I had a great time at the East Coast Graduate Liberal Studies Symposium on Saturday, held at the beautiful Stockton University in southern New Jersey. A lot of quality papers at this small conference, ranging from contemporary interpretations of Aristotle by fellow St. John’s College alum Peggy Bair to a terrific essay on corporate greed by Stockton business ethicist Keith Diener, “Hayek, Friedman and the Restricted Nature of the Shareholder Wealth Maximization Imperative.” The full program is here: 2015 AGLS Program

My paper explored how conventional wisdom and collective memory operate in newsrooms, and how this defines and restricts the news agenda. I examined Paul Ricoeur’s towering work, Memory History and Forgetting, and focused on his passages involving collective memory. The abstract is below and this is a work in progress. I plan to refine this further over the summer and submit it for publication, based on the strong response I’ve received so far. This essay represents my attempt to carve out a space between my philosophy studies at St. John’s and the journalism studies at the University of Maryland.

I welcome your thoughts.

Ricoeur, Collective Memory and Journalism

Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History and Forgetting (2004) explores the origins of collective memory and its perils, a project that is vital to understanding the crisis in contemporary journalism, particularly business journalism. With few exceptions, the business press needed to better explore some of the fundamental assumptions in the economy and business world that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. What explains this shortcoming? Some press critics assert journalists are captive to a type of group-think, or “conventional wisdom,” which artificially limits the types of stories they pursue. Ricoeur provides a theoretical framework to help understand the newsroom dynamic, one that suggests institutional memory and professional practice are shaped by the sociology of the newsroom and the culture at large.