Photographs and How They Shape Journalism is the Topic of This Year’s Brigance Forum Lecture

Barbie Zelizer

CRAWFORDSVILLE, IND. — The Speech Department at Wabash College invites you to the 2003 Brigance Forum Lecture given by Barbie Zelizer. The lecture will be held on Wednesday, March 26 in Korb Classroom in the Fine Arts Center at 8 p.m. Zelizer’s talk is entitled “Extraordinary Events, Ordinary Coverage: When Photographs from the Past Shape Journalism.”

Zelizer describes the content of her Brigance Forum Lecture:

"How does journalism function during extraordinary events? In an age where war and global conflict, acts of terror, and other kinds of cataclysmic events regularly fill the news, journalists become the spokespeople for occurrences that stretch and challenge their capacity to explain or interpret what is happening. Their adoption of "ordinary coverage" to cover extraordinary events is the focus of this presentation-how journalists develop and repeat formulae for covering such events, in a way that links different events from different time periods together in a seemingly natural fashion. When memories of the past stand in for real-time coverage of the present, particularly as seen in news images, critical questions arise regarding journalism's capacity to give the public the news it needs to function during extraordinary events."

Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Associate Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Zelizer’s areas of specialty include journalism, cultural studies, popular culture, collective memory, and media criticism. Her scholarly work includes studies on journalism as cultural practice, journalists as interpretive communities, media coverage of the Kennedy assassination, and Holocaust photography.

Her lecture is free and open to the public.