| Abstract | This paper contrasts two ideas of journalism as a ritual of communication and as a ritual of an objective professional norm by textually analyzing five newspapers’ coverage of the 2004 presidential campaign between John Kerry and President George W. Bush, whose mnemonic battles over Vietnam served to illustrate two fundamental concepts of objective history and cultural memory. Journalists’ professional norms failed to reframe the politicized memories in any meaningful way. Instead, journalists used the conflicting collective memory as the substitute frame, reenacting the original conflict in the newspapers. This paper explores a specific example of how memory processes are employed through journalism.
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