Narratives of Death: Journalism and Figurations of Social Memory

Resumo

Based on Brazilian news media narratives about “everyday” death, such as traffic accidents crimes, etc., this paper approaches the temporal features of journalism, based on concepts such as Koselleck´s “horizon of expectations” and “space of experience”, and Ricoeur’s “narrative” and “mimesis”. It focuses especially on the relations that built social memory and come from the intertwining of the worlds brought forth by news narratives and those of their readers.
Thus, this paper attempts to grasp the reflexive relations between news narratives and everyday life. In choosing death as a main theme of investigation, it takes into account that death has the quality of being a peculiar and potentially disruptive social event.
For death is seen as a defying meaning event which newsworthiness depends on an association with some other rather common themes, such as the overcoming of loss and pain, road conditions the behavior of car drivers, the heroism or flaws of the police force, and so on. However, those common news precisely create a remarkable tension between remembering and forgetting, since, for instance, each news story about a crime does not often tell its readers about previous ones. Thus, all recollecting of past similar events depends mostly on the readers’ ability to remember and associate characters and stories, i.e., to produce meaning for the present.
The arguments presented by the authors came from a methodological exercise which consisted in experiencing news narratives about death on their everyday routine. That exercise was based on the assumptions that: 1) the media do not have a unilateral role in “creating” audience interest in a particular event or issue, nor in making them visible according to their own, exclusive criteria; 2) one’s contact to media products and narratives is a regular, daily-based routine which is part of everyday life.