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In recent decades, disruptive media events, such as major terrorist attacks, have gained increasing relevance in news coverage around the world. Despite the growing importance of such globally broadcast media events, little research to date has examined cross-national variation in event coverage or the predictors of this variation. This study examines news coverage about the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States across 51 countries to analyze whether the topical focus and emotional tone of news coverage about the attacks varied according to a country's proximity to the United States and the dominant role perceptions of its journalistic culture. We show that these macro-level predictors are associated in varying degrees with the country-level topical focus and emotional tone of reporting over the 30 days following this salient event. Moreover, our analysis also suggests that temporal developments may have uniformly structured much of this worldwide coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to a series of articles published in the issue of the journal on the impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on media studies and topics such as the representation of pandemics in television programs, political violence on television, and the threat of terrorist networks.

The authors discusse a survey they conducted on social workers' assessment of the media's impact on the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Through point biserial analysis, they found a moderate degree of association between years of clinical practice and perceived trauma. They say that social workers with the greater amount of practice experience are more likely to envision that the media increases trauma among the victims.

Cultural theorists interrogating the appropriation of 9/11 through nationalist, capitalist, and media forces have tended to deauthorize the general public's embodied and affective responses to that event. Instead of disavowing claims of mourning unsupported by geographic proximity or material connection, this essay situates such responses in contemporary screen culture to consider how the shifting grounds of materiality complicate the experience of bodily location at every level from the perceptual to the political. Using photographs, fiction, museum exhibits, and survivor accounts, the essay explores how the transformed relation between subjects and objects defines our apprehension of 9/11 in material, technological, and phenomenological terms. The complex dynamics of perception and embodiment unveiled through these representations suggest the need to rethink categories of experience and affect to accommodate new paradigms of proximity and connectedness increasingly liberated from the measures of geography and the borders of the body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents criticism on the film "Cloverfield," directed by Matt Reeves. According to the author, the film's imagery is intentionally reminiscent of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and is illustrative of some Americans' experience of the attacks as a darkly pleasurable spectacle. It is suggested that the absence of sympathetic traits in the elite New York City characters allows the audiences to remain unaffected while witnessing their deaths.

In this article, the author discusses his experiences teaching a college course on representations of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in U.S. popular culture. Particular focus is given to students' reactions to the comic strip "Get Your War On" by David Rees. According to the author, students initially seemed uncomfortable with the Rees' critique of expressions of grief after the attacks, but as time passed younger cohorts of students seemed to think it not provocative enough. Details related to other elements of the course, including the celebrity telethon "America: A Tribute to Heroes" and performer Kanye West's criticisms of U.S. President George Bush, are presented. Other topics include journalist Mark Lawson's concept of September 12th art and Web 2.0.

The article explores the historization of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by analyzing representations of the attacks in U.S. motion pictures and television programs. According to the author, motion pictures and television were major cultural tools for dealing with the attacks. It is suggested that most productions have not explored the more problematic political aspects of the attacks but instead have used them as an emotional reference point. Details related to several film and television representations of the attacks, including the television program "The Flight That Fought Back," the motion picture "World Trade Center," and the television program "The Path to 9/11" are presented. Other topics include healing and U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

An essay is presented on popular reactions to images of people jumping from the World Trade Center in New York City during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The author questions why the public outcry against these images was so strong. It is suggested that the suppression of these photographs obscured individual deaths in favor of a narrative of heroic strength, and that the images may help Americans to grieve the attacks and to understand them in the larger context of world history.

An essay is presented on the ways in which the mainstream media in the U.S. has repressed disturbing images from the War on Terror. Particular focus is given to mondo videos which exploit shocking footage from worldwide events. Topics include insights on media from the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attacks and an exploration as to why the media chooses to keep disturbing images of events from the public.

The article discusses the teaching of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and their aftermath in history classrooms and museum settings. Particular focus is given to the idea of the U.S. as a home front for the War on Terrorism under the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush. According to the author, performing a comparative analysis between the home front in the War on Terrorism and other wars in U.S. history can direct the focus of the discussion away from rhetoric and emotions. Details related to censorship, racial and religious tolerance, and perceptions of threat in World War II and the Cold War are presented. Other topics include national security, political conservatism, and media coverage of the 2001 attacks.

By operationalizing visual frames in terms of the human-interest vs technical frame and the anti-war vs the pro-war frame, and exploring the use of two sets of framing devices: graphic portrayal and emphasis, this framing analysis of 1387 photographs examined contrasting visual narratives employed by English- and Arabic-language transnational press in covering the 9/11 attack and the Afghan War. For the English-language newspaper, the International Herald Tribune, the frames emphasized the human suffering of 9/11 and de-emphasized the civilian casualties and moral guilt of implementing military force in Afghanistan by focusing more on a pro-war frame that showed the complex military high-tech operations and patriotic pictures. For the Arabic-language newspaper, Al-Hayat, the frames focused less on the victims and more on the material destruction of 9/11 and humanized the victims of the Afghan War. Furthermore, it focused on an anti-war frame by running visuals of anti-war protests and emphasizing graphic visuals portraying the humanitarian crisis in the Muslim country of Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study employs Anderson's thesis of the imagined community as a heuristic to explain the formation of a national media sphere in the journalistic domain. Based on the argument that nationalistic sentiment continues to serve as an identity anchor in the contemporary global era during times of crisis, this study maps the emergence of a national 'mediascape' in The New York Times's coverage of media industries following the historic plane crashes of 11 September 2001 in the US. The properties of an imagined community as delineated by Anderson -- boundaries (limits), sovereignty (autonomy) and community (ideological proximity) -- constituted the primary categories of analysis for examining the peak coverage of media industries in the three months following the crisis. The analyses demonstrate the mechanisms in the coverage through which a national mediascape was constructed at this time, drawing global media within the national fold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes how Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is making over democratic citizenship in post-9/11 America. Seeking to counter a temporal bias that displaces attention to the spatial in communication scholarship, I conduct a kairotopic, or temporal-spatial, analysis of this program to illustrate how it mediates citizenship through a particular material space-time: the contemporary American home. Overall, I argue that this show operates to domesticate political practices by relocating social responsibility from public institutions to private corporations and redirecting political agency into familiar (nuclear) familial space-times. In so doing, the program paradoxically combines the economic and governmental imperatives of neoliberalism with the moral and social norms of neoconservativism to build a new national home that is both post-dissident and postfeminist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern terrorism and disaster film share a common emotional strategy: the dramatic impact on audiences through formulas of panic, phobos in classical tragedy. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Hollywood has experienced a new refurbishment of popular genres, especially of the traditional master plots of invasion and catastrophe in action, science fiction, and fantasy. This phenomenon has allowed directors and screenwriters to develop themes on latent social fear between 2001 and 2008 and its connections with issues such as the conflict between national security and civil liberties, the risk of xenophobia and entrenchment, or the consequences of preventive war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the shifting discourse on Islam and Muslims in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. It seeks to investigate and compare the visual and verbal frames used to describe Islam within and outside America, which aspects of the religion were emphasized or omitted and how closely the frames of Islam concurred with the ideology of officials. Through this case study of American network news coverage post-9/11, the article argues that objective coverage of Islam is a myth, not just in America, but across the world. The author supports the problematic but necessary remedial action of urging reporters to acknowledge their subjectivity and find ways to increase their transparency regarding the choices they make in constructing their frames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the representations of Palestinian hijackers in different productions of "The Death of Klinghoffer" opera in the U.S. It states that these productions reveal the opera reinventing before and after 9/11, when Arab identity attacked the U.S. According to the article, two productions in 2003 represented delineated Palestinian characters to demonstrate a race that may be symbolic of a post-9/11 era.

The debate over the news coverage of September 11 offers parallels to the century-old fight over the violent imagery of storybook märchen. Do monstrous fairy-tales scar the child who hears them or fortify that child by presenting horror within a safe frame? Evidence suggests that traumatized adults blend their own imaginary experiences with real-life horrors as part of a healing process. Verbally-tripped images may ultimately aid the listener in coming to terms with traumatic experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs theories of counterpublics to investigate the Arab-American press before and after 9/11 as a counterpublic to the American war on terror. We use Squires's categorization of counterpublics as (1) assimilative enclaves, (2) satellites seeking separation, or (3) resistant counterpublics, actively dissenting. Using a corpus of 113 articles from "Arab American News," we argue that the Arab-American press circulated stories consistent with (1) and (2) but not (3). We conclude that a strategy of active resistance required greater standing of the Arab-American point of view in mainstream American thought than Arab-Americans enjoyed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on his life as a public scholar. The author relates that his involvement in the public service began when he was officially promoted to Associate Professor at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle in September 2002 which also marked the publication of his research on the U.S. news coverage on the September 11 terrorist attacks. According to the author, the different response of the public on his research served as a catalyst on his interest in public service.

An essay is presented that discusses the use of comedy in the motion picture "Fahrenheit 9/11." The documentary film, directed by Michael Moore, focuses on the political ramifications of the U.S. terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The author suggests that Moore risks alienating audiences with his satirical style of filmmaking given the subject matter, but that comedy can be used to keep audiences interested in political messages and help them face difficult subjects. He discusses criticism that Moore fails to offer a balanced depiction of politics and suggests Moore uses comedy to promote his views of U.S. President George W. Bush.