News that Isn’t New: March for Our Lives and Media Mobilization of Historical Precedent

ABSTRACT

Media coverage of the March 24, 2018 March for Our Lives has been voluminous, including notable coverage framing the march in relation to historical precursors. Analyzing two chronotopes, or implicit orientations to space and time, embedded in this coverage, this essay contributes to efforts to understand journalism as a space of vernacular public memory. I argue that journalists and commentators mobilize historical precedent in ways that constrain the possible outcomes of teen activism in the present.

Notes

1. Thank you to the friends and writing group partners who read early drafts of this essay, especially Lindsay Rose Russell, Jen Borda, and Shevaun Watson, and to RR editor Elise Verzosa Hurley and RR reviewers Jane Greer and Tammie Kennedy, for their generous and generative feedback.

2. See Eves; Jack, “Space, Time, Memory”; Dubriwny and Poirot.

3. See Nicotra; Jack, “Chronotopes.” Importantly, chronotopes do not only occur through texts but also through material artifacts and assemblages, as Milbourne and Hallenbeck have argued.

4. The phrase “March for Our Lives” returns more than 9,000 distinct news items published in English between February 14, 2018, when the shooting in Parkland, Florida occurred, and May 14—that is, roughly six weeks before and six weeks after the national march on March 24, 2018. I limited my analysis to this date range because the March for Our Lives organization has continued to generate media coverage unrelated to the original march: through events like the “Road to Change” tour throughout the summer of 2018, through platforms such as the “Peace Plan” released in August 2019, and through the persistent media attention paid to specific MFOL organizers, especially Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg.

5. For representative investigations into official memory sites, see Blair and Michel; Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki; on vernacular and everyday contexts of public memory, see Eves; Bodnar; Haskins; Hess; Jorgensen-Earp and Lanzilotti. On public memory in relation to gun policy, see Rood.

6. Right-leaning news outlets such as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal tended to deflate rather than elevate the likely importance of March for Our Lives demonstrations (see Hong and Epstein; De Avila; Bauerlein) which may be one reason they rarely employed exemplars.

7. See Astor and Russell.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Risa Applegarth

Risa Applegarth ([email protected]) is an associate professor of English and director of the college writing program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research on gender, genre, and professional and public writing has appeared in College English, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Composition Forum, and in her book Rhetoric in American Anthropology: Gender, Genre, and Science (U of Pittsburgh P, 2014), which received a CCCC Outstanding Book Award in 2016. Her current book project investigates activism among children and teens to contribute to contemporary theories of rhetorical agency.