Historical politics in newspaper reporting: media representations of football supporters’ commemoration activism

Abstract

Historical politics is usually an institutionalised top-down phenomenon, in which the government or the cultural elites selectively formulate a historical narrative to unify and homogenize the imagined nation-state. Yet, there are also grassroots movements in the public sphere, which participate in the uses and abuses of history for identity politics. We focus on one such case: the football supporters’ commemoration activism. While football supporters’ social activism and the role of football matches as lieux de memoire have received significant scholarly interest, their commemoration activism is as yet poorly described. In this paper we investigate how two regional newspapers of differing political position report this issue. The DHA-inspired qualitative analysis shows that Gazeta Wyborcza writes about it relatively rarely and views it as an appropriation of collective memory. Glos Wielkopolski on the other hand constructs football supporters as a rejuvenating force in local identity and memory politics.