Journalism as an Agent of Prospective Memory

In everyday language, we use the terms ‘remember’ and ‘forget’ to express two very different temporal meanings (Neisser, 1982) — we remember, or forget, what happened in the past, and we remember, or forget, what we need to do in the future, or what we promised ourselves or others we would do: pick up the dry cleaning, get a gift for mother’s day, finish a journal review, follow through on campaign promises, bring our kids home from school; or at the national level, and the example that I will use in this essay — bring our hostages home from captivity.