Collective memory, the news media, and Major League Baseball's Steroid Era

Abstract

News journalists are charged with documenting current events in an objective manner. As a by-product of this role, journalistic accounts are often seen outside of the cultural realm, as third-party reports that are free from personal bias or cultural influences. There is a growing body of scholarship that refutes this categorization, arguing that journalism is distinctly inside the cultural realm and necessarily influenced by societal factors. This study draws on collective memory theory, and seeks to understand how the collective memory of Major League Baseball's history influenced journalistic accounts of baseball's Steroid Era from the late 1990s up to the year 2013. Utilizing a grounded theory methodology, this study qualitatively analyzed 226 news articles from both national and local newspapers and sports magazines in the years 1998, 2002, 2004, 2007, and 2013. The researcher identified articles' narrative structures and transformations of collective memories over time. Both of these aspects were then measured against the study's stated goal of objectivity, which was to "to "reach the highest degree of correspondence between journalistic assertions and reality" (Boudana, 2011, p. 396). The study found that the historical values with which the baseball collective identified--namely, that baseball had historically been a game of integrity--strongly influenced media coverage of the scandal. The partiality of collective memory negatively affected journalistic objectivity, as journalists often compared the current era to inherently incomplete versions of the past.