Motti Neiger

Tuned to the nation's mood: Popular music as a mnemonic cultural object

This article explores the concept of sonic memory via the investigation of popular music that constitutes a radio playlist. Our case study focuses on the songs aired on Israel’s Memorial Day for the Holocaust and the Heroism during the state’s first decade of local-commercial radio broadcasting (1993–2002). The critical analysis sought to understand what makes certain songs so identifiable with the national mourning ritual and the ways in which such songs gain the authority to symbolize and shape social memories. The article deconstructs the songs’ commemorative authority through three primary questions: (1) What is one permitted to sing about when addressing the Holocaust in popular music? (2) Who is permitted to sing or write about it? (3) How are those individual artists permitted to sing about the Holocaust within the context of popular music? The findings suggest that the authority of the songs as ‘cultural objects’ is derived from a complex combination of their quiet tone and slow tempo, the biographies of their creators and performers, and their lyrics, written by poets who embrace a philosophical-existential point of view. Beyond this analysis, the article seeks to understand the power and efficacy of popular music as a cultural object.

Print Is Future, Online Is Past: Cross-Media Analysis of Temporal Orientations in the News

This article examines the representation of past, present, and future in print and online news, while establishing a link between the temporal orientation of news stories and the constraints of the news cycle. Based on a content analysis of top news stories in the Israeli media, the study shows that a future temporal orientation is more prevalent in print media, which assume the role of projecting upcoming events, analyzing potential outcomes, and shaping collective expectations. In contrast, online news tends to assume the more commonly recognized journalistic role of informing the public on recent-past events. The discussion introduces the notion of “temporal affordances,” referring to the temporal constraints and possibilities of media technologies, which in turn can lead to distinctive content characteristics. These affordances, which connect symbolic and material dimensions, contribute to the shaping and reshaping of the functions served by divergent communication outlets in changing media landscapes.

Past Continuous: Newsworthiness and the Shaping of Collective Memory

This study explores the multi-layered interrelations between the production of news and collective remembering. We investigate this phenomenon by analyzing television newscasts aired on Israels Memorial Day for the Holocaust and Heroism (MDHH), 1994–2007. These newscasts provide a rich research corpus because they stand at the intersection between two types of rituals: the everyday ritual of newsmaking, and the national commemorative ritual, for which the media serves as a main site of articulation. The article implements a “zoom in” perspective: first, we examine the broadcasting schedules, exploring the role of newscasts in the process of leading the audiences in and out of the commemorative ritual. Next, we suggest a typology distinguishing between (a) items dealing with current events, (b) commemorative items focusing on Holocaust remembrance, and (c) dog whistle items that are “attuned” to the specific cultural ear and thus enable mundane news items to be interpreted as related to Holocaust commemoration. We argue that the dual aim of the items featured in MDHH newscasts–to provide both news values and commemorative values–leads to the construction of “reversed memory,” a narrative that commemorates past events (the “there and then”) by narrating present events (the “here and now”). Reversed memory commemorates the difficult past through the achievements of the present, and thus not only eases the collective confrontation with painful traumas, but rather avoids this encounter altogether.

Understanding Journalism Through a Nuanced Deconstruction of Temporal Layers in News Narratives

This article proposes a nuanced analysis of the temporal spectrum in news narratives, beyond the three conventional temporal orientations (past-present-future), thus affording a more complex understanding of journalism and its varied storytelling patterns. Combining qualitative and quantitative content analysis of print and online news items in the United States and Israel, this framework is used to evaluate and compare different journalistic cultures and media technologies in relation to public time. Based on hierarchical cluster analysis, the article offers a definition for “news” which associates between 5 clusters of temporal layers and different journalistic roles: updating (present and immediate past/future), reporting (recent past), contextualization and ritualistic functions (midrange to distant past), analysis (near future), and projection (far/conjectured future).

Structuring the Sacred: Media Professionalism and the Production of Mediated Holocaust Memory

In this study, the authors explore the considerations that guide media organizations when they narrate the past. To operationalize this research interest, the authors interviewed 10 senior Israeli electronic media professionals about the production processes that shape the broadcasts of electronic media on Israels Memorial Day for the Holocaust and the Heroism. The analysis of the interviews illuminates the constructed and negotiated (rather than natural and inherent) nature of media professionalism.

Days of awe: The praxis of news coverage during national crisis

Abstract The case study aims to reveal the praxis that serves the media during ethnic-violence conflicts. The article closely reads reports of the Israeli media covering the clashes between Israeli Arabs and the police, in the first days of the second Intifada (September 28–October 9, 2000). We analyze how mainstream Hebrew media (television news stations and newspapers) covered the unfolding events, and also refer to reports in Arab-language newspapers. Two prominent trends shaped the frame through which events were reported: Inclusion and exclusion. Israels Hebrew-language media excluded the Arab citizens from the general Israeli public, while, at the same time, equating them with the residents of the Palestinian Authority. That is, the media framed the Arab Israeli citizens as Palestinians, blurring the line between the riots within Israel and the armed violence in the West Bank and Gaza. This coverage changed after the first and most intense days of riots; Israeli journalists then switched to a more civil framing after establishing an inner as well as an outer discourse (mainly in concurrence with the politicians).

Cultural Oxymora: The Israeli Idol Negotiates Meanings and Readings

This article provides a close reading of the Israeli version of the Idol format. Using the concept “cultural oxymora,” contradictions that serve to negotiate meanings, the analysis examines the case through six lenses: pluralism (stressing the institutionalized pluralism by auditioning in Israeli and Jewish communities outside the country), performance (songs that are associated with the Jewish State’s bereavement rituals while adding a counterhegemonic vocal presentation), patriotism (nationalism and the military in the transnational format), periphery (exposing its ethnic richness while using stereotypes), participation (manufacturing consumers’ “democratic” election), and promotion (national media event of coronation with ordinary characteristics). The conclusions suggest that cultural oxymora may explain the appeal of reality TV since they support a complex inclusive interpretation of the shows that maintain a dialogue between neo-Marxist readings, emphasizing a critical view on the show’s commercial-hegemonic structure, on one hand, and reception-centered readings, stressing audiences’ gratifications and pleasures, on the other.

The war that wasn’t on the news: ‘In-group nationalism’ and ‘out-group nationalism’ in newspaper supplements

Media scholars investigating journalism during conflicts tend to focus on the news sections. This study, conversely, probes newspapers’ sports, lifestyle, arts and entertainment supplements. Based on a close reading of Israel’s leading daily newspapers’ supplements during the 2006 Lebanon War (July–August 2006), the article’s narratological analysis conceptualizes and distinguishes between ‘in-group nationalism’ and ‘out-group nationalism’; that is, manifestations of nationalism that look inward, to the ‘in-group’ (‘us’), expressed through journalistic representations of national unity (e.g. coverage of artists performing in war zones), versus manifestations of nationalism directed at ‘out-groups’ (‘them’), which are scrutinized according to ‘friend or foe’ criteria while using charged terminology, including allegations of anti-Semitism. The article also refers to rare manifestations of anti-nationalism, which only serve to emphasize the overall ‘rallying ’round the flag’ of the supplements. This typology helps to expose the political role of popular culture during wartime.

Temporal affordances in the news

This article develops the concept of temporal affordances as a framework for understanding and evaluating the relationship between news technologies and journalistic storytelling practices. Accordingly, temporal affordances are defined as the potential ways in which the time-related possibilities and constraints associated with the material conditions and technological aspects of news production are manifested in the temporal characteristics of news narratives. After identifying six such affordances – immediacy, liveness, preparation time, transience, fixation in time, and extended retrievability – we examine manifestations of temporal affordances in different journalistic cultures over time, based on a content analysis of Israeli and US news narratives in different technological eras (from 1950 to 2013). The findings point to a consistent pattern of inter-media differences, in accordance with the distinct affordances of print and online news, alongside cross-cultural and cross-organizational variations in the use of these affordances. In addition, we detect complex patterns of stability and change in the use of temporal affordances in print media over time. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Reversed Memory: Commemorating the Past through Coverage of the Present

On the eve of Israel’s Remembrance Day for the Holocaust and the Heroism (also known in Israel as ‘Holocaust Remembrance Day’ or ‘Holocaust Day’) 2012, the Israeli elite newspaper Haaretz published a provocative op-ed, written by Yoram Kaniuk, one of the country’s prominent novelists, bearing the title ‘Celebrate Holocaust Day.’ Referenced both on the newspaper’s front page and on its internet homepage the piece claimed that ‘Holocaust Day should be a day of joy. Tens of thousands of people survived, returned to life, raised children and grandchildren… In Auschwitz, people became the greatest heroes in history… Holocaust Day should be a national holiday of joy, celebrating the rescue [and] the heroism of the survivors’ (Kaniuk, 2012). A few days earlier, the popular daily Yedioth Ahronoth had published a feature story bearing the title ‘We Took-Off Like the Phoenix’ (Duek, 2012) that narrated the story of Holocaust survivors who became combat pilots in the Israeli air force (see Figure 7.1).