Newspapers commemorate 11 September: A cross-cultural investigation

Abstract

On 12 September 2001, as Hans-Peter Feldmann documented in his 2002 installation 9/12 Front Page, the front pages of newspapers from 151 countries showed similar photographs of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Despite this cross-cultural agreement on the most salient image at the time, in the decade since, distinct visual narratives of 9/11 have emerged in newspaper anniversary journalism. This paper examines how The New York Times (US) and Le Monde (France) have used photographs, advertisements, and editorial cartoons in 9/11 anniversary journalism. Using theories of collective memory and photography, along with demographic data of 9/11 victims, I examine how photographic representations of the victims have changed, offering a less complex story of events. I document the images that have been recirculated and discuss why the emergence of visual icons matters to our collective memory of 9/11. And I explore how the papers’ proximity to the events influenced their visual anniversary journalism.

Picturing the past: The Berlin Wall at 25

“…Last, that both German newspapers focused on the process of unification, and insisted on the former East’s continuity, adds further empirical evidence to the ways that proximity to an event influences anniversary coverage (Britten, 2013; Somerstein, 2015). The audience for these papers may help to explain that interest; unlike other nations, former East Germans comprise part of the German population, and the process of unification affects all Germans.…”

“…The audience for these papers may help to explain that interest; unlike other nations, former East Germans comprise part of the German population, and the process of unification affects all Germans. Somerstein (2015) found, in work on 9/11 anniversary coverage, that the closer a newspaper to the story being commemorated, the more ‘stuck’ it was recirculating the same archival photographs in a seeming attempt to heal. German papers’ images of the Eastern relics, framed to insist on the GDR’s continuity, may function similarly.…”

“…Anniversary reports, for instance, are often metonymic: they present an abbreviated version of the past (Edy, 2006; Keith, 2010; Kitch, 2002; Li and Lee, 2013; Sonnevend, 2013; Zelizer, 1998). They offer simplified historical narratives (Keith, 2010) or advance singular ‘facts’ (Edy, 2006: 10) or photographs (Somerstein, 2015) to represent a whole story, effectively omitting much about a given history. Anniversary stories also rearrange time.…”

“…These findings suggest that collective memory manifests through anniversary reportage in a similar manner globally: through circulating photos that are framed to support ideologically driven identities, compressing and rearranging time, and collapsing thematically related stories and memories. While studies have looked at the manifestation of collective memory in single papers over time (i.e., Somerstein, 2015) or in multiple newspapers in a single nation (Keith, 2010), this paper identifies cross-cultural manifestations of collective memories’ emergence in newspaper photography.…”

Silent Spring, Loud Legacy: How Elite Media Helped Establish an Environmentalist Icon

“…Obfuscations can include attributing a phenomenon’s origins to an arbitrary starting point, or misattributing vast social phenomena to a single event, such as Los Angeles media routinely indicating that the Watts Riots were the primary cause of “white flight” from the city (Edy, 1999). Such historical invocations “tend to supply a singular ‘fact’ to stand in for the whole story, which is otherwise told in broad strokes” (Somerstein, 2015, p. 360). This study will reveal similar oversimplifications in decontextualized references to Silent Spring , which has been misidentified as the progenitor of concerns over DDT, overcredited as the sole instigator of late-20th-century environmentalism (Meyer & Rohlinger, 2012), and used as synecdoche for the entire zeitgeist of the 1960s.…”