Model of Media and September 11 Attack

Introduction

The importance of September 11, 2001, will never be disputed in the minds of Americans all over the country after the horrific terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, DC. What may have been the date of celebrated birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays, will now forever be a day of mourning and remembrance of the worst attack on United States soil. Americans began their day like any other, oblivious to the fact that life as we knew it would never be the same. The country was in disbelief as we watched American Airline flight 11 hit the World Trade Center's north tower at 8:46 AM, and then United flight 175 crash into the 84th floor of the south tower at 9:03 AM. We watched the gigantic fireball created by the second plane as it pierced the building's steel and concrete frame, and we saw our nation's sense of security go up in flames with it.

What we saw as horrifying and devastating, the television media saw as their gold mine and seized this "opportunity," creating a media circus that continued almost non-stop during the following months. The majority of Americans, dumbfounded and in a state of confusion of these unspeakable events, ravenously consumed every sound bite that the television news channels could produce, regardless of the legitimacy of the reporting. Desperately seeking answers and conclusions, we relentlessly sat in front of the television, listened to the radio, and read every article, craving anything and everything that the media fed us. The frenzy of the news media for ratings combined with America's irrationality caused by the events of September 11, created a wave of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment that swept the country.

This paper investigates the relationship between access to media reporting and the maintenance of September 11 incident investigations Investigations on the effect of free access to information through the media on September 11 conditions are often limited to anecdotal examples and narrow case studies. There has been little systematic research in this domain. This paper explores the connection between September 11 and media access further (Mccorquodal and Fairbrother, 735-766).

Media and September 11 Attack

September 11 demonstrated the pervasive access to media in modern society and the resulting speed at which news can be conveyed. By one measure, one third of citizens in the Eastern Time Zone knew about the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center by 9 am (the crash occurred at 8:46 am Eastern Standard Time) and 90% knew by 10:30 am.2 More than half of all Americans learned about the terrorist attacks from television, one in four learned about it from another person, one in six from radio, and only 1% from the Internet.3 These patterns varied by time zones. On the East Coast, most people learned about the crash from another person, but 22% learned about it from television.4 This suggests that television is turned on by many people as they wake up and start their day (the first ...