Page 248 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Public religious culture post-09/11/01 237

source of national and global experience of the events. They were for all
intents and purposes media events. Second, the media were and are the
source of “our” knowledge of “them” and “their” knowledge of “us.”
Third, American media exports such as films are an important basis for
the Islamist moral critiques of US and Western Culture. And finally, 9/11
illustrated and confirmed the role of the media as central to a new “civil
religion” based in public rituals of commemoration and mourning. Let’s
look at each of these in turn.

The media as the source of the experience
One of the most unprecedented things about the 9/11 attacks was when
and where they occurred. Subsequent political and security analyses of the
strategy behind them noted that Bin Laden had a penchant for choosing
targets for their political and symbolic value, and for sticking with targets
once they were chosen. On one level, then, the 9/11 attacks on the World
Trade Center were nothing more than a second attempt following the less
“successful” 1992 bombing there. On another level, though, the 9/11
5
events were exponentially more significant in that they were so spectacular.
Their spectacle was an effect of their timing. The two airplanes arrived at
their targets approximately eighteen minutes apart. In the most media-
saturated city in the world, hundreds of cameras were trained on the
smoldering north tower when the second airplane struck the south tower,
ensuring that millions of people throughout the world saw that strike live
on television. 6
What the city, the nation, and the world saw, in living color, was a
horrible spectacle. Victims of the attack waved from windows above the
smoldering floors, and, in acts of unimaginable desperation, many of them
flung themselves to their deaths to avoid the flames. And then, the most
unimaginable sight of all: two 110-story buildings – the very symbols of
the modern triumph of metropolitan civilization – crumbling to rubble. All
of this was captured, shown live, repeated, and commented upon by media
observers during hours and days of coverage. Every reader of this book no
doubt has these images forever imprinted in memory. The immediacy, and
more important, the visuality of the spectacle defined it and continues to
define it. Other incidents of violence and horror before and since have also
been visualized. War, genocide, natural disasters, and accidents are visually
documented. In the case of 9/11 we all participated in the events, knowing
that these things were happening, in real time, to real people, in a place
where – our intellect told us – such things should not happen, as we were
watching them.
In her thoughtful work on the role that visualization and depiction
plays in the process of “bearing witness,” media scholar Barbie Zelizer
points out that the ability to picture and represent events such as the