| This research draws upon a selection of television and print media coverage of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and their aftermath to develop a case study of public drama, which is an increasingly common, yet largely unexamined, form in which mainstream media package and present issues, information, individuals, and events as "news." With public drama, the building blocks of news---information, official statements, eyewitness accounts, pundit commentary, images, and so on---get fused together through media narratives and frames to create an engrossing story that is stocked with drama, emotion, stirring moments, moving images, compelling characters, and captivating settings. The manuscript is broadly divided into two parts. The first seeks to provide a more coherent conceptualization of public drama, which is defined here as a mediated construction that is created when (a) media organizations devote extensive attention to some issue, event, individual, or topic, (b) news workers treat that material in particular ways (i.e., employ strategies aimed at organizing information and images into a highly dramatic, emotional story), and (c) an emotional connection is established between members of the media audience and the narrative or the characters that populate it. The second part of the manuscript involves the application of this nascent public drama framework to mainstream media coverage of the response and recovery operation at the World Trade Center site following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The central thesis is that the sheer volume of media coverage devoted to emergency response activity at Ground Zero, coupled with the dramatic and emotional narratives and visual images that characterized much of that coverage, helped to transform it from a large-scale disaster response into a mediated public drama---filled with spectacular moments, compelling characters, emotion, the melodrama of human tragedy and heroic overcoming, and other staples of dramatic storytelling---that played a vital role in how political leaders, media officials, and the broader public have constructed and used the dominant notions of "9/11" in the years since. By using this public drama framework to examine how mainstream U.S. news media covered the attacks and the activity at Ground Zero, we can better understand some of the social, cultural, and political consequences of the terrorist attacks, while also gaining greater insight into the role of mediated public drama in modern life. |
