Undeniably, the September 11, 2001 terror attack significantly affected several areas of American as well as human life in general. Such act is considered form of terrorism or the premeditated use, or threat of use, of extra-normal violence to obtain a political objective through intimidation or fear directed at a large audience. Terrorist attacks, like the 9/11 and its aftershocks are characterized by political objectives. If it is not embedded to a political objective, otherwise they are cannot be considered as terrorist acts but criminal acts. Additionally, terrorists often direct their violence and threats toward a vulnerable target group, not immediately involved with the political decision-making process that they seek to influence. With the effects of this historical happening, the world affairs are affected in one way or the other. Aside from triggering worldwide cooperation, the 9/11 tragedy paved way to some notable changes in different sections of the society and the world. Among the most affected areas of the said terrorists attack are international economics, politics and world relations, foreign business and trade, tourism, and media – both broadcast and print.
Primarily, there is a need to briefly elaborate the nature of international broadcasting to establish the rationale behind the broad scope of the topic. International broadcasting, according to Wikipedia.org, is a specialized area of broadcasting that purposively intended to a foreign audience. Instead of catering to the need of the domestic location, it chooses to reach diverse kind of audience by using specialized waves. Today, with the advent of modernization and information technology, satellite broadcasting and the Internet are among the new means of reaching international audiences. Additionally, international broadcasting by the television or radio and its programs as media, serve for the purposes of information dissemination, propaganda, transmission of culture and religious beliefs, communication with allies and colonies, education, trade and commerce, and proliferation of national stature. To reach a global TV audience, a media outfit must expand within satellite broadcasting, a pond with room for only a few big fish, and it has therefore sought alliances with other broadcasters.
This paper sought to answer the query that served as the title of this report. It also aims to provide some information about the adverse and beneficial effects of 9/11 tragedy most especially to the field of international broadcasting.
Media: a Brief Historical Account
The growing distrust of journalists – both broadcast and print in nature coincided with the break-up of the structural basis of an independent press during the 1980s. While the break-up began in the mid'70s with the launching of broadcast satellites and the spread of cable television, technical change massively accelerated as personal computers came on line, the telephone industry was re-organized and broadcasting deregulated or, elsewhere in the world, it was privatized. The communication system, suffering from massive excess capacity, entered into a phase of merger and acquisition that absorbed once proud news organizations into larger entertainment enterprises that were increasingly global in reach. Traditional news media, such as newspapers and magazines, redefined themselves as part of the “information industry” in order to find a niche in which they might survive in the new order. As firms grew larger, news in the traditional sense became a smaller and increasingly insignificant part of total corporate enterprise. Freed from effective requirements to serve the “public interest, convenience, and necessity,” broadcasting operations were subject to ruthless cost-cutting and paring in order to make an appropriate contribution to the bottom line of increasingly rationalized and bureaucratized corporations.
The Aftermath of 9/11 Terror Attack
Various institutions were affected after the massive catastrophe. Just after the attack, the world media – broadcast and print in nature immediately came into covering the whole story. In each of the different news media, the realignment of priorities took shape in different ways. In US during the early hours after the attacks, the four major television networks agreed to share video and satellite footages. They suspended their regular programming in their cable and satellite stations. Instead of showing entertainment formats revolving around music videos, sport, or films began broadcasting, news feeds were presented. This sudden shift of programming resulted to decrease or disappearance of the most number of commercials. Hence, it cost the country's media outlets hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue especially during the dates of September 11 and 12.
Looking beyond the television coverage, the importance of the other news media comes to the fore. Radio broadcast simultaneously joined worldwide coverage of the event. Several radio stations began broadcasting live television news feeds. Others produced their own reports direct from the different scenes, bringing to mind, for some listeners, Edward R. Murrow's wartime broadcasts from London.
Further, pointed out that the incident “was a moment when the training of professional journalists to use skepticism in the service of accuracy clashed with the role of the only national mass media-the television networks-to provide emotional reassurance.” In the field of print media, one New York Times reporter's words states that:
“the images were terrifying to watch, yet the coverage was strangely reassuring because it existed with such immediacy, even when detailed information was scarce. Imagine how much worse the nightmare would have been if broadcasting had been destroyed. On a day of death, television was a lifeline to what was happening.
Initially, the narrative appeared to be almost made for television. Because of the immediacy, details, visual and aural benefits, and as well as the experience of being-in-action, television broadcast is preferred by people as the means to see the happenings.
The Catalyst of Change
Since the media is considered as the fourth estate and the ultimate catalyst of change, its scope of coverage is trusted by people who use it for personal uses and gratification. In times like this, people are glued in front of their television sets, radio, and the Internet in order to see, heard, and “feel” the action and information themselves. In “Journalism and political crises in the global network society,” Ingrid Volkmer builds upon her work on CNN to argue that what became obvious in the aftermath of September 11 was that news media are playing a new role in a globally enlarged public sphere. In the age of internationalization of the news media, national broadcasters extended their national coverage “across borders” and reflected international events in the dimension of “parachute journalism.” This role challenged “global” news channels, such as CNN, which developed a new “worldwide journalism,” through new program formats and journalistic styles of reporting. Volkmer argues that since September 11 it has become obvious that the concept of the “national public sphere” has-again-changed. Given the global interconnectedness of media, the public sphere has become increasingly integrated into a global network society, with new sub-national and supra-national coordinates, and-in consequence-new players and alliances, such as al-Jazeera, the broadcasting station from Qatar. Given this new news infrastructure, conventional formats of “domestic” and “foreign” journalism have to be reviewed, in order to define the particular role and responsibility of journalism in a global public sphere.
When broadcasting came upon the scene as an essentially entertainment medium, it was saddled with the responsibility of serving the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.” To meet that burden, broadcasting stations and networks created news departments that adopted the ideology enshrined in radio and television as well as newspapers and other publications within the requirements of regulatory law strove, not always successfully, to perform as independent arbiters of truth and promoters of the values and norms of modernity.
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