Journalism, Memory, and Reparative Rituals: The Winograd Commission Report in the Israeli News Media (Top Three Graduate Student Paper).

This paper examines the role of journalism in shaping the meaning and outcomes of collective reparative rituals, and the ways in which such rituals are used to negotiate and repair journalists' own cultural authority. Using the case study of the publication of the Winograd Commission Report on the 2006 war between Israel and Hizbullah, and integrating different theoretical frameworks for understanding mediatized rituals and the memory work of journalism, the paper analyzes the complex web of interactions between journalists and other social players, between competing news outlets, and among the different cultural roles of journalism. The analysis shows that while the Israeli news media built the publication of the report as a crucial historical event and worked to fill in some of the missing pieces of a successful collective ritual, it also constructed it as a doomed-to-fail, and ultimately unsatisfying, ritual. This dialectical construction allowed the Israeli news media to reconcile its conflicting roles as news provider and ritual agent; repair its own failures in covering the second Lebanon War; and position itself as better qualified than the commission to both investigate and remember the war. The paper also demonstrates how competing media players advanced different reparative narratives, collaborated with different social and political players, and invoked the memory of the war in ways which served these different interpretations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]