Zelizer, Barbie
Email Address
ORCID
Disciplines
38 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 38
Publication Publication How Communication, Culture, and Critique Intersect in the Study of Journalism(2008-01-01) Zelizer, BarbieThe world of journalism has always been privileged—for good and bad—by the prisms through which we have recognized its parameters. In acting as more than just the provision of some kind of shared repertoire of public events, journalism can be fruitfully understood by bringing to the forefront of its appropriation the notions of communication, culture, and critique that go into its shaping. Each offers different but complementary parameters through which to think about journalism’s practice and, by extension, its study.Publication From Home to Public Forum: Media Events and the Public Sphere(1991) Zelizer, BarbiePublication "Covering the Body": The Kennedy Assassination and the Establishment of Journalistic Authority(1990) Zelizer, BarbieThis study explores the narrative reconstruction by journalists of the story of John F. Kennedy's assassination. It examines how American journalists have turned their retellings of assassination coverage into stories about themselves, promoting themselves as the event's authorized spokespeople. At heart of their attempts to do so are issues of rhetorical legitimation, narrative adjustment and collective memory, all of which underscore how journalists establish themselves as an authoritative interpretive community. The study is based on systematic examination of the narratives by which journalists have told the assassination story over the 27 years since Kennedy died. Narratives were taken from public published discourse which appeared between 1963 and 1990 in the printed press,documentary films, television retrospectives, trade press and professional reviews. The study found that journalists' authority for the event was rarely grounded in practice, for covering Kennedy's death was fraught with problems for journalists seeking to legitimate themselves as professionals. Rather, their authority was grounded in rhetoric, in the narratives by which journalists have recast their coverage as professional triumph and given themselves a central role as the assassination story's authorized retellers. Their narratives have allowed them to recast instinctual and improvisory dimensions of practice as the mark of a true professional, while attending to larger agendas about journalistic professionalism, shifting boundaries of cultural authority and the legitimation of television. All of this has made the Kennedy assassination a critical incident for American journalists, through which they have negotiated the haws and whys of journalistic practice, authority and community. This study thereby showed that journalists practice rhetorical legitimation in a circular fashion, circulating their narratives circulated in systematic and strategic ways across medium and news organization. Journalists use discourse about events to address what they see as issues central to their legitimation and consolidation as a professional interpretive community. This suggests that the function of journalistic discourse is not only to relay news but to help journalists promote themselves as cultural authorities for events of the "real world."Publication Journalism’s Deep Memory: Cold War Mindedness and Coverage of Islamic State(2016-01-01) Zelizer, BarbieThis article considers the coverage of and by Islamic State in conjunction with a mindset established during the Cold War. It illustrates the degree to which U.S. journalism shapes coverage of Islamic State via interpretive tenets from the Cold War era as well as Islamic State’s use of the same tenets in coverage of itself. The article raises questions about the deep memory structures that undergird U.S. news and about their [memory structures] travel to distant, unexpected, and often dissonant locations.Publication Child in Warsaw Ghetto, 1943(2015-01-01) Zelizer, BarbiePublication War and Conflict Through Magnum’s Eyes(2013-01-01) Zelizer, BarbiePublication Journalism’s Memory Work(2008-01-01) Zelizer, BarbiePublication Journalism, Memory, and the Voice of the Visual(2010-01-01) Zelizer, Barbie