The Shock of the News

Media Coverage and the Making of 9/11

Brian A. Monahan

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814796122
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

How did the events of September 11, 2001 come to be thought of as 9/11? The Shock of the News is an authoritative account of post-9/11 political and social processes, offering an in-depth analysis of the media coverage of this momentous event. Brian Monahan demonstrates how 9/11 has been transformed into a morality tale centered on patriotism, victimization, and heroes.

Introducing the idea of “public drama” as a way of making sense of how media processed and packaged the 9/11 attacks for their audiences, Monahan not only illuminates how and why the coverage took shape as it did, but also provides us with new insights into the social, cultural, and political consequences of the attacks and their aftermath. Monahan explains how and why 9/11 became such a potent symbol, exploring how meanings and symbols get created, reinforced, and disseminated in modern society. Ultimately, Monahan offers an important new understanding of this singular event of our time, and his compelling narrative brings the momentous events back into focus.

Part I

1

Introduction

Understanding Public Drama

We are in the age of the endless news cycle. At any time of any day across an ever-expanding array of print, television, and online media, news is being crafted, communicated, and accessed by millions. Much debate in recent years has centered on the merits of this environment. Some people offer a “glass-half-full” assessment of the contemporary news industry, suggesting that the benefits of the ever-present stream of news and information outweigh any negative by-products it may generate. Those in this camp may point to a number of factors to support their view: the theoretical potential of better news (i.e., more broadcast and print space should produce greater depth and breadth of coverage of a wider range of news), the advantages of a robust stock of readily available information, or the fact that those with the requisite motivation and news-seeking skills can select the information that they want.¹

Others have a decidedly more pessimistic outlook on the state of news today, warning that the news industry is in the midst of a steep and prolonged decline. Those with this view often position the 24/7 news cycle—or, more to the point, the economic, technological, and cultural transitions that produce it—as the primary reason for the declining quality of mainstream news. They contend that the increasing profit orientations of news organizations, technological changes (notably, the advent and growth of the Internet and twenty-four-hour news networks), growing inter- and intramedia competition, cutbacks in newsroom resources, fragmentation of media audiences, shifting audience interests, and other forces have fundamentally altered the news industry. Many people argue that the media are now governed first and foremost by an entertainment ethos and that this new news culture has virtually usurped traditional journalistic norms, thus abandoning the investigative and educational principles on which the industry was founded. From this perspective, the efforts of the organizations and individuals who produce news are said to be increasingly favoring news that is entertaining and titillating, to the exclusion of objectivity, public interest, the pursuit of truth, and other long-standing journalistic values. These critics contend that news work is becoming more and more beholden to the “if it bleeds, it leads” standard by which greater news value is assigned to what “sells,” as opposed to what could be consequential or important to society. We are said to be “entertaining ourselves to death” as we consume the productions of a mainstream media whose entertainment function has overridden its more important educational function (Postman 1985; see also Fox, Van Sickel, and Steiger 2007).

News as Public Drama

The public drama framework outlined in this book is founded on two core assumptions. The first is that news is a social construction, which suggests that what audiences see as “news” (i.e., the finished product that arrives in our televisions, radios, newspapers, magazines, and computer monitors) is actually the tangible manifestation of a series of decisions made by the people—editors, producers, reporters, anchors, guest bookers, news promoters, and other media figures—who determine which events, issues, and individuals will be attended to, what resources will be allocated to their coverage, what aspects of an event or issue will be the focal point, which plotlines will be followed, which characters will be promoted, and so on. From a constructionist perspective, all news is a collection of individual news elements: facts and figures, images, eyewitness accounts, expert commentary, and the like. The differences in form and content are largely in the selection of news elements and the manner in which they are presented to the audience. Information and images become part of the news not because they are inherently important or provide an accurate reflection of objective reality but because they have been defined as “newsworthy” by those whose job it is to identify potential news items and to transform them to appeal to the needs of both media officials and media audiences.²

We can see this in the public drama form. Public dramas are built out of those news elements that offer the most drama and emotion. Once selected, these items are then molded into an engrossing story that offers an enticing mixture of compelling characters, dynamic plot, captivating settings, and other story elements. The well-crafted public drama represents a gripping media tale that can, ideally, evolve for an extended period of time under the glare of media spotlights.

The second guiding assumption is that news matters. That is, news is the principal source of information for most of us, particularly for events and issues to which we are not directly connected. The images and information we acquire through our interactions with the media shape our perceptions of social reality. The productions of the news media, in particular, direct our attention and shape how we think and talk about what is featured as news. We use this information as a basis for activity, as a cue to how we should define the situation, and as a way to understand current events. We make sense of political and social issues and learn about our culture and social institutions through the frames and interpretations provided by the news media. Even though its forms and the media for its delivery are constantly changing, the news remains essential to both the creation and the communication of the systems of shared meanings that people use to guide their actions and interactions.

Locating Public Drama in the Media Landscape

Public drama is primarily a production of the television news media. Although other media create public dramas, it is in the television news cycle that most public dramas acquire their shape and form, attract an audience, and are generally “brought to life.” Television is uniquely situated to create these kinds of stories because of its capacity to fuse images and framings in ways that, again, make their content seem more like popular fiction than news. If you were to put down this book and turn on a televised news program, you would quickly and easily find coverage of a public drama. For instance, many public dramas can be found on the networks’ morning programs (e.g., NBC’s Today and ABC’s Good Morning America) and on the “news crawls” that show news and information in text form at the bottom of the television screen on cable news broadcasts throughout the day. The ongoing public dramas of the day also supply much of the fodder for the evening talk show news hybrids on the cable networks (e.g., CNN’s Larry King Live and Nancy Grace, or the Fox News channel’s On the Record with Greta Van Susteren). For instance, when the saga surrounding the murder of Laci Peterson and the subsequent prosecution of her husband for the crime was in full swing in 2003, it was a staple of the American news cycle. In fact, in 2003, Larry King Live, which has long been one of CNN’s top-rated programs, devoted nearly fifty of its one-hour shows to that story (Anderson 2004, 35). More recently, CNN’s Nancy Grace covered the story of Caylee Anthony, a two-year-old girl who disappeared and whose remains were later found, on all but six of its 117 broadcasts from July 17, 2008, to December 31, 2008.

Even though the television news media are essential to the initial development and growth of a public drama, it is important to recognize that this is not solely a television-driven phenomenon. Newspapers, general news magazines, the Internet, and talk radio all regularly consider public dramas, which help facilitate their growth and extend their reach in surprising ways. For instance, many public dramas find an unusual source of support in magazines concentrating on celebrity and human-interest stories (e.g., People or US Weekly), whose weekly editions often feature a prominent public drama on the cover or in its pages. Newsweek, a leading weekly news magazine, also follows some of the public dramas and has a semiregular feature that is often used to tap into older mediated dramas that have long since been removed from the news cycle. Dubbed “Closure,” this section introduces its content and purpose as follows: “In the mass-media age, news stories captivate us, then vanish. We revisit those stories to bring you the next chapter.” Recent editions offered brief updates of the Duke University lacrosse scandal, Jessica Lynch, Elizabeth Smart (who was kidnapped in 2002 and was discovered nine months later living with her captors twenty miles from her home), Mark Foley (the Florida congressman who was forced out of office after the discovery of his sexually charged correspondence with a teenaged boy), and—going quite a bit back in the annals of mediated drama—the story of Bernie Goetz. In 1984, Goetz, a white male, opened fire on a group of African American teens who, he assumed, were intending to rob him on a New York subway. In the media frenzy that followed, Goetz emerged as symbol of citizens’ disgust with urban crime. The bigger point here is that these “next chapters” rarely contain any of the dramatic or emotional elements that initially gave life to or sustained the public drama (if they did, they would probably have become a longer news article rather than a boxed insert). Instead, this content can be seen as a mechanism for providing a brief “where-are-they-now” style retrospective on once-prominent media stories in an attempt to extract any remaining news value from them.

Much of the appeal of public drama is independent of the medium through which it is presented, although the immediacy and video footage available to television’s news workers do offer certain advantages in fashioning news in this form. What makes public drama work is the manner in which it is packaged and presented. A well-crafted public drama features highly dramatic and emotional news elements, compelling characters, evocative themes, and captivating settings, all combined in an uncomplicated narrative that unfolds in a fairly linear fashion, allowing its audience to “keep up” even as the demands of everyday life necessarily preclude constant attention to the ongoing events. These features often make news fashioned as public drama seem more like entertainment than news. In fact, many public dramas explicitly exhibit the sort of entertainment ethos and narrative conventions usually reserved for those who create fictional serial dramas and soap operas. The fact that the information is being presented by a news personality, on a news program, becomes a secondary feature.

The integration of entertainment conventions into the construction of public drama often is evident in the mainstream coverage of crime, which has formed its own genre in the news industry. When stories about crime and criminal justice are packaged as public drama, the news coverage appears to be built on the reverse form of a production trick used in NBC’s popular Law and Order series. That program, which dramatizes the detection, investigation, and prosecution functions of the criminal justice system, often contains content that is similar to real-life cases. Many episodes are promoted as having a story line “ripped from the headlines,” to convey to viewers that they are watching some semblance of real life rather than just a formulaic contrivance pieced together for dramatic effect. Public drama represents the flip side of this: news workers construct news as public drama using narrative principles that have been “ripped from television” or other productions of Hollywood’s fictional register.

Once firmly ensconced in the news cycle, these presentations, particularly high-profile public dramas, can remain there for quite some time, dominating the attention of media officials and the general public and permeating discourse about the issues and events at their core for years thereafter. An example is the O. J. Simpson case, which dominated the news cycle in 1994 and 1995. The death of Princess Diana, and the resultant efforts of some media to try to solve the mystery surrounding the fatal crash, remained an important item in the news cycle for the latter part of 1997 and into the following year. Following the murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey in 1996, the television-like search for her killer, featuring various plot twists and unexpected developments, dominated news cycles off and on for more than a decade. Indeed, many of the most prominent public dramas take shape around criminal abductions and suspicious disappearances, especially those involving children or other vulnerable individuals.

Assuming there is enough information available to form a plot and bring the characters to life, tales like these often prove to be particularly amenable to the kind of sustained dramatic and emotional narrative that marks a public drama. This can be seen in the media sagas surrounding the disappearance of Laci Peterson (and the subsequent murder trial of her husband, Scott Peterson), the return of Elizabeth Smart (the Utah teenager who was abducted from her home), the disappearance of Natalee Holloway (the Alabama teenager who disappeared during a school-sponsored trip in Aruba), and even the rekindling of the JonBenet Ramsey story in the summer of 2007 (following John Mark Karr’s admission, since proven false, that he was responsible for her murder). Moreover, the legal proceedings that often follow these cases provide a wellspring of information that can be used to advance the existing public drama or develop new directions for the narrative.

One of the more remarkable aspects of the public drama form is its longevity. The ecology of the modern news industry means that most of the news items introduced into the news cycle are discarded with astounding rapidity. But many public dramas avoid this fate, exhibiting greater “staying power” than most other kinds of news. Moreover, even after they are no longer part of the daily productions of the mainstream media, these stories rarely disappear from the news cycle altogether. Instead, they exist on its fringes, awaiting the emergence of new “newsworthy” details or developments to warrant their reintroduction.

Some public dramas become so vast and well known that their reach extends beyond the general media audience, becoming part of popular discourse and culture. When this happens, even those who do not actively follow a particular public drama in the mainstream media are still likely to overhear conversations about the mediated drama of the day among colleagues at work or see these stories on magazine covers while passing newsstands or waiting in line at the grocery store. Public dramas are, in one form or another, all around us. Clearly, they are an important device for packaging and presenting news in the contemporary news industry. The frequency with which they can be found in the news cycle and the range of media that attend to them underscore their importance to those charged with identifying and organizing content to feed the insatiable demands of a 24/7 news cycle.

Public drama, however, can be an insidious form of news. Its aura of entertainment and compelling plot structure often mask its potency as a creator and conveyor of meanings. When crafting a public drama, news workers necessarily must omit the more complex aspects of an issue or event in favor of a less complicated narrative. As a result, members of the media audience are told a dramatic tale with a fairly simple story line that unfolds in a relatively straightforward fashion and contains interesting characters or issues to which the audience can relate. This, however, requires an unfortunate trade-off: instead of a nuanced assessment of the causes or consequences of an event or the policy implications of an issue, the audience is presented with a story that has a rather narrow narrative crafted around a familiar structure, archetypal characters, and a melodramatic plot filled with notions of good versus evil.

A Case Study of Public Drama: The September 11 Attacks

The extensive media coverage characteristic of public drama, coupled with the presence of an engrossed, often large, audience, creates a context in which public drama can alter existing repertoires of meaning, create new collective definitions of issues and events, reshape the dominant culture, and affect the status of the participants (i.e., its cast). Never has the power of public drama to create and convey meanings been more evident than in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks (now popularly referred to as 9/11). This was the most widely and intensely covered event in the media age. Much of how we made sense of the attacks in those first days, weeks, and months after their occurrence and, in turn, how we have come to understand and act on “9/11” in the years since, derives from how the media first constructed and told the tale.

The way the media packaged and presented the attacks and their aftermath transformed the web of events leading up to and following the attacks into a mediated public drama. The complexities of the causes and consequences of these events were quickly stripped away as the coverage was fashioned into a story filled with spectacular moments, compelling characters, human tragedy, heroism, gripping images, and other staples of dramatic storytelling. My hope is that by examining mainstream coverage of September 11 as public drama, we can better understand some of the social, cultural, and political consequences of the attacks while also gaining greater insight into the role of mediated public drama in modern life.

I chose September 11 as a case study for this analysis because it provides an excellent window into the public drama form, illustrating not only how these mediated productions take shape, but also how their constitutive features and proffered meanings influence how we make sense of the issues, events, and individuals of our time. The huge amount of coverage generated in both the immediate and long-term wake of the attacks provides a rich source of data from which we can develop the conceptual tools needed to identify public drama, articulate its causes and characteristics, and analyze its consequences.

It is easy to forget, now that several years have passed since the attacks and the dominant 9/11 narratives have been reified through repetition, that the way these events were framed and communicated was not intrinsic to the characteristics of that day’s events. Instead, what we now think of as “9/11” is a product of choices made by news workers, political officials, and others regarding what to say about those events and how to describe them. The report of the first plane crash was initially treated as a highly newsworthy accident. The working assumption at that point was that a small pla...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Author