Till death do us join: media, mourning rituals and the sacred centre of the society

On the night of 19 March 2004, in Konginkangas, Central Finland, a bus carrying passengers on a skiing vacation from Helsinki to Lapland crashed into a tractor-trailer loaded with paper rolls on an icy highway. The heavy rolls ejected into the bus immediately killed most of the passengers, mainly teenagers and young adults. With 23 dead, the Konginkangas bus accident represented the worst traffic accident in Finnish history. The death of young people is not expected in a modern society and perhaps because of that the expressions of public grief and ritualizing were unprecedented: people laid flowers and lighted candles at the snowy road site, placed virtual condolences and attended memorial services. A sense of national tragedy was heightened by intense media coverage that focused on mourning rituals and the youngest of the victims. Recently, a discussion within media research on the notion of ritual and the relationship between ritual and mass media has intensified (e.g. Becker, 1995; Coman, 2005; Cottle, 2006; Couldry, 2003; Dayan and Katz, 1992; Ehrlich, 1996; Ettema, 1990; Kitch, 2003; Liebes, 1998; Rothenbuhler, 1998). Our contribution to this debate is to offer a historical perspective on mourning ritual in news media. What has been lacking thus far within media literature is a discussion on the kind of changes that have taken place in the relationship between ritual and media. In fact, the idea that public mourning, and the rituals it entails, has a history in which the development of media plays a role (for example, the