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‘Broadcast to mark Holocaust Memorial Day’: Mass mediated Holocaust commemoration on British television and radio

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-02-05, 09:56 authored by John Richardson
This article examines the various programmes that British television and radio broadcast to mark Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD), between 2002 and 2016. Adopting a content analytic methodology, I quantified the broadcast schedules of 15 successive HMDs, as recorded in archived copies of the Radio Times. My analysis reveals significant variations in mass-mediated Holocaust commemoration. Principally, I found: a decrease in programming, despite a significant increase in the number of television channels; a tendency towards ‘anniversarism’ in the form and frequency of broadcast programmes; a stress on Auschwitz, as metonym of the Holocaust, and on survivors, children and music; and that commercial channels were significantly more likely to broadcast documentaries (and repeats) than the BBC’s more varied and original outputs. These variations appear to be the result of three interlinked factors: first, a sense that the audience had grown weary of World War II commemoration, following saturation broadcasting of anniversaries in 2004-2005; changes in the management and programming priorities of key broadcasters, particularly the BBC; and that HMD has not yet become an established day for broadcasters in the nation’s commemorative calendar.

Funding

This research was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

European Journal of Communication

Citation

RICHARDSON, J.E., 2018. ‘Broadcast to mark Holocaust Memorial Day’: Mass mediated Holocaust commemoration on British television and radio. European Journal of Communication, 33(5), pp. 505-521.

Publisher

© The authors. Published by SAGE Publications Ltd

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2018-01-28

Publication date

2018

Notes

This paper was published in the journal European Journal of Communication and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323118763919.

ISSN

0267-3231

Language

  • en