A Study On The Collective Memory Of The Watergate Scandal In The Mainstream American Newspapers

Collective memory is a kind of social behavior.People get collective memory from society,and they also communicate with other individuals or groups in society.Maurice Halbwachs defines collective memory as "the process and result of sharing past events by members of a particular social group".Study on the collective memory of Watergate scandal in American mainstream newspapers in foreign news media in China put forward suggestions based on the attempts to cover the "past" and "now",explores the factors of Watergate scandal in collective memory is selected or forgotten,and studied how to be social construction.The Watergate scandal occurred 45 years of news reports,memoirs and oral history,this paper explores the American mainstream newspapers in collective memory about the Watergate building characteristics and selection bias,as time goes on,the dramatic weakening of the Watergate scandal,the president and his senior adviser to cover up crimes criminal conspiracy stories,in fact the fuzzy and complicated plot later evolved into a myth,is often used to explain the political trouble.This paper argues that the media construction of the Watergate collective memory has a continuous development and change of the nonlinear process by event time,place and people etc.multiple effects,by paying attention to details and concrete effects gradually become a noun abstract concept of one-sided,by different groups with a specific purpose.