Media can represent lions or hunters. However, powerful media and cultural institutions whose business it is to record, archive and make accessible the everyday life, major events and social and cultural herit¬age of nations and communities, invariably write those narratives in ways that glorify not only themselves but the cultural hegemony of the societies they serve. They need to keep their customers, readers, audiences and users happy. They control their own archives even if they are actually only the custodians and not the full rightful owners of a nation's heritage. This is the case with the publicly funded broadcaster in the UK, the BBC, and I shall consider the BBC's opening up of its archive in more detail in Chapter 5.

The last chapter explored the key concepts of memory as they have developed in relation to media and cultural studies. However, media are not neutral phenomena. When studying media and memory we need to keep in mind the context of media power and that ‘institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution’ (Clay Shirky, cited in Kevin Kelly's ‘The Shirky Principle’, 2010). If ‘the problem’ is private and public memory (its retrieval, recording, archiving, dissemination and accessibility) and that institution is a media company, then we need to do two things. Firstly, we need to critique the role of media institutions in the production and consumption of public and personal memories.