Journalism’s Role in Constructing Grief

Abstract

In the previous chapters, we discussed how deaths have been represented in news reporting, both in text and images, over the past centuries to today, and some of the reasons why certain deaths are reported and others less so. These have been dominant paradigms in the scholarship of death in the news over the majority of time, but, in the past two decades, a new approach has entered the fold. This approach, which developed out of a cultural approach to the study of journalism and the media, takes a more qualitative approach and explores the way in which journalists construct meaning from current events. Scholars in this field argue that journalists legitimatize their role as authoritative storytellers in society through the way in which they shape the society’s collective memory (Zelizer, 1993). In particular in relation to journalistic reports on — predominantly high-profile — death and its aftermath, many now believe that such stories are actually also shaping modern responses to death, in that they instruct audiences in the acceptable ways of dealing with grief. This form of journalism is generally referred to as ‘commemorative journalism’ (Kitch, 2000) or ‘memorializing discourse’ (Carlson, 2007).