Commemorative journalism offers communication scholars and collective memory researchers alike a unique opportunity to study media memory work: while journalists operate as memory agents mainly within non-commemorative contexts (Schudson, 2014), the rare occasions in which journalists suspend their routine work in order to commemorate the past sheds light on their role as cultural meaning-makers.
Anniversary journalism, a salient example of commemorative journalistic work intertwines between dimensions of time: the past is narrated through the lens of current convections, in a way that uses the past as a resource for explaining and justifying present outcomes. Anniversary journalism enables media consumers to imagine their belonging to a cohesive social group, advancing collectively through time. By doing so, anniversary journalism mostly tends to galvanize collective national identities (Kitch, 2002). Conversely, creators of anniversary journalism might use this unique moment of heightened attention to the past to challenge the conventional national narrative (Meyers, 2019).
Consequently, this study explored 18 Independence Day supplements, published by Israeli print media in 2018, marking Israel's 70th anniversary. Integrating quantitative and qualitative analyses, our research focused on the protagonists, the plots and the narrators of the studied journalistic narratives.
Our findings show that the majority of the supplements presented a monolithic and uncritical version of Israeli past and present. The protagonists of this meta-narrative were mostly Jewish men, while the corpus of analyzed items (N=430), featured only 10 Israeli Arabs, whose stories mostly reinforced the legitimacy and triumph of Zionism. The representation of women echoed traditional perceptions, as it featured them mostly within domestic settings, and focused on the women's emotional roles as caregivers, or bereaved mothers and spouses.
The plots of the supplements echoed the Zionist master-commemorative narrative, stressing the survival of the Jewish people against all odds, from exile to national revival (Zerubavel, 1995). In contrast, a minority of the supplements focused on Israel's future, and embraced a policy-oriented approach. Such supplements did not focus on the stories of individual Israelis, but rather pointed at the strategic challenges and threats facing the country, and offered solutions. In most cases, such supplements provided critical assessments of Israel's present standing, and future trajectories.
Collective memories are not mere representations of the past; rather they are reflections of present convictions and conditions, and the outcomes of the ongoing competition between meaning-making memory agents. Following that, we argue that the dominance of glorying, uncritical commemorative narratives could be attributed to changes in the landscapes of Israeli politics and media: the last two decades were characterized by the ongoing decline of the Israeli dovish secular left and the corresponding rise of the hawkish religious right. This political shift has also transformed the news media field, with the rise of new news outlets, bearing a professed right-wing orientation. Thus many of the 2018 commemorative supplements echoed these large-scale changes; the rhetoric of such supplements reflected an awareness to the existence of a critical option, accompanied by a consciousness choice to follow a more traditional path.
