Journalism and Memory

Memory is not only an individual but a collective process and journalism has been our most public, widely distributed, easily accessible and thinly stretched membrane of social memory. (I will use the terms social memory, collective memory, cultural memory and public memory interchangeably.) But just how do the news media contribute to memory?

‘Time affects the work of every institution, but few so substantially as the news media.’ This statement by political scientist Thomas Patterson (1998: 56) underscores the significance of time for understanding journalism and its challenges (see also Barnhurst, 2011). Concurrently, it exposes the prevailing view about the direction of the relationship between time and journalism. In scholarly, journalistic and popular discourse, time is commonly viewed as a factor that influences, shapes and constrains journalistic practice. From this perspective, journalists increasingly struggle to meet the demands of accelerating news cycles (Boyer, 2010; Klinenberg, 2005), while having to produce more news in less time (Boczkowski, 2010) and compete with online actors who have temporal advantages over traditional journalism. This news culture of immediacy and speed is situated within the broader temporal conditions of contemporary society, including the accelerated compression of time in post/late modernity (Harvey, 1989; Virilio, 2000), or what Douglas Rushkoff (2013) calls ‘Present Shock.’ Time pressures are also seen as undermining the ability of journalists to fulfill their societal roles (Patterson, 1998; Plasser, 2005; Rosenberg and Feldman, 2008). According to this view, the focus on an ever-more fleeting present and the need to produce news that meets the demands of accelerating news cycles lead to the production of news stories that are shortsighted, shallow and inadequately verified, and that reflect sudden events rather than enduring problems.

On the eve of Israel’s Remembrance Day for the Holocaust and the Heroism (also known in Israel as ‘Holocaust Remembrance Day’ or ‘Holocaust Day’) 2012, the Israeli elite newspaper Haaretz published a provocative op-ed, written by Yoram Kaniuk, one of the country’s prominent novelists, bearing the title ‘Celebrate Holocaust Day.’ Referenced both on the newspaper’s front page and on its internet homepage the piece claimed that ‘Holocaust Day should be a day of joy. Tens of thousands of people survived, returned to life, raised children and grandchildren… In Auschwitz, people became the greatest heroes in history… Holocaust Day should be a national holiday of joy, celebrating the rescue [and] the heroism of the survivors’ (Kaniuk, 2012). A few days earlier, the popular daily Yedioth Ahronoth had published a feature story bearing the title ‘We Took-Off Like the Phoenix’ (Duek, 2012) that narrated the story of Holocaust survivors who became combat pilots in the Israeli air force (see Figure 7.1).

You cannot take a photograph of the past. This simple fact alters the relationship between journalism and collective memory. Journalism may be the ‘first draft of history,’ but others will be written as well, and the loss of immediacy may be of little consequence in distinguishing between earlier and later written accounts. As additional reports are collated, ‘smoke everywhere’ may become ‘smoke filled the street for half a block.’ Accuracy can improve and additional actors and perspectives can become part of the story.

This chapter considers how the nature of journalistic memory work is changing in our ‘new memory ecology’ (Brown and Hoskins, 2010; Hoskins, 2011), when smartphone-carrying citizens are replacing professional journalists as on-site eyewitnesses to breaking news stories and, consequently, filling in as key producers of images that linger as historical markers of disruptive events. Camera images, still and moving, are critical ‘technologies of memory’ (Sturken, 1997): key representations through which public memories are created, questioned and given meaning. This is also to say that the significance of journalism as a key institution of mnemonic record, and its centrality in broader cultural memory formation, hinges on the special potential of images for shaping public understanding and memory.

News of the shooting by US security forces of the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, was broken via the micro-blogging site, Twitter. The event was significant in terms of marking a watershed in the intersecting practices of mobile and social media with journalism, with the Bin Laden story ‘marking a new reference point’ in media coverage (Filloux, 2011).

Just as personal memory functions through matching the here-and-now with an intelligible there-and-then, by shifting context, re-framing meaning and massive selectivity, journalism has long held — and imagined — a larger aperture of social memory. This relationship — between journalism and social memory — is riven with the news values of rupture and catastrophe, paradoxically tinting the journalistic lens by framing incoming uncertainties with the historical certainties of the survival of societies and the continuities of the past. In this way the journalistic churning of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century history is particularly entangled with the contemporary memory boom(s) or ‘turn to memory,’ with an increasing premium being placed on historical discourses and memories of warfare in modern societies (Huyssen, 2003; Winter, 2006). At the same time, the salience of journalistic schemas — premised on the scarcity of journalists, their experience and their embodiment of the ‘matching of context’ — has suddenly been devalued. The ‘connective turn’ (Hoskins, 2011a and b) — the massively increased pervasiveness and accessibility of digital technologies, devices and media — has ushered in a ‘post-scarcity culture’ and charged a wholesale reappraisal of the nature and the value of journalism.

During the first three days of July 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg resulted in more than 50,000 casualties, to which the Union contributed almost 20,000 wounded and 3,155 dead. The toll was so great that President Abraham Lincoln agreed personally to dedicate a new cemetery for the Union’s fallen soldiers.

The peak moment of American journalism’s power and prestige is debatable, but many observers would be likely to place it somewhere in the middle decades of the twentieth century, a time when a handful of high-profile newsmen and major news institutions had the visibility, resources and reach to make them important historic actors. In his 1969 book The Kingdom and the Power, Gay Talese described the influence of the one news institution he held above all:

… each day, barring labor strikes or hydrogen bombs, it would appear in 11,464 cities around the nation and in all the capitals of the world, 50 copies going to the White House, 39 copies to Moscow, a few smuggled into Beijing, and a thick Sunday edition to the foreign minister in Taiwan, because he required the Times as necessary proof of the earth’s existence, a barometer of its pressure, an assessor of its sanity. If the world did indeed still exist, he knew, it would be duly recorded each day in the Times.

(Talese, 1969: 72)

This tribute to the New York Times is recited in the narration of Page One: Inside the New York Times, a 2011 documentary film by Andrew Rossi in which the newspaper’s media reporters discuss the current ‘crisis’ in newspaper journalism.

Buenos Aires, August 2011, I am attending a hearing. The witness testifying warns: ‘The only way for you to enter into a concentration camp and travel to those times is through our memories. And they are imprecise.’¹ This powerful and emotional statement acknowledges the limitations and imprecision of survivors’ memories while recognizing that in the absence of confessions from torturers and assassins, the hazy memories of survivors are our only window into what happened inside Argentinean torture chambers three decades ago. Who dares to challenge this statement? The impact of the testimony is obvious in the courtroom. I look around; there aren’t many people present and I wonder why all of Argentina isn’t here to witness these testimonies. Will people who are not in the courtroom ever know about what is unfolding here? Are journalists covering these trials?