| This study traces the development of collective memories about controversial pasts in the news media. Mediated memories of the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles and the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago are used to assess how the information-gathering and storytelling practices of journalists affect the development of social memory and the ways that reporters use the past in their everyday storytelling. These two troubled pasts are frequently recalled in the newspapers examined, the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Chicago Tribune. This study demonstrates that over time, a "collective" memory of the controversial pasts develops and identifies the characteristics of these unifying stories. Mediated memories of troubled pasts are affected by the organizations and individuals involved in the controversy, by reporting practices such as interviewing sources, by storytelling practices like "anniversary journalism," and by audiences who may recall earlier coverage of the same event. The collective memories that emerge in these cases embrace and subsume the many perspectives that fueled the controversy rather than accepting one and rejecting others. This study also explores collective memory's potential to shape responses to more recent events. Stories of the Watts riots, revived during the 1992 urban unrest in Los Angeles, made economic interpretations of the violence more plausible than they otherwise might have been but other potential connections, such as similar accusations of police brutality, were not realized. Memories of the 1968 convention were made a part of the past because they were tied to a finite event, the Vietnam War, rather than to ongoing debates about the nature of American democracy. |
