Commemoration of a deceased prominent media professional offers the journalistic community a symbolic opportunity to reiterate or reshape their preferred role identity, professional ideals, and cultural authority. This paper takes Chinese journalists’ commemoration of Yang Weiguang, former head of China Central Television, as a case to examine the interrelations between media memories, the boundary of journalism, and journalistic authority. It identifies the threefold-intertwined memorializing narratives on personal, organizational and professional levels. Unlike Western media memories of deceased prominent journalists aiming at defining the boundaries of “good journalist” in line with professional norms, Chinese journalists’ commemoration of Yang Weiguang primarily serve to define a “good media leader”. Media memories also communicate journalists’ nostalgic feelings of the past “golden age” of television and legitimize journalists’ authority in using the past to critique the present and to map out television journalism’s future. Chinese journalists achieve high-degree consensus in the boundary-work of a “good leader”, but diverge in using memories of the “golden age”.