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Public religious culture post-09/11/01 255

the fact that the program replayed it, over a month later, introduced by
Lehrer this way: “And now, an encore presentation. We first aired this
report on September 19. We’ve had many requests to see it again, and so
we are re-airing it tonight. Ray Suarez has the story.” The story ended
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again with the video elegy. It stands as a powerful example of the way that
media and media experience can connect with audiences and publics
through events like 9/11, and that an expectation now exists, on the part
of both media professionals and audiences, that practices of commemora-
tion are part of the business of the media.
The shared experiences of the 9/11 events are a marker in cultural and
media history not just because of the sheer significance of the events, but
also because they brought into relief the ways that media experience is
integrated into both public and daily life. As we saw, they were huge and
transcendent in their significance, but also small and local in their conse-
quence and in what they called individuals to do and to think. They served
to erase the proscenium that is presumed to exist between audiences and
media. They were not a watershed in this regard because, as we have seen
and I have argued, that barrier has long since become negotiable in
reflexive late modernity. But they did motivate us to new ways of thinking
and acting. It is possible to speculate that the fact that Glenn Donegal,
who we met in Chapter 4, was motivated to move outside his own frame
of reference to seek out information or material about “other faiths”
signals a new post-9/11 consciousness of otherness and difference. We
have seen that many of our informants (and other studies have shown )
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turn to media for information and ideas that transcend their traditional
sources and contexts of religious and spiritual meaning. That is the essence
of the seeking sensibility as applied to media. In a post-9/11 world, such
practices support the possibility of awareness and possibly understanding,
something that many felt they lacked before the tragic events.
In a larger sense, though, it is important to understand that the media
do carry the implication that some kinds of common experiences and
common ideas can be and are made available. On a fundamental level, it
may be a condition of mediated modernity that the question is not so
much how discrete communities understand each other, but about how the
global mediascape presents both difference and commonality to us all. 59

Media, religion, and politics

The November 2004 US General Elections were widely anticipated and
subjected to more scrutiny than any in recent memory. The facts of a
closely divided electorate, the emergence of digital media as important in
political discourse and coverage, an ongoing and controversial war, and
the contested nature of the 2000 election, all served to heighten interest in
the contest. As I noted earlier, though, the election was also unique in the