Journalism and Memory

B. Zelizer, K. Tenenboim-Weinblatt, B. Zelizer, K. Tenenboim-Weinblatt

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137263926
• eBook ISBN: 9781137263940
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Tracking the ways in which journalism and memory mutually support, undermine, repair and challenge each other, this fascinating collection brings together leading scholars in journalism and memory studies to investigate the complicated role that journalism plays in relation to the past.

Part I
Trajectories of Journalism and Memory

1
Reflections on the Underdeveloped Relations between Journalism and Memory Studies

Jeffrey K. Olick

In the 2008 inaugural issue of the journal Memory Studies, Barbie Zelizer claimed that ‘memory’s work on journalism does not reflect journalism’s work on memory.’ Her charge to colleagues was clear: ‘As journalism continues to function as one of contemporary society’s main institutions of recording and remembering, we need to invest more efforts in understanding how it remembers and why it remembers and why it remembers in the ways that it does.’ In the pages that follow, I take up this charge, albeit in a rather schematic fashion: for as a memory scholar and historian of memory studies (Olick and Robbins, 1998; Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi and Levy, 2011), I am one of the guilty who has not given journalism its due.

Preliminary issues

To begin, it is important to engage in some definitional clarification. Zelizer’s essay, for instance, can be read as addressing at least two analytically distinct, though empirically related, issues: on the one hand, memory’s work on journalism and journalism’s work on memory, and on the other hand, memory scholarship’s attention to journalism and journalism scholarship’s attention to memory.

In the first case, journalists can be said to be interested in memory in a variety of ways. For instance, journalists cover memory science and memory politics, as well as commemorative events (for example, political anniversaries). Not only does journalism cover commemorations, it also celebrates them, for instance by publishing special issues of newspapers on anniversary occasions. It also has its own commemorations, for instance celebrating journalistic anniversaries, such as the twentieth year of a news show, or acknowledging the role of founding journalistic fathers, like Edward R. Murrow. In the second place, cultural and collective memory is not only shaped by journalism, but includes memories of journalism: as a society, we remember important broadcasts, iconic broadcasters, and even the media themselves (such as the look of a major newspaper’s front page or the theme music of an evening news broadcast); collective or cultural memory includes journalism and journalistic events, as well as being shaped by journalism. Journalism and memory are clearly implicated in each other.

The question of the relationship between memory and journalism, however, is distinct from the issue of blind spots in their respective scholarships. On the one hand, there are excellent examples of both kinds of scholarship that have taken up the connection: journalism scholars have investigated the relationship between memory and journalism (for example, Zelizer, 1992; Kitch, 2005; Edy, 2006). Memory studies, too, has occasionally explored journalism as either a source or a site of memory (for example, Olick, 2005), though often it has done so under the broader rubric of media. On the other hand, it is also true that ‘no main theorists of the field of collective memory included “news making” as an important component in their work that explored the field’ (Neiger, Meyers and Zandberg, 2011: 7). Obviously, this has been consequential for the course of memory studies in its development as a field (see Olick et al., 2011).

Indeed, while memory and journalism as endeavors and practices focus on, as well as ignore, each other implicitly and explicitly in a variety of ways, it is the task of memory scholarship and journalism scholarship to catalogue and theorize these relations. By the same token, not only must we specify ‘how [journalism]… remembers and why it remembers and why it remembers in the ways that it does.’ We need also to explain the scholarly attention and inattention across the link. And the ways in which memory scholarship and journalism scholarship engage with or ignore each other and their objects (memory and journalism) are the consequence of historical and institutional factors that may or may not have to do with the primary relation between memory and journalism as practices.

A second preliminary issue emerges from the foregoing, namely the subsumption of journalism under the more general topic of media. For instance, had Zelizer replaced the term journalism with the term media – as in ‘Why Memory’s work on Media Does Not Reflect Media’s work on Memory’ – her argument would have been less convincing, though to be sure not entirely without merit. For, as Astrid Erll (2011: 113–14) has put it in her introductory survey of the field of memory studies, ‘Cultural memory is unthinkable without media.’ As a result, Erll continues, ‘it is no surprise that cultural memory research is often simultaneously media research.’ Indeed, the literature on media memory, media and memory, and media of memory is by now quite extensive. But it is unclear in what ways, to what extent, and for what reasons this scholarship has left journalism behind.

Often, for instance, media studies is preoccupied with so-called ‘new media,’ rather than the supposedly boring old media usually implied by the term journalism. Something could be said about journalism that is analogous to what Pierre Nora (1989) said about memory: namely, that ‘we speak so much about memory because there is so little of it left’: perhaps we speak so much about journalism because there is so little of it left. Of course, as just noted, we do not in fact speak as much about journalism when we are speaking about media today as we speak about other matters, so the equation does not quite work. Furthermore, Nora’s statement about memory is itself debatable: is there really so little memory left, or have its forms and functions merely changed? If the answer is more the latter than the former, the same could be said about journalism: it is not that journalism is no longer an important medium or that the importance of journalism has diminished in an age of ‘new’ media; rather, it is that the forms and functions of journalism have changed within this new media environment. So too have the relations between journalism and memory changed, and in even more complex ways, since, as Nora’s work makes clear, memory itself has clearly changed as well.

The foregoing leads directly to a third preliminary issue, namely that memory and journalism (to say nothing of media) share the quality of being imprecise and over-generalized categories. Journalism took its name from its traditional function, the recording of the events of the day as they happened – mostly in the form of the daily newspaper, itself often titled the such-and-such journal. With the advent and spread of broadcast media, however, the term expanded to include other forms of reporting on ‘news,’ though the spread did not fail to generate professional rivalries (Schudson, 1981; Starr, 2005). Such professional rivalries, moreover, are key to locating journalism as a practice and profession in the new media environment, when access to restricted means of dissemination (for example, printing presses or television stations) is no longer a defining characteristic of ‘reporting’ and ‘commentary.’ The bottom line is that ‘journalism’ is hardly an operational concept for social science, just as it is a porous and multivalent identifier for varieties of forms and practices, many of them novel.

Something similar, of course, must be said about memory. Already in this chapter, I have referred to memory, collective memory and cultural memory. These terms in turn refer to a wide variety of mnemonic products, practices and processes, including commemoration, recall and testimony, among others. Even with the lay and sometimes scientific term ‘memory,’ there are a huge number of different references, and psychologists routinely distinguish between semantic memory, episodic memory, procedural memory and others. The point is that any analysis of the relations of memory and journalism, and of memory scholarship and journalism scholarship, requires a great deal of care and a large number of caveats; which is not to say that nothing of a general order can or should be said about the issues. Both terms, I believe, retain probative value despite their multiplicity of possible referents. But we must be careful not to ignore that multiplicity.

Why memory studies has not paid sufficient attention to journalism

As I am not a journalism scholar, I have comparatively little to offer on the place of memory in journalism scholarship. Nevertheless, a few speculative comments may be permissible. First, while memory studies as a field has indeed grown exponentially since the early 1980s and has attracted attention from scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds (Olick and Robbins, 1998), with perhaps the one exception of experimental psychology, it has remained a special interest within these disciplines. In journalism scholarship too, memory studies is a special interest. Therefore, we should not assume without further investigation that there is something special or extreme about journalism scholarship’s purported neglect or marginalization of memory. Second, journalism scholarship has many important concerns that are not specifically addressed in or as memory, namely public discourse and deliberation, free speech, ideology and so on (though of course memory is not irrelevant to these topics). Journalism scholarship’s neglect of memory may thus be unfortunate, but it is hardly fatal. Finally (though this by no means exhausts the issue), journalism scholarship is concerned with professional practice in a way that memory studies is not (though to be sure memory studies is relevant to politicians, archivists, public historians, museologists and preservationists, among others). The identities of professions depend at least as much on their distinction from other professional practices as they do on their relevance for them. The cliché may run that journalism is the first draft of history, but historians are very clearly invested in the claim that they are not journalists, and journalists are at least somewhat careful about this distinction and usually recognize what it entails. Journalism scholarship, in turn, is distinct from – which is not the same thing as uninterested in – historiography, just as writing journalism is distinct from writing history, however much they may be confused in popular contexts.

What, then, may be said from the other direction, namely about the neglect of journalism and of journalism scholarship in memory studies? As I already showed, Zelizer pointed out the absence of discussions of journalism in the seminal theoretical works in memory studies. But beyond what Zelizer claims about Maurice Halbwachs and others, not one chapter of Pierre Nora’s massive seven volume encyclopedia (Nora, 1984–1992) Les lieux de memoire – surely next to the seminal texts of Halbwachs the single most significant ‘lieux de memoire’ of memory studies itself – identified journalism as a whole, or any particular newspaper, magazine, or broadcast, as a major ‘lieu de memoire’ in France. And the number of works in memory studies addressing journalism – rather than media more generally – is relatively low given journalism’s importance to memory.

To begin, however, I would like to walk back this empirical assertion just one notch. One of the most generative works of recent decades – perhaps not explicitly a contribution to memory studies, but surely well-noted within it – for instance, is Benedict Anderson’s (1983) book, Imagined Communities, which theorized ‘print-capitalism’ as a – if not the – central feature of the age of nationalism. According to Anderson, print, including daily newspapers and related enterprises, was central to the consolidation of national identities, which in turn were understood by Anderson, following Ernst Renan, as memory constructs. As Renan had argued (quoted in Anderson, 1983: 6), a central constitutive feature of national identities is ‘the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories.’ Indeed, based on this and related works, the connection between memory studies and the theory of nationalism was a hallmark of memory studies in the 1980s and 1990s. As I will suggest below, memory studies has at least in part responded to contemporary issues, and in the 1980s and 1990s, especially following the break-up of the Soviet Union, nationalism was clearly a central concern. It may be that, since then, a perception of journalism as mediation – and journalism in the new media environment – has absorbed some of that attention. As for the claim that memory studies has utterly ignored journalism, of course, this is likely too much. For sociologists at least, the works of Lang and Lang (1989), again of Zelizer (1992), of Schudson (1993), or of Dayan and Katz (1994) and at least a few others are key references. And analyses of newspapers and other forms of journalism appear in many empirical works, both as sources of data and as important institutions for the processes being studied.

Nevertheless, there are a number of features of memory studies as it has developed and consolidated as a field that have indeed worked against a more extensive focus on journalism. In the first place, as Kristin Ross (2004: 1) put it in her study of May ’68 and its Afterlives, ‘the whole of our contemporary understanding of processes of social memory has derived from analyses related to… World War II,’ which, she argues, has ‘produced the memory industry in contemporary scholarship…’ Memory studies, for Ross, is thus marked by ‘parameters of devastation – catastrophe, administrative massacre, atrocity, collaboration, genocide – [which] have in turn made it easy for certain psychoanalytical categories – “trauma,” for example, or “repression” – to attain legitimacy as ever more generalizable ways of understanding the excesses and deficiencies of collective memory.’ This characterization of the origins of memory studies is certainly overstated, but it is not entirely incorrect. And it suggests in part why journalism – rather than, say, psychiatry or conflict resolution – has not been center stage in memory studies. Long-term trauma and repression born of war and genocide are hardly the bread and butter of daily reporting, which is more inclined to the coverage of events than conditions, especially old conditions: that Holocaust survivors suffered long-term trauma is hardly ‘news,’ in any sense of the word.

In the second place, the changing conditions of both journalistic media and memory may give at least some reason to believe that whatever neglect of the relations between journalism and memory there may have been in the past was at least partly inscribed in the old media and old memory worlds, the implication being that the new media and new memory environment will ‘naturally’ lead to more exploration of the connections. Indeed, memory studies itself may be entering what Erll (2011) has identified as a third stage. The first stage of memory studies took place in the interwar period in the work of the sociologist Halbwachs (1925), art historian Aby Warburg (Gombrich, 1997) and psychologist Fredrick Bartlett (1995 [1932]), among others, each of whom independently theorized memory as a social or collective rather than entirely individual faculty. The second stage, according to Erll, was exemplified by Nora’s theory about the role of ‘lieux de memoire’ in national identities, as well as the investigation of what Nora called ‘the memory-nation nexus’ more generally, as alluded to above in the discussion of Anderson and Renan. In the last ten years, a third wave has emerged. This has included work by Erll (2011) herself, influenced in part by post-colonial theory; work by scholars like Michael Rothberg (2009), which focuses on migration as a challenge to the clarity of the second stage’s ‘methodological nationalism’; and the arguments of, for instance, Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (2010) and Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2005) which claim that memory of the Holocaust is an example of a new ‘global’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ memory. Taken together, this new scholarship is intent on showing how memory in the contemporary period transcends the ‘container’ of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Notes on Contributors
• Journalism’s Memory Work
• Part I Trajectories of Journalism and Memory
• Part II Domains of Journalism and Memory
• Epilogue
• Index