Mediated memory: framing and sustaining collective memory of the 1967 Milwaukee race riots in contemporary and retrospective newspaper coverage

This study was inspired by scholarship that investigates the relationship between media and the formation of collective memory by communities of individuals. It focused on the way three metropolitan newspapers covered a single event, the Milwaukee race riots of 1967, and also how each newspaper treated the riots in coverage published on the 10, 20, 25, 30, and 40-year anniversaries of the riots. Relying upon a narrative analysis proposed by Jill A. Edy (2006) that focused on the construction of frames within newspaper reporting, this study concluded that, over time, the newspapers engaged in a replacement of memory by consistently arguing that problems facing the Milwaukee community in 1967 had not been solved in the decades since the violence and that those problems persisted in modern-day times