Cannibalizing Memory in the Global Flow of News

Abstract

This volume presumes a link between mediation and memory that sets in motion two central questions: what happens to memory in its mediated states and what happens to mediation when it engages with memory? The answer to both questions rests on an underlying misfit between the work of memory and that of mediation, which rears its head in problematic ways in the global flow of news. When events, issues, and problems become part of journalism by relying on memory to take on meaning, their processing drives the resulting journalistic record in problematic ways. How this happens and what results is the topic of this chapter.