Living room pilgrimages: Television's cyclical commemoration of the assassination anniversary of John F. Kennedy

Abstract

Visually and verbally, through dramatic narratives, the U.S. American mass media lead the public on pilgrimages, journeys of devotion and consecration, in commemoration of the anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This paper examines and offers an explanation of these cyclical mass‐mediated ritual dramas. Specifically, 14 news specials and documentaries (ranging from 1–4 hours each in length), 13 news stories (from national network, cable, and Dallas local television) are analyzed using Turner's (1974) concept of pilgrimage as social drama. Within the discussion of the four‐phase narrative structure (the syntactic landscape) of these living room pilgrimages, three of the “fixed” symbols (the semantic building blocks) of pilgrimages that recur in these assassination anniversary narratives are discussed. The essay concludes with a discussion of the functional and dysfunctional dimensions of these televisual rehearsals of the assassination anniversay within the context of the theoretical concepts of communitas and mediated therapeutic communication.