Seen to be grieved: Queen Elizabeth II’s death and the unsettlement of the modern media event

Abstract With millions of viewers across the globe over more than 10 days’ time, media coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s death appears to constitute a “media event” in the sense of its popularization by Dayan and Katz in 1992. But it also ignited an immediate synchronized effort at counter narration that criticized the Queen’s tenure and the institution of the British monarchy. Employing critical discourse and conjunctural analysis, I argue that the Queen’s death was a moment in which the state-driven “media event” was challenged by a grassroots “viral event.” Media events, I argue, deploy nostalgia, which masks history, as their prevailing tool, while the viral event of the counter commentary deploys critical memory, which highlights and parses history, to make its case—the latter upsetting the perceived dominance of the former.