Page 324 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Notes 313

6 Judy Cruz was interviewed by Scott Webber.
7 The Milliken family was interviewed by Scott Webber and Michelle Miles.
8 The Baylors were interviewed by Christof Demont-Heinrich.
9 The Sealys were interivewed by Christof Demont-Heinrich.
10 For a fuller account of Web-based religious information-seeking, see Hoover,
Clark, and Rainie (2004).
11 The Steins were interviewed by Anna Maria Russo.
12 In order to protect Jeff’s anonymity, it is necessary that I not name the specific
“New Age,” “self-help” movement he has become involved in.
13 Hoover et al. (2004).

9 Media and public religious culture post-09/11/01 and post-11/2/04
1 It is beyond the scope of this book to address this matter in detail, but we
should not overlook that such an understanding of the relationship between
religion and politics in the 2004 election cycle is entirely too superficial and
limited. For example, the so-called “religion gap” should be understood to be a
gap related to type or style of religion rather than to religion per se.
Evangelicals, for example, are both more conservative politically and more
likely to attend religious services more frequently. Non-Evangelicals may be no
less fervent about their faith, but tend to attend formal religious services less
frequently. Thus, the presumed association between “religion” and “politics,”
measured by attendance alone, is spurious.
2 The signal precedent for a time was the bombing of the Murrah Federal
Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. In a haunting passage, Edward Linenthal
wrote of that event in 2001, “Will a future terrorist act that inflicts even more
death consign Oklahoma City to a less prestigious location on the landscape of
violence?” (Linenthal 2001, p. 234).
3 Ismail (2001). While no systematic study exists, anecdotal and press accounts
do detail a large number of incidents of “backlash.”
4 Said (1997). Political struggles over immigration in Western Europe seem to
have drawn some of their force and effect from post-9/11 understandings of the
dangers of immigration from Islamic countries, and from the widespread notion
that 9/11 represented a resurgent confrontation between Islam and the West.
5 Juergensmeyer (2001).
6 The planners could not have anticipated that film footage of the first plane
strike would also surface, shot by a French cameraman working on a documen-
tary about New York firefighters, and that a security camera also would
capture the crash at the Pentagon. But, in an increasingly media-saturated
world, we have come to expect that, somehow, pictures of such things are more
and more routinely available, either from surveillance cameras or from the
ubiquitous amateur videographer.
7 Zelizer (2005).
8 Mitchell (2006). See the chapter on “reframing news” in particular, where
Mitchell asks, “why is it that when about 3000 people died on September 11
most news broadcasters and newspapers around the world provided saturation
coverage for days and sometimes weeks afterwards, while when over 3 million
die in the D.R.Congo it is largely ignored by the media?”
9 Of course, these are only the claims rooted in the normative view of the events.
In addition to these, there are the claims of Al-Qaida itself, and of those who
see the events as a justified attack on the US or the West generally.
10 At the risk of a seemingly gratuitous reference, my own institution found itself
embroiled for most of 2005 in a controversy brought on by a faculty colleague’s