Troubled pasts

Shared memories of the past are not handed down fully formed; they are built, piece by piece, and the news is one of the places where that building happens. Jill A. Edy examines how a society works out what a past event means as the story takes shape in news coverage. She considers how journalistic routines, the working relationships among people who generate news, what audiences expect to read, and the pressure of ongoing events all shape which memories take hold and in what form.

To test her ideas, Edy turns to two episodes from the 1960s: the Watts uprising of 1965 and the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Through these cases she lays out a framework for seeing how competing accounts of an event eventually settle, what kinds of settlements emerge, and how those settlements later affect the way new stories are reported.

The book is aimed at readers interested in political communication and the part media play in public culture.