"The live broadcasting of television events attracts the largest audiences in the history of the world. Lest we be misunderstood, we are talking about audiences as large as 500 million people attending to the same stimulus at the same time, at the moment of its emission. It is conceivable that there were cumulative audiences of this size prior to the electronic age - for the Bible, for example. Perhaps one might have been able to say that there were several hundred million people alive on earth who had read, or heard tell of, the same Book. But it was not until radio broadcasting - and home radio receivers - that simultaniety of exposure became possible. The enormity of this audience, together with the awareness by all of its enormity, is awesome. It is all the more awesome when one realizes that the subject of these broadcasts is ceremony, the sort which anthropologists would find familiar if it were not for the scale. Some of these ceremonies are so all-encompassing that there is nobody left to serve as an out-group. 'We Are the World' is certainly the appropriate theme song for media events. To enthrall such a multitude is no mean feat; to enlist their assent defies all of the caveats of media-effects research...Like religious holidays, major media events mean an interruption of routine, days off from work, norms of participation in ceremony and ritual, concentration on some central value, the experience of communitas and equality in one's immediate environment and of integration with a cultural center. The reverent tones of the ceremony, the dress and demeanor of those gathered in front of the set, the sense of communion with the mass of viewers, are all reminiscent of holy days...Passive spectatorship gives way to ceremonial participation. The depth of this involvement, in turn, has relevance for the formation of public opinion and for institutions such as politics, religion, and leisure. In a further step, they enter the collective memory."

- Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992)

Questions to consider

• Dayan and Katz draw an analogy between "media events" and religious ceremonies. In what sense might we see the media coverage of the WTC tragedy as having a religious overtone?
• What words, language, or practices link the news coverage to the practice of religion?
• What is seen as sacred or taboo within this new, perhaps temporary, set of religious beliefs?
• What new rituals or sacred spaces have emerged from this event?
• How might the religious overtones of the media event help people cope with their feelings of mourning and loss?
• What aspects of the news coverage might contradict this religious framing of the events?

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