Producing indefinite drafts of history: Journalists’ roles in historic revisionism in Europe and beyond

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore to what degree revisionism and journalism interact in a European context. By looking at countries with troubled pasts, such as Greece and Spain, which are well into the European Union and also the euro-public sphere, and Kosovo, which uses European Integration as a framework to deal with its conflicting past, we aim to answer the crucial questions of what historical revisionism in journalistic productions is; how it emerges and how it is addressed by journalistic productions in such discourses. We use data from 22 semi-structured in-depth interviews with selected journalists who cover ‘troubled past,’ identified by searching content on the media with the same keywords. These journalists represent a pool of professionals who research the past and forensically deconstruct events and documents to come to new conclusions or re-interpretations of the past through present journalistic productions. Our data suggest that journalists indeed have a narrative of the past in their minds and are eager to explore it further in seeking an ideal professional role of finding out the truth as a counter-revisionist measure. In doing so, journalists also face competing loyalty between their identity and professionalism, belonging, and political situation. Greece, Spain, and Kosovo have suffered very different past conflicts and have different ways of dealing with the past, but journalists in all three countries compete for the true narratives of war and the past. Writing the first draft of history, they argue that the latter is continuously under revision.