American Television's Live Coverage of the 9/11 Attacks - by Paul Arras (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book analyzes the narratives and news coverage of 9/11 across ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox News, arguing that television coverage shaped the cultural meaning, collective memory, and language of 9/11 in ways that continue to resonate throughout American culture.

Book Synopsis

This book analyzes the narratives and news coverage of 9/11 across ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox News--the five most important American television news networks at the time. Though America's collective memory of the key events of 9/11 have solidified, Paul Arras demonstrates how muddled and chaotic the experience was due to the unique difficulties television journalists faced during the event. By examining that morning's media coverage, Arras assesses the quality of the live journalism, suggesting key differences in the television experience for audiences watching different networks and observing the consequences of differing styles of communication among anchors and other journalists. Approaching 9/11 as a unique television experience in American history, Arras locates and identifies the building blocks of America's memory of 9/11 while also revisiting many dramatic television moments that have been forgotten. Ultimately, this book reveals the ways in which television coverage shaped the cultural meaning, collective memory, and language of 9/11 in ways that continue to resonate throughout American culture.

Review Quotes

""Paul Arras's new book is a remarkable achievement of structure, scholarship, and storytelling. I've never read anything quite like it. It's a riveting procedural tale, describing how the exhibition and interpretations of a central event in American history were created, written, performed, and presented live, as the event was happening. Arras examines five distinct 41/2 hour-long television programs as they played, simultaneously, over five different networks on the morning and early afternoon of September 11, 2001. Sober media analysis is embedded within an elegantly constructed chronicle that unfolds like a novel."" --Robert Thompson, Syracuse University

About the Author

Paul Arras is assistant professor in the Communication and Media Studies Department at SUNY Cortland.