Mourning News: Grief, Memory, and Television Viewership of 9/11.

摘要

News footage of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon building were broadcast widely across network and cable television programming. This dissertation explores in detail how a small group of seventeen participants viewed that news, both on September 11 and in the week immediately following the attack. Using in-depth interview responses, it contributes to a larger body of scholarship that seeks to understand what it is viewers actually do while watching news television during a national crisis. Qualitative in methodology, this dissertation is interdisciplinary in its approach, combining seminal works in cultural studies, ritual studies, and television studies to illuminate connections between the social construction of meaning, memory, and television viewing. Additionally, it offers an historical analysis of how interviewees viewed a number of significant American crises in order to provide a foundation for understanding the complex processes involved in becoming an active interpreter of the news. I argue against scholarly work that tends to depict news viewers as passive and unreflective consumers, helplessly viewing hours of televised images on September 11. On the contrary, for this study's interviewees, the reasons for watching were manifold, and reflect neither a mindless nor compulsive urge to consume news on 9/11, but rather an intentional effort to employ an everyday practice during an extraordinary event. I conclude that, although it is an ordinary practice, for the subjects of this study, news viewing was also a complicated ritual that both enabled and constrained them in their quest for meaning about the crisis at hand. Ultimately, their hours of news viewing on 9/11 served not only as an important emotional signifier of their grief, fear, and anger about the event itself and the way the major news networks chose to cover it, but also served to greatly influence their reflections of that difficult day years later. Arising from interviewees' personal experiences watching television on 9/11, this dissertation expands on contemporary theories of mourning, news viewing, and national crises by reconsidering the role of ordinary rituals during extraordinary events.