The Voice of the Visual in Memory

For as long as collective memory has been an area of scholarly concern, the precise role of images as its vehicle has been asserted rather than explicated. This essay addresses the role of images in collective memory. Motivated by circumstances in which images, rather than words, emerge as the preferred way to establish and maintain shared knowledge from earlier times, it offers the heuristic of voice to help explain how images work across represented events from different times and places. The essay uses voice to elucidate how the visual becomes an effective mode of relay about the past and a key vehicle of memory

The Authority of the Profession: Recollecting Through History

The tale of President Kennedy\u27s death was, of course, more than a story about journalism. This meant that journalists needed to do more than perpetuate narratives that emphasized their own authority for the story: they needed to account for other authorities too. Nearly three decades after the assassination, journalists\u27 competition with the independent critics had taken on familiar forms. Some critics had either voluntarily abandoned the story or been marginalized by mainstream journalism. Those who continued to investigate it coexisted with reporters tensely, in recognized, circumscribed channels. Historians, on the other hand, who had not yet played an active part in recording the assassination, had no such familiar patterns of interaction with journalists. Yet history remained the main discipline with a clear claim to the tale. Journalists were attentive to the fact that historians had not yet fully addressed the story, and they began to consider the role of history in its retelling. History gave journalists a way to tailor their assassination memories into a consideration of the structure of their own profession. These tales privileged considerations of the profession of journalism over those of the individual, organization, or institution

Remembering to Forget: Images of the Holocaust

Dr. Barbie Zelizer, Raymond Williams Professor of Communication, University of Pennsylvania.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/bennettcenter-posters/1322/thumbnail.jp

Journalism’s Deep Memory: Cold War Mindedness and Coverage of Islamic State

This article considers the coverage of and by Islamic State in conjunction with a mindset established during the Cold War. It illustrates the degree to which U.S. journalism shapes coverage of Islamic State via interpretive tenets from the Cold War era as well as Islamic State’s use of the same tenets in coverage of itself. The article raises questions about the deep memory structures that undergird U.S. news and about their [memory structures] travel to distant, unexpected, and often dissonant locations