Two media endeavours, the Heritage Minutes and the CBC documentary Canada: A People's History, hope to serve as a corrective to Canadians' lack of interest in their history and to bolster national identity. However, the producers do not want to appear propagandistic in a country where there is conflict about what the shape of the nation should be. They accomplish this by appealing to the “on the spot" authority of journalistic representation and the emotional immediacy of dramatic story-telling. They also emphasize the multi-cultural and multi-perspectival nature of Canada's past. However, ultimately these efforts exist within a larger narrative about the "story of Canada," where events of the past are framed in terms of their contribution or relevance to the present shape of the nation-state. In this way, these programs reveal their purpose and, as collective memory scholars might predict, press the past into the service of present aims.

The American jeremiad long has been an established rhetorical form that operates as a corrective to conditions gone awry. In response to a falling away " the jeremiad issues a call to the community to return home to idealized foundational principles The American experience in Vietnam produced in the national community a crisis of faith in foundational principles precipitated a crisis of representation of national identity. This essay argues that the secular American jeremiad emerges prominently in Steven Spielberg's film Saving Private Ryan Through a close reading of the film contextualized by the preceding twenty years of popular cinematic lamentation following Vietnam I argue that the film operates in part as a rhetorically skillful response to the post-Vietnam crisis of national identity. I further argue that Spielberg both acknowledges appropriates the crisis offering viewing audiences a "way home" to mythic America. The essay concludes with a discussion of the tensions between the conservative mande in the jeremiadic form the possibilities for social transformation

The prevalence of verbal and physical aggression on daytime television talk shows has earned this genre the designation of `confrontainment." In recent times academics, politicians, clergy, and media critics have frequently and publicly expressed their concern about the violation of moral values featured on the "The Jerry Springer Show." On the other hand, sociologists in the functionalist tradition argue that commonly held moral values must be violated and the villains publicly punished for their transgressions to mark and reinforce moral boundaries. The goal of the study reported here was to assess the potential of "The Jerry Springer Show "for fu filling these social maintenance functions. A content analysis of 100 episodes of the show over an eight-month period revealed that deviance from traditional family values is frequently featured on the show but that the studio audience and Jerry Springer played active roles in the public degradation of these transgressions, casting the show in a morally conservative light