Page 265 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

254 Public religious culture post-09/11/01

with journalists taking roles that link them personally and morally to the
events, and at the same time function to narrate the experience for the
broader public. The mediation of the events connected people to them in
ways that gave the events a sense of reality and instantaneity. The unique
horror of the events gave them a particular power to motivate action. The
actions moved in the direction of finding commonality and connection
rather than of crafting narratives of triumph or transcendence. The unique
facticity of the experience further motivated people in disparate locations
remote from the events to take ritual action, even actions as trivial as
lighting candles and attending prayer services. The nature and extent of
the evolution of these cultural forms will no doubt continue to evolve.
What is clear, though, is that the events of 9/11 provided a unique and
particular moment of interaction between ideas of religion and practices of
the media.
The other component of this evolving tradition of course involves the
formal structuration of the coverage of such events. While, as I have said,
it is beyond the scope of this book to undertake a detailed analysis, there is
much evidence that those responsible for providing and narrating such
events do, in fact, move to a level of participation, almost a priestly role.
As Dayan and Katz note, they “suspend their normal critical stance and
treat their subject with respect, even awe.” They certainly did in 9/11. A
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particularly profound example, and one that connects the context of
production with the context(s) of consumption by erasing the proscenium
that is usually interposed between production and audience, comes from
Public Broadcasting’s flagship evening news program The Newshour with
Jim Lehrer. On their 19 September 2001 program, they covered a photo-
graphic exhibition mounted in Greenwich Village called “Here is New
York.” The exhibition was composed of photographs of the events of 9/11
and its aftermath, and the gallery where it appeared was selling prints as a
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fund-raising project to support relief and rebuilding efforts in the city. At
the end of the news report, anchor Jim Lehrer introduced a photomontage
of images from the exhibition, accompanied by the haunting vocal
“Evening Falls . . . ” by the New Age diva Enya.
The result was an intensely moving meditation on the meaning of the
events. The implicit spirituality and religiosity could not be avoided. At a
key moment in the montage, where the Enya track modulates and swells,
with an organ becoming the featured instrument, the images showed first a
picture of a blown-out window, cropped so that a cruciform shape
revealed a scene of destruction behind, and that faded to an image of a
cemetery with the smoldering city behind, and other formal funerary
scenes. I have shown this video during lectures on a number of occasions,
and it never fails to bring an emotional response. It is very powerful, and is
deeply linked to the events in a way that only the medium of television can
be. That it was also powerful to the Newshour audience was evidenced by