Abstract

Media Matters
Zelizer, Barbie | March 31, 1997 issue

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According to the author, if the past is a foreign country, journalists are among its most avid visitors. Drawn to the past with the intensity of collectors, journalists hoard its underpriced trinkets, wait for their value to rise and display them with the pride of connoisseurship. In turning the past into news, the distance between then and now is collapsed in curious ways, making "the journalist as historian" so common that journalism often seems needlessly stuck rewriting history's first draft over and over again. Journalists stuff the past into ill-fitting packages that simplify history's complexities and disorder.

See Also:

JOURNALISTS; JOURNALISM; SCHOLARS; LITERATURE; HISTORY publishing; HISTORY
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