Wednesday, September 29, 2010

War and 'new memory'

Andrew Hoskins (2001, 2004) argues that television is a key site for the production of 'new memory': a type of collective memory that is highly mediated, subject to manipulation, and continually reshaped to meet the needs of the present. He focuses in particular on the way that news coverage of wars (such as the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War) provides examples of this 'new memory'.

As an example, here's a retrospective item based on the recollections of CBS news correspondents who were embedded with US troops in Iraq. These accounts represent a highly partial version of events in Iraq, constrained by the fact that the reporters were not independent from the military (highlighted by the intertitle showing how many 'tours' were undertaken by each reporter), and shaped by the mediated memories already generated by previous reports on the war.

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