CJ's Revenge: A Case Study of News as Cultural Narrative

Bird, S. Elizabeth

doi:10.4135/9781452233819.n21

Cited by 11 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Through ritual, a shared sense of narrative appears that draws on familiar story elements flowing from the society itself (Berkowitz, 2005;Bird, 2005). This story-telling activity becomes highly narrative in nature, unfolding a resonant drama that journalists know how to tell and audiences know how to decode (Ettema, 2005;Kitch, 2008;Schudson, 2005).…”

Section: Collective Memory Social Trauma and News Narrativesmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…This specialized form of journalism represents a kind of ritual -an activity with a special meaning for those involved -that often tells similar stories in similar kinds of ways through their connection to the journalistic interpretive community (Kitch, 2003;Zelizer, 1993). Through ritual, a shared sense of narrative appears that draws on familiar story elements flowing from the society itself (Berkowitz, 2005;Bird, 2005). This story-telling activity becomes highly narrative in nature, unfolding a resonant drama that journalists know how to tell and audiences know how to decode (Ettema, 2005;Kitch, 2008;Schudson, 2005).…”

Section: Collective Memory Social Trauma and News Narrativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The ironic hero of Virginia Tech: Healing trauma through mythical narrative and collective memory

Berkowitz

2010

Journalism

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In times of great trauma, news can offer healing, consolation and inspiration. This study applied textual analysis of news items and opinion pieces about the April 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech to explore how collective memory and mythical narratives become part of the healing process that news media offer to society. Many of the items studied involved an ironic hero who survived the Holocaust only to die at Virginia Tech, with frequent references to collective memory of school shootings and the Holocaust, along with narratives based on the hero myth. The ironic hero became the perfect story character to fuse both narrative tools to bring a stronger positive message of healing.

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Section: Collective Memory Social Trauma and News Narrativesmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Collective Memory Social Trauma and News Narrativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The ironic hero of Virginia Tech: Healing trauma through mythical narrative and collective memory

Berkowitz

2010

Journalism

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“…Lule's list records dominant archetypes of people and places used in news during times of struggle and survival. However, such broad applications of dominant mythical archetypes to news have been criticized for marginalizing the role of local culture and values in the construction of those archetypes (Bird, 2005).…”

Section: News Myth Archetypes and Audience Needsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behold the monster: Mythical explanations of deviance and evil in news of the Amish school shooting

Gutsche

Salkin

2016

Journalism

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In October 2006, Charles Carl Roberts IV walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse in West Nickel Mines, PA, USA, brandished a handgun, and killed five female students who were all under the age of 13. Through an analysis of 215 news articles published in 10 local, regional, and national newspapers in 2006 and 2007, this article examines news characterizations of Roberts that cast him as a ‘Monster’. We explore interdisciplinary notions of pure evil to expand current literature of news myth to include a form of explanation that appears in news when no other current mythical archetype will suffice. This study complicates current perspectives on news myth by expanding the ideological tools to examine the nature of evil in loss through the example of the Amish shootings.

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“…News is a locus of “interpretive practices” (Beeman and Peterson ; Van Hout and Jacobs ) through which people reflect on everything from “morality, to religion, to race” (Bird :35) to the nation‐state to the state of the world. News is at once big business, produced by gigantic corporations through myriad high‐tech newsrooms (Bagdikian ; Machin and Niblock ), and deeply personal, exchanged by individuals as part of everyday microinteractions (Bird ; Polanyi ). It is thus also deeply intertextual, because news migrates easily from written, recorded, and visual forms to spoken forms, with each new entextualization being extremely sensitive to context (Bird ; Peterson ).…”

Section: News and Metapragmaticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speaking of news: Press, democracy, and metapragmatics in a changing India

Peterson

2015

American Ethnologist

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Speaking of news:Press, democracy, and metapragmatics in a changing India A B S T R A C TThat the news matters is a fundamental postulate of modernity. Yet the ways people talk about the news varies across cultures and over time. In this article, I examine how such "metapragmatic" speech about the news changed across a 15-year period, during which India underwent seismic shifts in its political and economic order. By unpacking and contextualizing five metapragmatic utterances collected between two fieldwork periods, 1992-93 and 2007-08, I examine how people used the tension between the concepts of "news as public good" and "news as commodity" to indexically position themselves as democratic citizens in a changing nation. Furthermore, I explore how and why these discursive practices changed during the Indian economy's so-called liberalization.

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CJ's Revenge: A Case Study of News as Cultural Narrative

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

The ironic hero of Virginia Tech: Healing trauma through mythical narrative and collective memory

The ironic hero of Virginia Tech: Healing trauma through mythical narrative and collective memory

Behold the monster: Mythical explanations of deviance and evil in news of the Amish school shooting

Speaking of news: Press, democracy, and metapragmatics in a changing India

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