The repertoire, not the archive: The 1950 Life and Time coverage of the Korean War

Abstract

Journalists plunge into a social drama in which they interact with other actors, witness an event, and translate their observations into sensible texts to communicate with audiences who are not ‘on location’. A journalist’s account is the partial representation of the very reality that he or she constructs at the moment of witnessing an event within a specific context. A journalistic text thus does not merely create the archive, but works as the repertoire that invites us to participate in a continuous meaning-making process during subsequent memory constructions. Based on media coverage of the Korean War in 1950 by Life and Time magazines, this article identifies five plausible scenarios of how US journalists performed acts of witnessing the unknown battlefield of Korea. This exploration prods readers to critically appreciate both the journalist’s role as memory agent and the journalistic text as the repertoire in our act of remembering.

Generating more inclusive media memory: the limits and possibilities of news archives

“…She notes that archives are systematically incomplete, having ‘their own structural mechanisms of exclusion in terms of class, race, and gender’ (p. 106). Choi (2015) makes a similar point specifically about journalism, arguing that the repertoire of news tropes available at a moment in history creates an archive which in turn limits the subsequent interpretations of an event. While Assmann is hopeful that such archival limitations can be overcome through critical scholarship and the serendipitous ways in which everyday life is preserved by accident, Choi suggests the systematic absences of news archives have lasting influence on collective remembrance.…”