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244 Public religious culture post-09/11/01

And, significantly to our considerations here, it was all televised.
Television reporters and anchors struggled to find their footing in this new
reality. Anchors such as Walter Cronkite served to guide the viewing world
through the events, offering words of sorrow, comfort, hope, and consola-
tion. It forever changed the way we think about television news, and
imprinted on a generation of television news people (and on succeeding
generations) the expectation that at certain times, and with certain events,
their role would be to step up and act in real time and with real emotion.
There are simply those times when emotional detachment is difficult,
particularly when journalists are experiencing the same events at the same
time as their audiences. The years since 1963 have seen many debates in
professional circles about “personality journalism” and about the tendency
for television journalists to become entangled with their stories. Behind
many of these debates is a cultural memory of the JFK assassination.
It is my argument that this event ushered in the beginnings of a new
form of public ritual linked to collective national and international
processes of commemoration and mourning. In the years since 1963, there
has been a series of such events. These include the tumultuous year of
1968, which saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F.
Kennedy, as well as the Chicago Democratic Convention. Television of
course played an important role in public experiences of the Vietnam War
and its aftermath, and some of the same issues and trends might be seen in
the coverage of Watergate. But, commemoration of loss is the key ingre-
dient of the rituals I have in mind, linking the JFK assassination with
subsequent events such as the Challenger explosion, the shootings at
Columbine High School, the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building, and
of course 9/11.
Cultural scholars Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz have described the role
of television in the emergence of global forms of what they call “media
events.” These collective events are “real” in the sense that they are rooted
in actual political, religious, or civic processes, but they are also important
and unique because they are televised and interrupt the flow of television.
Television, say Dayan and Katz, has introduced new contexts, processes,
and conventions to these forms, seeing in them an underlying taxonomy
composed of contests, conquests, and coronations. They would not be
structured in the same way without television, they argue, and television
makes them national, even global, in scope and character. Religion may
play a role in the events described by Dayan and Katz, but its presence or
absence is not a central feature of their analysis. 29
I wish to take things in a different direction than Dayan and Katz,
looking more directly at how 9/11 can be seen as an expression of a kind of
“civil religion” of commemoration and mourning. This differs from Dayan
and Katz’s view in two key ways. First, I see in events such as the Kennedy
Funeral, the Challenger explosion, Oklahoma City, and 9/11 the dimension