Journal of Narrative and Life History - Volume 4, Issue 1-2, 1994

AbstractThis article discusses the relevance of narrative analysis to the study of media globalization by presenting results of an ongoing study of television news in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. It discusses issues of local and global meanings by focusing on a number of elements of narrative structure (time, valence, story/discourse, themes, drama, genre, and myths) and argues that each element presents ways to track particularistic and universalistic meanings in television news. A concluding section emphasizes the importance of narrative analysis to the study of globalization with a discussion of live global television events. (Journalism and Mass Communication)

AbstractThe article begins by arguing—against conventional wisdom—that one of the defining features of television news is the absence of narrative codes in its structure. Rather than raising the questions that it later resolves, television news has a disjointed structure that makes it hard to follow or comprehend. Viewers find it much more difficult, for this reason, to retain information from the news than from almost any other form of television. To understand the influence of television news, we must understand which elements this disjointed narrative encourages us to retain. These elements tend to involve oft-repeated sets of simple associations rather than any more complex histories. Indeed, the failure of news to communicate historical connections impoverishes the quality of decision making and public understanding by citizens who increasingly rely upon television news to provide information about the world.

AbstractThe appearance of Hanna Bloch Kohner on a 1953 episode of the series This Is Your Life is among the earliest presentations of a Holocaust survivor's personal history on American television. Analysis of the program explores how television—a collaborative, corporate medium—shapes the telling of an individual's life story, and how the program relates the story of the Holocaust in terms of personal history. The article also examines how the program's producers employed television's distinctive characteristics to enable, limit, or otherwise shape the presentation of the Holocaust, and how the episode indicates that its creators understood its subject as being somehow singular, even as the conceptualization of the Holocaust was emerging, before the term Holocaust entered American public discourse. The article also considers how the program reflects the social and political context of post-World War II America in general and postwar American Jewish life in particular. Finally, the article considers how analysis of this program offers insight into other, later presentations of the Holocaust on American television, especially those dealing with the life story of an individual survivor. (Yiddish Studies/Jewish ethnology)

AbstractThis article challenges the postmodernist view—embodied in the work of such theorists as Baudrillard and Lyotard—that contemporary society is rife with meaninglessness and objectification. Rather, we will argue, meaning is creatively negotiated, among other ways, through narratives conveyed by the mass media. In examining the metanarrative underlying American news accounts, the drama of democracy, and the application of its various genres in the cases of Mikhail Gorbachev and Clarence Thomas, we aim to show that the dramatic categories of good and evil are ever-present parameters of morality in media accounts. The existence of such parameters demonstrates the robust nature of the social imagination as a resource to combat the despair offered by the postmodern perspective. (Sociology)

AbstractThe article examines the impact of cultural structures on journalistic story telling. It argues that the mass media can be understood in neofunctionalist terms as a subsystem of civil society. Mass media discourses are therefore responsive to the cultural forms shaping civil discourse. At the core of American media discourse is a set of binary codes that specify civic virtues and vices. These codes provide the foundation from which more complex narrative forms are constructed in the American mass media. The proposed model of codes and narratives is briefly applied in a comparative analysis of American mass media interpretations of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the 1956 Suez crisis, and Saddam Hussein and the 1990-1991 Gulf War. (Sociology)

AbstractThe mass media convey dominant values and attitudes through stories and myths that they circulate within a specific culture. As a narrative form, news coverage places events into social reality by retelling them within the framework of known stories or myths. Events acquire meanings and reactions by the ways in which these stories are told. In Israeli society, the Holocaust is a historical event that plays a prominent role in shaping national and cultural identity. An analysis of Israeli press coverage of terrorist attacks on Israel reveals that the Israeli press uses these events to convey the basic myth of the Holocaust and the revival of the Jewish state. Using Barthes' theories of narrative analysis, a composite story is constructed to illustrate the workings of this process. In this story the Jews, formerly helpless victims of Nazi aggression, are saved by Israeli soldiers as proof of the revival of the Jewish people in the state of Israel. The findings of the study suggest that the myth of the Holocaust may be used as a framework by the Israeli press in more serious emergency situations, such as war. At the same time, the study suggests that the analysis of news as narrative provides a means of understanding how terrorist events are reported by the press in other countries and in other media as well. (Mass Communication)

AbstractThis article analyzes the famous Biblical account of a group sent by Moses to scout the Holy Land in anticipation of its conquest (Num. 13-14) and focuses on the unhappy ending of the story. It examines three explanations for why the scouts were punished: (a) for adding their opinions to the facts they were supposed to report (editorializing), (b) for insinuating their opinions into the report itself (bias), and (c) for releasing the report to the public rather than funneling it through the leader. The article analyzes not only the story itself but also the story of the story to reveal the narrator's ideological position. (Mass Communication)