on the relation of journalism to narrative, visual, and institutional memory. Its section on narrative memory reveals memory work in journalism’s most mundane practices. Schudson uses the New York Times to show how the past is regularly enlisted to explain the present in non-commemorative coverage; Neiger, Zandberg, and Meyers, with their concept of ‘reversed memory’, go in the opposite direction, showing how the present is used to make sense of the past (at the cost of historical details) in commemorative coverage.
In exploring journalism and visual memory, the book evokes one of Zelizer’s (1995) earliest arguments: that collective memory is partial. Hariman and Lucaites’ chapter shows this very literally by examining fragmented body images (hands and feet) used to tell the story of the past. Reading addresses images as a point around which partial memory can coalesce, describing how the ‘Situation Room’ photo from the killing of Osama bin Laden became the focal point of an incomplete narrative. Looking forward, Hoskins suggests not simply that memory is fragmented, but that there are now so many fragments in our ‘post-scarcity’ culture; both he and Reading show the need for a reconceiving of journalists as memory assemblers.
The final section, on institutional memory, provides several perspectives on the cultural authority that journalism claims for itself. Kitch traces how news organizations use memory over the long term to position themselves as significant and indispensable. Where Kitch examines memory work at the macro-level, Carlson and Berkowitz dig into its internal structures, examining how coverage of dead journalists serves cultural authority by solidifying boundaries and practices. Finally, Kaiser shows that authority does not free one from negotiation, examining journalists’ active shapings of memory in the trials of Argentinean torturers.
Journalism and Memory is a text about using the past that looks forward. Rather than suggest that memory scholars should study journalism, it makes the case for why they must. Claiming authority, building wholes from too few (or too many) parts, and describing anything collective in a fragmented world are all concerns current memory scholarship must address, and they are on display each day in the news.